Mythbusting - Home Security Myth #2: Effectiveness

There was an interesting article about the effectiveness of home security a few weeks ago.

You can read the full version here.

The summary is that Britain has high rates of burglary because people don't take adequate steps to protect themselves (such as locking up and using their alarms) and that many steps they do take are ineffective (such as security lights and siren only alarms.)

They argue that some of these actually aid the burglar, like lights to work by, or are easily circumvented, like wearing a hoodie around a CCTV camera. And we all know that most alarm sounds are routinely ignored.

I would argue that the real reason all of these security measures fail is that they don't tell anyone who cares that there is a crime in progress. With our approach, a crafty burglar may still get in as none of us really wants to live in a concrete bunker, but if they do, you know instantly. You can then call the police and give them an opportunity to intervene WHILE it's still happening.

I'd much rather the police catch the bad guys in the act, than just take a crime report long afterward.

Effectiveness is based on deterrence and response. We can help with both.

A shout out to all Entrepreneurial Engineers

Yesterday Amyas and I were at the IET's Entrepreneurial Engineer event in Cambridge. It was wonderful to see so many engineers keen to learn more about entrepreneurship, both in the true sense of starting new businesses, and within their current employing organisations. Everyone we spoke to was excited by the AlertMe proposition, and it was good to meet so many people who are already fans of ZigBee! There was a real buzz around new consumer technology ideas such as ours, and several people said how great it was to see a company using ZigBee for the purpose it was designed for, and getting a compelling new product out using it.

So a big Hi to everyone we met yesterday, especially the avid followers of this blog! Do sign up at www.AlertMe.com so we can keep you up to date with when AlertMe will be available in your area, and keep being entrepreneurial.

Mythbusting - Home Security Myth #1: Risk

One of the most common misconceptions of home security is about RISK.

Generally, people are bad judges of risk. Whole industries exist for the management of risk in various forms, ranging from financial to personal. Business managers are kept up nights by their decisions around risk mitigation. And we all have to judge risk, reward, and consequences on a daily basis.

• Can I park on the yellow line for 15 minutes or will I get a ticket?
• Should I buy a house now or hope the property bubble will burst soon?
• If I leave work early today will the boss think I'm being slack?
• Do I need to replace the batteries in my smoke detector today or next week?

A good way to think about risk is to weigh the CHANCE of an event happening against the OUTCOMES if it does or does not.

Parking on the yellow line might conveniently saving me walking several blocks and circling around looking for a legal space, and the chance of a traffic warden coming by in the next 15 minutes is fairly low, but the consequence might be a 60 pound penalty citation and the minor hassle of paying it.

Interestingly there is also an emotional cost to all this. If I park in a legal space, then I don't have to worry about it - very nice benefit that should be factored in. If I get a ticket for illegal parking, it'll probably annoy me for the rest of the day, and again when I get around to paying it.

What does this have to do with home security? A lot actually.

Some decisions are made daily. Lock up the house, using one or more locks. Close some or all of the windows.

Some decisions we make once and then forget about. Getting an alarm system. Installing smoke detectors. Joining Neighbourhood Watch.

It's well worth re-evaluating the risks of home security now. The chance factor should reflect 733,000 reported home burlaries last year in the UK according to the Home Office Crimes Report, and the average cost is fairly high at an average theft claim of £2,250 (total home property loss claims were at £1.4 billion in the UK last year.)

Again, not least is the emotional cost of the risk. That same Home Office report says that 63% of people believe crime has increased in the UK, with 13% expressing very high levels of worry. The most significant issue may be the awful feeling of invasion if you do have the misfortune of being a victim.

This is all a personal decision, but now you have some of the facts, assumptions and myths around the risk of burglary. A similar decision can be made for smoke and fire detection, and a variety of other considerations.

Perhaps the strongest conclusion is that it is worth being informed and making an educated decision about risks to your home. I hope this helps you do that.

Usability in practice

Last week I attended a three day intensive camp called "Usability in Practice." This was run by the world-renowned Nielsen Norman Group, a consultancy who work in the field of usability - making tools which are easy for people to use to accomplish their desired task. The group is made up of people who have been working on product design and thinking about the whole user experience for decades, and has the philosophy "to help companies enter the age of the consumer, designing human-centered products and services." That's AlertMe!

I've previously met Don Norman (co-founder of the group) at Intelligent Environments, a Microsoft Research event. He's a really inspiring guy, with a huge range of design and psychology expertise, as well as technical experience (amongst many other things, he was Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple). Norman recommends companies design the Total User Experience, going beyond just a few nifty features and good engineering to make a product, and we've followed that best practice whilst designing the AlertMe system.

The camp focussed on how to design and test for usability, which is something which has been critical to AlertMe from day one. It was great to build on my previous experience with some more detailed study at the camp, and I'm now planning the next round of user testing for our system.

Jakob Nielsen ran some of the sessions; he's one of the foremost advocates of easy to use websites and a top usability guru. He also founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces. This kind of rapid, responsive technique to create a highly usable, functional and fun-to-use system is at the heart of AlertMe's development.

I'm going to be looking for participants to help AlertMe refine our user interface and website during the summer. If you'd like to be considered, send me an email at usability @ alertme.com or sign up for more information at www.alertme.com. This is a great opportunity to help us make using the AlertMe system a truly straightforward and enjoyable experience.

Long weekend #4 - The morning after

Again, absolutely true experience - I really am not making this up.

Ah it was nice to be back home. I love the cosy feel of our little English terrace house.

I woke up the morning after we got back, refreshed and ready to get back to work. Except, why was the house so cold this morning?

I wander downstairs for my usual glass of Ovaltine (the good stuff we bring over from the States.) I notice it's even colder down here. Ah, I see why!

The front door is wide open!

Apparently it has been wide open all night. The Yale lock must not have latched properly when we closed it, then the wind must have blown it back open. It does that sometimes. This is why I'm always wondering if I closed the front door. See, there is a perfectly good reason for my paranoia!

Um, wait a sec, the front door was wide open all night!

We live on fairly busy street, just off a major road through town. It's a mixed part of town, generally very nice, but some rough characters bumming around pretty often, too. Uh, oh.

Rush into the front room for a quick look around: yep, there is my laptop, my iPod, my wallet, my keys, my wife's purse, and all our passports, right there where we dropped them after the France trip.

I am very, very, very relieved no one wandered in last night.

We really do need to get one of them high tech new home monitoring systems....

Long weekend #3 - The Return Home

The following is absolutely true. Sometimes life just hands you material.

Coming back from the ZigBee conference in Paris, I had the usual mild worries:

• Did the cleaner come while we were gone?
• Did we leave the heating on for five days with no one home?
• And generally, was the house ok?

Interestingly, these worries increase the closer we get to home, which is compounded by the fact that the trains get exponentially slower as we approach home:

• Paris to London - no stops - 2 hours 40 minutes - 280 miles - average 105 mph
• London to Cambridge - 28 stops - 4 hours 20 minutes - 60 miles - average 14 mph

At last, we're home!

The house is still there, not a smoking pile of bricks!
The front is closed, not hanging off it's hinges!
The front door is locked, but we can't open it!

Err... apparently the cleaner did come, and she locked an extra deadbolt on the door, one for which I don't have a key. Whoops. Now what?

Time to break in to my own home!

Wife watches me vault the locked gate to the back alley, easy enough, this is kind of fun!
Slip around the neighbours', into our back garden.
Test the french doors to see if they're locked - yes, good, we remembered to lock them when we left. Now what?

Tug a bit harder on the back door... hmm... it seems to have a little play in it... I wonder.
Sharp yank on the handle of the french doors, and voila, quiet splintering and I'm in!

• Locked out to broken in - 1 stop - 2 minutes - 40 yards - average 0.7 mph

That was really easy. Quick and quiet. No one saw me.

We'll need to fix the door though.

And perhaps we should get some sort of high tech home monitoring system....

Long weekend #2 - ZigBee in Paris

The ZigBee Alliance held a conference and open house at the Hyatt by Charles De Gaulle Airport last week. It was an international event, with attendees coming from at least four continents.

Interesting to see the booths - a lot of developers and platforms and chipsets and everyone had some green circuit boards on display. What I didn't see was many consumer applications of the technology. It still seems very rooted in the industrial world. The technology is ready and solid, but we'll be one of the first to deploy it for a really cool home usage.

Even Eaton's presentation was about their electrical and automotive bits, not their geek-next-door home products. It just feels like this isn't the focus for their company.

The best customer oriented product was Control4 and they had a nice demo of their kit - we'd love to have a chat with them about the security aspects sometime. We also enjoyed the TSC Systems display.

It was great to see our friends from Ember and PRI.

All in all, a very interesting event, but it'll get better when we are ready to show our stuff!

Long weekend #1

Wednesday last week, we left home for a long weekend in France. A conference in Paris requires some extra time on holiday. (Note to our Directors: this was not a boondoggle. Really.)

As always, I had to go back twenty steps from the front door, just to make sure it was closed tightly. I had a touch more worry than usual, after all we were going to be gone for five days. The neighbours were gone also (to Bristol, almost as glamourous.)

Worse, we had to put the trash bins out in front of the house two days early because we were going to miss the collection day otherwise. They only collect every two weeks here, which means if you miss once, it's an entire month of rubbish to stomp into the small bin, sort of a very sad man's grape stomping. But I digress. The non-political issue with the bins was that leaving them in front for five days on a semi-busy street seems to be a clear sign of "Nobody's Home - Come on in!" They even have the house number spraypainted on, just so your slower crook doesn't get confused about which house is empty. Sigh. My paranoia needs little encouragement.

The trains were fine: Cambridge to King's Cross, King's Cross to Leicester Square, Leicester Square to Waterloo, Waterloo to Gare Du Nord, enough trains already, taxi to hotel.

Ah, Paris in the spring. If you must know, the weather was absolutely perfect -- warm but not hot, blue sky sunny, with a cool, light breeze -- all day on Thursday. Of course, I spent the entire day in a windowless convention room in an airport hotel, but more about the ZigBee Open House in the next post....

(To Be Continued.)

AlertMe moments at the weekend: Freezers and Cats!

Last week was my wife's birthday, so on Thursday we took the family up to London for a long weekend at my sister-in-law's house. On Friday I got a call from our cleaner, who'd arrived at our home that morning to find our freezer door ajar ... and most of the food inside spoiled.

"If only we already had AlertMe!" I thought - we'd have known about the problem and asked someone to come and close the door before any damage was done. This alone would have been worth the cost of a year's of AlertMe subscription, to say nothing of all the hassle.

This is a classic example of a device in the home knowing that there's a problem (our fridge-freezer beeps if either door is left open), but not having any way to tell its owner.

So we were house-sitting my sister-in-law’s house. They have a cat, and were reassured to know that we'd be around to check that it was getting in and out of the house OK, getting fed and watered. I wondered - could one of our AlertMe door/window sensors on the catflap give some peace of mind for cat users? In 2004, 4.5 million UK households owned 7.7 million cats.

Can't wait to get the system launched!

Happy Birthday to AlertMe.com!

AlertMe had its first birthday this week -- turning the company into a jolly one year old.

We've achieved an amazing amount in one year:

• incorporating as a "we're really going to do it" business
• growing the team with many new superstars
• moving into our new headquarters in the heart of Cambridge
• defining and adopting our brand and identity
• closing our first major round of venture funding
• finding great partners to help us with design and development, manufacturing and marketing
• and most importantly, prototyping and developing a revolutionary new home security and monitoring system

We look forward to moving from infancy to toddler-dom in the next year...watch us grow!

Hip-hip-hooray!

ZigBee: at home in Cambridge

This month, AlertMe has performed a variety of tests using our own ZigBee hardware, to make sure that it performs well in real houses. Following on from previous test phases, we went out into a wide range of homes, of differing sizes and construction types, in the Cambridge area and beyond, and explored how our kit would work in these homes. As well as checking that ZigBee has the range to reach everywhere in these homes, we also tested the potential for interference with operating Bluetooth and WiFi networks in the home. I'd like to take this opportunity to say thanks on behalf of the technology team to Preethi Kalimuthu and Sean Warren, who joined AlertMe to help with this study, and who were rigorous and insightful.

We used our hardware to simulate real user installations of AlertMe equipment, and generated heavy network traffic on the other wireless networks present in the homes where they existed. From nineteenth century large family homes to new build townhouses, with all kinds of electronics already installed (microwaves, DECT and mobile phones, and even giant plasma TVs and huge fridges!), we found great performance using ZigBee. This is excellent news, confirming our previous conclusions. We're looking forward to getting real systems out into houses soon!

Champagne moment #4

The champagne flowed at AlertMe last Thursday, as the team celebrated the major achievement of "System Alpha" - a demonstration of the integrated system working from end to end.



We're all thrilled to see our system working. We even exceeded our aims for this demo, so a very successful milestone passed!

A MySpace party and a wrecked home

It's long been conventional wisdom that a major benefit of programming computers is that this allows you to do a task many times over with ease. It's also been noted that if this task isn't well thought through, any bug is repeated many times over. The computer does what it is told, and the result may be much less or much more than desired. Networking on the internet can probably be said to escalate this effect by distributing the result far and wide.

In this case, we have a simple task: "Invite people to a party", that contained a small error of judgment "the party was unsanctioned by the parents and uncontrolled by the teenage host", and led to a disastrous result of "more party than desired".


Web revellers wreck family home

About 200 youngsters caused damage put at £20,000 to a family home after a party organised on a website.

Police said a teenage girl used the social networking site MySpace to advertise the party while her parents were away from home on Easter Monday.

The full article is available here.

So what does this have to do with AlertMe?

Well, our service monitors activity in the home. It could easily be set to report unusual volumes of activity, for instance the front door opening 200 times in an evening and ceaseless motion in the lounge, kitchen, or any other room. If the parents were alerted of this unexpected and abnormal circumstance, perhaps they could have responded in time to avoid the result, even calling the police to break up the party if necessary.

ADT adds daily premium rate phone charges

Another interesting news article, from the Guardian on Saturday:


'Phantom' calls raise the alarm

Premium rate lines: Patrick Collinson on a lucrative security mystery

(Saturday April 14, 2007, The Guardian)

Ben Whitney's father just could not work out why his phone bill was so high. He's retired and recovering from a stroke, so he asked his son to take a look at it. The thing puzzling him most was a 20p or 23p call every day, sometimes twice a day, to an 0906 number at 1.17am each morning. The calls had started months ago, and if they carried on were likely to add £100 a year to his bill.

The calls lasted only a few seconds, but the high cost alerted Mr Whitney to the fact that they must be premiumrate lines. Had some rogue dialler or trojan software hijacked his father's phone? He contacted industry regulator Icstis for help - and was astonished to discover that the premium rate calls were being auto-dialled from the family home's ADT burglar alarm as it made a daily registration contact with the ADT monitoring centre.

Mr Whitney and his father were flabbergasted. The alarm had cost more than £1,000 to install, plus monthly service charges . The last thing his father had expected was another £100 or so a year in premium rate phone calls. "I traced the number via the Icstis website to ADT alarms," says Mr Whitney. " I made some enquiries and was told that this type of ADT alarm has to 'check in' every day by calling in to their system. The units come with an expensive revenue-generating number as default but I was told they can be modified to call a cheaper 0870 number by an ADT engineer."

The ADT call centre assured him that on the next inspection visit by an ADT technician, the line would be changed.

"However, the engineer who called knew nothing about this or how to change it. I was astounded that this information had to be uncovered by me and was not something that the company tell their customers when the unit is fitted, " says Mr Whitney.

The article continues on, you can see the rest of the story here

It's well worth noting that AlertMe.com's service will continuously monitor its status through your home's broadband connection at no additional charge, not just once a day over a premium phone call as ADT's does.

"Police take action as burglary rate increases"

I'm back from a two week holiday in the USA - not surprisingly I spent a fair amount of time there wishing I had a way to check in on our house in Cambridge....

I did return to find an interesting article in the Cambridge Evening News about local police efforts to stem burglaries. Seems to be a bit of good news/bad news - I'm very glad the police efforts are meeting some success, but it's a shame the burglary rate was almost triple last years' numbers.

Here's the first bit of the story:

SEVEN people were arrested and stolen property was recovered as police launched a bid to stem a sharp rise in burglaries.

The move, called Operation Onslaught, saw police swoop on the Arbury and King's Hedges areas of Cambridge in a crackdown on break-ins.

Between November 2 last year and February 23 this year there were a total of 128 burglaries in the two areas. In the same period the previous year 44 offences were reported.

It was also reassuring to hear that "All reports of burglary are taken extremely seriously and are fully investigated."

You can read the full article here.