Kontakme Launches Kontaxio (kontax.io) - a Video Door Cam & Access Control Solution for New York City Apartment Buildings

New York City apartment buildings come in all forms and sizes. Some have doormen to open the doors and welcome guests, others have virtual doorman services that handle the opening of doors from a remote location. Some are equipped with audio/video intercoms with access control, but majority still uses the traditional audio-only intercom doorbells. You can't miss those pimpled stainless steel boxes that adorn the entrance of the apartment buildings, a lot of them have existed way back in the 90's. Modern audio/video intercom systems with access control are also becoming common for newer apartment buildings but the video monitor and door control is still fixed on a specific location of the house or apartment. Unlike smart door bells being sold today, these doorbells support audio/video communications via smartphones and are fairly easy to deploy, but, they are for single detached houses or residences only.

Welcome to New York City, a city with over 100,000 apartment buildings, more than half of them are a century old. Most of them make do of audio only door intercom and access control system which is a functional at best but with a serious short coming. These types of intercom does not allow the tenant to see who is ringing the door bell at the main door entrance which is now deemed an inconvenience and a security risk. Thieves and package bandits gain entry to these unguarded apartments by ringing the doorbells of random tenants and hoping that a tenant will get annoyed and just open the door. Kontakme takes a look at this market and took the challenge in building a solution to bring the current door cam features into a multi-tenant apartment building to solve this security risk and provide additional conveniences to the tenants.

Here's some trivia, last year, the market for smart door bells was worth around 500 million US dollars. The market forecast for 2023 by research company Statista is projected to reach US $1.4 billion (Reference). I personally believe that this is a forecast for single detached houses and may not include multi-dwelling apartments. Today, there are at least 10 brands selling their own video doorbells, most of them offer the same features and are aimed for single door residential houses and detached dwelling units. Interestingly, these doorbells had been instrumental for catching porch pirates in the suburban and rural areas of the USA.

So why launch a service in New York City?

New York City has over 100,000 apartment buildings. Most of the building owners have not yet upgraded their audio intercom systems into audio/video capable systems. The cost to equip a 30 unit apartment with wired audio/video intercom system will cost at least USD 4,500.00 for just the equipment alone. Factoring in professional installation services and if new cabling is required, total cost can balloon into at least twice the cost of the the equipment. And this traditional solution is not yet mobile phone integrated, meaning you access the door control and the audio/video from a fix base station. Solutions that allow for smartphone integration costs a lot more and requires some advance IT skills to operate and manage, something that not all landlords have the luxury of having because they're busy in maintaining the whole building. The cost of the system is actually peanuts for these building owners. They can afford to buy these systems and recoup their cost in one month. It's the manpower or the time to manage the login credentials of the tenants that hold them back to adapt high tech systems. This is where Kontakme comes in.

With so many smart doorbell brands now flooding the market, what makes Kontakme's offering unique?

Kontakme has been operating an onliine Universal Contact Information Service since 2013. We delivered the promise to make it easy to use, deploy and manage digital business cards and cloud enabled contact information directories. We are now promising to deliver these benefits to the door audio/video intercom market which we believe, still has a lot of room for innovation.

To start with, our current solution aims for minimal configuration at the client side. No special apps to download and configure. Apartment landlords can deploy the solution with minimal infrastructure build-up. User instructions on how to access the video door cam from their smartphones are so simple, anybody who knows how to surf the web can use it. Our solution for opening doors is compatible with existing legacy door strikers and door openers. This is a very important feature, something that is not available yet in most smart door bell products. And if cost matters, our solution is a fraction of the cost of traditional and current audio/video intercom systems for multi-tenant buildings.

I am happy to present Kontaxio (kon-taks-yow) to the market, an innovative online video doorbell service aimed at multi-dwelling apartments and condominiums. The first commercial online service will be rolled out in Manhattan, a city with over a 50 thousand apartment buildings. With Kontaxio, apartment building owners can now offer their tenants the capability to view and open their apartment building doors from their smartphone.

Interested parties who want to deploy an innovative door cam system in their residential or apartment complex can contact us at info@kontak.me. For more information please visit kontax.io .

Tags :apartments, doorcams, doorsecurity, smartdoorcams