– Sarah Cox, Operations Manager, Capital Factory
Capital Factory is a membership organization that helps technology start ups succeed. Our mission is to be the entrepreneurial center of gravity for Austin. We provide workspace, networking events, and entrepreneur training classes ranging from programming to team training.
We chose Eagle Eye in part because they store their video off-site, which adds a layer of security. It won’t go away due to tampering or a local malfunction. They also completely encrypt the video stream, which ensures full privacy, which is also very important to us.
We use the Eagle Eye Security Camera VMS, along with Axis cameras. We’ve deployed 14 cameras across 2 different floors in our building.
On our main floor from we have ten cameras as follows:
- two in the kitchen
- two in the lobby entry
- two at the freight elevators (different angles)
- one in the co-working area with a fire escape
- one in the library conference room
- one in the classrooms
- our computer server room
On our other floor we have four cameras:
- one at the main elevator
- one at the freight elevator
- two at the two fire escapes
I like the way Eagle Eye does the camera layouts on my browser or phone – we even get audio. We can assign cameras according to groups, such as “elevators”. I can view multiple videos simultaneously, then click on the video of interest, and fast forward through a time range.
I have Eagle Eye bookmarked in my browser, so it’s very easy to access. We have set our user permissions so that the executive director and I can both log in, plus we set up an Eagle Eye team user, Mark Cotton, who is available to help us.
Property Protection
Our members bring in their own items when they work here. Our policy has been that they can leave their personal property unattended at their own risk. Some even have permanent desks where they leave their belongings at the end of the day, such as computer monitors and credit card machinery.
Operations
We request that our members treat our shared facility with respect. This includes proper equipment usage, such as learning how to use the copy machine so that it isn’t left jammed. We’ve noticed that putting in the system has already been a deterrent to some of the activities that were occurring. Though I cannot state for certain the reason, we’ve even noticed people are no longer leaving their dishes in the sink.
Forensic Searches
I currently use Eagle Eye more for historical forensic searches than I do for real-time viewing. You can also easily target a specific day and time, and/or it is fast and easy to pinpoint an event based on motion markings. One tip I have is to not leave the television running after hours in view of the camera, as it triggers motion detection on the cameras.
We’ve had a couple of minor security-related incidents where we used the Eagle Eye system for our forensic analysis. The first was what we call “The Great Bean Bag Caper”. During an evening event, where someone managed to take one of our lounge area bean bags on the elevator out of sight of where our events manager was sitting, and down to the first floor lobby. From there they abandoned their efforts to steal the beanbag and just left it. Our lobby security team brought it back up.
I did the forensic analysis myself. I logged into Eagle Eye’s portal. I knew the general time window for the occurrence based on when security brought up the beanbag. We were able to use a picture of the woman at the downstairs lobby elevator and match it to pictures from the video we had of one of our classroom meetings at around that time, and identify the culprit.
Our other incident was a table suddenly appearing at our facility after a long weekend. We went through the footage over the 4 day weekend, using motion detection, which was an efficient method. We found the footage of a couple of our members carrying in the table. Although this was not a security threat, that have allowed us to confirm the usefulness of Eagle Eye’s system.
Because Capital Factory also has evening events that are open to the public, by having the Eagle Eye system in place, we can provide our members a strong feeling of safety and protection of their property.