Part of the backstory here I think is that ALPR cameras are a commodity technology. They're not defensible by themselves medium term; the market will go to whoever ships the cheapest most reliable cameras with the best pre-sales team, which is a tough space to compete in. For Flock to defend a growth-stage startup valuation, it needs to come up with value-adds.

For a while it looked like that was going to take the form of single-pane-of-glass fusion products (think: Grafana for public safety orgs), but post-AI that seems pretty hard to defend too; Axon doesn't need deep roots in SFBA tech culture to compete on that anymore.

So I guess expect a lot of wacky ideas.

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rconti 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don't they have network effects? Let the locals search the next few towns over? Obviously this diminishes with distance; there's not a lot of benefit to Denver sharing with Minneapolis.

	▲	tptacek 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They do, but it's unclear how defensible they are. You don't have to operate Flock cameras to get access to Flock data (or Axon date) from neighboring municipalities; Flock even operates (last I checked) a subscription product for doing queries on their sharing network without their cameras installed.

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0xbadcafebee 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think Flock is going to care that much about profit and growth. Their CEO seems to be a true believer, as opposed to the typical SVer whose god is cash. And at this point they need to win hearts and minds a lot more than they need new installs.

Data is the real product (the whole point of this is having a large network of correlated data, not just putting one security cam in an office), so at some point the Ring<->Flock combo may be proposed again, probably as Flock acquiring Ring (if they get the cash together). Ring was un-ironically marketed as "pre-crime", which is basically Flock for doorbells.