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Jan. 31st, 2012
Software mines security footage to help business owners see what people do once they're inside the store.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2012
BY TOM SIMONITE
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39552/
block quote start
The huge success of online shopping and advertising—led by giants like Amazon and Google—is in no small part thanks to software that logs when you visit
Web pages and what you click on. Startup Prism Skylabs
offers brick-and-mortar businesses the equivalent—counting, logging, and tracking people in a store, coffee shop, or gym with software that works with
video from security cameras.
"There's a lot of wonderful information locked up in video, and 40 million security cameras in the U.S. collecting it, but it's data that's not been available,"
says Steve Russell, cofounder and CEO of Prism, based in San Francisco. "We want to free up that information."
Prism's software can count people that come into a business, measure the length of the line at checkout, and produce static or animated visualizations showing
how people moved around a store. It is designed so that it cannot identify or track individuals. One national wireless carrier is already using Prism's
technology to generate heat maps of where visitors go in their showrooms, to compare the level of interest in different devices—valuable data to them and
to the device makers.
Prism's software can also be used to turn security footage into a live version of Google's Street View, says Ron Palmeri, Prism's president and other cofounder.
"We give the ability to go beyond the facades of businesses and show you the inside and even how busy it is, using very effectively privacy-protected imagery."
Prism's software can blur people into anonymous ghosts, show them in what Russell calls "predator vision" (a pixelated image), or remove them altogether
and replace them with a "heat map," on which colors signal the density of people. One gym in San Francisco trialing the technology plans to use it to show
customers a live view of how busy it is.
block quote end
TUESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2012
BY TOM SIMONITE
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39552/
block quote start
The huge success of online shopping and advertising—led by giants like Amazon and Google—is in no small part thanks to software that logs when you visit
Web pages and what you click on. Startup Prism Skylabs
offers brick-and-mortar businesses the equivalent—counting, logging, and tracking people in a store, coffee shop, or gym with software that works with
video from security cameras.
"There's a lot of wonderful information locked up in video, and 40 million security cameras in the U.S. collecting it, but it's data that's not been available,"
says Steve Russell, cofounder and CEO of Prism, based in San Francisco. "We want to free up that information."
Prism's software can count people that come into a business, measure the length of the line at checkout, and produce static or animated visualizations showing
how people moved around a store. It is designed so that it cannot identify or track individuals. One national wireless carrier is already using Prism's
technology to generate heat maps of where visitors go in their showrooms, to compare the level of interest in different devices—valuable data to them and
to the device makers.
Prism's software can also be used to turn security footage into a live version of Google's Street View, says Ron Palmeri, Prism's president and other cofounder.
"We give the ability to go beyond the facades of businesses and show you the inside and even how busy it is, using very effectively privacy-protected imagery."
Prism's software can blur people into anonymous ghosts, show them in what Russell calls "predator vision" (a pixelated image), or remove them altogether
and replace them with a "heat map," on which colors signal the density of people. One gym in San Francisco trialing the technology plans to use it to show
customers a live view of how busy it is.
block quote end