CamioCAM

CamioCam Turns Any Web Or Video Camera Into A Smart, Cloud-Based Monitoring Device

What if you could get an alert to your phone anytime someone left a package on your doorstep? Or, if you could track whether your elderly parent took her medication in a given day? CamioCam’s intelligent, video-monitoring service wants to be able to accomplish these tasks and more. The startup, which is launching at the LAUNCH conference today, turns any connected camera in your home (a tablet, smartphone, computer) into a cloud-based monitoring experience.

The company is founded by ex-Googler Carter Maslan who was director of product management for local Search, Maps, and Earth at the search giant. And CamioCam has raised over $1 million in funding from Freestyle, Marissa Mayer, Greylock, Floodgate, Ellen Levy, John Hanke, Box Group and others.

Here’s how it works. You can connect any Wi-Fi-connected phone, tablet, webcam or IP camera to CamioCam. The cameras upload video to CamioCam whenever there is motion and proprietary algorithms analyze the motion to figure out whether the motion should be marked — basically aiming to cut down hours and hours of video into small alerts. Users will get instant alerts on their phone or email, along with snippets of the concerning video so they don’t have to go through hours of video. Users can also search or filter through the most important events.

You can even get more specific alerts by selecting zones in your camera view, like a countertop in your kitchen or the baby’s crib, and you can choose which zones alert you of movement. You can have multiple zones for one camera (i.e. in a kitchen you could have a trashcan zone as well as a fridge zone).

As Maslan explains, CamioCam is fast, with near­ real-time alerts coming roughly 7x faster than traditional cameras, and the service uses 92 percent less bandwidth than streaming services. The startup also promises fewer false positives.

In terms of cost, you can use a web camera, using the CamioCam app in your browser or on an Android device for free. Beyond that, each additional camera is $9.90 per month.

At the heart of what CamioCam does is basically turn a browser camera into a motion detector camera, which is allowed in part via the WebRTC. For now the startup offers an Android and web app.

  

CamioCam will go head to head with Dropcam, a favorite for cloud-based video monitoring. But Maslan believes that CamioCam provides simplicity for users because they can use a browser within a phone or tablet and don’t necessarily have to purchase outside equipment.