Dr. Ralf Hinkel
Founder and CEO of
MOBOTIX AG |
When Dr. Ralf Hinkel came in 1999 upon the idea of designing a web cam capable of delivering images to the Internet via ISDN - easily and without a PC - no one imagined that more than 40,000 of these cameras would be sold worldwide within three years.
As it turned out this revolutionary concept would mark the beginning of a whole new era in video surveillance and the video technology of more than 60 years that worked with analog signals, interlaced fields, and at low resolutions would be dismissed. The new technology combines two high-resolution digital image sensors with a powerful Linux PC and does not even require the usual hardware compression (codec) because the entire camera functionality is embedded in a simple software package. In addition, the optics are highly optimized and mounted firmly in place without any moving parts. For these reasons among others, MOBOTIX cameras are extremely low-maintenance and capable of withstanding wide ranges of temperature.
To market the idea, Dr. Ralf Hinkel formed MOBOTIX AG, a privately-owned joint stock company, in 1999. Headquartered in Kaiserslautern, Germany, the company today develops and manufactures professional network cameras for security systems, production monitoring, and Internet applications. MOBOTIX AG operates worldwide through its own subsidiaries, qualified specialty distributors and retail partners. More than 45 percent of the products are exported. |
