Stalk Yourself At Home With This Free App

What goes on in your house when youre 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 youre 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 youre 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 companys algorithms predict youll find most interesting, based on which clips youve watched before. Click a still, and you can watch the the video clip it came from.

Its 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 whats 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.

The idea stemmed from Maslans time working on Google Maps Street View. During literally every usability study at least one person would ask Why isnt 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 theresuch as Dropcam, which was acquired by Googles smart home company Nest last yearbut they tended to capture far too much video to be useful. Plus, since they tended to stream everything they captured, theyd use a lot of banddwidth, which could slow down other video streaming services like YouTube or Netflix.

Camios innovation is that the camera app is selective about what it uploads. Maslan says that its 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, Camios 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.

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Stalk Yourself At Home With This Free App