Happy Belated New Years to everyone. Our blog has been a little quiet of late, so I figured I would take an opportunity to kick off the New Year with a look back at 2014.
I took a trip down memory lane to put together some of the key events at DME Forensics over the past year. Coming up next week, I will be putting together a post with some of our goals for 2015, so stay tuned.
The Team
2014 was a big year for us at DME Forensics, what started as a company of two (Jimmy and Jason), has grown to a company of 5.
I came on board at the beginning of the year to work on DVR Examiner and some of our other technology related products. We made significant progress on DVR Examiner (more on that later) and we have built a lot of really handy internal and externally facing tools (Support Portal) that have set the stage to help us grow and exceed our 2015 goals.
Kevin came on board in June to help us support DVR Examiner users, and continue to grow DVR Examiner. He has taken on a lot of the testing work and is now our resident expert when it comes to dealing with all the DVRs that are incorporated into DVR Examiner. Once we discovered Kevin’s hidden talent for graphic design, we quickly tasked him with updating our website and putting together all of our printed materials. If you haven’t had the opportunity to see Kevin’s work, you can check out our DME Forensics and DVR Examiner flyers.
Last but not least, we had a recent new addition to the team. Amy came on in early January as our Office Administrator. She has been tasked with helping to keep us organized, and clearly has no trouble keeping us all in line. If you call us with any questions or concerns, Amy will make sure you get to the right place.
The Office
Our office went through some major updates throughout the year. The first happened when the unit next door became available. We decided to use it as an opportunity to expand both our laboratory and research and development spaces for DVR Examiner. Not even 6 months after moving in and building our lab, we decided to move it! With those components moved, it gave us the opportunity to remodel and expand our training room. The new training room gave us more room for students, as well as ample working space for our DVR Recovery classes. Apparently, however, we are bad at taking before and after pictures. I tried to find some pictures to highlight the changes to our space last year, but I couldn’t find any.
Kevin and I also got tired of the boring color of the walls in our offices, so we decided to paint them DME orange. While I do not regret the decision, I do have to say, it is very orange.
DVR Examiner
2014 was a big year for DVR Examiner! We officially released version 1.0, and subsequently released 7 additional updates.
DVR Examiner – By the Numbers (as of January 2015)
- More than 12 releases providing support for additional DVRs and features
- 900% increase in subscribers
- Users in 10 countries
- 450 free trial keys issued
- 39 fully supported (scan & export) filesystems
- 11 of which support inaccessible data recovery
- 73 Total DVR filesystems
- 200+ Test DVRs (plus lots of user feedback)
While we are still unable to say just how many DVRs are supported, we are starting to build out a list of DVRs that we know for certain are supported. Once we get more feedback from users on what devices they have encountered, we will hopefully be able to put together a partial list.
The Lab
The lab has been growing almost as fast as DVR Examiner has. We currently have 2 forensic laboratories. One here in Manassas Park at our main office, and the other is in Kansas with Jason. Here in Virginia we worked multiple forensic DVR recovery cases, including one which resulted in 500+ pages of case notes.
Meanwhile, Jason has been busy with video and image analysis casework as we saw a dramatic increase in the number and complexity of cases received. One case began with a byte level analysis of a DVR and then included analytical photogrammetry on the recovered video. Like many of our requests, this analysis was critical to the final outcome of the case – DME Forensics was able to provide analysis in civil litigation matters totaling over 20 million dollars in 2014. We anticipate that the number of laboratory submissions will increase even more in 2015.
Training
In addition to all of the other activities we had going on, we hopped, skipped, and jumped across the country to attend conferences and give training. This was our first time manning booths as exhibitors so that was certainly a new experience for us. Everything went great and we really appreciate all the positive feedback and support we received!
Conferences:
- NCCC 2014
- RIOT 2014
- HTCIA 2014
- LEVA 2014
For training we had a combination of classes held here at our Manassas Park facility, as well at the LEVA Lab at U-Indy. I personally was able to attend and help Jimmy with a Byte Level Analysis class at LEVA and it was a great experience to see the lab and meet a great group of people.
All told,
2014 was a great year for DME Forensics. We grew a lot as a company, both in terms of our team, and the capabilities we can provide. However, we aren’t slowing down. We are very excited for 2015 and we’ll be sharing some of our goals for the year with you in a follow up post.