A new Yellowknife business is looking to offer technological state of the art camera for security and surveillance needs of Northern institutions and organizations operating in this COVID-19 work environment.
Frank Fu, owner of the company and Daryl Byrne, sales manager, have been working closely together since launching Intellibroad (visit website here) in December.
Fu has been in the IT industry for 25 years, including many years with IBM. He has identified a need to enhance surveillance cameras with human temperature sensor detection equipment and other related video recording software during a period of time when people are concerned about the prevalence of Covid-19.
Intellibroad has a variety of security products available from several mainstream producers. Fu said based on his years of working in China and in IT, he has garnered the ability to identified manufacturers of technology products that can specifically meet the security and surveillance needs of Northern institutions and organizations.
"My intention is to sell product solutions to the companies here (in the North)," he said. "I can support them in bringing in a new product and provide new solutions to them so that they can build more business and increase new revenues.
"With Covid-19 we have talked about where there is business, and we thought that with everything stopped - with no airplanes and no cars coming in (to the NWT) - when those businesses come back, there will be a need for businesses to take care of their customers."
Fu and Byrne see the increasing need for public spaces, such as office buildings, barber shops, gyms, shopping malls, cafeterias, hospitals and airports, to have equipment that can thoroughly compute and retain analytics, such as facial recognition or heat temperatures as well as provide security and access control. This will ultimately provide a greater "peace of mind" for both building owners as well as other members of the public when there are fears about the coronavirus spreading in the public.
"Even after people say that don't need to worry about the fever, (our equipment) will still serve a purpose," Byrne added. "It's going to give you that front-line defense, because from now on that is what people are gonna be thinking about. We know there are asymptomatic cases and that it is possible to miss those odd (people with fevers)."
Byrne added that the company is looking to more directly work with organizations from its main office on 49 Street that can offer solutions in security and surveillance, rather than what tends to be the practice - Northern organizations contacting a southern distributor, or worse Amazon, for help. Being located in the North, Byrne can physically go to a space to work with clients on budgeting and advise what types of equipment might be most useful, based on their individual needs and on what is available from thousands of items available.
"From my background a lot of guys here we would have to go to Edmonton to a low voltage wholesaler to get what they need, so then we're looking at shopping in the North idea," Byrne said. "Yeah you can buy some big names (in Edmonton) that we might not have. But we have the same product similar performances, just with different names. It's kind of a nice thing that you can drive down the road and buy a box a cable here instead of paying $100 to have it shipped."
Fact file
Fu and Byrne are quite proud of the numerous types of technology that they have to offer and believe these could enhance security needs here in the North.
Among them include:
- Full colour cameras, are among the biggest highlights, which can capture vivid colour information in low-light conditions or even in the dark, they explained. Dark alleys or tow truck yards and surveillance within a specific perimeter area would be among popular uses for such equipment, they stated.
"It can effectively extract the colour features of scenes, be it human, vehicle or details," he stated, noting that this can be of great help to police officers when trying to obtain information at a crime scene.
- He also noted the availability of "ePoE" technology which offers long distance transmission of power, video, audio and control signals at a variety of distances, and are more designed for in and around office buildings and businesses, Fu said.
- Automatic number-plate recognition - or ANPR technology - uses optical character recognition on images to reach vehicle registration plates and are similar in nature to how police or enforcement officers would use photo radar.
- Yet another piece of technology Fu and Byrne are offering includes a "WizMind" which are AI powered camera systems with deep learning algorithms. Fu explained that these models provide "comprehensive human-oriented solutions" that include face recognition, privacy protection, human video metadata, people counting and stereo analysis for a wide variety of uses.
