What goes on in your house when you’re not around?
A startup called Camio offers a free service that turns any old Android or iOS smartphone or tablet into a web-connected surveillance camera. Just install the app, sign up for an account and you’re ready to go.
Camio co-founder Carter Maslan, a former Google Maps project manager, says people use it for everything from home security to finding out what their pets do all day while no one is home. But the company ran into a problem soon after launching last year. Even though it only captures video that includes motion — so that you’re not storing hours and hours of video where nothing happens — it was still more than most people actually needed. “For most users, only about 51 seconds per day matter,” Maslan says.
Camio saves 30 days worth of video in the cloud, which you can watch from anywhere. You only have to pay if you want to connect more than one camera to your account.
So last week, the company launched a new feature called Camio Daily, an email digest of the stills that the company’s algorithms predict you’ll find most interesting, based on which clips you’ve watched before. Click a still, and you can watch the the video clip it came from.
It’s certainly a different take on the Internet of Things. Instead attaching sensors and Wi-Fi card to everything we want to know about or keep track of, the company repurposes something many of us just having lying around — old phones — and turns them into a way to learn more about what’s happening in a particular place. You can search your video archives using natural language — for example, “people approaching my walkway” — or set up alerts when certain things happen, such as when it captures an image of someone inside your house.
From Street View to Home View
The idea stemmed from Maslan’s time working on Google Maps Street View. “During literally every usability study at least one person would ask ‘Why isn’t my car there? I parked it there this morning,'” he explains. That led to the realization that there was a demand for live monitoring. There were plenty of other video streaming products out there—such as Dropcam, which was acquired by Google’s smart home company Nest last year—but they tended to capture far too much video to be useful. Plus, since they tended to stream everything they captured, they’d use a lot of banddwidth, which could slow down other video streaming services like YouTube or Netflix.
Camio’s innovation is that the camera app is selective about what it uploads. Maslan says that it’s algorithms are smart enough to tell the difference between, say, lighting changes or a blowing tree branch, and someone walking up to your porch. By reducing the total amount of data uploaded and stored, Camio can use much less bandwidth than a traditional webcam, and the company can afford to offer a free version of the service.
For most users, only about 51 seconds per day matter. Carter Maslan
Once the footage is moved to the cloud, Camio’s computers analyze the videos to try to automatically detect things such as which ones have people and what colors are present, so that users can search the archives.
It’s hard not to worry about uploading video footage from your house to the cloud, but Maslan says that all the video is encrypted so that not even Camio’s engineers can access it (though it’s not possible to verify this without auditing Camio’s servers). For people uploading video that’s not particularly sensitive –such as publicly viewable areas such as their front yards — this might not be a big deal. Everyone else will need to take a leap of faith.
It’s not hard to imagine Camio being used for corporate security or other applications, but Maslan says that the company is completely focused on the home market, at least for now. But Camio did just announce a new API that will allow select partners to build new integrations, and it’s possible that project could lead to some corporate or government uses.
“I came from Google Maps where we decided to focus on making a super simple product for consumers, but then open it up so that people could tie it into,” he says.
Or just spend all day watching yourself.
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