Ex Googler Startup, Camio, Targets Surveillance

Luis, here are their rules:

1. Maximum 1 frame per second for jpeg snapshots sent from any camera.
2. Maximum 1MB per jpeg snapshot.
3. Maximum 2MB per individual video clip (typically, 10 seconds of video+audio at 15 frames/second in 640x480 resolution).
4. All cameras must upload only upon motion detection.
5. Your account covers all cameras in a single residential location (i.e. all cameras on the same home router).

Basically, the service depends on the camera first detecting motion events (max 15fps / SD) and then sending those clips to the cloud for (further) processing.

That's a good question / point. I am sure it can be 'used' but there is a higher risk that it is challenged as the 'whole' video is not available. One could then argue that the system missed critical parts that would validate a defendant's innocent. Right now, it's just for home use, so it's probably not a big deal but the whole approach does increase risk of acceptance in court.

If search is so important why is Avigilon worth 50 to 100x more than 3VR? :)

Now, that by itself, is not conclusive. But ask yourself - what surveillance company that focused on search is now a major industry success? Literally, there is none. That should tell us something.

To your point, "Recording and searching simply based on motion detection doesn’t allow you to quickly find what you’re looking for."

The reality is that (1) most people are not looking for much and (2) most of the time they can get it. It might to take a few minutes instead of a few seconds to see who was at your door when you were away but it's generally feasible.

I saw the problems of selling searchable surveillance first hand. It plays well in the Valley because Google is gargantuan, but it's just not that important for surveillance users. It does not drive many buying decisions and the advantages that search focused providers have over ones that don't are typically not enough to win deals.

Overall, my experience is that powerful search is a 'nice to have' but not a core business driver.

Carter, thanks for responding.

On search and alerting, if you can deliver accurate alerting, you should focus hard on that. Alerting delivers far more value than searching for a monitoring / surveillance application for the simple reasons that alerts can stop something bad from happening while searches just tell you who or what did it. On the other hand, alerting accurately is hard and there's a long trail of VC backed companies who have failed at it.

On setup ease, there are a number of steps that Camiolog requires that makes it more complex than the Dropcam approach.

First, what I would consider 'pre-requisites':

• Dropcam's home page call to action is much clearer - buy a camera with a big buy button. With yours, one needs to click on a small 'join now' reference or a still relatively small 'get started' button below the fold. Then you are sent to the 'Get Started' page which has 3 steps, buried in the middle is the critical step of buying a camera (creating an account to record own's cameras is almost certainly a negative experience for all but the most technical and determined users).
• With Dropcam, it's really clear that you are buying a Dropcam camera. With Camiolog, it's confusing to know what a 'Camiolog Ready IP Camera' is. It's a Sharx camera? What Sharx cameras? What firmware? etc.

I think you are losing 80% of people just because it's so confusing / complex to get started online. Sell your own cameras, but a big buy button on the center of the home page.

Then, there's the setup specific things. According to your instructions, one needs to either go to a specific URL or download / install an app. By contrast, with Dropcam all you do is plug the USB cable into your computer and a wizard 'magically' appears. This is a lot easier for non-technical people. They now how to plug devices into a USB port, they tend to get lost reading instructions, finding websites, apps, etc.

Finally, there's the configuration of the system and the layout of the UI. It's hard. Setting up zones. Experimenting with the smart image filter. Figuring out where live view is or how to get to it. When you try things out, the display seems to radically change and it's not clear where one is at.

Dropcam is easy - easy to buy, easy to setup, easy to watch video live and see recent recorded video. It's certainly not as powerful as Camiolog, but for the consumer market, I doubt the end to end ease will trump power for most every user.

I got no love for Dropcam, and I would prefer a stronger, more dedicated engineering organization to 'win'. But Camiolog needs to work hard on making it easier for people to get started (from buying to install to basic use).

Your evidence is an IPVM case study?

Listen, there have been people who have complained about search performance for years. This is not new. And despite those issues, no one who has led with search has been successful.

And how do you propose to solve the London search problems? Tens of thousands of cameras from hundreds of different systems using myriad types of cameras and recorders? There's no magical search solution that solves it.

You have two problems here - (1) search is NOT the top priority, alerting / stopping events is - always has been and always will be (i.e., do you want to get an alert on a terrorist about to drop a bomb or find out who bombed afterwards? The former is always far more valuable) and (2) the enhancements to search have not been so dramatically better to radically improve performance.

Murat, the reality is almost all security users prioritize their spending on alerts. And, by the way, clicking search and finding a terrorist in the city of London is just as magical as alerting against a terrorist about to drop a bomb. The difference is the alert can prevent disaster, but the search can only more quickly document the damage.

Who's doing 'scene analysis on camera side' with what cameras, at what costs, with what capabilities? Because from what I have seen with color, people, face, motion analysis, searching will still be very rough and not that radically better than the search capabilities that are already built in to VMSes.

Murat, you claim that "Search will be the next big thing in Video Survillance industry" and "that inability to search - is N1 problem of our industry". I certainly do not accept either of those propositions.

If you simply want to say that companies can and will incrementally improve search, sure, no objection, but it is not going to be the 'next big thing' or solve the industry's biggest problem.