CamioCam Top 40 Debut

CamioCam debuted in the top 40 startups at LAUNCH Festival last week. It's a digerati crowd... the tech enthusiasts... the power users... the people to thrill first on the way to smart video monitoring for everyone. Their excitement for making video useful - with fast digests, low bandwidth, and any camera input - has prompted people around the world to start using CamioCam (translations coming!)

CamioCam Brings Ambitious Search Smarts to Video

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

Our LAUNCH stage demo covered the "action" on my my front lawn. All my demos are limited to my own account. And you're probably much more interested in what's happening at your own place. So now you can use CamioCam free with your Android phone or tablet as the camera.

The CamioCam Android app records and alerts you for free.

Nothin' but Browser

A common maxim among photographers is that “the best camera is the one you have with you.” We agree. Dedicated security cameras can’t be beat, but almost everyone has a perfectly good webcam built into their computer.

That’s why we’re so excited to preview CamioCam Web, which turns any (modern) web browser into a full-fledged security camera with nary a download.

Just open www.camiolog.com/cam to record. That's it.

It's simple and free for anyone with a webcam to get advanced motion detection, smart alerts, fast search, and easy sharing. It’s great in a pinch, or to try out Camiolog before buying standalone cameras. 

Just open www.camiolog.com/cam to start recording. Close the page to stop. Give it a try and, as always, let us know what you think!

Update: get CamioCam as a Chrome App too.

Sí, hablamos español (ok, Spanglish really)

Camiolog comenzó en México. Mis padres viven cerca de Puerto Vallarta durante gran parte del año. Les di una cámara y Camiolog como regalo para que pudieran permanecer cerca de la casa de sus sueños, incluso cuando están lejos.

Han tenido nuevos usos de Camiolog por decir lo menos. Era su casa en México que se quemó por un rayo y era su casa en Los Ángeles, donde tres coyotes casi comieron su perro.

Tres Coyotes... la traducción no es necesaria.

Estamos encantados de ofrecer Camiolog en español. No hemos traducido todos las páginas web al español, pero se puede utilizar la aplicación principal en español con www.camiolog.com?locale=es.

¡Disfrute!

53-second Setup. No Cables!

“

This feels like magic. I can mount an outdoor WiFi camera right out of the box. No cables! – Colin Maslan
Camiolog Installer #1

„

With this new Android app, your cameras are up and running in 53 seconds without ever needing access to a router or PC.

In the earliest days of Camiolog, Colin did most of the Bay Area installations so that we could learn quickly how to simplify setup. His biggest request: eliminate the need to connect to a PC or router - especially when installing outdoor cameras.

To experience the "magic", I recorded my out-of-the-box setup of a Sharx outdoor WiFi camera using nothing more than my phone:



No more crawling behind desks and cabinets to connect cables. Now Colin returns from his installations dust-bunny-free!

Pick up where you left off

When we leave our dog at home alone, I often search [ black dog ] for a quick check on how she's been doing.

But I'd have to repeat the same search each time I opened Camiolog, since the default search included all events from all cameras.

Now, Camiolog picks up right where you left off. Your last search is remembered as the starting point for the next time you open camiolog.com or the Camiolog app.

Click the X (highlighted above) in the Search Box to clear all search filters.

Since reloading camiolog.com no longer forgets your prior search, we've added an X button in the Search Box as a quick way to clear all search filters to get back to viewing all events from all cameras. The equivalent mobile app Menu option is Clear all filters.

This new "sticky start page" is especially helpful when you typically use Camiolog as the Guest of another user. Rather than having to select the Account of the person sharing with you each time you open Camiolog, you jump straight to the shared video images - whether viewing Live Motion or Search results.

p.s. - Live Motion View (#live) now includes a button on each camera to take you to the recent events of that particular camera.

Events at-a-glance

Want to see a quick summary of your video at-a-glance?
Now, whenever you pass your mouse over an event, you'll see a 2x-speed animation of the whole event sequence. In this screencast, I use the new color search feature with the query
[ front red yesterday 8pm events ]


Events can be animated, expanded, or collapsed with these actions:

animate	- move your mouse over the event
expand	- click on the event's green bar graph
collapse	- click on the expanded event's color-coded bar

On your smartphone or tablet, where you have no mouse, click on the event bar graph to start the animation.

Enjoy!

p.s. - click a timestamp (e.g. "8:05:24 PM") to show results second-by-second starting at that time.
p.p.s. - the keyboard shortcut character 'e' toggles to/from viewing events.

Crowdsource your Office Video Security

Now, all the Macs in your office are free security cameras! Just download CamioCam from the App Store.

If you have our latest iPhone app, your Macs will also alert you to what is happening wherever you are.

CamioCam only records when it matters, since it automatically adjusts to the lighting and motion levels in the room. When you get an alert on your phone, you can jump straight to the video that triggered the alert - no matter what network you're on. There's no need to configure firewalls or forward ports.

Once CamioCam is up and linked to your camiolog account, set up alert zones on the scene it’s capturing, like this:

conference room zone

You’ll get Alerts like this on your iPhone/iPad:

realtime alert

It’s as easy as that. I'm signing off with a screenshot of CamioCam and me triggering the conference room alert for your amusement!

CamioCam alerting me about me

Search. In Color!

[ entrance blue ]

[ entrance white ]

Have you ever wanted to know when the FedEx or recycling truck came by?

Now you can - with a quick color search!

In these examples, I jumped to the white FedEx truck and blue recycling truck by including colors in my searches.

Camiolog now instantly detects the colors of moving objects in each frame.  Computers and humans process colors differently: we call a truck white, even though its moving image contains many shades of color in the tires, the body, the logo, and the windows.  Camiolog imitates the human vision process, detecting the "relevant" colors for each moving object in real time.  We are still fine-tuning the color detection; we welcome all feedback!

We have made colors searchable - just like camera names and zone labels. That way, you can quickly find your UPS delivery with a search like [walkway brown] or your black labrador with a search like [backyard black].

Color is another ingredient in making your video cameras more useful - easy to access, easy to search, and easy to act on. 

Smarter Search with Vector-based Zones

When you label motion zones with simple terms like "lawn" or "driveway", you make your Camiolog search and alerts smarter. For example, the search [walkway by event yesterday] can include only the motion that happens in this oddly shaped polygon, selected in orange:

Vector-based Zone Editor with "walkway" selected

To label a zone, just:

1. click on any image in your Camiolog stream
2. click the "Edit Zones" button
3. click "Draw Area" to place the vertices of one or more polygons covering your zone
4. name your zone (e.g. "walkway") and click "Save"

Camiolog has switched to this vector-based zone editor. That means that:

1. your labeled zones are precise at any image resolution
2. it's easy to edit zones by moving polygon markers, and
3. you should no longer use the old zone editor!

We'll still use your old zone definitions until you replace them with the new vector-based zones. Once you save a zone using the new "Edit Zones" for a particular camera, then Camiolog's image analysis for that camera will use only your newly defined vector-based zones.  We've included a temporary link to the "Old Zone Editor" in the upper right just so that you can view any previously defined zones in a separate window while creating your new ones.

Search the Real World... on your iPhone

The Camiolog iPhone and iPad app was just released in the iTunes App Store. So now it's as easy to check your cameras on your smartphone or tablet as it is when you are at your desk.

Camiolog is still available from any standard web browser on any device, but we created this iOS app to improve the navigation and sharing experience. The app makes it easier to:

• search quickly with keywords like [walkway 3pm yesterday]
• filter results with native controls for cameras, zones or time frames
• share Camios using the native share dialog
• swipe to go back or forward in your navigation history

The Camiolog app will handle any camiolog.com link you click from your device. So it's easier to view a Camio shared via email, text message or web site.

I look forward to hearing from you how we can make it easier for you to get the most out of your content.  Please send me your top missing features so we can get them into our development plans.

Compressing Time at a Watering Hole in Kenya

It's a thrill to see wild animals on the other side of the planet. But it's nighttime in Kenya when we're awake here. And even when we stay up late, there's no guarantee we'll tune-in at just the right time to catch an elephant or zebra. 

Zebra Moon: Camio of their sunset salutation to Mount Kilimanjaro

But now we can search [watering hole kenya] to compress weeks of video images into the watering hole highlights.

Rather than wading through lots of dark night images and weather changes over the course of many days, you can jump straight to the activity at the watering hole.

tip: Camiolog automatically purges content older than 30 days. But when you create a limited timespan Camio like the one on the left, you also prevent its content from being purged until you delete the Camio.

Search the Real World (in real-time)

Michael T. Jones taught me that silly questions aren't so silly.

Many people, when viewing satellite imagery in Google Earth or Maps for the first time, would zoom over their home or office and ask, "Why isn't my car parked outside? It's outside now." Those same questions popped up even with Street View.

(cue laughter from anyone that had labored for years to build a pipeline to stitch and normalize all that imagery together even monthly - much less in real-time)

But it got me to thinking - what would it take to search the real world in real-time? Why can't I ask "Which way did my black lab go?", "Did UPS deliver?", "Are the kids home from soccer yet?", etc. There's so much useful information to make searchable in real-time.

That's our goal at Camiolog - to make it simple to search the real world in real-time.

Here's a personal example from Monday. We're mounting a TRX strap to the ceiling of Camiolog's office (to help us counter all that hunching over keyboards), and I wanted to know whether the mount had been delivered to my home.

I searched [walkway 3pm Monday by event] to see that the package was left at our doorstep and then confirmed that my son had come home with the dog to pick it up from the front door. Simple.

And with Android's voice transcription, I'm using Camiolog's Search more often than menu buttons. It's not silly to ask why my car isn't parked outside anymore!

More info and help links at:
camiolog.com/search-the-real-world

The Cloud is Always On (even if your camera isn't)

My dad's home in Mexico was struck by lightning. The palapa burned down — just 32 hours after insuring it.

Sounds suspicious, doesn't it? But the good people at Mariners Insurance México paid immediately to rebuild. It helped a lot that they could watch the video.

The cameras melted. But the video was already in the cloud. The lightning strike and subsequent fire are captured in this video by the reflection in a ceramic vase:



Since Camiolog is always-on — always running in the cloud — you get security and reliability benefits that also make video surveillance a lot more useful.

Not only is the video immediately off-site and securely replicated across datacenters, but the absence of video can be detected. For example, if your vacation home loses power, or if the dog knocks over your pet cam, Camiolog tells you. You'll get alerts like these:

As a cloud-based service, Camiolog just keeps running — reliably detecting the presence or absence of important events — even when lightning strikes.

Secure & Bandwidth-Efficient Live Motion

From the start, we built Camiolog for our own use - for our dearest friends, family and neighbors. So privacy and security have been top design objectives.

That's why, for example, your cameras record to the cloud with encrypted Upload Tokens rather than with usernames and passwords, and access to your video is protected by Google's 2-step verification.

That's also why it bothers us so much that you're often told to forward ports in your local network router just to view live video! Unless you're a security geek, you may not realize that port forwarding makes your local network vulnerable to attack from anyone across the globe.

camiolog.com#live is secure & bandwidth-efficient.

So when you want to view live motion while away from your home/office network, please use camiolog.com#live instead of connecting directly to your camera or DVR over the Internet using port forwarding.  That way, you keep your local network safe and your camera credentials confidential.

You also save bandwidth - which is especially important on mobile data plans. Instead of continuously streaming video, you fetch only the latest motion as it happens.

Keep it safe! Learn more at help.camiolog.com/live-motion

Shortcuts for Power Users

Camiolog's Keyboard Shortcuts

Press the / key to see Camiolog's keyboard shortcuts. They're especially helpful when blazing through still frames.

In my screencast demos with fast time-lapse sequences, I'm just holding down the arrow key (← or →) to bypass the normal play timing.

The m key is helpful whenever I want to re-display the orange motion highlights after they've stopped flashing.

In Luca's Learning Motion Filter example, the quick hide and show of motionless frames was done with the - and = keys respectively.

Enjoy. Power User.

Video Images with 94% Less Boredom

If you have a web camera, you know the drill: the excitement of being able to see what’s going on at your house is soon replaced by the tedium of wading through images of branches swaying in the wind, shadows playing on the driveway, cobwebs dangling in front of the camera, etc.

Camiolog is coming to the rescue by learning what’s boring and selecting only the images with interesting action. It’s not perfect yet. But to show how helpful it is in reviewing video images, take a look at the examples below.

BEFORE & AFTER
Camiolog's Learning
Motion Filter
(94% less boredom)

On the left, you see a video image stream BEFORE and AFTER Camiolog’s learning motion filter was applied. 1,080 images were distilled to 105 images. Most of that 90% reduction eliminated blowing branches and their shadows. 42 of the remaining 105 images contain motion that’s interesting to us.

The orange motion cloud highlights the interesting motion.

That’s a 94% reduction in boredom!
(from 1,034 to 63!)

There were very few false negatives (4 frames out of 1,080) and not a single interesting event sequence was missed. Watch how a person playing chameleon with his car is detected even while ignoring swaying branches just pixels away!

In practice, Camiolog’s learning motion filter turns a flood of images, in which the interesting action is lost among the spurious motion, into a short and informative summarization. Watch this BEFORE and AFTER video for a sample of the effect:
(you may want to watch in full-screen HD)



Getting rid of spurious motion is only half the benefit; the other half is drawing your attention to the interesting events, preventing them from getting lost in the chaff. The orange motion cloud highlights the interesting motion.

We plan to make this "interesting motion only" view the default on camiolog.com very soon - you can still see all frames on request. In the meantime, use the keyboard shortcut key - to hide motionless frames and the key = to unhide motionless frames. (BTW, the slash key / displays all the keyboard shortcuts)

We have work to do, so thank you in advance for your continued use of the Donate to Science button that helps so much in making your Camiolog smarter!

The Right Network Camera

With so many new IP cameras coming out, I often get asked “which camera should I get?”
So I’ve shared my camera cheat sheet that includes my current favorites.
We’ve automated setup for Foscam, Panasonic, and Sharx Security cameras so that getting them talking to Camiolog is just a few clicks.

Rocky would be proud

Our neighborhood cat Rocky was bold.  He'd sleep under parked cars, stare down dogs, and greet you on your walk home like he owned the neighborhood. In fact, he seemed more dog than cat - right down to his pooping habits.

So I guess it's fitting that today's Wall Street Journal article on Camiolog is titled in honor of his legacy!

A Few Good Spider[wo]men

Can you find spiders in the dark?
Can you do it blindfolded?
With a confidence level sufficient to wake someone at 4am?

That's one of many Computer Science challenges at Camiolog - and not just on Halloween.

You have to create and refine algorithms that operate on imagery that you cannot see.
You'll have training samples like this one explicitly "donated to science" by users like me:

But your work has to continue learning from the direct and indirect feedback from the Camiolog users actually authorized to see the results of your analyses. 

Why do we care about examples like this spider weaving its web?
Because we send alerts to people when significant events happen in regions of scenes that they care about. You'd appreciate a message at 4am if someone were breaking into your car; but if you're awakened to view this spider... not so much.

Check out www.camiolog.com/careers/.

Happy Halloween.

Construction Site Video Intelligence

For all you contractors out there that have dreamed of monitoring deliveries and job site progress from your mobile phone, here is a portable setup that lets you do it! We've summarized the total costs and included links to purchase the products.

You can also use this setup to get instant messages if something important moves when it shouldn't (e.g. your Bobcat tractor or table saw at 2am).

The Orbit box is included just as a weather-proof, locked place to keep the Verizon MiFi 4G Hotspot; try to place it within view of the camera so that the camera can protect itself from theft.

We're experimenting with off-the-grid solar-powered configurations too. More on that another time...