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Day 2 photos of IFSEC 2007 from Security Dealer’s Peter Harlick . (Click to enlarge photos.) Read the text of his report from Day 3 here.  See they Day 1 report here and the Day 2 report here.

Adam Stroud of Paxton Access showcasing the Net 2 Nano

Stroud demonstrating the integrated prox/lock combo called EasyProx

TXI’s immersive imaging unit provides a 360-degree view and has been used for surveillance by police/defense officers in crowds, and in use on Humvees in the Sand Box.

Pelco was showing its Esprit PTZ surveillance camera systems with a cool choreographed “dance”.

Michael Mikaelian, Margie Gobler and John Taylor of STI

At Hirsch Electronics’ stand: Lars Suneborn, John Piccininni, an IFSEC attendee and Scott Howell

Hirsch’s Verification Station can do multi-factor authentication, and was designed around the HSPD-12 government access control need.

Dennis Johnson of UltraVision Security Systems was proud of their buried intruder alarm sensor, the UltraSensor, which was recognized by IFSEC for “best new intruder alarm product”.

Mango DSP’s Oren Feldman

Mango DSP’s rugged Raven X2 video encoding unit

Mango DSP’s high-powered RavensNest unit can handle 60 D1 video streams and add IP-ready encoding and even analytics.

Doing business at the EverFocus stand

As would be expected, Bosch Security had a strong presence at this UK security tradeshow.

Smiling faces handing out booth bags at the ultra-modern entrance to the IFSEC show

CSL made us do a triple-take; the company makes the DualCom devices for intruder alarm signaling.

IFSEC DAY 2 PHOTOS
IFSEC DAY 1 PHOTOS

Day 2 photos of IFSEC 2007 from Security Dealer’s Peter Harlick . (Click to enlarge photos.) Read the text of his report from Day 2 here.  See they Day 1 report here.

It was a packed cue to get into IFSEC’s tradeshow floor on day 2 of the security tradeshow

Cygnus’ Henry Lott (left) with ACT Meters’ marketing manager Jane Grant

Joanna Brace, chief marketing officer at IndigoVision, knows her way around IP networking and logical access in addition to Indigo’s network video solutions.

Shlomit Herschko, marketing communications manager for RISCO, with Security Dealer’s Peter Harlick

(L-R) John Kwak, Mike Kim, Danny Choi, and James Kim representing Nuvico at IFSEC 2007

RoboCam’s sales manager Chris Kwan with a staffer at their stand.

Fluidmesh Networks’ 1100 wireless mesh unit can communicate over a line-of-sight range of 1-1/2 miles.

Dick Soloway (right), president of NAPCO, talks with a client at the show.

Paige Robbins of DVR manufacturer Blancom

Video analytics firm ioimage at IFSEC 2007

Sword Security provides risk and security services to hotels, events, and more.

Norbain is not just three pretty faces; the company is one of Europe’s leading security and professional electronics product distributors.

Day one pics from Security Dealer’s Peter Harlick — sent across the pond from Birmingham, England. (Click to enlarge photos.) Read the text of his report from Day One here.

 
The team from Zandar Technologies

Heather Russell of Lenel talks with clients

An installer competes in the IFSEC Apprentice Challenge

Ed Davis of American Fibertek with customers

IQinVision’s new Sentinel system

Ritto Chandna with more of the crew from Security Dynamics

The crew representing Samsung Electronics

Norbain’s lasses

InitSys showcasing its love to fight crime

The English apparently love their French Maids…

…So much so that they had two crews across from the continent.

That’s all for Day One of IFSEC 2007

So last month I drove down to Indianapolis for Vicon’s half day IP seminar, “Building Blocks of IP Video.”  Vicon is actually holding these seminars all across the country, and since the Indy one is closest to where I’m at in Chicagoland I figured now was my chance. 

Scheduled to go from 9 a.m. to noon, the seminar went by rather quickly.  The speakers were Tom Cook, director of sales, and Guy Arazi, digital product manager.  Cook gave an overview of Vicon, how it started out as a hardware company and morphed into a software company.  He also noted that Vicon’s stock had risen by a factor of about four in recent months; he theorized that Vicon’s recent change in business model to sell to an exclusive dealer group could be a factor in that.

Arazi gave an overview of IP video as well as how the ViconNet 4 software platform could be used to operate a video suveillance system.  ViconNet 4 will officially be released this June, and ViconNet 5 will be released in 2008.  (Vicon plans to upgrade its ViconNet platform every year, with each version being backwards compatible with the previous version.)

During a break in the seminar, Cook told me that Vicon’s training was having a much better turnout than they did 2 years ago.  He credited the fact that these seminars are co-sponsored by Security Dealer, Security Technology & Design, and SecurityInfoWatch.com with getting the word out.  Rather than just having their own dealers attend (as was pretty much the case 2 years ago), Vicon is now getting their own dealers, potential dealers, engineers, consultants and end users.

As it turned out, the gentleman sitting next to me during the seminar was a salesman from Cincinnati who’s not even in the security business.  His business is more on the electrical and cabling side, but his boss wanted him to attend in order to start learning about IP video. 

From what I can tell, there is high demand for training in the security industry.  However, some companies (and organizations) who are offering the training don’t always get their message out.  I’ve seen classes have extremely poor attendance, and I’ve even seen classes get canceled.  Sure, sometimes this is because a class isn’t offering what people want, but I think more often the case is that the right people don’t know about it.  So, with that in mind, it was nice to see 45+ attendees pack a hotel room in Indianapolis for Vicon’s IP class.  And better yet, people actually learned something.  A lot of the questions came from dealers–and some of them were tough.  But Cook and Arazi hung in there and gave their best answers.

Who knows, maybe my next trip to Indianapolis will be for the Indy 500?  (I’m actually not a racing fan, but hey, I’d got just for kicks.)

-Greg

How many megapixels do you need?

I got a note from the UK version of the IP UserGroup this morning promoting one of their clients that will be at IFSEC next week. The company, SentryScope, apparently has a 21 megapixel camera. If you want a sense of how high or a resolution that is, then consider this — if you record at their highest level, you could eat up 100 Gigabytes of storage a day doing continuous recording. The camera’s image is a black-and-white panorama with an aspect ratio of 5:1. This is basically what you’d see (you can zoom in of course, because there’s plenty of data detail):

So I’m sitting here thinking about when you really need that much detail. Obviously, as one of our columnists wrote earlier this year, these kind of cameras are great if you want to catch license plate data.

But parking lots are only one aspect of security. I’m thinking back to a recent visit with the security staff at a hockey arena in South Florida and thinking how it could have been set up with a camera at each end of the venue that could give you great situational awareness, as if you were standing in a nosebleed balcony with a nice set of binoculars in your hands — instead of where you really are — in the basement, in a cinderblock room watching cameras.

The fact that you can get 21 megapixels (it’s higher than most color cameras because you can get higher resolution if you ditch the color pixel capture on the image sensor) makes me wonder where the megapixel push will end up. Scary as it is to those who have to consider compression and bandwidth, I’ve heard rumors of Gigapixel technology for surveillance cameras. (You can kiss your 250Gb hard drives away if that happens!)

If you remember back to the advent of consumer (still) cameras, they started at .5 megapixels and then progressed such that most consumer cameras seem to be delivering between 4 and 6 megapixels. They certainly can go higher, but this seems to be the place where the need stops. At that size, you can shoot a full-resolution 8×10 image, but it’s still small enough to not fill your hard drive up too fast.

I think we’re still trying to find that point in the super-high-resolution/megapixel surveillance camera business. Sure with correct lenses, these new cameras can read your license plate from 150 feet away, but there’s a point at which image stabilization issues come into play. And if we built a big enough sensor, we could probably capture 200 megapixels (if we could handle the data processing — which would probably need its own dedicated PC running with the sensor). But we’re having to define what it is we need.

Those of you who have integrated these super-high-res systems, and those who are manufacturing/selling them, feel free to write in and let me know if you think there will be a virtual ceiling on how high of resolution we will need to go.

Sometimes we get caught up in technology-centric security.

We talk about high-tech systems that integrate access and video, and which allow for integrated alarm event management. We talk megapixels and gigahertz and VPNs and thumbdrives and PKIs and DVRs. We talk about critical infrastructure and think about powerplants and major utilities systems, ports and the things that make our world move. But I’ll posit that your people are the critical infrastructure. I was reminded of that core notion when talking with a friend of mine who is in Kandahar. Now Kandahar, Afghanistan, isn’t the friendliest place in the world. In fact, most would probably place it in the top 10 of most unfriendly places to be. It’s the kind of place where attackers directly target aid workers and journalists in addition to soliders and local government officials. It’s where just one day ago a vehicle driver for the U.N.’s refugee agency was killed on his way to work by men on a motorbike.

When we occassionaly catch up over messaging or email, we sometimes talk security, though we often try to move the subject to something that doesn’t weigh so heavily – like former adventures in the Appalachian Mountains or surfing the Atlantic breaks. He is not a twitchy type of person, not the kind of person who is continually nervous about security. Having been in that part of the world for about three years, it’s a part of life. Bulletproof glass and automatic weapons mix with the fact that life must go on, that his wife is expecting and that family and friends are halfway around the planet.

I’m not sure there’s a point to saying all of this, other than when you get caught up in thinking about how to budget for another surveillance camera or a new card access project, sometimes it’s good to step back and think that, somewhere around the world, a heavily armored, South African-made Nyala anti-mine vehicle and a gun slung on the shoulder is what security means when protecting your people, your critical infrastructure.

The “sports car” of secured travel in Afghanistan: A South African-made Nyala armored patrol vehicle in the Kandahar province