You're on camera!

CCTV cameras are all around. They've installed about 12 of them in and around my office. And the security guard and the administration manager can watch what's happening around the office and in some select areas in the office. I must say our office is a reasonably closed space with not much scope for break-ins. And above all, there seems to be no real motive to break-in. I've always thought that the CCTV cameras are a waste of money and time. What can you detect or find on such camera output?

The total amount of data or footage generated by all the cameras put together cannot be fathomed by all the security guards, assuming that's the only thing they do. They simply don't have the capacity or bandwidth to review all of it. And to tell you the truth, its pretty boring and uninteresting to watch the footage beyond the first few minutes, leave alone a whole day. Most of the time, nothing happens. But it is the job of the security guards to review it, all the time; well, at least most of the time. And it has to be real-time!

BriefCam, an Israeli company, has come up with this brand new idea in CCTV cameras. It works by separating the times when there is movement and times when there is no movement at all. And it senses those times when there is no movement, and excludes such footage. It uses motion detection algorithm and separates the static background, creates a fixed database and focusses only on the moving images. These moving images are summarised and bunched together for the security and surveillance staff to review as and when convenient.

The process still requires the surveillance staff to go throught the footage manually. But it gives them the option of making better use of the time by editing out the non-moving boring footage. Now that's something! Its amazing how people come up with such small improvements to ease life.

Does Twitter make money?

I've been fascinated and intrigued by whether website companies make money. Google may have 'non-intrusive' and 'relevant' advertisements, but I can't imagine they making any decent margin. Just think of the costs that they incur, maintaining these huge servers, the electricity costs, the airconditioning required to keep them cool, all for storing stuff that is at least 90% junk and unwanted. (In a separate post, I would like to discuss how much of junk the world might have created).

Youtube stores videos, Flickr stores pictures, and Scribd stores documents that add up to many gigabytes. So for all of this, the expense would be enormous. As I can think, any number of non-intrusive advertisements and sale of personal information cannot make up for this.  

Twitter is a more recent phenomenon. It may have the benefit of being much modest in terms of size, since it restricts messages to 140 characters, has no images or videos. But with its popularity growing and the number of posts increasing at an exponential rate, it will be in trouble.

The one aspect that is different about Twitter is that it has no advertisements whatsoever. And by the language of what is written, I'm sure they can't figure out any pattern that they could use to sell your information, at least as of now.

It has succeeded in building a following of enormous proportion but hasn't done anything to capitalise on that yet. It could've easily put up advertisements, at least on its website, though many may be using the mobile application.

In the social networking world, it has achieved what very few have. To have so many tweeting away in such a short time is worthy of recognition.

I can see a few sources of income possible in the future. As for other such players, they could study patterns in tweets and generate targeted advertisement campaigns to select groups of individuals. They could be 'sponsored' tweets. In fact, they could have these sponsored tweeters following you.

As Google has reached out to the masses with their AdWords initiative, twitter could do the same. That way, you could have these small and medium businesses follow pertinent potential customers. This may work in the developed world better.

As a finance professional, I think they would securitise their future expected streams of income and leverage that to expand today, thus feeding their growth. Whether it will work, only time till tell. Whether it is desirable, I can say no now.

Since it runs predominantly on mobile applications in the developed world, I suppose they may have a tie-up with mobile service providers for a share in income generated because of tweets. This is yet to catch up in the developing world.

The interesting part in the case of Twitter is that they have a set of venture capitalists who have funded them. I'm sure they must be expecting and demanding a share of the pie when the cake is baked and ready to eat.

It'll be interesting to see where this leads. Till then, tweet away!