afar

There's a lot more to it than just contracts and contractors. There's a good book that talks about improving the military's ability to respond (The Kill Chain). The general point is that the face of war has evolved but the U.S. military's primary method of changing direction and decentralizing decisions (The Kill Chain) has not.

Worth a read.

Gold. Proud to be affiliated.

Can confirm

You're asking good questions about raising capital but the outcome was a rare circumstance where all cofounders, previous investors, new investors, current employees, and the exec team are thrilled. There's a lot to do but the round was right-sized as it was the same amount we planned to raise pre-pandemic.

Can't count cars at the moment, unfortunately. But there's some cool tech from Flocksafety and other camera solutions.

Lower cost systems like Google's Popular Times, are not as accurate as they seem. The next time you see a graph on google, you'll notice there's no y-axis. It's a clever way to look like actuals when it's relative to itself. Also we have units in many GPT locations. They're not accurate. On the vc returns thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We'll see.

No rain! It's a great callout. We'll see what we can do if for no other reason than to understand risk.

Thank you. Fwiw, our eng team has deeply benefited from all those dev tools and libraries. The stack to result in real-time, accurate count is nuts. I think one of our devs, Gus, was on the thread. Maybe he can weigh in.

This one's legit (cofounder here). We honestly thought it would be a side project. We originally used a raspberry pi and two TP-Links to recreate a router (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRGa9-QUDWo&t=7s). People are really hard to count.

We get this question from time to time. It may be possible with some systems but it's not feasible at our resolution. You can see more of our depth data here -- https://medium.com/density-inc/ai-is-not-magic-its-manual-la...

I've lost track of the number of times we've said, "well, we count people" and thought... god this must be boring for other people.

If it becomes super wide spread, we'd make it low to no cost to provide wait times to end users.

dtertman! Those were awesome questions (same cofounder here). I read a thing a while back as a startup, your job is to survive long enough for the market to need you. Great talking to you 5 years later.

That is an exceptional name. If you still want to build it, we have a real-time API. Love supporting apps :) (Density cofounder here)

I agree with this. It's compliance will be contextual / regional / etc. This is why the system also support real-time alerts and safe analytics. In the event a place like Walmart wants to more actively enforce they can. Display is just the public facing feature.

MAC address tracking is one approach but it's imprecise and with the proliferation of "things with antennas," you have to do a lot of reconciling on the backend to not count 1 person as 3 when they have multiple devices on them. Euclid analytics tried this. It's a common but flawed approach to count (use depending).

That's an interesting point. What would you recommend? Follow street sign structure?

There are grocers who have required all corporate employees to work at least 3 days a week in a store bagging groceries, cleaning carts, and managing lines. Side not, essential businesses are the only real experts in safety right now. Everyone WFH is just guessing.

Good example of this is in elevators. People fill the available space like water.

You're right. "Notify me when it's quiet" is a thing the system supports. In related news, load balancing humans is a two-sided thing.

Actually, many deployments are going into factories, fulfillment centers, and meat processing plants specifically to help keep workers safe.

+1

Definitely not creative just really, really hard. Took us nearly half a decade.

This. People are weird. They do strange stuff and it's really hard to count accurately.

I don't think cameras will be displaced / eliminated. It's just a question of whether or not they will be accepted as a form of active surveillance or remain a method of security. Today, they are largely security but it's entirely possible the world moves toward mass surveillance.

Many have / are trying this. Harder to pull off than it seems. Privacy is a big part but distributing the infra to do this at scale is nontrivial. A number of years back Placemeter used to pay you 50/mo to install your Android device on a window sill so they could understand movement. Never quite took off.

Agree. Intent is to kill the product once this is all over and use the infrastructure to design better cities.

In an ideal world, we just give this stuff away and the applications on the platform become the primary value. Some people are open to that others are less used to having a widget and not owning it. Will take time.

It's definitely going to take a village of tools and methods. Don't think it will make it more dangerous, though.

Skepticism on this stuff is valid. If we're going to distribute large scale infrastructure that measures human movement we ought to be critical of it. So many systems purport to work but don't. Others are way over engineered. And a lot market as if they're sensors when they're really just cameras taking pictures of behavior.