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Company Interview Excerpt
ADAM ARONSON - ARROWSIGHT INC
Full article published: 4/26/2004    


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TWST: Would you begin with an overview of Arrowsight and your history as founder of ParentWatch?
Mr. Aronson: About six years ago, we founded a company called ParentWatch, which was in the business of putting cameras and video servers into childcare centers that typically served more than 100 children. ParentWatch provided a Web-based service so that parents and grandparents around the country and around the world could remotely access a single Website, www.parentwatch.com, and securely see live video images of their children while they were at the childcare center. It was a service centered exclusively on a single industry, with a single purpose ' to provide a few moments every day for parents and children to be connected. ParentWatch began during the dot-com era. We raised quite a bit of money and achieved extensive market penetration of about 2% of the overall childcare market utilizing a number of different Web service offerings. At our peak, we had installed over 5,000 cameras in the field and upwards of 20,000 different parents were using our Web services. It's a business we continue to run today, and it was a great platform for understanding how to enable remote services so that people could effectively see and enjoy seeing something remotely ' in this case, kids. In the year 2000, we decided to expand the business beyond childcare, into other commercial marketplaces. We restructured the company away from what you would categorize as a direct sales business model and we partnered with a company called ADT Security Services to develop and market remote viewing technologies. Our thought was that there are business people specifically in the retail market, for example, who are running thousands and thousands of stores. Wouldn't it be great for them to have access ' just like the parents ' to a single Website that they could go to, put a user name and password in, and to be able to remotely see the stores and to monitor the stores for operational compliance, security compliance, safety compliance and marketing compliance? As we began tailoring the service to retail, fast food, food and meat processing, manufacturing and other marketplaces, we realized that COOs, regional managers, district managers, etc., did not have a lot of extra time to just sit in front of a computer and look at lots and lots of video. So we developed a service called Remote Video Auditing where we look at the video for a client and we deliver compliance reports. Arrowsight Remote Video Auditing is currently sold through ADT Security Services, with a suite of services under the private label brand ADT Select Vision powered by Arrowsight. We can remotely monitor a number of different types of industries ' retail, fast food, grocery, manufacturing, marketing, and transportation facilities ' and then provide e-mailed reports on a weekly basis to those customers with statistical summaries so that you could see specifically which locations are performing well, which are performing poorly, and specifically within each of those locations, which areas are doing well or doing poorly. Within this report, you not only get statistics, but you also get pass and fail hyperlinks to each and every video event that we looked at on behalf of the customer. Instead of looking at motion video, we first look at still pictures associated with either something having to do with the procedure or something having to do with some type of an alarm event. So an example of a procedure would be something as simple as, was a store clean? Were food safety regulations followed in the food preparation area? We might look at 10 different times during a day, 10 still pictures, and if in any of those pictures we saw the store was not clean, we would identify those pictures as fail pictures. They would then be tied back through an automated reporting mechanism feature in our service. An alarm event might be something like a back door opening. For a potential thief, a back door that opens into a parking lot or into a corridor is attractive. That store might have some very high theft losses and merchandise might be disappearing out the back door. So every time that back door opens, we may be asked by the customer to ensure that the manager was present because if a manager was present, it's less likely to have been theft. And so our technology is able to interact with a wide range of alarm events. It might be a cash register transaction that was identified by the corporate customer as being highly suspicious. An example might be an exception-based event like a 300 sneaker return in a mall retail store where the event occurred at 9 o'clock at night. In this case, the corporate customer says, 'This looks a little suspicious because at 9 o'clock at night, 30 minutes before the store closes, we shouldn't really be seeing a 300 return. Let's just make sure there was even a customer there because oftentimes some of these large thefts are just staff members ringing up their own returns with inventory from the store.' And so, as an example, they will export to our Video Auditing team a list of these exceptions and effectively say, 'Go back and look on Tuesday to see if there was a customer at 9 o'clock at night in this store at this particular register.' Our service makes it easy to review these particular events. These are the two different types of audit services that we provide. We also have another service along the same lines ' a remote guard tour service. The entire ADT commercial sales force, which is about 1,400 people, is now offering the Arrowsight Remote Guard Tour Service. If a company employs guards in several locations, our remote guard tour service can deliver significant and immediate returns and efficiencies through the use of remote monitoring to periodically observe stores on a live basis. Instead of having a guard sitting in a chair all day, what if once an hour, somebody from an ADT central station, using the Arrowsight software, looked into that location to assess it as being safe or not safe, secure or not secure? The Arrowsight guard service is also complementary with another ADT service capability, which is two-way voice capability. There are several security features that deliver a significant return on investment. A guard typically costs about 60,000 a year in a retail environment. A company might be able to reduce that expenditure by 30,000 to 50,000 depending on what kind of frequency they wanted ADT to look remotely view a location using our tools. The remote guard tour service is a way to save money and still maintain a highly secure environment. So that's sort of the high-level summary of the company, our history and some of our key products and services


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