[epberry]

First, the negatives. This space is enormously difficult. You have low margin, low technology clients with physical infrastructure. You have to get approval from operations, IT, and legal. Once you're up and running the data becomes stale fast and you have to produce insights like move this shelf here. Then you have to wait for them to do that, if they ever do, and demonstrate that the client is now seeing a ROI from that change. And prove it was you and not the new ad campaign they just ran or the better staff they have in place now that is making them slightly more money. I've been working in this area for years, also with a computer vision research background, also read Prayas's post several years ago and dismissed it, also started with specialty retail and focused on ease of install, also dismissed RetailNext for using their own hardware, etc.

Phew. Now, the positives! I do believe that someone will crack this at some point. There are several promising trends including a massive jump in the share of IP camera installs, massive drop in the price/performance ratio of GPUs, and steady increase in commercial broadband. And everybody loves data. Those trends, plus a pivot to optimizing physical business processes, are why I'm still working on camera software at my company, Perceive (www.perceiveinc.com). We got an interview at YC several years ago for this idea but were rejected.

So Jonathon and team, despite how this post started, I really do wish you guys the best. Your tech looks really good. I would love to talk.