There was an interesting article on NPR about the increase in buyer’s remorse. Joseph LaRocca, vice president of loss prevention with the National Retail Federation estimates that retailers are expected to experience nearly $220 Billion (yes, that’s with a “B”) in returns in 2008.

That represents an unprecedented risk to retailers because with that many returns, it will be increasingly difficult to separate the real return from a fraudulent return.

Now, more than ever, it is critical for retailers to use an exception reporting system that lets them examine refunds to insure there is a person present and an actual item is returned.

I came across an interesting read while viewing a related article at the networkworld.com website. It cites marketing departments as one of the big drivers behind the growth. This has actually been a strong value proposition as we gain more traction in the retail market vertical. For example, analyzing linger times and traffic patterns around promotional displays provides remarkable insight into the validity of the marketing effort and ultimatley, the best ROI of each marketing dollar.

While you’re visiting the site, be sure to check out the Top 10 IT Security Companies to Watch. Specifically, the third company listed.

Fall is my favorite time of year; the leaves are changing, it’s cooling down and most importantly it’s football season.  For the past few years I’ve anticipated the start of the season with much more enthusiasm.  The reason for this new found enthusiasm has been my involvement in a fantasy football league.  Fantasy football, takes something that I already have a passion for and makes it even more exciting by giving me a reason to be involved in several games in order to track my team’s performance.  It also gives me the opportunity to put on my GM hat and make decisions that can help or hinder my team’s performance. 

Effectively managing a team requires time, effort and an understanding of information (e.g. trades, injuries, trends) that is crucial to a successful season.   A GM has a lot of information to dissect each week in order to give their team the best chance to win.   The first couple of seasons I found it difficult to keep up with all of the trades, added/dropped players, injuries and the progress of free agents, which one can add to their team if someone on their team has a bye week or isn’t performing.  Finally, I activated a feature on the Fantasy Football web site that I had never used before, “Alerts”.  The second that I enabled this setting I became a much better GM and could make decisions that would affect the outcome of the game days in advance.  The alerting function of this website takes information that is being gathered about each NFL player and proactively alerts (sends and email) each GM based upon criteria they have designated as important.  A GM can be alerted to set their line up, player updates, league trades, and scores.  This information can be vital to the planning of your starting lineup each week and if acted upon can give your team a competitive advantage.

MVaaS acts in much the same way as the Fantasy Football website.  Through the integration of software based business applications e.g. POS systems, access control, temperature sensors etc. an owner or manager can set up reports with specific business rules, that if broken, can generate an alert that proactively prompts a user to log in and review video from a specific location.  For example if I have an MVaaS solution integrated with my POS system I can define a rule that if a site has more than ten voids in a day I want to be alerted.  This type of capability can come in very handy when making tough decision about your Fantasy Football team, and more importantly your business.  I find it to be a great asset to be able to make decisions based upon up to date information.

Image via Wikipedia

While perusing my blog reader, I noticed an interesting headline on A VC, Bustup Not Bailout.

Certain that the post was related to the current issues facing GM and Ford,  I read on.  I worked briefly at one of the large U.S. automotive companies, so the topic is of particular interest to me.  Also, as the title suggests, there are options to a pure bailout, and they should be considered.  If we, the taxpayers, choose to allow our government to subsidize a failing business or industry, shouldn’t the monies come with significant conditions?   

Most striking to the post was the quote “too big to fail means too big to exist”.  Although it’s origin is unknown to me, it was at least uttered recently by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Okay, the only thing worse than a string post is the promise of a string post the next day and then not following up on it for a week.  Guilty.  Actually there a lot of things worse than either of these things, but my apologies anyway.

I posted at some point last week about the pricing decisions we are making around the centralized video storage capability.  In that post I posed the question as to how much storage we should include with our base service, assuming that providing some amount of storage is good so that people could try the service and providing unlimited storage is bad bc that is only good for the few customers that would take advantage of the business model and suddenly archive 10 years worth of video “for free”.

After debating this internally for a little while, we came to the conclusion we were thinking about it wrong.  We had been trying to figure out the minimum amount of storage we could provide so that customers could try that aspect of our service (just enough) but we could still charge a lot of customers that would exceed this threshold.  We concluded this was a shortsighted approach - if we provide 500Mb or 500Gb of central storage with the base service, it doesn’t really matter that much from a cost standpoint - storage is cheap (and saavy customers know this).  What does matter is figuring out how customers are going to use the service and how to make it more valuable for them.  To do that you we need to give customers enough central storage to enable them to utilize it in creative ways that help improve their business.  If we give them too little we’ll constrain their ability to use it and fewer new applications and use cases will likely be created.  If we give them a decent amount of storage (more than enough) and let them play, they’ll figure out ways to use it to create value.  If we pay attention we can learn from this and enhance our service to accomodate their new needs.  At that point they should be willing to pay us more if our enhancements drive real value for them.  They should definitely be willing to pay more than they’d pay for simply another 100Gb of storage.

Net of all of this is we are going to be generous with initial storage to let customers experiment and won’t have a pricing model that is directly tied to the amount of storage you get on the network.  We are after all selling a service, not a hard-drive.

I recently read a great article in my favorite restaurant industry publication Nation’s Restaurant News. Most of the headlines are laser-focused on the economy and it’s effect on the industry. In fact, of the six leading stories, five of them contained the headline words gloom, glum, laid-off, slump and downturn. On the bright side, the articles focus on solutions to these adjectives, whether it be staffing, menu updates, loyalty programs or technology.

The one that caught my eye analyzes the elimination of many midlevel execs of multiunit enterprises. The remaining staff is then required to double their store coverage, essentially trying to do more with less. While the current economy and job elimination is rarely a pleasant subject, shouldn’t businesses be constantly striving for efficiency and productivity gains, no matter the economic condition?

Let take a hypothetical situation where a single $80K field position is eliminated, thus increasing the coverage of another field position from 5 stores to 10. Further, a technology investment in MVaaS is made to boost the productivity of the remaining field employee. Mathematically, that might look something like this:

10 location MVaaS 4 camera deployment: $42K

Investment Payback: About 6 months

1st Year Profit Increase: $38K

3 Year Profit Increase: $198K

Keep in mind, this is in payroll alone. There are many additional benefits of MVaaS that contribute directly to the improvement of store operations and increased profitability without straining existing staff or IT resources. Something we should be looking at everyday, even during the good times.

Yesterday Rob Hagens and I attended the Colorado Inventor Showcase where we exhibited and were up for an award. We did not win but it was interesting to see all of the inventions that were present. The exhibits ranged from a smart toilet seat/lid that automatically closes to a very cool wind turbine for home use.

We had a good time and it was a good PR event for Envysion. Here’s a couple of short videos I took at the event with my iPhone:

The discussion around “Should You Use Software-Only Video Management Systems” at ipmarketvideo.info got me thinking about a feature we’ve been talking about over here at Envysion for a couple of years now, the “Downloadable NVR”.

A downloadable NVR appliance may offer a valuable mix of “software only” and appliance hardware.  Given the number of software appliances over at VMWare’s Appliance Marketplace, this is not a new idea, but perhaps one that just haven’t been done much with NVR’s/DVR’s.  Here’s one way this could be done:

- Go to a website

- Download the NVR software and burn onto a CD

- Put the CD into a PC and boot it up

- About five minutes later, the PC is now a dedicated NVR

- The NVR automatically appears in your Envysion Video Web application account

This has the value of reliability and easy of maintenance of embedded software, but without the specialized embedded hardware that locks you in to a hardware vendor.  Perhaps it’s also valuable due to the ease of obtaining the software.

What do you think?

Image via Wikipedia

The current economic environment is tough.  This fact is not lost on most people.  It has certainly been on the minds of many, and it undoubtedly loomed large in the November 4th election. 

This environment also provides investors with a unique opportunity.  The U.S. economy has had several recessions since 1945.  But these periods have all been two years or less.  Overall, the U.S. economy has been in recession for roughly 14% of these 63 years.  This means that even our oldest investors have very little experience at this.  Even an 83 year-old has had only 9 years in this type of environment.

Determining which companies will suffer and which ones will thrive, both now and when the economy turns upward, is the problem they are attempting to solve.  Add to this, the proliferation of new industries that have not faced a down economy, and the “math” becomes even more challenging.

Many of the outcomes will seem so obvious with hindsight.  “They had a differentiated product or service, a demonstrable and proven ROI for their customers, and a large and growing market.  Of course they succeeded!”

There are a lot of contexts in which you could ask that question.  In our case, we have recently been asking ourselves this question in the context of video storage.  Unlike traditional DVR solutions, there are two types of video storage in our MVaaS architecture - storage on the customer site on the recorder, and centralized storage in the network (actually in a data center attached to the network if you want to pick nits)

The question we are asking ourselves is not how much video is enough to save on the customers premise.  The customer premise question is too straight-forward.  If a customer wants more storage, you put in a bigger hard drive, you give them more storage.  It isn’t challenging technically, it is pretty transparent economically, and it isn’t particularly complicated to think through.  The question we are asking is how much video storage is enough in the network.

This is a bit more complicated thing to think about.  The issue is this - with our MVaaS solution we can enable users to store video off of the recorder at their remote location and into a secure data center.  Users can do this manually by finding video that is interesting and then saving it into the network (so it persists, they can tag/annotate it, share it with others, etc)  They will also be able to do this programmatically (we are about a month away from this) by setting up business rules that will cause video to be pulled off of the recorders and into the network based on specific transactions (like a void transaction on the POS) or events (like the back door opening after hours)  Early customer feedback on this capability has been positive.  The question is how much centralized storage should we include with our service.

Start with the assumption that we are going to provide some amount of storage greater than zero as part of our base packages.  Philosophy here is simply that we want users to try the capability, use it, get hooked and then want more of it - at which point we can charge those users that really use the service while still letting everyone get a taste of the capability.  Add the other assumption that giving away unlimited storage as part of the base package is not a good idea - having a fixed zero price point coupled with an unbounded potential cost structure doesn’t seem too smart and the baking in an average price based on the expected average usage of storage will likely make the base service too expensive for those that don’t use the central storage.

So I’ve narrowed it down then, we are going to include some amount of central storage with our service that is greater than zero but less than infinity.  Isn’t that helpful?

I’m going to violate my self-imposed ban on string-posts and give some more insight tomorrow.  I spent last weekend and the first couple days this week on a vacation with my family (at Legoland among other places) and am still trying to catch up and ditch the nausea I picked up from the Age 5 appropriate Bionacle Blaster ride!  I can definitively say that once is enough when it comes to that ride.