Density - A modern infrastructure for anonymously counting people

@andrewfarah What a useful, smart, practical tool to create. Awesome work, I hope you have huge success!

@richlowenberg Rich, ever run into a use case? What is Halo Neuroscience, btw? Thanks for the support!

@andrewfarah Funnily enough, I was having drinks with the IT director of a mega church a couple of nights ago. They're beginning to delve into data science and analytics to manage their five congregations of 40,000 people or so. I'm uncomfortable with religion in general, but it was fascinating to think about church attendance in a startup-y sort of growth model. Right now I believe they manually count the empty seats in the church to estimate attendance. We were talking about the idea of using cell phone mac addresses to measure retention, running A/B tests across their 5 locations etc, but I bet something like this would be really useful to them too. You can see more about Halo Neuroscience here: www.haloneuro.com. We just opened pre-sales on our product yesterday!

@andrewfarah Wow! You guys have added so much to Density in a year since we last spoke! Awesome. BTW, great video. Sandwich?

@andrewfarah @rrhoover This is a simple and useful product with a clean design. And the data could be very useful in an emergency, besides you could add some triggers to platforms like IFTT or Zappier, so people could get notifications when their favorite place has enough people or even trigger IoT devices... sorry if I dream a lot but I see a lot of uses in a simple and clever device like yours.

@yulian_ustiyanovych We plan on integrating Density sensors to provide additional value to our product- Sensors are our bread and butter and I think you'd be hard pressed to find as robust a tool and platform as this at a better price. The question should be, does it provide enough value to what you're building to make sense for you? For us it's a pretty sweet deal.

@yulian_ustiyanovych We have customer data for that use case to suggest it's worth paying for at our current price. We've done everything we can to keep the monthly low but it's a very powerful sensor generating a tremendous amount of data every second. Long term, customers are paying for regular and reliable access to that as opposed to a one-off physical product. Try it out. You can return it after a month.

@andrewfarah I'm following you guys from the very beginning, and of course I'll try this out. I would love to talk personally(via fb, or other chat apps)

@shemagmk @yulian_ustiyanovych That's the best endorsement we could have asked for, Shema. Pricing on this is a tough balance. We want to democratize people count or make it available to anyone but there are some company business models that work with our pricing and others that are looking to be super inexpensive or even free. For the moment, we can't support the lowest rung but eventually we'll get there. It's the only way to be on every relevant door.

@yulian_ustiyanovych Cool! Shoot our head of BD an email. We'd love to talk - matt@density.io

@stewartjarod There are two reasons we've come across - perception and functional. Perception -- when you're anonymous, you can go places a surveillance camera can't. We've heard from stadiums about bathrooms, publicly traded companies that don't want third-party vendors storing video off-premise, churches (turns out people count is how most dioceses dole out capital, college campuses that can't have their students "surveilled," coffee shops and other SMBs who have an aversion to "tracking customers" as a way of gathering relevant data. When a location uses a camera for security and play-back, it's justifiable. When you use the same camera to gather data about foot traffic, or do facial detection, or demographic estimation, it starts to cause privacy issues and can hurt patronage. Functional -- there are a lot of surveillance cameras from a lot of different providers already deployed. Getting them to work properly with one another is a significant challenge. There are computational problems like "hand-off" - when a person moves from one camera's field of view to another. This blind gap in-between those Fields of View needs to be algorithmically accounted for in order to not lose track of the person. You'd also need a lot of cameras installed to cover a large area. There are bandwidth concerns - image processing would have to happen on-device in order to not hog a network. Lastly from a computer vision stand-point, separating all the different kinds of backgrounds from moving objects and correctly categorizing them is not a small task. There are a lot of cameras that do this but there's still basic research going on in right now in university trying to solve this problem. In some cases, we've actually found customers who would like to use Density in conjunction with a closed-circuit security camera system (like tailgating in secure offices) A sensor dedicated to deriving relevant information without compromising consumer privacy has been a big selling point for our customers. It's also easier to explain. Some other uses - https://www.density.io/uses/ Hope this helps!

@andrewfarah thank you for this great answer. I really like the business model. Best of luck!

@widawskij Ah! The Medium article we wrote ages ago! That's awesome that you remember that. Thanks for the support along the way. What do you do? Any way we can be helpful?

@logangarcia (as a result of that website) I'm pretty sure there are several "I've been up since 4am" looks on our team's faces, :).

@andrewjdupree The gym is a legit issue

@zachschleien! Indeed. How are those muffins?!

@andrewfarah, sent over our distributor list to our manufacturer. Will be up in 2-3 months.

@brian_tessier You should definitely follow that instinct :)

@jessie_mooberry There may be some longer term potential for a long-range version. However, today, the product needs to be installed above an entryway, up to 10 feet above the ground for best results. The FOV is less important than the ability to illuminate well from a distance. Illumination with infrared light at long distances gets more challenging the further away you go. Power and ambient light become new constraints if attached to a drone. It's a great idea though!

@andrewfarah Thanks Andrew. If you ever do want to think about putting the technology to use with UAV let me know :)

@jessie_mooberry Will do. [...adds to roadmap...]

@adamroot Appreciate the note. That's high praise. Although... it is summer and tech gets a little sleepy around August :). Why did you find it interesting? Data, business model, device, something else? Would love to hear about your background.

@andrewfarah entrepruner who exited turned angel, now vc. I sent you an invite on LinkedIn and my email is my first name at TricentCapital dot com.