@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!

@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.

@steve_brigden1 can you elaborate on the "on-prem" model? As to how real-time the data is, even though it needs to go through our servers, it's very fast. Regarding accuracy, so long as it's installed in supported environments, it will count pretty much everyone. Groups, colliding people, etc.

@andrewfarah Hi Andrew. So by on-prem I mean not cloud. At the very least I mean not priced as a utility model. Your current pricing suits a retail environment, but I'm not so sure it works well in a corporate real estate or manufacturing environment. With regard to accuracy, I was more thinking in terms of centimetres. Your gifs are interesting and obviously you are detecting people coming through doors, but does the API provide positioning detail out to other systems, or just a person count? If it does give positioning data, how accurate is it (in cm). Where are you based btw?

@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.

@yulian_ustiyanovych it's available for order globally - https://density.zendesk.com/hc/e...

@ckalegi Actually, we had an email this morning from someone who provides software to TSA. "Coming to an airport near you... [you] [you]" ‹ that was supposed to be an echo.

@darrenbuckner My close friend and Density's very first pilot customer ever. I think we originally met b/c of Product Hunt, actually.

@andrewfarah indeed we did. As your very first pilot customer, I'm proud to have been witness to such great progress. You've come a long way my friend and it's impressive!

@richardfinnie What type of systems have you worked with in this space before? Accuracy is definitely an issue with tech in this space.

@abe_storey We cannot determine male v. female. But by design. Anonymity has been an important selling point for many of our customers. Definitely let me know if you'd like to get one andrew@densirty.io

@abe_storey Hey Abe, just following up :)

@blainehatab really appreciate that. The business model is arguably the thing that is most compelling and most contentious. People are used to buying hardware and sub-ing to services. Having a sensor-as-a-service is sort of a weird and curious middle ground that abstracts away the physical cost of good sold. Where else do you see this potentially applying?

@andrewfarah 100% agree on the sensor as a service. I personally think camera data and who gets the best camera data to expose and sell to big companies and devs is gonna be huge. Big x factor there is if privacy concerns will limit companies to only certain types of camera data which is why I think your service is so brilliant. Now ideally I'd like to have 3d cameras all over the city and in every building to do an insane amount of things with, but that's not how the world works. My dream would be having so much camera data that we can do live finite element analysis of the world to detect all potential building issues and crimes, but it would obviously enable a lot of things that aren't so positively aligned. Most likely it will be combo where some places are gonna only have your cameras and some places will allow 3d cameras. So more back to what you're doing, my first thought was matching up physical ad campaigns to user behavior in places that normal cameras can't go. First thought is like a condom ad in a bathroom, but I think there's bigger picture things than that if you think hard. And maybe just adding normal cameras to the rest of the store or facility like a grocery store in conjunction with your cameras would help detect theft in stores or show how purchasing habits are effected in private areas. It's really hard to pick off the exact benefit of only your private camera, but what gets me excited is that it extends the physical data gathering to places we couldn't go before. A platform to have your data combined with things like dropcams data into an campaign analysis platform would probably get some clothing store, retail store, or grocery store companies excited. I'm sure that some companies are doing this though. shrug.

@0gishere This is an awesome comment. Marketing speak only goes so far. Sometimes just showing what you can do is better. What do you mean by the societal infrastructure? I've got an idea but I'm curious. Also, how might a financial company visualize security?

@andrewfarah What I mean by societal infrastructure is like the structure of interactions that create different groups and different emotions. For example, your product could be used as great technology for testing new marketing efforts of a product, or pinpointing user experience at a cash register to the amount of objects you have...simple stuff like that that could be really powerful. As for my comment on financial companies, I was talking more about your video that shows the infrared images the camera sees. If a financial company did something like that to show how they receive and use data, I feel that people would trust their systems more.

@alvinmilton Appreciate the share. What do you do? We love hearing from devs.

@jonathanpasky Would love for you to highlight this, too :). My email is andrew@density.io. What's yours?