Creating Ivideon: from idea to successful implementation

Remember that feeling when you want to please a girl, but have no idea how to do it? Scroll through many options. And then you drop everything, bumping into the phrase that sounds in your head: “You will never have a second chance to make a first impression!”. I remember. Trying to "become better for her." You change clothes, you start playing sports, you sign up for dancing. But, and you do not dare to approach. And then, after years, you can learn that all this was not required. She liked you already. When was himself. Only she did not understand why you just took and did not fit.

The other day I opened the mailbox and saw a letter from the administration of the habr. Three months have passed since we started a corporate blog or, more precisely, paid for it. But never wrote a single article. In many ways, this is my fault, since I considered the first article on Habré to be very important. I also believe that there is no second chance to make a first impression.
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I was thinking about what to write? "We are market leaders ... the first video surveillance service over the Internet ... advanced technology ...". Complete nonsense. I just would not read. To hell with all this nonsense.

Many people remember about the sensational project Web-elections 2012. But few people know that at the time of its launch, the Ivideon servers were already on virtually all continents, except, perhaps, Africa. The number of connected cameras was already comparable to the figure required for installation in all polling stations. And in our technical support only 3 people worked and most of the time they were “idle”. Since our system works. All applications were processed no longer than one business day. And often not longer than an hour.

If at the first stage we couldn’t attract investments for a very long time, now the funds are interested in us. What can I say, this is a very pleasant attention.
I remembered how it all originated and realized that this is our first article on Habré. The history of our company. Which, above all, begins as my own story.

Looking for the perfect job

The year 2003 stood in the courtyard, and to be honest, this is no longer the beginning, but the middle of a story I could tell. But, in this case, it will turn out very long. Therefore, the year 2003 ...

I am a student of the 3rd year of an excellent university, MSTU. Bauman. Over the shoulders of heavy fighting for tests in general engineering subjects and two years of work as a freelancer at night. I was very fond of computer games then. I was terribly interested in how they are arranged. We read the language "C". We collected simple DOS text programs by the Borland 3.1 compiler. Between them and the beautiful three-dimensional games in which I played, there was a huge gulf that the teachers could not fill. Therefore, in parallel, I studied the game, developing my own engine.
I always had my own projects, after which I always learned something new. He did something for himself, paid money for something.

By the 3rd course I wanted to replace freelancing with a permanent job. Naturally a programmer. Which, on the one hand, would allow to study and its projects, on the other - would bring money. It is clear that living on a scholarship, however, as now, was not realistic. And can I tell you how many different temptations await in Moscow at every turn !? Invite a girl in a regular theater cost as two scholarships. Therefore, we had to save and buy tickets to the puppet theater. Cheap. But how many impressions! Sitting on the front row with her! On the best places! And around schoolchildren from 8 to 12! The show begins, and one of them takes her by the shoulder: “Aunt, aunt! You could not transfer ... I see nothing. " Well, and you, like a real gentleman, give him a rebuff ... The girl has tears of joy. She is happy to be with you! Grateful kisses have no end! And your date, of course, ends with ... morning coffee. Well, something I went to the side ...

In the building of our department at the time of my study there were several offices. One of them belonged to a company that was engaged in video surveillance systems.
The founders of the company are graduates of MSTU. I got there with a free schedule, but in fact almost all my time was devoted to work. I really liked it. Lack of knowledge and skills for some issues had to be compensated by time. In the evening, at night, in the morning. Often, instead of lectures. I never looked at the salary, did not pay attention to the fact that it was not even officially arranged. I always wanted to give only the best result and be proud of my work.

One of my first tasks at a new place was sending SMS notifications about movement in the field of view of the camera ... But I went much further and first offered to send a photo, and then a video of the event itself. I had no idea how to do this, but it seemed to me that this should be possible. And really. At the end of 2003, the first Siemens SX1 smartphone appeared on the market, followed by the “paunchy” Nokia 6600.



It is worth paying tribute to those people who paid me a patch. They gladly allowed me to deal with this area and purchased both smartphones. And I started studying the API for Symbian and developing an application for remote viewing of video from surveillance cameras. I had enough freedom, so in fact I was not only a performer, but also the head of this development.

20 million dollars for television on mobile

I got great pleasure from my work and from the result. In 2004, on the screen of a Symbian smartphone, with the help of my GPRS application, it was possible to remotely watch video from surveillance cameras with sound. And it was not a series of JPEG images (as many people still do), but a full-fledged MPEG4 video stream. From 5 to 20 frames per second! This even now seems unthinkable, but then it was just revolutionary.

We managed to port and convert the MPEG4 and MP3 decoder to integer. I still remember how funny, on the ARM architecture of a smartphone, a second of MP3 sound was decoded in 8 seconds! And how great it was to get the opportunity to do it all the same in real time.


Stretched a series of working days and sleepless nights. 2005 has come. A version for Symbian S60, S80 and even UIQ has been released (with touch screen interface). And our development are interested in the leadership of a large company. Perhaps, almost every resident of Russia somehow uses its services daily. And the deputy director of this company wanted to create a separate startup based on our technologies that would be involved in television for cellular networks. He had the latest Audi A8, a personal driver, a five-room apartment in a luxury house ... Just yesterday, he saw Putin, and the Arab sheikh, co-owner of Vodaphone, is his best friend. In general, he could definitely be trusted ... Yes, and he knew the price perfectly. Twenty million dollars. This is the minimum for how much he promised to sell the created startup. And I, as the main developer, explained with a solid share of 2%)))

Vedomosti, Kommersant and many other publications have published announcements of our development. There was interest from not only Russian, but also foreign mobile operators. I remember once attending a meeting at the hotel Ararat. The rented room per day was worth more than my annual salary. I very much remembered that there even the attendants were dressed much better than me, not to mention those who came to the meeting.

Everything was wonderful. In the same year, Megafon released its mobile television based on a Real player (RTSP streaming). But, the installation time of the session (start viewing) was at least 45 seconds. Whereas we have this figure corresponded to only 4 seconds.

There was only one problem. Our effective manager was too secure and it was not interesting for him to sell our project for less than $ 20 million. And those who were ready to lay out such a sum he did not find.

The last time I saw him in mid-2005. He urgently called me and asked me to drive to the central office. For some important matter. It was a sunny summer day. And I was just walking somewhere close by.
I was taken to his huge office with a view of the Kremlin, and there already sat three people for 40-50 years.

With a view of a child who had just learned to ride a bike and thinks that this is a breakthrough for all mankind, he introduced his visitors to me: “Pesniary” ... those ... very famous ... They will promote us.
If I then filmed that moment on video and sent it now to +100 500, I would have made a very funny release. Especially, considering that, they were sitting in suits, and I was wearing jeans, sneakers, a NoFX T-shirt and a skateboard in my hands.

Suitcase without handle

The main income of the company where I worked was not from the development, but from the resale of equipment, installation and commissioning. And, of course, from good connections that allow you to magically get good contracts.

Unfortunately, most managers had a negative attitude towards the development department. For them, we were like a suitcase without a handle. Carry hard, and throw a pity. In part, they were right. If my subsystem concerning video transmission to mobile worked perfectly, then the whole surveillance system itself only became worse from version to version. Constant freezes and crashes resulted in the complete failure of the application, which should work reliably for years without rebooting.



The main reason was that the head of the department, co-owner of the company, who wrote most of this system, simply did not need it. My salary was at least twice the market. For several years, I was promised a good percentage of sales. But, what sales can be if the system does not work?
I and other developers have repeatedly offered to spend time on comprehensive testing and refinement of the product. In part, something needed to just throw out and rewrite. We were ready to do it. But, no one allocated time. And for large projects, where our development stood, a special person was taken who toured all the installation objects and manually rebooted the system. Here is a living analogue of cron.

SaaS video surveillance

By 2006, when I successfully graduated from university, I was still not on staff. Therefore, nothing prevented me from continuing to engage in freelancing. I began to notice with each new order that everything was beginning to move actively towards the Internet.

My development was good. But, she had many flaws. The most important of them is the work only with analog cameras connected to the capture board of its own production. That implies the need to keep the computer turned on.

I analyzed the experience of other systems and realized that their main cost for a small enterprise is in maintenance. Necessity to go to the installation site and analyze faults. Which often lie in the software itself.

But what if you transfer the most complex logic to the datacenters and install extremely simple but high-quality software at the points? Then it would be possible to significantly reduce costs and improve the reliability of work! I called this project as video surveillance over the Internet. He completely fell under the SaaS model (Software as a Service), but in 2006 I did not know that there was such a direction. And it was not even on everyone's lips.

I liked this idea so much that I spent almost a week sitting and drawing structural diagrams, business models and options for using such a system. And then, carried them to the general director of the company. He really liked the idea. He called the technical director and ... they refused. Many data centers ... It is very difficult. These are years of development and nothing will come of it. Therefore, we will not do this. Moreover, nobody needs it, as the experience of “mobile television” has shown.

Our proud “Varyag” does not surrender to the enemy.

As they say in Japan, if you start doing something to achieve the goal (victory), you can lose. But if you do nothing, you have already lost.
I have always preferred to send to hell those who say that nothing will work out and go forward.
If the company is not interested in my idea, well, I implement it myself. But the longer I analyzed the project, the more I realized that I had nothing but an idea. Everything needs to be created from scratch. Software for work in the data center was written under Windows using non-scalable technology. That is, more than one server could not be installed. And accordingly, there could be no talk of any millions of users. The application for capturing video from cameras continued to fall and it was easier to throw it out than to try to fix it. Moreover, I did not develop it myself.

If you write from scratch, it is better to do it right under Linux. I had to actively explore its features, including the network subsystem. It took me several months of sleepless nights in development and debugging, but it was terribly interesting. In the end, I wrote the first version of the network library using the epoll mechanism. And since I wanted the code to be cross-platform and be used in all parts of the project, I also made a Windows implementation on the I / O completion ports.

Now, of course, I understand that this was fundamentally wrong. Since from the point of view of the whole project, it was more correct not to develop a network subsystem optimized for high loads, but to create a prototype that could be optimized after launch. And so, it turned out that several months were spent and an optimized network module was obtained ... But why is it needed when there is nothing else?

In general, I wanted to do everything perfectly, free time was not so much, because of which it took almost 2 years to get the first well-working version. It was a cross-platform video server code (running on embedded platforms as well), applications for authorization, management, and streaming on the data center side, which allow displaying the video stream in Flash on the browser side. Well, in addition, a Windows application was made for remote viewing of cameras. It was the prototype of today's Ivideon Client.

I did not chase after money or commercial success. I did the project, first of all for myself, whether it is good or bad - time will show. I did the work that I wanted and could be proud of. These criteria were not compatible with the development “for business” and were not a business. Therefore, as a result, from my point of view, it turned out to be a truly cool, reliable and thoughtful project.

Looking for investment

The success of VKontakte and Odnoklassniki circled many heads. The story of the founder of Odnoklassniki was retold with special ecstasy when he went and asked for a rather modest amount of money, promising to catch up with Yandex in attendance in a year. Nobody believed him. Some just twisted at the temple, but he really got it. He's great.

I understood that investments are also needed for my project. And without them nothing will come of it.
The idea was very simple. Create a cloud service that allows the user to combine an unlimited number of cameras scattered geographically in his personal account. And it can be either a Web or IP camera connected to an application on a computer, or an IP camera for which a computer is not needed, since the necessary software for work is on their board. I wanted most of the IP cameras produced in the world to already contain our service. Like now DynDNS. And, of course, all the software, as well as the basic package (remote video viewing and archive) should be free for non-commercial use. The money was planned to earn on additional services, such as SMS alerts, remote archive storage, extended support, etc., as well as commercial implementations.

I wrote letters to potential investors, went to meetings, but all to no avail. The main problem was the uniqueness of my project. At that time, he simply had no analogues. And how are we? Have a successful western counterpart? So you can invest and try to repeat in the CIS. Nobody wanted to risk on a unique project. Yes, and the idea of ​​"free" of many did not inspire. The example cited unprofitable at that time Youtube and Skype.

It is ridiculous to say, but I even wrote to the President’s website. The fact that I have such a development that allows you to combine an unlimited number of cameras via the Internet and watch them remotely. For example, such a system would be useful for observing elections ...

And you know, I got an answer. Do not believe it - from the Ministry of Communications! It was very clearly stated that such a project is not needed, because Youtube is there and in general the state does not need anything. Given the recently spent 15 billion rubles on such a system, this sounds very funny and at the same time sad. What a twist of fate!

First money

In 2008, I still continued to periodically work in the same place. I did not want to leave, because I was sure that in another company with a larger load, I simply would not be able to do my project.
And as it turned out, this was not done in vain. I was addressed by one of our system dealers. Like, he likes how remote access works, but he does not understand why everything else is so bad? How to make the system reliable?
We talked about it for a long time. And at the end I talked about my own design.

He liked everything very much and we agreed that if he found a way to finance my project, he could count on a share. No more than a month passed, the investor was not found, but instead he received two contracts for the implementation of my development. From this moment we started to earn together.
Surprisingly, the system was very much in demand in companies with a branch network, where remote surveillance was required. In the same year, for the first time I got to negotiate with him in one very large oil company. Looking ahead, I will say that there have been many such negotiations there. And only 2 years later we were able to reach the right people and got a contract there. As they say, the main thing is not to give up.

Video surveillance for megaphone

With the advent of the 2008 crisis, the hope of finding investments has become significantly less. But, it did not prevent to continue independent development and sale of the system. I was developing, and my new partner was selling. During this period, I first installed a video server on board an IP camera. It was an Axis camera. It was enough to turn it on to the network and she got in touch with the data center. Therefore, in order to connect to it, an external IP and dances with a tambourine were not required to redirect traffic if the camera, suddenly, is also behind the router.



Following Axis, the video server was also ported aboard the Asus WL-500GPv2 router, by embedding the application first into the “firmware from Oleg”, and then “from enthusiasts”. To such a router it was possible to connect a USB hard drive for recording an archive and 4-5 IP cameras.



My system was sold, but what we earned was not enough to attract additional developers to the project. More precisely, the income was not regular. And I was afraid that at some point we simply would have nothing to pay the salary.

We began to look for contracts that could bring us the necessary money to develop a mass service (as I called the open Internet version of the project). Meetings and negotiations with different people for half a year, gave their results. They knew about us, they knew that there was such a project and once, towards the end of 2009, they were invited to a meeting where they offered to take part in a tender for the development of a similar service for MegaFon.

The company that invited to the meeting was a well-known system integrator and had already worked with Megafon on a number of projects. They promised to make every effort to win the tender, and we in turn - to create a decent product of high quality.

At stake was the amount that would be enough for a staff of 5 - 10 developers with good pay throughout the year. Since I myself was a developer, I did not want to save on specialists. Considering that quality work should be adequately rewarded. And the desire to make the first, truly massive introduction, was very great.

We were shown TK. It almost completely corresponded to our vision of the service from a technical point of view. This gave us even more confidence that we would play this tender. But, we were not alone. A number of different companies appeared in the list of “contestants” who never did anything like that, but they had an overwhelming desire to earn.

It did not stop us at all. And in order to have time to finalize the system for display, I told my friend and colleague about everything, inviting him to participate. If successful, he would receive a percentage of the tender won, as well as work in a new company and twice the salary. He agreed. In a short time, he wrote a QT interface for a video server, as well as a module for working with webcams. Today's interface ivideon Server is very similar to the very first implementation.

We went to meetings in Moscow. We flew to St. Petersburg a couple of times (the competition was held by the North-West Megaphone). We won two stages of the tender. Ahead was the third stage. The confidence that our development will be the best in the competition was 100%. How else? It makes no sense to work in a project in which you do not believe! All this took at least six months. Unfortunately, almost all large companies are very bureaucratic and, as a result, not flexible.

In between meetings, I strenuously continued to work and develop the system. It was not only an increase in functionality, or optimization. It was the construction and development of the service architecture as a whole. It was required to conduct development taking into account that the service will be scaled, and its individual components will be developed by the team. That is, the modules must be clearly separated and be able to be tested separately from the entire complex. If today the video server only supports IP cameras, then you need to consider that tomorrow you may need to connect other sources. Now the video server is writing the archive to the hard disk. Tomorrow he should do it in a remote repository.

Dismissal

Due to frequent travels and work on the project, I began to appear less often in the office. My salary was at that time 2.5 times less than the market, and my schedule (as we agreed initially) was free. At the same time I managed to solve all my tasks. Only, for some reason, the leadership decided that if there was a crisis in the yard, then it was necessary to work from 9 to 6, regardless of salary. And the fact that there is no promised interest on sales, so it does not bother anyone.

In general, without going into details, I will say that in December 2009, because of this, I had a conflict with the management and was offered to quit. Looking back, I can say that in this conflict I was very wrong. I wanted to create a development direction within the company that produces quality products. This implied major changes and a radical change in the approach that was used at that time. It was necessary to abandon part of the development and rewrite something completely. But, I saw a reluctance to do it and it annoyed me. Especially considering the few years of my life spent on this company. Why change something when the profit is already there? I could not understand this position. I can not understand now. But, I forgot about the main thing. They are leadership. And they have that right. This is their business and their own way. Therefore, if I was dissatisfied with something, I simply had to leave myself and create my own company.



And I did it. The dismissal was a great kick to create what is now called Ivideon. It should have been done much earlier. It was necessary to devote oneself entirely to the project, not burning to other tasks. But it is always easy to talk about it afterwards. When you clearly see your mistakes.

Cancellation of the tender

The year 2010 has come. Year of birth Ivideon, as a separate company. But so far, we were looking forward to the start of the third stage of the tender from Megaphone. Dates are constantly transferred. At first it was January, then February. And then March. And then we were just told that the tender was canceled. And a completely different company was chosen without competition. One could guess the reasons for such a decision.

For us it was extremely unpleasant. Much time was spent on this tender, but all that is not done is done for the better. Looking ahead, I want to say that today, over the two years of operation of this service, despite the massive advertising, Megaphone could not connect to its video surveillance even half of the users registering with us in a month.

But about this, I will tell in the next article. How did we find a great investor. How we created our own team and developed our project. About the emergence of competitors. What mistakes made and what successes have been achieved. As without significant advertising costs, Ivideon has become the most well-known SaaS video surveillance service over the Internet in the CIS.