Behind the Lens of Construction Technology’s Future 

Podcast Transcript

Steven Rossi: 

Hello there and welcome to the Construction Revolution Podcast. My name is Steven Rossi and here on the show we explore the latest trends, technologies, people, and organizations that are revolutionizing or disrupting the construction industry and are changing what the industry will look like tomorrow. 

Today we welcome Roger Yarrow, the Co-founder and CEO of TrueLook Construction Cameras. Roger brings over 25 years of experience in programming, computer hardware, systems administration, and web technologies with a distinguished career that includes leadership roles at IBM and Xerox. 

As CEO of TrueLook, he is leading the company in providing state-of-the-art construction cameras, advanced analytics and comprehensive job site surveillance solutions. Join us as we explore the future of total job site visibility. 

Hi Roger, thanks for joining us today. How are you doing? 

Roger Yarrow: 

I’m well, Steven. Thanks for having me on the show. 

Steven Rossi: 

Absolutely. I’m excited to learn more about you and about TrueLook as well. So, why don’t we get started and you can just tell me a little bit about the story of TrueLook. 

Roger Yarrow: 

Yeah, I would love to do that. So TrueLook, I’ve been doing this for 19 years. I’m one of the co-founders of TrueLook and we were a pioneer in IP camera technology. We actually introduced one of the first pan-tilt-zoom cameras called PTZ now, everybody knows that term. Back in the day, cameras were kind of revolutionary. The internet had just come out sort of, a lot more people were getting online and you needed a way to connect a camera to the internet, and that’s where TrueLook filled the gap. 

This is way before webcams were a common accessory for your computer, so TrueLook kind of led the path on that. We were actually a media and entertainment company way back in the day, and we were used in many major events like NBA Finals, the World Series, shuttle launches, and even at US presidential inaugurations. At one point, TrueLook was even on every single continent in the world, including Antarctica. It was pretty awesome time, technology was evolving and it was a great way to connect the masses to remote events. 

Then as technology and time went on, the media side of the business, a lot of those organizations wanted to control their content and it became more available camera technology, and they could start to do their own webcams and broadcasting. So as media sort of pulled back on this camera connectivity model that we adopted, one of the industries that used us was construction. They always hung out with us, stayed the course, and we suddenly saw a great opportunity in construction to really apply our remote visibility tech to them. 

It addressed a lot of their unique challenges, which was being able to see something that was 100 or 1,000 miles away, getting visibility into what was going on. Once we went all-in on construction, that’s when things went great for TrueLook, and since then we’ve evolved into being a leader for project documentation, real-time monitoring, live viewing, security. So it was a great transition of our tech, just providing visibility, and then now we provide that to the construction industry. 

Steven Rossi: 

Nice. Yeah, that’s really interesting how you’re able to take the tech and pivot it to a different industry, and it’s definitely going well, so that’s great. 

So in terms of now that you’ve pivoted to construction, who is TrueLook’s target market? And additionally, who also benefits from having the TrueLook cameras and solutions onsite? 

Roger Yarrow: 

Yeah, the interesting thing about TrueLook is we have a wide feature set. It includes live-streaming, time-lapse documentation with high-res photography, 24/7 monitoring either with AI or an additional layer of human monitoring, which can be tied in for security and police dispatch. So with our model, we have quite a few features and what turns out is there’s a lot of features that work for different people in the construction ecosystem in a variety of ways. 

Our main users are going to be general contractors, project managers, and they’re going to use TrueLook to monitor their job site. Whether that’s just checking in on multiple jobs from their office, it saves them traveling out to the job site, they can see when a delivery’s coming, they can track the progress of their project, they can direct an incoming shipment, they can catch an issue before it becomes one, which is another common problem. If something’s about to go wrong and someone’s watching the site remotely in real-time, they can stop an oopsie, so it’s a great way to prevent something like that from happening. 

Marketing teams love the high quality time-lapses you get out of our product, and then all the images that make that time-lapse are proof of record, they’re documentation of what you built. So if you have a dispute or you need to go back and justify something, you have this visual record of your project. That can become very helpful if you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation where you need evidence of whatever, justifying a weather delay or you just want to showcase something very special that you built. 

Other users are going to be safety managers, compliance, things like that. The camera’s always watching and recording. If there is a accident or a theft or even just something very amazing happened, you have all that footage. You can use that either for an insurance claim, safety and training videos, a postmortem. So there’s a lot of additional things you can do with the video outside of just recording what is being built, so that is another handy feature set that people love to use. 

Of course when you’re talking about owners, there’s transparency. You have a lot of people who are invested in the success of a project, and when you have visibility, when you can share content, pictures, video, the owner knows what you’re doing. There’s no hiding from the truth of the situation, and so transparency goes a long way with our cameras. 

So there’s quite a few different people who enjoy using it, whether it’s even just the finance team verifying that someone did deliver what they said. 20 loads of whatever showed up, and they can refer to that on the footage to make sure it really did happen, so a lot of interesting use cases with TrueLook. 

Steven Rossi: 

So you touched a little bit on theft on job sites, which is something that’s increasingly becoming prominent and contractors and builders are having to deal with. How does TrueLook and specifically the job site surveillance service help prevent and help with security management? 

Roger Yarrow: 

Yeah, unfortunately a trend that continues to ramp up is theft, and it’s a real concern for all of our clients in the industry in general. There is obviously huge numbers involved with the amount of heavy machinery, supplies, tools, materials, all that onsite, that’s a lot of dollars and people want to protect that. So a fence isn’t enough anymore, a guard isn’t enough anymore, you need lots of layers of protection, TrueLook is one of those layers. 

So, all of our cameras have basically AI and that’s always watching the feed off the camera and it’s looking for humans or vehicles. Then you can go a little further and say, I don’t want anything in this area, and then you can go a little further and say, if there’s something in this area, notify me the customer, and you can keep going further with TrueLook security. 

That was our intelligence security where it’s AI-powered and it can alert you, but we also have professional monitoring and that’s our job site surveillance program. That goes even further where you have a arming schedule and configured zones of interest on your camera. When you’re off your job site, now the camera’s watching, it detects something that is suspicious, that video footage goes to monitoring center. They review the footage and based upon the parameters we’ve defined with you, we’ll alert you or we’ll dispatch police, basically. 

All these units can have multiple deterrents, a visual deterrent, like a flashing strobe that triggers sound or lights when motion is detected, a speaker so we can actually talk down to the trespasser, confirm they’re supposed to be there, warn them they need to leave the site, they’re trespassing. So, all of these are tools to keep your job site safe. Of course, having a camera that’s highly visible is a deterrent of its own, so that’s always nice to get as many cameras as you can just to keep people away, ’cause they can see it. 

Then the last thing is kind of just the presence of a camera just encourages honesty. Workers are like, “Oh, there is a camera, I’m not going to do this risky behavior. Maybe I won’t do something.” The cameras aren’t generally there to be big brother watching over you and get you in trouble, they’re just a tool to help you make sure you’re working safe. They can identify safety issues and then they can handle security after hours to protect your job. So TrueLook, we sort of combine all that into our total job site visibility mission so that you can see everything when you’re there and when you’re not. 

Steven Rossi: 

I’m wondering if you have a story that you can share of after hours that you guys have detected in terms of someone’s been trying to take off the job site, ’cause I’ve definitely been talking to people who have been on job site and they have some pretty crazy stories sometimes. 

Roger Yarrow: 

It is. We’ve had a lot of successes and we’ve seen some pretty wild stuff. Obviously the best success is we detect something, police are dispatched and then they show up and there’s an arrest made, and that can happen within just a couple minutes. The camera detects, it’s reviewed and the alert goes out all within 10 to 30 seconds, and then it’s the police response time. 

We’ve seen situations where I’ll say alleged criminal will show up dressed like a construction worker. They’ll be on the site poking around looking for things, that’ll still generate an alert, because there’s not supposed to be anybody there during those hours. So the attempting to trick us doesn’t work because of the workflow of how the security’s set up, but we’ve seen things super crazy. 

I remember one where someone just drove on with a pickup truck, tried to hook it up to the job site trailer and just drag it away. We’ve seen all the crazy things. We’ve had some great arrests, some vandalism prevented, a lot of theft prevented, so it’s always good to get a win. Obviously we try and make it foolproof and criminal proof, but there’s always that one guy who figures out a way to circumvent the system, but we’re gunning for him. 

Steven Rossi: 

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, that’s great. A trailer’s not one I’ve heard, that’s an ambitious one to take. 

Roger Yarrow: 

Yes, there was a lot of dragging on that. 

Steven Rossi: 

Yeah. All right, so moving on from the product specifically, you mentioned that you’re one of the co-founders of TrueLook, and I know that you recently became the CEO earlier in the year. I’m wondering how you’re adjusting to becoming CEO, and how things are going so far and what you’re enjoying and any challenges that you’ve come across in the first few months? 

Roger Yarrow: 

Well, so far so good, I’ll say that. It was a natural evolution that I never really expected would happen for me. I’ve done everything at TrueLook. When we started, we had one screwdriver and I did it all. I wrote the code for the software, I built the cameras, I did the customer support, I helped sell, I designed marketing material. So I did it all, and so I have a lot of knowledge in my DNA. I’ve lived and breathed TrueLook over the years. 

As we’ve grown to the organization we are today, I’m so fortunate to have all these amazing people, great teammates, great leaders, and everybody is very supportive. So we’ve always sort of ruled by a committee, it’s been a democracy, a lot of collaboration to make the right decisions. There came a time recently where we said, “We want a little more decisive leadership, we want to make sure we’re executing quickly. The industry’s changing, times are changing, so we just got to be reactive and nimble and fast.” We said, “Hey, let’s get a CEO to steer the ship.” Everybody just turned and looked at me, and I was like, “Oh boy, what just happened?” 

So it was an honor that my peers who I have ultimate respect for, that they all came to me and said, “We’d like you to take on this role.” The change has been very good for TrueLook in that we are really good at making decisions now, we’re really good at getting to the next step. That’s one of the things with not a lack of leadership, but by everybody having an opinion, we wanted to make sure everybody was heard. It was almost kind of like we couldn’t reach a consensus, ’cause nobody wanted to step on anybody else’s toes. 

Just having someone to make the final call, me, has worked out really well for us. With all the history and the experience and in my guts I know what’s best for the business and what we need to do, especially in terms of the technology and the product, which is where my background is, rather than the sales and marketing strategy, which we’ve got great people leading those teams. 

So it’s been an honor, and it turns out when we did this move, half of the company was like, “Weren’t you CEO already?” So, it was kind of a natural change. I had been functioning as COO for a long time prior, so it was just one letter change, kind of everything’s the same. The biggest challenge for me is, again, just letting go and letting people execute. 

I’ve always been a control freak my whole life, and this is my baby, so of course I want to have my fingers in everything. But that’s really the biggest challenge is just making sure that everybody has the tools they need to succeed, and then letting them do it without being like, “I have a thought.” So I try and stay out of it, ’cause things go better when I say less, but it’s been awesome and I look forward to where we land in the future. 

Steven Rossi: 

Nice. Yeah, no, that’s great. Yeah, it definitely can be a challenge, I’m sure, especially as a founder. Similar to at Giatec here, one of our co-founders is the CEO, and same thing there. As we grow, it’s harder to stay as involved as you’d like to be, I’m sure, and as you were when things got started. But yeah, it sounds like you’re adjusting well, and it sounds like it’s been a good change, which is good. 

Roger Yarrow: 

Yes. Yeah, agree. 

Steven Rossi: 

So you touched on how becoming CEO’s helped you drive some product evolution and stuff, so I’m wondering how you see TrueLook evolving and if there’s anything exciting that you guys are working on that’s coming up that you could share with us? 

Roger Yarrow: 

Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, we’re a camera-centric business, TrueLook Construction Cameras, and we do job site visibility, so a lot of what we’re doing is all based around visibility, the theme of visibility. So obviously when there’s new camera tech, we’re all over that. That could just be higher resolution, better capabilities. We want the best of the best equipment for our customers. We need something robust, durable, that’s going to last for whether it’s six months or a five-year project. 

We have to find the right tech that’s going to work, be maintenance free, trouble free for our customers and easy. Easy is one of our selling points, we make everything easy. Part of an easy TrueLook experience is great software that blends seamlessly with that camera tech, so we’re always working on improving our software platform. 

There’s a lot of value in the TrueLook platform. All the features I mentioned, the live video, high-res time-lapse, security feature set, that’s all available in the platform for all users, no matter what kind of camera they have. So we have this standardized feature set, and as we adopt new cameras, we always try and think, can this camera support this feature set that all of our users love? 

Excitingly of course everybody loves AI, we’re working hard on our own in-house AI offering. It’s going to provide great insights and visibility into job site safety, compliance, productivity. We have 20 years almost of construction media data with weather data and all sorts of other analytics, and so all of this is going into our own pipeline we’re building with computer vision for detecting. Whatever it may be supplies, people, vehicles, all of this is coming to a natural cohesion to help give you insights into what is the state of your job, what’s the visibility, what do all these inputs mean? 

So, that’s a lot of the exciting stuff coming soon from TrueLook. Then we’re always looking at what are other ways to improve visibility, and that can more cameras, wearables on workers, wearable cameras, wearable sensors, sensors on equipment, sensors on vehicles, cameras on vehicles. Everything is becoming more common to be wired and connected, IoT of course, so a job site is going to become a highly monitored, curated and measured work environment. 

So what we’re building will help ingest a lot of those data points, and we’re always looking for obviously cool little gizmos and widgets that have the tech that will plug into our platform to help increase the visibility you have. So there’s a lot of exciting stuff coming with just the data being collected on a job, and so we’re glad to be releasing some of that here near term. 

Steven Rossi: 

The AI is super exciting, especially with all the data and the media data specifically. I can imagine how much value you’d be able to extract and to learn from that and to apply to users’ projects now. 

Roger Yarrow: 

Yeah, it is fascinating how much … obviously construction is change over time. It is amazing, when a camera first comes online, we look at it and you just see a green field, a dirt lot, you see nothing, and then you come back and there’s something wild in its place. So if you don’t look regularly, you don’t see the transformation, you don’t understand all the nuances of what impacts a project over time. We’re glad to finally be able to capitalize on all that media captured and gleaning real insights that can help people execute better. 

Steven Rossi: 

So, you mentioned that construction sites are increasingly becoming more technological and across all aspects of it. How do you see TrueLook sort of integrating with new emerging technologies? Is there any new technologies that you’ve seen that you’re really excited about, just in general, but also as a potential to work with TrueLook? 

Roger Yarrow: 

So, I’m a nerd and a child of the ’80s. I grew up playing video games and writing my own video games, and I think the tech that’s going to evolve and help the industry the most is the kind of tech that helps workers for both worker safety and worker training, and so I think virtual reality and augmented reality are big ones. Obviously everybody has their VR goggles they play video games on, but there’s some great training material in VR specific to construction to get workers comfortable in environments that are risky, dangerous. 

So the training, I think, available through VR is pretty wild, and as we move forward in time, augmented reality, smart glasses, things like that that help relay critical information in real-time, hey, safety hazard near you, or this is how you actually operate on this piece of equipment, all that information starts to become available to you in real-time and not just from the training in the VR. So, I think that is going to be a huge bonus to all the workers, it’s going to be a force multiplier. It’s going to help recruit a new age of worker into the industry, because it’ll be easier to train and give them the materials they need to succeed. 

All that’s very visual, the VR and the AR, and that’s our sweet spot, so I’m definitely excited to see where TrueLook can converge with those techs and start to have real-time visibility complimented with the augmented reality, and we can start to see this convergence of all these different, like I said, cameras on every single device all feeding together to create a virtual real-time project site. Then you start layering on all the data and the analytics, it’s going to get pretty wild. It sounds sci-fi, but I do see a convergence of all these great techs in the near future, and we hope to definitely be part of that. 

Steven Rossi: 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, the workforce issue is definitely something that construction continues to face, and I think technologies like the ones you mentioned and others definitely the way to resolve that. Yeah, I mean, your long-term vision of a whole model and connected site with all the cameras would be awesome. 

All right, so just to wrap us up, if someone wants to get started with TrueLook, where should they go and what does the beginning of that process look like? 

Roger Yarrow: 

Yeah, we make it very easy. Obviously you can go to our website, truelook.com, T-R-U-E-L-O-O-K.com. You can give us a call, send us an email. We’ve got an awesome team of people that can give you a demo. They can take you through all the different things about what camera would be right for you, whether you need a high resolution camera that sits in one spot or one that can pan, tilt, zoom and look around at a variety of spots, solar-powered trailer. 

We have all the options you need, but you just got to get to TrueLook. We’re on all the social platforms, so just give us a call, shoot us an email, we’d definitely love to help you out. Again, we’re easy and we make it easy to go with TrueLook, so come see how easy we can be. 

Steven Rossi: 

All right, that’s great. Thank you. So yeah, thanks again for joining us, Roger. It’s been great to learn more about TrueLook and about you as well. Thanks for your time. 

Roger Yarrow: 

Yeah, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Steven.