Fulham FC Staff Now Monitoring Grounds with Tablets

Staff at Fulham Football Club are now using tablets and smartphones to wirelessly monitor the grounds.

Tablets and smartphones are more than just app machines that allow us to play Angry Birds on the tube or watch our favourite shows on long plane journeys. These small, powerful mobile computers are helping improve the way many people do business. Fulham FC has just joined the tablet revolution and is using tablets and smartphones as part of its new security set up.

The BBC reports that Fulham FC staff can now use iPhones and iPads to keep an eye on the Premier League club's 63 HD cameras. According to the Beeb, all of the video is stored on one central server that can be accessed from a range of devices, including Apple iPads and iPhones that are currently being handed out. The solution means staff can monitor security while on the move, zoom in on people in the stands, and circulate images to other staff and local law enforcement if needs be -- a massive step up from the VHS standard-def system the club had been using up until now.

"Incidents that happened were taking days to recover. We can now do that within seconds," Nicolas Pendlebury, Fulham FC's head of IT projects, told the BBC. "Say there are five fans in the away end breaking seats, we would bookmark the image in the application, email those photos to one of our response team and say 'please eject these people'."

Pendlebury goes on to say that while images lifted from the old system were so low quality, even the gender of the person in the photo was questionable, these pictures of a high enough quality that there's little room for doubt.

"They can't argue it is not them. It stands up in court if we need to take it there," he said.

Read more on FFC's new security system here.