Once a week, the tech, ideas and people actually moving this industry forward, in plain language, with zero fear-mongering.

MAIN FEATURE · FIELD REPORT

No one will argue that visible armed response is an extremely effective crime deterrent in urbanised SA and suburbs. But as soon as you get to infrastructure properties, agricultural and modern luxury lifestyle estates like Steyn City (800 ha+), the game changes.

When you have massive perimeters in the hundreds of hectares, entry points and coverage blind spots multiply, while the effectiveness of human guards drops sharply as the sheer costs of deploying and maintaining them escalate — each extra guard is a full extra cost for a sliver more coverage.

(Wages can run at 55–65% of gross revenue in security, and autonomous solutions can cover 15 times more area, often at a third of the cost.)

Which is why a local operator invested in new tech and brought in partners to find a better way…

24/7 Drone Force is a specialist in fully integrated aerial intelligence with 100% autonomous drones deployed from on-site smart docks if an alarm is tripped, fence breached, panic button activated – you name it. And the units can get to and patrol larger areas much faster than a human response.

Developed by 24/7 Security Services and powered by software from FlytBase, the drones can instantly fly to a spot, streaming live video to operators in a command centre, and then put themselves back on charge. Each dock needs just two things: stable power and stable internet.

See for yourself:

What’s more, the drones are not meant to replace or threaten the jobs of human personnel. Humans are still best for human interaction. The drones are there merely to give patrolmen eyes on the scene to gain a tactical advantage, before they even arrive.

The tricky part

The hard part wasn’t flying. It was the rulebook, because there simply wasn’t a local framework for beyond-visual-line-of-sight security flights. So the 24/7 team had to write the procedures with the SACAA from scratch.

Full breakdown: the 24/7 Drone Force case study →

Signal from the noise · 5 reads

A human watching a wall of monitors loses the thread fast, attention drops off sharply after about 20 minutes, and one operator on a bank of screens misses most of what happens. That's the real reason AI triage is taking over the live-monitoring layer: It never blinks, surfaces only what matters and leaves the judgment calls to people. Not robots replacing the control room; just watching so the control room can think.

Signal: The sell isn't more cameras, it's smarter eyes on the ones already on the wall.

At a Singapore industrial park, Deep Robotics' Jueying X30 "robot dogs" have taken over routine patrols, padding up and down staircases and across gravel between the greenbelts, covering the corners fixed cameras never quite reach. One even clocked someone lighting up where they shouldn't and issued a verbal warning on the spot.

Signal: Legs go where wheels and poles can't — worth watching for sprawling SA estates, plants and mines.

Palm readers are going mainstream in Hong Kong clinics for patient check-in, gyms and venues abroad, and Japanese banks using them in place of ATM cards. The pitch is simple: Nothing to clone, nothing to lose, nothing to touch — and false-acceptance rates better than one in a million.

Signal: Contactless and near-impossible to fake — an easy premium add-on on access-control jobs.

The soft target has moved from the lock to the kit, watching it. Most connected cameras and sensors ship with default passwords and firmware that rarely get patched — and this year, hijacked IP cameras were used for remote reconnaissance abroad. The fix is unglamorous: Change the defaults, keep firmware current.

Signal: “Is it connected, and is it hardened?” belongs on every install checklist — and in every client conversation.

Worth knowing which way the wind's blowing: SA is already the continent's biggest drone market, with one study putting growth near 26% a year to 2028. The SACAA reckons 50,000–55,000 drones are now in use and climbing around 16% a year. That’s enough pressure that beyond-visual-line-of-sight rules are being modernised to keep up, with security and surveillance leading adoption.

Signal: The regulatory door is opening — early movers in aerial response get the head start, and the reference sites.

If you sell any kind of security tech or services, avoid the trap of quoting the lowest price just to win the job. That behaviour signals to customers that price is the only thing that matters — so the moment someone offers a lower price, they leave.

The way out is to sell the outcome (feeling safe and secure, knowing that help can be on the way in seconds if needed) instead of the box. Three ways to do it:

Want to take your team deeper? Olarm Academy's free course, Selling Olarm effectively to installers, is worth an hour a week.

Scientists in Germany have worked out how to identify people using the WiFi signals already bouncing around a room. No camera, no app, no phone in your pocket — just the way your body bends the radio waves as they pass through you. In a test at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the system told 197 different people apart with almost perfect accuracy. The same trick is now being looked at for a future version of WiFi.

Signal: One to file under "watch this space." If a signal can tell who's in a room, the same idea in the wrong hands could track who's home, when, and eventually maybe more — what's typed, what's said. Worth keeping an eye on as the tech matures.

Winter's settled in, which for a good chunk of this list means hunting season and cold, quiet mornings out on the water. There's no big expo on the calendar right now (the next one's only in July), so this one's just a nudge to make the most of the season while it's here.

We'll round up the shows, gear and spots worth your time as real dates land. In the meantime, if there's a shoot you swear by or a fishing spot worth the drive, hit reply and tell us — we might feature it.