London is known as the city with the highest level of video surveillance for whatever reasons.  The writer has recently visited Taipei (where Computex tradeshow was held) and has found Taipei to be full of video surveillance cameras too.  Hotel lifts, buffet restaurants, office building corridors and ATM machines, for example, are all supervised with cameras.  One ATM machine is supervised with 2 cameras- one watching the keypad and one capturing the face of the person using the machine.  Also, we can go on to www.webcams.travel site and see highway traffic conditions or tourist spots in real time or snapshots on top of a satellite map of the area. For sure, those cameras have helped organizations like banks, hotels, city councils as well as travellers, citizens and consumers.  They are win-win arrangements. 

We talked to a top video surveillance technology company in Taipei and learned that Taipei is going through a technology evolution step at the moment.  In this respect, Europe is leading the way with 20% of installations based on Internet Protocol (IPVS) technology and the rest with analogue cameras and Digital Video Recorder (DVR).  Interestingly this Taiwan company said Taiwan has only 10% of IPVS penetration and Australia would be half way between Taiwan and Europe.  The CEO of the company did not know about New Zealand other than our timber and dairy products.   

During this technology exploration tour, the writer has seen an application of video surveillance that was not previously thought of.  This is based on the easy archiving, searching and playback features of IPVS.  A building or infrastructure construction company archived video clips of their building sites periodically even if there was no accident or theft or whatever.  The archives show the progression of building construction over time and the amount of activities at each stage.  The information could be used for training or analysing their methodology for future projects.  Well thought out!  See this for 2 samples of IPVS at home.