I’m doing some work for a small Silicon Valley start-up that’s in a very atypical Silicon Valley kind of business: franchising. Part of the work involves writing a company blog called “Hard Focus”.

The company is SightMind and they sell institutional networked video surveillance camera installation franchises. That’s a bit of a mouthful, but describes it well. If you buy a SightMind franchise, you get the right to use the name and business systems in your own business. Think of Jiffy Lube, or MacDonald’s. Those are both national franchises with independently run and operated locations, each using the name and systems of the franchisor. That’s mainly why you go there: you know the name and you know you’ll get what you expect for the price you expect.

IP video cameras are everywhere now -- you can add them to your home and hook them up to your PC at low cost -- but there is no national company installing them. Who you gonna call? Joe-Bob’s Alarm and Fire down the street? While there are plenty of small, local installers, there are none with a national brand, none that focus exclusively on digital networked cameras, and none that are selling solely to educational, industrial, and government customers. These customers have very specific needs, and as the world switches from analog CCTV to IP networked cameras, they are looking for a known, reliable company to understand them, do the installation, and maintain the system for many years. Hence the business.

The fist blog entry is “Six Sure Signs That The IP Video Surveillance Industry Is Still In Its Infancy”.

Tags: Video, Surveillance, SightMind, Blogging, Franchising, Security