Business
What is Prism Skylabs?
Prism Skylabs brings physical spaces online, creating new places for people and businesses to understand and engage each other. The company is changing how businesses use video and how consumers experience physical spaces online. In the longer term, Prism Skylabs’ goal is to transform the world’s multi-hundred billion-dollar camera network investments into a platform for online-to-offline commerce that creates new revenue streams and new opportunities for businesses to engage customers.
How does it work?
At a high level, Prism Skylabs combines streams of washed-out and noisy video into gorgeous, photo-like images using a variety of processing techniques designed to enhance resolution, dynamic range and overall image quality. Additionally, the company uses unique video synthesis and cloud storage technologies to significantly reduce the data footprint while also increasing informational content.
Who’s behind Prism Skylabs?
The company was founded by technology visionary Steve Russell, the founding CEO and current chairman of 3VR, and company builder Ron Palmeri, the guy behind GrandCentral/GoogleVoice and Scout Labs, as well as an impressive roster of scientists and engineers with backgrounds in computer vision, search and large-scale social media site development.
Funding/Investors
Who has invested in the company?
Prism Skylabs has raised seed funding from a who’s who syndicate of investors, including technology industry veteran Yuri Milner, Founder and CEO of StumbleUpon, Garrett Camp, Founder and former CEO of Mint.com, Aaron Patzer. The company also received funding from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures and SV Angel, in addition to being the first company to receive investment from CrunchFund.
Product
How do merchants and business owners implement Prism Skylabs?
To use Prism Skylabs, a business owner or merchant simply downloads the free cloud-based software that automatically detects cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs), encoders or even mobile devices on its network. Without disturbing any existing equipment, those feeds are then linked to Prism Skylabs’ cloud infrastructure.
What types of businesses would be interested? What are benefits merchants will see as a result of using
Prism Skylabs?
Prism Skylabs will be used by all types of businesses, large and small. This includes retailers with thousands of locations or your local laundromat or coffee shop – and everything in between. For a restaurant or bar owner, using Prism Skylabs means being able to review a visual heat map of activity to help understand how Yelp ratings affect restaurant traffic. For a retail shop owner, it means being able to compare recent weather patterns against foot traffic to explain a recent barrage of slow sales totals. The possibilities and use cases are almost endless and are unique to each venue and space.
How will consumers experience Prism Skylabs?
Businesses will automatically syndicate Prism Skylabs’ real-time views across company websites that customers are already using, including Facebook, Twitter and Yelp, among other websites. When consumers visit their favorite venues and spaces online, they will see the Prism Skylabs view option to gain real-time insight, reviews and information. As consumers get used to having this view option, those businesses that don’t offer it will begin to feel like darkened storefronts.
How will it fit in with their existing payment platforms/services?
Prism Skylabs integrates with point-of-sale (POS), electronic article surveillance (EAS) and other systems to report data, exceptions and reports with visual context, as well as customer counts, social media and general web mentions (Four-Square check-ins at your business, Facebook “likes” of your business, etc.), and even weather data. It’s the unique combination of analytics, video management, business information and marketing capabilities within a single, cloud-based platform that sets Prism Skylabs apart.
How do you ensure customer privacy is protected?
Prism Skylabs was built from the ground up to protect privacy. Unlike Google or other technologies that apply blurring techniques after the fact, Prism Skylabs’ technology is able to extract foreground motion details as it learns and understands venues — before the image and video is seen.
Using video and images to understand the venue, Prism Skylabs separates out faces and bodies from activity to create real-time visuals. Once those images are created, businesses can apply layers of foreground activity and blurred silhouettes to create beautiful and informative privacy-protected views, as well as build other visualizations useful to understanding a place.
How do I get Prism Skylabs?
Currently, Prism Skylabs is in closed beta. To register for beta access, please visit prismskylabs.com/beta.