2018 Intertraffic Innovation Award Selection Day impressions

Februar 28, 2018

Musings of the CEO

Time: 20th February 10.30AM.

Location: RAI, Amsterdam – Intertraffic Innovation Award Selection Day

Mood: Anxious, and a bit desperate to get my presentation working. Trying hard not to look it though and chatting up the jury while waiting for a converter that holds the key to starting the show.

But every story has a beginning – so let’s start ours with the flight leaving for Amsterdam at 8.00 AM sharp. We are a traveling duo with our Head of Development. Spirits are high as we have good feelings and high expectations of the day. I consider the serious lack of sleep only a minor setback, I mean who in their right mind would sleep when there is a chance to introduce their product to a highly professional jury in mere 15 minutes. It’s not that I find it hard to present ARU – our plug ‘n play LPR solution – properly, rather that I want to present Asura Technologies in a broader context. I want to show that ARU is but the first step in a series of innovative solutions from a company which has innovation written all over it. That is why we spent a lot of time with the team to come up with the best way to present the Asura Recognition Unit.

Initial brainstorming sessions included playing safe by coming up with a “classic” presentation that shows the features of our solution. Not our style. So, let’s come up with spectacular graphs to demonstrate the savings an integrator, a PMS provider or CCTV/VMS solutions provider can potentially reach by setting up and LPR system using ARU. Not a bad approach but still lacking. OK. We will be talking about the natural flow of market evolution – development based on customer insight – that we preach and practice. Does not sound half-bad either but the impact is questionable.

OK, let’s think. We have 15 minutes to show who we are and what we do – questions from the jury included. Plenty to set up a live LPR system right before the eyes of the jury. 5 minutes should be enough in fact. That way the term “plug ‘n play” will surely come through.

So back to the flight. After a clear landing in Amsterdam we jumped into a Tesla model X – a clear sign of being a progressive city is that these favorites of mine are now representing over 50% of the taxi fleet of the city. Congrats on this one Amsterdam! Arriving at RAI, we were greeted by the amazing Intertraffic staff. Helpful people with all smiles, easing up all of us before the interview, and our saviors when coping with Murphy’s law. Because Murphy came of course and hit hard.

Just to give you some context, we brought a laptop to demonstrate setting up a live multi-lane handling LPR system with ARU in a matter of clicks. It was only before our turn presenting that it became clear we need a VGA cable to connect to the projector – not an option when armed with a developer’s laptop that has a sole HDMI socket…

I desperately tried to stall for time while members of Intertraffic’s lovely staff tried fetching a converter for us. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank the jury again for bearing patiently with me in these trying times – who are by the way a bunch of great people, open to new ideas representing a high level of professionalism from all over the traffic industry. Still, questions like whether we have the presentation on a pendrive or online could not be avoided. As it happens, the online version did not load. A pendrive version did not exist. “We would like to leave PowerPoint presentations to others, our purpose today is to show you our easy-to-use, high efficiency LPR solution live and working” – I commented as convincingly as I could at this point. Fortunately for us help promptly arrived along with the converter. For which I cannot properly express my gratitude. From here on out it was easy as pie.

In a matter of a few clicks – BOOM – we were already connected to a live stream of the motorway and set the ROI to optimize license plate recognition. Both us, the presenters and the jury were compensated for the rough start – ARU delivered instant LPR integration and the advanced video analytics did what it was supposed to. When the jury leaned forward to get a clearer picture of what is happening on the screen I knew we are on the right track and to my greatest joy the questions started pouring in:

You can connect to any existing image source or IP camera?
Yes
Does this mean that LPR can be enabled on CCTV or other VMS systems?
Yes, pretty much.
Did you say that ARU is capable of multi lane handling?
Yes
Does it work as a cloud-based service?
Yes, as a dedicated cloud service for now.
Does it work on-site as well where data security does not allow the use of an online service?
But of course.

And my personal favorite: “So, do we see the system running on a live, real-time stream?

Yes – I was smiling confidently by this time – this is a live system, set up right before you in 5 minutes, without using any hardware triggers, event data pushed to a database. This room right now is literally LPR ready.

I was happy when we were nominated for the 2018 Intertraffic Innovation Award and now, after meeting the jury and other nominees during the Selection Day I’m proud that Asura Technologies became part of the “club”. I am reassured to belong to a team where professionalism is the base-value and you qualify with operational products, that bring actual value to the customer, not just concepts on whitepapers or in brochures.

In the meantime, let me invite you dear reader to our booth at Intertraffic ( Hall 11 Booth 107) to experience our plug ’n play LPR live while sipping a beer. Just click on the link below, get your free entrance ticket and see what the future holds for LPR.

Click here to get your free entrance ticket to Intertraffic Amsterdam 2018

ARU is a plug ‘n play solution to enable high accuracy LP recognition in any existing or new visual data collection system. Currently most LPR solutions are either expensive and not flexible or too complicated, hard to integrate. ARU is camera-independent, can work with any IP camera and delivers high recognition rate without using expensive HW triggers with its sophisticated validation algorithm. ARU stores and pushes LPR results to any business application in either MySQL, XML or CSV format.

Do you have any comments or remarks? I’d love to hear it!
Drop me a mail to ceo@asuratechnologies.com.

Click Here to Request a Live Demo Session