Company: Prism Skylabs, San Francisco, CA
Company Description: Prism Skylabs is the global leader in understanding and optimizing offline commerce. We give retailers and businesses a real-time window into their stores, enabling them to understand customer trends, manage their products, and optimize everything — all from their mobile device or laptop. Our unique cloud service transforms any video camera into a real-time visual business intelligence tool.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Company of the Year - Computer Software - Up to 250 Employees

Nomination Title: Prism Skylabs

1. Tell the story about what this nominated organization achieved since January 1 2013 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Prism Skylabs has undergone remarkable growth in 2013. Our customer base has tripled in size; as we approach 2014, we are now serving approximately 90 of the world’s largest retailers, brands, and businesses located in the U.S., the U.K., and Southeast Asia. In addition to our direct end-user relationship building, we have also strengthened our channel of partnerships with global and national leaders in video hardware and security cameras. These partners include Axis, Sony, Cisco, BSI Group, ISD, Telaid, Eagle Technologies, CSC, Scarsdale, Comworks, Exacq, and Milestone Technologies -- and this list has doubled in the last year alone. Moreover, we are also currently integrating with providers Genetic and Avigilon.

To match these changes, Prism Skylabs has evolved internally this year. Our marketing, sales, and quality assurance testing operations have grown incredibly quickly. We are now an organization 36 employees strong – more than double our numbers in 2012. We have increased our social media and press presence, garnering attention and coverage from the Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, The Guardian, TechCrunch, CNET, Wired Japan, and more in 2013 alone.

We additionally acquired Series B funding in 2013. This year’s $15M round of funding was led by Intel Capital. With our expanding financial resources, Prism has begun rolling out features more frequently, continuously improving our app interface and algorithms. Highlight feature launches include crowd estimation, area-of-interest customizability, charts, exportability, in-app sharing options, maps that summarize in-store movement, and cutting-edge algorithms for accurate customer counts. Moreover, the app can now be downloaded in seconds and used on any tablet, laptop, iOS device, or Android device.

Prism’s technological advances this year are reflected in the 21 patents we hold. In a more personal achievement, Prism also broke the industry standard in 2013. Prism Skylabs conducted a product deployment across approximately 1,000 sites in 24 hours. That means that within a day, our brand-name retail customer was able to transition from having absolutely no data available on what was going on in their stores' day-to-day operations, to having instant real-time access to images and analytic insight – for all of their stores, anywhere across the globe. Prism looks forward to setting more records, providing even better service, and creating new trends in 2014.

Upload a collection of supporting files and web addresses to our server to provide more background information to the judges. You may upload any number of attachments and URLs through the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above. (Do NOT list your URLs below.)

Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader of this nominated organization:

Steve Russell is a Silicon Valley veteran with 15 years of experience in building and managing disruptive content networking, video search, and video intelligence technology companies. He is the CEO and Founder of Prism Skylabs, a cloud service that transforms any video camera into a visual merchandising, auditing, and business intelligence tool. Prior to Prism Skylabs, Steve served as the CEO and Chairman of 3VR, the world’s leading video intelligence company, which he founded in 2002.

Steve is an active investor and advisor to a some of Silicon Valley’s most interesting and disruptive companies, including StumbleUpon, OpenDNS, BlackJet, and Uber. He also holds 11 patents and was named #8 in the American Venture’s Top 40 under 40 list.