With the car industry in a slump, John Kerekanich doesn’t want to be missing any potential customers.

Yet, the Newberg Ford dealer has a back lot left largely unsupervised. He knows people often enter the lot just to look around. And by the time a salesperson becomes aware of it, erstwhile customers may already have left the premises.

So, a chance meeting at a charity golf tournament turned into something of a boon for Kerekanich.

He observed a friend looking at a live webcam of a friend’s swimming pool. The camera is set to watch the pool because neighborhood kids often sneak over to use it.

The owner is able to watch real-time, high-quality video, have it recorded and get access to the video anywhere that he has the Internet.

Kerekanich not only was impressed, he wanted a piece of the action.

“I’m thinking as I’m watching this, ‘This is something,’” he said. “We have a problem. We have one location, one entrance to our lot, and you can’t see it from the showroom. I thought, ‘If we could see it, we can see customers who stop by that we usually don’t know about. We can send a salesman out there and engage the customer.’ They thought they could help.”

His golfing buddy, as it turns out, owns Technocom, a Wilsonville-based technology company known for installing corporate telephone systems and wiring residential homes. With the slowdown in building, the company needed to find new revenue.

When a bank customer approached Technocom about a problem with securing foreclosed homes, they combined their knowledge of technology with a unique software program to create UGuardU, a live video monitoring system.

The service was just what Kerekanich needed. He will have the camera, about the size of an iPhone, installed on the top of his building, where it can continuously monitor the dealer’s back lot. A laptop set up inside the dealership and the monitoring system will provide an alert whenever it detects motion.

It also has the ability to zoom, and all surveillance can be recorded.

“It’s really slick,” he said. “An added benefit, because we don’t have a fence, is to give us surveillance at night. We lost a couple of cars a couple years ago. Surveillance is so expensive, we couldn’t justify doing it. This gives us the ability to record 24 hours, 48 hours, a week, whatever we want. If we find a car missing, we can replay that recording. The cameras are so sophisticated that it can read the license plates on the cars.”

Matt Mosley, Technocom’s residential division sales manager, said the cameras provide higher quality than anything else he’s seen, as well as being live. The service, which starts at $10 a month, can provide access to multiple cameras in multiple locations. Customers only need access to the Internet.

He sees potential for people who have a vacation homes, or who are on vacation and want to keep an eye on their home while they’re away. Business owners may want to install the cameras in their businesses, to see how customers are coming in.

“All you need is broadband and the camera to broadcast over the Internet,” he said. “We provide access to that camera. Wherever you have the ability to get on a web browser, even on your phone, it also stores those video records and you essentially have access to 24 hours of recorded material.”

Cameras range in price from $200 to $1,000. Technocom has a list of approved cameras it has tested with its service.

Additionally, Mosley said all video storage is done off site. If the camera is vandalized or stolen, the recordings are still safe. Technocom also does not view any of the recordings.

“The service is UGuardU,” he said. “We want our customers, not us, providing a monitoring service. We’re not looking at the screens. We’re the host. It’s recording to our servers, but we never see the footage.”

“It’s costing us $1,000 in an initial investment,” said Kerekanich of his Ford dealership, “with a small fee per month. In our case, we would never have put the investment before. It’s an amazing thing, this little camera, sitting on the corner of our building. It’s a no brainer.”

As he drives in and out of his lot, Kerekanich suspects his sales people are missing two to three customers per day who are browsing the inventory.

“If you can engage the customer, you improve your chances of selling something exponentially,” he said. “I expect this to pay for itself 100 times over.”

Gabe Authier, Technocom’s IT director, said he set up another customer in Wilsonville, and has a well-known celebrity using the system to monitor his home.

“They’re a globe trotter, and travel quite a bit, so it’s nice for them to take a look at their place when they’re away,” he said. n