On March 15, 2006 Mike said:

Interesting. Cisco has also been working closely with Sony’s network camera business. They’re cooperating around sale of enterprise video systems, especially for security. That’s an area that doesn’t get much attention in Silicon Valley, but it’s hot in the wake of 9/11, and there’s a lot of value you can add to the system via computing power — for example, monitoring video feeds to automatcially identify suspicious behavior.

Some network camera owners configure them to send automatic e-mails when motion is detected, but the systems are pretty dumb today — the users tell stories about getting urgent alerts from the system because it detected a piece of paper blowing off a table. So there’s a lot of value Cisco can add here, which is probably what’s attracting them.