Hasta La Gadget!

I’ve had about a week to play with the new Dropcam Pro and I’m pleased to say I haven’t noticed it at all since I set it up. And that’s a good thing.

The Dropcam Pro is a wireless video surveillance camera with a lot of great features. It costs $199 and the DVR service costs $10 per month. This lets you record everything that happens for seven full days, offering a 24/7 view on your world. It connects to any wireless network – the new model supports 802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz and 5GHz, a massive improvement, and it has better night vision, HD recording, and a nicer case. It also has a 130-degree field of vision, 20 degrees more than the original model. In short, it’s 100% better than its predecessor and its predecessor was still pretty darn good.

It works like this: you connect the Dropcam to a computer and set up your wireless network and account. Then you let the Dropcam record. According to CEO Greg Duffy, his company processes more video per day than YouTube and it’s easy to see why. Every time something happens in front of the camera it marks that point in the recording and can even notify you. A built-in mic and speaker lets you listen and talk to interlopers and the night vision system uses infrared LEDs to create a slightly creepy but entirely visible scene.

Dropcams are, in short, the best way to keep tabs on your home or office. They’re unobtrusive, you can turn off the front indicator light, and they run off of a standard USB cable. You can put them anywhere – you will notice glare if you try to shoot night vision through a dirty window so almost anywhere – and they are extremely well-built. I’ve been consistently impressed with the experience and the Pro model is a real improvement.

The most important thing, however is the software. You can now zoom into HD scenes and even focus the processing might of the Dropcam on one specific corner. This allows you to, say, make out the license plate of a parked car or figure out a face. For example, this is the view from the Dropcam:

I then zoomed in:

A little bit more magic and you can get a clearer picture of the scene. You can then enhance a part of the scene, as shown below.

While you’re obviously not going to get perfect results each time, it is a cool experience to truly “Zoom! Enchance!” a live scene. Who is this for? Small business owners, home owners, and folks who don’t want to waste their money on chintzy babycams and instead want something that actually works. We’ve used Dropcams to keep an eye on the kids, watch our car outside, and even figure out who is ringing our doorbell. I could see these replacing the chintzy CCTV cameras in mom and pop shops and offices and because everything is recorded you’ll never lose a minute of the action.

I’m not the kind to heap praise on a device but after setting and forgetting the Dropcam Pro I’m pleased to note that I’ve never had to go to tape in order to solve a crime or, for that matter, identify the manufacturer of a replicant’s robotic snake by enhancing 224 to 176.

Dropcam wants to make streaming video from your home, your office, or your baby’s crib easier, clearer, and brighter, and the new Dropcam Pro camera is how it plans to do it. Boosting audio and video performance from the first-gen camera, and taking advantage of Bluetooth LE for tighter integration into your Smart Home, the […]

San Francisco-based video monitoring hardware and software startup Dropcam today announced the close of a new $30 million Series C funding round, led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and with participation by new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing backers Accel Partners and Menlo Ventures. I spoke to Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy about the funding, which, by his own admission, the company wasn’t in a position to really need. It’s about staying two steps ahead of the game, is what he essentially told me.

Dropcam has raised a total of $47.8 million for its connected home monitoring solution, which pairs signature Dropcam HD hardware with a web-based platform for remotely monitoring, recording and playback of live video feeds. It’s ideal for a home or office security solution, with relatively inexpensive setup costs and extensibility, and features like off-site storage that get around limitations with locally-managed installations.

I asked Duffy why raise if Dropcam didn’t need the cash injection, and he said that in part it’s because the funding will help the four-year old company accomplish a lot of its goals for 2014 by the end of this year. It’s about anticipating the market and making sure that Dropcam insures itself against the kind of disruption it has itself accomplished in its chosen market.

“We had actually a ton of inbound interest on this round, and when this started happening I kind of said ‘What would be the amount that I would raise if I were competing against a radical, kind of Dropcam-like competitor? How could I use additional capital to beat them?” he said. “I used this from talking to friend of mine who are also running highly successful companies […] like Dropbox, for instance, they’re competing against a lot of great companies right now but back when they were going through periods of insane growth that wasn’t the case, and they had to imagine how best to compete with a theoretical Dropbox competitor.”

For Dropcam, that means investing heavily in product pipeline, and one of its key areas of its investment is in computer vision. This is about making the entire platform much more capable of taking advantage of the data it collects, according to Duffy.

“One of the things that we decided to invest a lot in, which has been a big project for us, is the computer vision side of things,” he said. “A lot of these guys [potential Dropcam competitors] are really focused on the hardware, and are offering basically just a camera you can access with your iPhone. You certainly can access Dropcam with your iPhone, but that’s about where the similarities end. We have started a computer vision team here, and since we take in more video than YouTube, we decided it would be a good way to figure out how to use that data to get better video analysis for users.”

Dropcam has been working on their computer vision system for just about a year now, and they plan to start releasing features around it and hiring more engineers to develop on top of it, and they can do both much sooner now than if they’d not taken more money. These are designed to leverage data gathered from Dropcam’s network, while preserving user anonymity and privacy, Duffy said.

Given the amazing volume of inbound video Dropcam’s servers parse, the big data aspect of this could be Dropcam’s most interesting achievement in a year’s time. And depending on how the startup attempts to monetize it, also a big revenue booster; already, Dropcam is seeing a 39 percent conversion rate in terms of users who opt in to its paid subscription services, and additional value-add features derived from data analytics should push that number higher.

We sat down with Greg Duffy, CEO of Dropcam, to talk about his company’s move into online DVR services connected with their cool little HD webcams. The big news? Dropcam cameras now upload more video per day than YouTube.

Duffy noted that the company is working towards more intelligent content sensing so their cameras and online DVR service will be able to pick out faces and figures in the scene and be a bit more intelligent with notifications and motion sensing.

There wasn’t any new Dropcam hardware to speak of this CES but the service is definitely more interesting these days simply because a cloud-backed DVR could be a lifesaver for businesses and personal users alike.

Dropcam has launched a new iPad app, allowing easy monitoring of multiple streaming cameras whether you’re at home or on the move, and in HD quality. The freshly released Dropcam for iPad app supports up to 720p HD in full-screen, or alternatively can show up to four different camera views at once – assuming you have the cameras in the first place.

If you’re lucky enough to have five or more, you can swipe the app left and right to see more footage from different units. The app supports instant snapshots, saving stills from the video stream to the photo gallery on the iPad, and there’s also My Clips for iPad, allowing straightforward access to the catalog of clips you’ve saved in Dropcam’s cloud.

More immediate playback uses the DVR timeline, allowing you to scroll back through events that the cameras have caught by dragging your fingertip along. There’s also support for public Dropcams, and of course there’s Dropcam’s system whereby any movement in-frame is automatically flagged up for easier review.

For more on the Dropcam HD, check out our full review from earlier this year. You can download Dropcam for iPad here [iTunes link].

Dropcam for iPad hits App Store with multi-cam support is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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