Behind the Scenes Innovation Demonstrated at ISC West

• By Ginger Hill
• Apr 17, 2015

At the end of the day, the security industry's main goal is to provide security, safety and peace of mind, so that all living beings can enjoy a life-time of happiness. This is accomplished by various products and services offered, but where do these innovative ideas come from? What do companies and associations literally "do" behind the scenes to promote inventive thinking and creativity to battle the bad guys? Here's how some are plunging in and taking on this challenge.

Z-Wave Alliance, creator of an interoperable standard, a certification process and partnerships with over 300 companies to create smarter homes and secure business applications, launched the Z-Wave Labs Program to foster innovation. Seeking applications from small businesses, schools and individuals young and old, a panel of Z-Wave members will choose a monthly winner who will receive a Z-Wave kit, 1 full year of membership in the alliance and a mentor to create, develop and build a concept product.

FIBRO Home Automation System provides homeowners with the ability to control their lighting, HVA, coffee pot, water valves, etc. remotely, saving homes from fire and flood. To prove their creativity, innovative thinking and that their products work effectively, FIBRO presented the Mt. Everest Challenge. They actually sent Polish-born Mariusz Malkowski, a security professional who is dedicated to the development of the home automation industry, to the top of Mt. Everest to prove that you can control your home from the "top of the world."

As crazy as this may sound, I witnessed Malkowski via Skype from the showroom floor with his tablet in hand, sitting on the side of Mt. Everest as he pressed a button on the touchscreen and coffee literally brewed from a Keurig right before my eyes! That's serious stuff right there!

Later on in the day, I meet with March Networks who is taking data and analyzing it in a rather innovative way. Because their management software has business intelligence, the ability to capture dwell time, people counting and more, March Networks developed an innovative analytic with proof of video capture.

As a real-use example in retail security, an individual enters a retail establishment and March Networks' software captures this person, adding him/her to the real-time occupancy count. The software then analyzes the dwell time of that individual as he/she enters a predetermined "zone," a particular area within a store, let's say an end-cap, measuring the time in which the individual stays in the zone.

Taking the occupancy count and zone dwell time of a period of 7 days, for example, at this particular end cap, the store can determine the percentage of people that actually stopped to view the end cap. And, because this was all captured on video, the percentage is backed by proof of video capture.

This stuff is pretty powerful, and this is just but three examples of behind the scenes innovation that I learned at ISC West this year. Imagine if I could pick the brains of the 1000+ exhibitors. It would be mind-blowing!