NYPD and Microsoft Team Up to Peddle Retroactive Surveillance System

August 9th, 2012 Via: Wall Street Journal:
Microsoft helped the New York Police Department build a surveillance and intelligence sharing network to fight terrorism and help investigators solve crimes. Now the NYPD will get a hefty cut of the revenue as the partners prepare to jointly market the intelligence system to other police departments around the world.
Microsoft finished work on the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System in October. The software allows investigators to simultaneously view video gathered from the city’s thousands of cameras and information culled from 911 calls and public records.
Microsoft will now share 30% of the revenue with the city as the company sells the technology to police forces around the country and in allied countries, according to Mike McDuffie, vice-president for Americas services, sales and business development at Microsoft, and a former general in the U.S. Army.
“We hope to make back everything we spent,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a press conference Wednesday at the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, in front of a wall of blinking surveillance feeds. That amount would be as much as $40 million, including the cost of labor by city employees, Bloomberg said.
The partnership is an example of how an enterprise, such as the city of New York, can derive revenue from the software tools that it creates for its own use.
The deal represents a windfall for the city at time when it is strapped for cash. It’s the first time Microsoft has shared revenue with a public sector client that hired the company to develop a product, McDuffie said.
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NYPD, Microsoft Hope to Make a Mint Off New Surveillance System
Via: Atlantic Wire:
The new data analysis system New York police department unveiled Monday not only monitors images from surveillance cameras, license plate scanners, and myriad other data streams citywide, in real time, it also has the power to make the NYPD money. The department developed the so called Domain Awareness System in partnership with Microsoft, and every time Microsoft sells a system, NYPD will get 30 percent of the sale, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Wednesday.
The new system doesn’t add any new surveillance input, but it makes processing and analyzing the existing data — including streams from public and private security cameras and sensors, maps, and city records — way more powerful. “The system allows investigators to instantly see information including arrest records, 911 calls associated with a suspect and related crimes occurring in a particular area, according to the [NYPD] statement,” Bloomberg’s Chris Dolmetsch and Henry Goldman report. “It also allows investigators to map crimes to reveal patterns and track where a car associated with a suspect is located and has been in the past.”

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