Santa Monica based Ring has been working to reduce crime in neighborhoods for the last six years and while doing so, the invention of Ring has revolutionized the way many think about home security.
The company produces digital doorbells and cameras. The equipment has the ability to be completely wireless. The cameras can be accessed from anywhere in the world through an app available on smartphones and gives users the ability to view live footage and record events. The cameras detect motion and send out alerts and many of them now have floodlights and sirens to scare off burglars.
Founded in Santa Monica by inventor and entrepreneur, Jamie Siminoff, the product is a unique invention on multiple levels. It is the first product like it and unlike most other companies, Ring is using its products to create solutions.
In 2015 Siminoff and the LAPD partnered in a pilot program to test the rates in which Ring can reduce crime. Six months later the police said the neighborhood using the Ring device saw a reduction in burglaries of about 55 percent compared to a neighborhood that didn’t use the device.
Siminoff has had a knack for inventing since he was a child. RC cars were his introduction to coding and electronics because they always would break down and need repair. The perseverance that he learned as a teenager in high school, prepared him for the perseverance that he would need as an entrepreneur. High school and college are formative times for all young minds and for Siminoff, many of the ways he runs his billion-dollar company today were formed in high school.
“The toughness of high school really shaped me,” Siminoff said.
Not having a perfect high school experience gave him an opportunity to learn and better prepare himself for what was to come later in his career. Siminoff believes the most important thing that he learned was to “find your passion” because “if you are going to succeed, you can't fake it.”
Without perseverance, Siminoff is certain that he would never have been able to arrive at where he is now.
Siminoff’s father was somewhat of an entrepreneur himself and the CFO (chief financial officer) making pipe elbows for refineries in New Jersey, where Siminoff grew up. Every summer, he worked at his father's company and soon started a telecom company of his own, along with various other technological endeavors, before he created Ring. Siminoff really wanted to create something that would make a marked difference.
While solving problems in his garage, Siminoff solved a problem for his garage.
“I was working in the garage and I couldn't hear the doorbell,” he said. “I thought that there would be a doorbell that would link to my phone, but there wasn't one so I just built it.”
“Doorbot” was the initial product that Siminoff created in 2011. Unsatisfied, Siminoff and his collaborators worked to rebrand the company and gave birth to Ring.
“I really like living with my doors open. This (Ring) allows you to live like that … let technology look over you.”
Unlike a traditional alarm system that protects homes and business after they have been broken into, a doorbell like Ring and its multiple camera possibilities outside of a home have the ability to prevent crimes before they are committed.
Santa Monica’s Best Buy’s technology expert Steven became a Ring specialist by default as the popularity and booming sales of Ring as a product have risen at an astonishing rate.
He said, “The greatest return to having a security camera like Ring is not the fact you can capture a thief's face to show to the police but that the criminal will see the camera and not rob that home because of it.”
Recently Ring has added a neighborhood watch feature that requires the participation of its users. Through this feature, Ring users have the ability to communicate with each other by sharing footage and alerting their communities to any suspicious activity.
“The social sharing of information by itself is a really important piece,” Siminoff said.
To stop home burglaries there are many small steps that need to be taken. Whether Ring is selling solar panels so that the camera batteries don't run out, developing lights and sirens to scare away burglars or providing Ring users with a way to communicate, Ring is always trying to further its effectiveness in reducing crime.
“All these little things build on one another to reduce crime,” Siminoff said. “We deliver a presence through Ring into a neighborhood … and actually bring presence back into empty neighborhoods.”
Mitch Brody of Brentwood owns a Ring video doorbell and feels like many others, that it is a major theft deterrent.
“I think the mere presence of having it deters crime,” Brody said. He playfully went on to explain how useful it is to remind his teenagers that they are not alone.
Elijah Ezralow is a 10th-grade student at Crossroads High School
