sensr.net cameras from 31 timezones

I noticed we got a new camera from Jakarta recently. This made me curious as to where our cameras are located. When a user adds a camera to sensr.net, they can set the timezone. This allows us to show nice daily views of what's happening on their camera, as shown above.

I ran the following SQL command and you can see that we currently cover 31 time zones, including our new friend in Jakarta. Nice!

mysql> select distinct( time_zone ) from cameras 
              order by time_zone;
+-----------------------------+
| time_zone                   |
+-----------------------------+
| Abu Dhabi                   |
| Alaska                      |
| Amsterdam                   |
| Arizona                     |
| Bangkok                     |
| Berlin                      |
| Bern                        |
| Brasilia                    |
| Canberra                    |
| Casablanca                  |
| Central Time (US & Canada)  |
| Chennai                     |
| Eastern Time (US & Canada)  |
| Hanoi                       |
| Harare                      |
| Hawaii                      |
| Jakarta                     |
| Krasnoyarsk                 |
| Kuala Lumpur                |
| Kyev                        |
| Lisbon                      |
| London                      |
| Minsk                       |
| Mountain Time (US & Canada) |
| Pacific Time (US & Canada)  |
| Paris                       |
| Riyadh                      |
| Rome                        |
| Singapore                   |
| St. Petersburg              |
| UTC                         |
+-----------------------------+
31 rows in set (0.00 sec)

$1 Billion DIY Video Surveillance Camera Market

These guys are predicting a $1 Billion market for DIY network cameras by 2012. That works out to about 10 million cameras per year, if you assume the cameras cost about $100 each.

Gosh, sure would be nice if someone built a cloud based service that would leverage all those cameras. Wait, that's what sensr.net is about.

Got a network camera? Try sensr.net. We provide sharing, archiving, and alerting for your network camera. We support almost any brand of network camera. As long as the camera has FTP, it will work with our cloud based service.

Can't FTP from IP Camera

At sensr.net we provide free FTP logins for people with network cameras. A common problem is that IP cameras, like the DCS-920, can't always do DNS. This means that the camera can have problems reaching our servers, say f3.sensr.net, since it can't find the IP address for the FTP server.

The best way to fix this is to set a DNS server in your camera's network settings page. You can either dig out the DNS settings for your ISP, or you can simply use 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. These servers are the DNS servers from OpenDNS, another favorite startup of mine.

Eventually we'll have better realtime support to help you debug your FTP server settings. In the meantime, check those DNS server settings!

sensr.net now supporting kyivstar sms

At sensr.net we received a request from one of our Ukrainian users asking us to support SMS for his local phone carrier. Luckily we're using a package called sms-fu that makes adding carriers very easy.

Our sms_fu.yml file now has these additional lines, which means our users can select the appropriate Kyivstar email to SMS gateway.

kyivstar-contract:
 name: Kyivstar (contract)
 value: @sms.kyivstar.net
kyivstar-prepaid:
 name: Kyivstar (prepaid)
 value: @2sms.kyivstar.net

Of course nothing is as simple as you might expect. We were checking numbers on the user's settings page to make sure the number was legit. Unfortunately, the site was enforcing a US centric format, 212-555-1234. I tried to add a Ukrainian format number and our site rejected it. After changing the model verifier to be more liberal, we then ran our unit tests and found that a few of them failed. We then modified the tests to match the new more liberal phone number format and all is well.

Give sensr.net a try. You can use us to archive, alert, and share your network cameras. Now even from the Ukraine!

Quicktime Screen Recording

Quicktime (version 10.0) on Snow Leopard makes it crazy easy to create screencasts. I was playing with the experimental DVR view on sensr.net this morning and thought it would be cool to be able to screencast it.

If you have a Mac running Snow Leopard (aka 10.6), just run Quicktime and select New Screen Recording from the menu. It will even directly upload the video to YouTube for you.

Here's the screencast I made. It shows the DVR view. You can select a time period and then play all the images from that time period. Go to sensr.net and try it out for yourself. More on sensr.net later.

Spycam via Sensr.net to iPad

When you create a camera on sensr.net you can now use your laptop's built in webcam. (Note that you'll need to login with Facebook Connect to activate the Add Camera link.) This can come in handy when you want to keep an eye on something. For instance, I setup my MacBook pro in the corner of the master bedroom and left it monitoring the room. It took about a minute to setup.

In the shot above you can see me viewing the "Live Preview" of the MacBook's camera on my iPad. Later you can see the cleaning lady come in and tidy up.

While in this example, I'm using the iPad as a viewer and the MacBook as the camera source, anyone can view the camera since it's on the sensr.net site. I've set this camera to public so it's open to the world. Your cameras can be private or restricted to your Facebook friends.

Setting up cameras on sensr.net is free for now. Give it a try and let us know what you think. For more details on the Live Previews feature, see this article on our sensr.net Google Group.