Dropcam

Dropcam founder and CEO Greg Duffy argues passionately that cloud is creating huge opportunities for startups to build hardware, just as his company does.

He's also learning first hand just how hard that can be.

This morning the company began taking general orders for its newest cloud-based home-monitoring camera -- about two months behind schedule. The setback stemmed from a good problem (big customer demand) and a painful one (sloppy manufacturing by the factory in China).

And so Duffy and his team have spent the last few months scrambling to figure out why the image quality wasn't up … Read more

Please don't call the authorities.

I don't even know at what point parents can get in trouble for leaving their kids at home alone. My older daughter, Eve, is 8, not 2, but that's still young in my view--especially since she was coming off a 104.7 fever the night before.

But we were in a bind, and not an uncommon one. My wife had to pick up our younger daughter from school and take her to a theater class she was eager to attend. I was a good 45 minutes away at work in downtown San Francisco and couldn't escape in time to watch Eve. Our nearest family is across the country. And we don't have a regular roster of babysitters, especially who can come over in the middle of the afternoon.

What we do have is two iPads. Three, actually, and each proved helpful in this babysitting challenge. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Dropcam, which has made a name for itself for providing a user-friendly, easy-to-setup video-monitoring camera and service, has taken the wraps off its new video-monitoring camera, the Dropcam HD.

While Dropcam has just announced the product--and is shipping it later this month for $149--I've been playing around with an early sample for the past week. It has an interesting design and is fairly tiny. The camera can be removed from its stand (when you hook it up to your computer, you take it out of its stand), but most people will leave it in its stand and either set it up on a flat surface or mount it on a wall.

You can't swivel the camera remotely, but you can manually tilt and swivel the camera into almost any position. It's a fixed lens, which means there's no optical zoom, but Dropcam is now offering a digital-zoom feature. … Read more

When Greg Duffy shopped his business idea around in 2008, investor after investor told him the same thing: you're crazy.

Duffy wanted to build a gadget--an IP camera for home surveillance that's accessed via the cloud--and most startup investors didn't want anything to do with manufacturing. They wanted software, and software only.

Duffy persevered. Today, his company--Dropcam--uploads and processes more video every day than YouTube. This fall he raised $5.8 million, the first big pile of money for his San Francisco company. And while it's still in its early days, Dropcam's traction points to … Read more

Last year, we reviewed the Dropcam, a consumer video monitoring system that integrates into your Wi-Fi network. Previously, you could remotely monitor video feeds from a Internet-connected computer or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, running the Dropcam iPhone app. Now the company has brought that same remote mobile monitoring to Android devices in the form of a free Android app.

What we liked about the Dropcam was how simple to set up it was. The network-enabled Webcam produced by 88Volts uses hardware made by a company called Axis. Two models are currently available: the standard Dropcam ($200), which just … Read more

In recent years, a few companies have taken a stab at creating consumer-friendly networked video systems that allow you to monitor your home remotely over the Web or on your mobile phone. With time, these systems, which people use to check in on their pets, property, nannies--or whatever--have improved in terms of reliability and ease of setup, but all too often there are some shortcomings.

Enter the Dropcam, a network-enabled Webcam produced by 88Volts, and using hardware made by a company called Axis. Two models are currently available: the standard Dropcam ($200), which just captures video, and the Dropcam Echo ($… Read more

We were impressed with the results and utility of cloud-based video surveillance system Dropcam when we gave it a spin back in March, but one thing that was sorely missing was a way to hear sound, since the camera hardware did not have a microphone.

That shortcoming has been addressed with a new version of the Dropcam hardware the company is calling Echo. It sells for $279 (an $80 premium on the video-only version), and lets users listen to what's happening on both live and archived footage. Better yet, it uses the same trigger system for video movement, as … Read more

Last August, I wrote about converting a Webcam into a home security tool, and truth be told, the results were underwhelming. Sure there are services and specialty hardware that let you do it with very little setup, but there continued to be a notable gap in what you could do with some consumer solutions versus the considerably more expensive, professional surveillance gear.

One company that's tried to find a happy medium between those two groups is Dropcam. Based in San Francisco and founded by former Xobni engineers Greg Duffy and Amir Virani, Dropcam turns a fairly standard Webcam into a home security tool with an elephant's memory.

The hardware, which retails at $199, is actually made by another company, Axis Communications. Dropcam's service, which goes along with it, is where things get interesting.

Instead of offering just a live feed, as people are able to get with most IP Webcams, Dropcam's video can be sent to the cloud (actually a concrete bunker in Texas) for safe keeping. Compared to storing recordings on a computer that's located inside the place you're surveilling, this makes for a much more secure solution. And unlike some do-it-yourself solutions that use FTP to send video or photo stills to the cloud, Dropcam handles all those settings, so that you essentially just plug the thing into a wall socket.

Video can be viewed online, on any computer with Adobe's Flash player installed. The company also recently released an iPhone app that can pull up the live stream of your camera, and a handful of sample cameras.

On the Web, Dropcam can store up to 30 days of nonstop video. This appears as a timeline, which can be scaled anywhere from one second all the way to a week. It also makes it easy to see when things actually happened. Times when the camera sensed motion are marked as yellow dots, and when a user mouses over one of these dots, it pops up with small thumbnails of what was captured. The same thing happens if you hover over any part of the timeline.

Right now there's not much you can do with these images and video clips, but in the near future Dropcam plans to roll out a notification service that will send an e-mail or SMS text message to users, that includes a clip of what's been captured, every time one of these events occurs. Some of the software and Webware solutions we looked at last year did this, and it's definitely a must-have feature for people who want to use it for security purposes.

Dropcam is mainly a consumer solution, but the service has a pro service plan too. The basic service is free, but users at that level don't get any recording storage. The plus plan, which costs $8.95 a month saves a week of footage, while the pro plan, at $24.95, saves 30 days. That ends up working out to 50GB of video on the high end. Both of the higher-end plans also let you use two cameras instead of one.… Read more