AnalogFolk's Innovative Use of Facial Recognition for Marmite Taste Test

To fuel growth and innovation, V5 Systems needed to increase market exposure and evolve its intelligent security platform to support more use cases, requirements and technologies.

When you’ve developed innovative, groundbreaking software that brings emotion to the gargantuan Godzilla on the big screen or adds life to leading video game characters to the delight of serious gamers, protecting your intellectual property from counterfeiting and reverse engineering is paramount. When evaluating licensing and IP protection vendors, Faceware Technologies, Inc. turned to Wibu-Systems’ CodeMeter to protect their valuable intellectual property that was years and over $40 million USD in the making.

Enjoy a beer on the upper Texas Gulf Coast, and you can probably thank Del Papa Distributing Company. Founded more than a century ago, the company today distributes 10 million cases of beer annually, from 30 suppliers. More than 375 employees work at headquarters in Texas City and two other distribution centers. The family-owned company has a simple aim: to be a great beer distribution company. So when Del Papa set out to build a new 27-acre headquarters, company leaders thought about how technology could contribute to its greatness. “We wanted the new distribution center to have a single, secure network we could use for physical security, communications, collaboration, and even monitoring the temperature of our inventory,” says Steve Holtsclaw, Manager of Information Systems for Del Papa. The old building, in contrast, had separate networks for voice, data, video, and physical security. Separate networks were expensive and got in the way of business. For example, personnel could only monitor video surveillance cameras from certain workstations. And Wi-Fi performance in the warehouse area wasn’t reliable enough for the voice-activated order-picking system.

Doug Gilroy and Mark Bayrock of Advanced Audio Concepts, a Vancouver-based systems integrator, were given free reign to design, install and operate River Rock's complex surveillance system. Gilroy had freedom to design the system with several unique aspects, such as the use of video balun technology to integrate quickly, and an innovative design in the tech room that makes it easier for the operator to spot problems. The integrators also had a long-standing relationship with Honeywell and chose to use Honeywell products almost exclusively throughout the installation.

Securitas wanted to give new and existing customers a proposition that was unlike anything they had offered before, a security system that broke the traditional mould but took advantage of the monitoring infrastructure that was already in place, including the manned response capabilities and alarm receiving centres.

Suncor, one of Canada’s largest integrated energy companies, faced a significant challenge at their Fort Hills mine. Upon completion of commissioning in 2018, the control room operators were dealing with alarm loads 30 times higher than those recommended by alarm management standards and best practices. These alarm loads, combined with frequent alarm floods caused by plant upsets, resulted in significant operator overload. This increased the risk of safety, environmental, and production-related incidents at the site. The alarm system was overactive, causing a high level of stress and potential for error among the operators. The challenge was to reduce the alarm load to manageable levels and ensure the safety and efficiency of the operations.