CES 2008, Day 2: Home and Business Surveillance
"We don’t need perfect video," said Prince. "We just need to be able to do good motion detection and facial recognition."
On the opposite end of the spectrum, a Taiwanese original device manufacturer (ODM) is moving to market its own video monitoring product that the company strives to make very easy to use. StarVedia, based in the Hsin-Chu "science city" area of Taiwan, is an ODM with 20 years project experience that is interested in creating products for simple video monitoring that can be viewed via a cell phone.
StarVedia, along with its U.S. partner CMT International, is rolling out an IP camera with 3GPP/ISMA support that can be configured very quickly with the included CamView software. Using both wireless and wired connections, with both being recommended for failover viewing, the company’s IP cameras can be plugged in, connected to the home network and then assigned a name in the CamView software. The software is capable of viewing 16 cameras simultaneously on screen, and recording as many, but the company plans to primarily sell the cameras singly.
"We see the market for our product as those consumers who just want to plug it in and have it work," says Monica Lien with CMT. "We even list the three simple steps to getting the camera ready for remote viewing right on our product packaging, so the consumer doesn’t need to know about IT configurations like some of the competing products."
While the IP camera viewing from outside the home or business on a Windows laptop is straightforward, thanks to the CamView software, those on mobile devices or Mac/Linux devices would be required to enter an IP address and MAC address, a bit of a daunting task for the consumer who wants ease of use.
"We think customers will bookmark the camera or cameras on their web browser," says Lien, "so they’ll only need to enter the information once. But we’ve also been asked to create a small mobile program for phones like the iPhone, which we’re considering as the product launches."
CES 2008 continues through Thursday, January 10.