Los Altos GeckoEye Pilot already generating savings…

Over the past few years the management/development team of Manuel Antonio’s Los Altos Beach Resort have started to appreciate the significant recurring operational costs associated with energy consumption.  To compound the situation, each elegant and spacious units has a floor plan that invites the renter to open balcony doors. To be specific, each of the 24 units has 4 large lanai (balcony) doors.  These balcony doors are a burden to the air handlers when they are left open during air handler run time. Each minute that these balcony doors remain open, with the AC running, represents huge loss. That loss quickly adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual operational costs as it relates to cooling requirements for the rental units.

Starting in May, GeckoTech introduced its GeckoEye energy management system to two pilot units. Each GeckoEye system included one automation computer, 6 door sensors, and 4 motion sensors. From day one, the GeckoEyes were generating savings by simply stopping the AC from running when balcony doors were left open for more than a few minutes. Further savings are realized through “temperature setback” when the rental units are unoccupied for more than few hours.

The engineers at GeckoTech as well as the Los Altos management staff are anxious to analyse the ICE facturas in the upcoming months. The question is not “is GeckoEye saving Los Altos money?” but rather “how much money is GeckoEye saving the property?”

It is expected Los Altos moves forward to install GeckoEye in the remaining 22 units before the beginning of high season 2012.

GeckoTech introduces mobile viewing services for Video Surveillance

GeckoTech is proud to announce availability of a mobile viewer for Video Surveillance. This add on service allows any GeckoTech client to view their video security cameras from iPhone, iPad and Android mobile devices. The ability for property managers, property owners and developers to view their assets remotely using their private mobile devices is a huge boon to asset management and security. Vista Las Palmas has recently signed up for the service and designated support staff now have access to any video camera 7×24 using their personal communication devices. They are able to view real time (and historically) video imagery while “on the go”. Wow!!

Live Video stream deployed to Jaco’s most recognized brand

Live video streaming in Costa Rica (especially in outlying areas to SJO) represents unique challenges. Unreliable internet, low bandwidth, high latency, climate/humidity issues, power grid delivery, etc.. will have a negative impact on video streaming. After 1.5 years evaluating/testing various streaming technologies GeckoTech has deployed a live video feed for Jaco’s most recognized restaurant. This stream leverages the ubiquity of Adobe’s flash players as installed on most of today’s desktop, laptops and mobile devices. The live video stream http://www.losamigosjaco.com/webcam is available and active during the restaurant’s normal operational hours. The stream has been “fine tuned” to ensure maximum uptime and quality given the constraints imposed by the Costa Rican’s internet service providers. To some, the the solution may seem quite trivial, but deploying a system capable of unattended operations and recovery on the local Costa Rican Data network was no small feat. Check it out, and give us your feedback/comments.

GeckoTech moves more services to Amazon Cloud

In an effort to increase system/service reliability (five 9s of uptime) GeckoTech has moved additional services into the Amazon EC2 cloud. These services include the following:

* GeckoEye Energy Management – GeckoTech has moved its GeckoEye energy management data gathering portal out of its Jaco offices into the Amazon cloud to ensure end to end delivery of all Energy related events for rental properties.

* Milestone NVR Management – GeckoTech has more CCTV cameras deployed in Jaco than any other vendor. The cornerstone of GeckoTech’s Video Surveillance deployments is Milestone. Commercial subscribers to GeckoTech’s video surveillance systems will now use servers in the Amazon cloud to authenticate and gain access to their cameras. This will ensure that as long as there is internet service to the property’s cameras, the user will be able to access using the authentication servers hosted in Amazon’s cloud.

* Network Monitoring – Prior to the migration of GeckoTech’s Network monitoring services into the cloud, GeckoTech’s monitoring software was hosted its Jaco offices. This meant the network monitoring services were subject to the regular power and internet outages that Jaco experiences. Now, with its network monitoring services in the Amazon cloud, GeckoTech can provide metrics that are an order of magnitude more accurate than in the past. This migration also allows for better “real-time” alerts of impending outage through SMS and eMail delivery to GeckoTech technicians.

* Reporting Services – GeckoTech is leveraging Amazon’s robust infrastructure to deliver reports from various JacoPOS (Point of Sale) Servers installed at various client sites on the central pacific. The idea is that this On Demand reporting server will deliver necessary operational reports on scheduled basis without reliance on ICE’s network.

GeckoTech’s management is confident that the ROI for migration will be less than two months. More importantly GeckoTech can boast a service level that is unsurpassed in Costa Rica.

Content (Movies) on Demand Services for Rental Properties

As the “Movies on Demand” market continues to gain momentum in Latin America, there are some fundamental issues that owners of Rental properties need to take into consideration before deciding to use a specific service (Netflix or BlockBuster for example) for their rental property(s):

1) Do you have sufficient bandwidth to stream the movie realtime standard definition? (High Definition content consume far more resources than are currently available on the Costa Rica network)
2) If you make your subscription available to renters, how do you preclude them from consuming “premium” services thus “running up” your monthly subscription costs?

If you have more questions about how to successfully leverage “digital streaming content” in your rental property please feel free to contact one of GeckoTech’s sales engineers.

JacoPOS Deployed to Bar in Lansing Michigan

Yes, everyone thinks of GeckoTech as a regional company. Believe it or not, we do have clients that not only enjoy our professional service offerings here in Costa Rica for their locally owned businesses, but they also take advantage of these same services for their off-shore businesses.   One such client, Chris Petrick, owner of Bohio Grill (long time GeckoTech client) has contracted with GeckoTech to provide similar Point of Sale services for his bar in Lansing Michigan.  Chris wanted to keep his operational process the same (as it relates to point of sale) across all of his dining/bar venues. In this case it made perfect business sense to work with the same solution provider for his US concerns that he uses in his Costa Rica venues.

GeckoEye Score Card (Energy Management Savings)

As part of GeckoTech’s ongoing support, relative to managed services, we provide sundry of unbeknownst “goodies”. Such as spot checks (health/performance) for clients..

This month’s spot check include “Score Card” evaluations for two of our GeckoEye subscribers.

* Acqua 406 had been experiencing energy bills ranging from 200-400$/month. Even when unoccupied. July’s analysis showed the unit’s lowest electric bill ever!! 52$.
* Vista Mar Penthouse had been experiencing ICE electric bills ranging from 1300-1700$/month. July’s bill was one of the lowest in history, and was 25% lower than the previous 4 month’s trend.

In subsequent months we plan to show other GeckoEye subscriber’s savings as they release their ICE bills to us.

Vista Las Palmas offers GeckoWatch managed service to unit owners..

Vista Las Palmas (VLP) has begun offering GeckoTech’s “GeckoWatch” managed service to it’s unit owners. With GeckoWatch, VLP can offer individual Video Surveillance cameras to monitor the entry ways of any/all private residences within the VLP tower. VLP unit owners, wishing to subscribe to the service will be charged a modest installation/setup fee and then monthly fee for the GeckoWatch service. GeckoTech will provision a state of the art IP camera outside the subscriber’s “main entry door”. The camera will record motion/activity 7×24 and retain history for 30 days. Subscribers can login using standard web technologies and view the camera(s) recorded history from anywhere in the world. The service now makes it “affordable” to monitor staff and traffic through the private residences.

The video recording server is a redundant DELL commercial rack server. This server hosts the award winning Milestone xProtect video recording software. The server will leverage the key components of the VLP infrastructure to include high speed data services and power generation/backup services.

Vista Mar Penthouse signs up for GeckoEye Energy Management Services

GeckoTech engineers have recently completed the deployment of a GeckoEye Energy Management System to Vista Mar’s Penthouse.   The penthouse’s ower was frustrated with his ever increasing electric bills.  Sometimes reaching as much as $1,700/mo.  The property’s largest consumer of energy is the three central AC units.   Couple this with the fact that there are four large balcony doors, it was evident that there was potential for huge waste.  The GeckoEye system will turn off the AC when various balcony doors are opened for more than a few minutes.  Furthermore, GeckoEye will intelligently determine when the unit is unoccupied and perform a temperature setback to avoid “freezing” out the unit while guests are away on all-day excursions.   It will be at least two months before we have empirical reports to demonstrate savings, but it is believed we may be able to reduce the entire electric bill by as much as 20% given rental trends.

Rental property, Cielo Azul, deploys 4 camera security system

This June, GeckoTech completed the deployment of a 4 camera video surveillance system for the popular rental destination, Cielo Azul.   The property owner’s objective was to enhance customer security as well property-asset protection by providing 7×24 surveillance recording services.  The 4 camera system is scalable to 24 cameras and is predicated on MileStone’s “best of breed” xProtect recording software.   Like all GeckoTech solutions, this video system is managed and monitored remotely by GeckoTech’s network monitoring services.