Spatial Computing Catalyst #9: A Camera On Your Wrist?

Foreign. We're here at Risk Cam. Where are we? San Mateo.

Downtown San Mateo.

Yeah. And we're getting a taste of what you guys do right there. You're putting a camera on the wrist and I'm usually in the spatial computing and I'm like, why should I go.

See a wrist camera company?

And then I'm like, wait a second. When we do get the glasses and we're all wearing glasses, how are we going to take a selfie? I was thinking, man, I'm going to need a wristcam. And so. So who are you guys?

I think you'll start, Matt.

Who are you?

I'm Matt Frischer. I'm the chief Marketing officer for riscam.

And who are you?

I'm Wary Gannott and I'm the CTO of Wiscam.

Very cool. And who's that over there?

Hi, I'm the creative director for riskamp, Rachel.

And so what is the idea behind riskcam? What are we looking at here?

On your wrist, soon to be the most accessible camera, allowing you to instantly lift your wrist and capture a picture without missing that moment. So part of, I think the importance of the world we live in is that we powered with this camera, which is typically living within our pocket. So when we want to capture something, we've got to go digging now. That moment could be lost. Now, I think the other problem is. But I find myself as in I'm experiencing this moment from behind the screen. So we believe that the most natural behavior and it combined with the opportunity around fashion and lifestyle allows you to not have to dig around. You see it, you lift, you capture it also for.

And it captures both ways.

It captures both ways. So there's two little cameras. So there's two cameras. There's an outward facing camera.

Oh, that's sick.

For the world around you. Right? So let's say I want to capture my daughter's first steps. I didn't because I didn't have a wrist cam back then. But now I'm not digging for that phone. I'm right there and I could lift or I see something that's happening in a moment in the world around me and I want to broadcast that to a story on social or I want to become a newsmaker myself. The really interesting world we live in now is that we're all piping in the content from everywhere and it's living on these platforms now. We can actually take the Apple Watch, which has been predominantly used for notifications and health, and turn it into a.

Tool to create and more people are running with just their watch. They're not carrying their phones anymore. Now if you see something cool, you can capture it. And this works wholly on the watch. You don't need an iPhone app to capture.

To capture. No. Yeah. So you capture directly from the wrist. It finds its way into the cloud. You get an immediate preview on your watch which you then are able to share out. We also have a companion app on the phone with light editing capabilities and then where you provision your settings. Right. What networks you're going to be hooking to. But we want to give people enough tools to create but not take over their experience. People are before they post. Some people are doing a lot of post work on their assets. Some people are just going. But we know that the feed has redefined itself into storytelling. And so I believe that giving a tool on a product that Apple has sort of rebuilt and redefined watches, that it's really, really uniquely interesting. Even when the glasses eventually come out. Because if I'm wearing AirPods and I'm wearing glasses and I'm wearing my watch, I'm literally going to have a super efficient life never having to dig into anything, always being present and in that moment.

And this totally answers why I can do a selfie with glasses. Because we're not going to take off the glasses and go like that, you know, to take a selfie when we're doing something fun.

Right.

Or hang out with friends. Exactly how much is this?

So when it's going to MSRP for $299, what you see here is a silicone band. We also have a more upmarket mixed material which has leathers and metals and pearlescence to give really, really focus on the ability to interchange. I mean half of Apples model is around. You switch out your band. The same can be said for your wrist cap. And so if you've got a sport band that's a silicone or nylon weave, you can then style it with a leather band as well. So the Hart is able to load interchangeably into different style bands as well. Aligning itself with Apple strategy.

And when does this ship?

We'll begin shipping this fall. We've got, you know, a whole bunch of folks that have pre order. So in tandem with fulfilling all of our pre orders, we're preparing for a retail launch this holiday season.

Is it waterproof?

It is water resistant. Same as the Apple watch. Right. So you can't do deep submersive diving, but it can certainly get wet.

Did you know that GoPro started out as a camera on your wrist.

I didn't.

Yeah.

But I do know that GoPro started out in San Mateo just like us.

They started out in the coast because I live 200 miles. 200ft from their head, maybe.

All right, so you know more than me. Just their office showed me his first product.

It was a flip up camera for capturing yourself in a surfing wave. Right. And this is perfect for that.

Right.

If you're surfing a wave or snowboarding and you want to capture yourself going down the hill.

Right.

One way is to hold a 360 camera like I am here. But this fat ass, you never have to have anything in your pockets or carry it around or lose it on the, on the ski, you know, on the wave or whatever. It's always going to be there.

So similar to Nick, Ari is a. Likes to get wet. Myself and Sean as well. So I think there were secretly some thoughts in mind around the ability to be hands. Completely hands free.

Yeah, that's really cool. Shifting later this year. Tell me a little bit about the technology in there and tell me a little bit about the content company, how I got started.

Bro, you want to talk about tech and I'll talk about company. Yeah.

So it's like, you don't need to care about this guy.

No, I don't.

There's a lot of algorithms in my camera now, keeping track of the ground and everything. It's crazy.

So this device actually has a lot in it. It's everything you're looking for. Much bigger devices, like we just mentioned, GoPro, except that this one has two cameras. So at the outward facing is 8 megapixel.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

Good quality, excellent quality.

Actually.

The selfie 1 is 2 megapixel. Again, good sensors. SoC, a very strong SOC that does, you know, take care of the quality stabilization and all that. Jazz internal memory for the full HD and full quality pictures. Immediate capturing of 8 gigabytes. That's enough for a runtime at least. It has its own battery. Obviously that lasts through the day. On typical usage, it could probably last for more than a week. But.

How much? Let's say I wanted to film an hour long interview maybe about which would get me really tiring.

Yeah, we've gone into perfecting different sort of personal gimbal sort of creations. So yeah, we'll put that out on our pro tips when it comes out. In terms of how you should. You want to hold your armor for a long period of time on how to do that.

Tell me about the memory.

It maybe would last for an Hour long. And that's about the battery capacity. But we don't like when we use it. We see that you take videos, you take pictures you'd probably use even on a hike. For example, you'd use about 30% of the battery on an active date.

Is that me? That's you. I was upset. Our digital devices are going nuts.

Yeah.

How come the 360 camera doesn't turn off?

I wish. Needs a cell phone jammer built into future.

Another important point is communication. So this device is handling, except for cellular, everything you can imagine. And that's all the relevant WI fi and Bluetooth, including direct Bluetooth with the phone and BLE with the watch. And as far as I know, we're the most extreme use case in terms of terms of bandwidth for ble. So that's a unique technology at this point and that allows you for both having a preview on the watch and being able to also on the go connect to the band and get the full resolution pictures or videos to be able to share. So it's a lot of things in this box. Water resistant, hopefully actually a little more than that. So you'll be able to swim with that.

That's the key.

Right.

You don't want to take off your watch while you're getting wet. You want to go running in the rain. You want to go surfing or go.

Go to the beach.

Yeah, yeah. And not have to take off my watch, you know. That's one reason we're starting to leave. Leave the phone behind. Although the phones are waterproof too. I took pictures underwater with my iPhone without a case on it.

Right.

And it survived. But that's 1500 bucks. And that's something we usually leave. And you gotta in the car when we go surfing. Right. We don't want to carry a phone when we're in a wave.

It's only those. Swim with it. No.

So this is going to open up a whole new way of capturing our lives, our world. It's really an interesting product to think about, I think. I think it's really interesting when the glasses show up because we're going to be not wanting to dig our phones out of our pockets. Right. Even if I carry a phone for the 5G radios and stuff like that. Let's say I'm going skiing. I don't want to take that out of my park.

Yeah, skiing, that's a whole.

Right. But I want to take a picture while. Because we're. We're having a great day in the powder when we want to capture an image Right.

I'm completely. But to what Matt said before about still being in the moment. So even if you're taking out the phone and you just hold it like that, you're actually seeing whatever it is through the phone and you lose the experience. And with the watch on your hand, you just take some glances, you're more or less in tune and there's nothing between you and what's happening.

Image stabilization, you're fairly stable on your wrist anyway, so, yeah, we enjoy.

Exactly. Like you said, we enjoy the fact that first of all, you're more stable to begin with. You're even better than holding something. But it does have internal gyro.

Hey, Ari, you're live on video now, so you should introduce yourself since you just came in too. Who are you?

I'm Ari. Who are Elias today?

No, you're not live, you're just getting recorded. And.

Yeah.

So is there anything else I need? Tell me a little bit about the company. How did this get started and what's the challenges for the company now? Are you going for more funding? How did you get funded? How did you get to this place?

The real question is, how long ago do you want to go?

Let's go.

Glide actually started as a live video walkie talkie.

Yeah, we met each other in Israel, right? Yeah, we met.

Well, Ayala originally connected us.

Yeah.

Tel Aviv, you know, we hung out at your place and then we had dinner at the Ritz.

Yeah, good old days. Now it's the new days when we get devices on our hands and our faces. Right.

I got introduced to Glide through our product, which was actually driving the technology of the live video. And we merged actually before that. And when we sold the watch, it was obviously. We obviously thought we were missing something, which is the camera. You can't do the video walkie talkie without a camera. But the position of the watch is the best you can ask for. It's there. You could just, hey, Robert, what's up? And that's it. No need to search. So initially we were like, okay, let's wait for someone to create a camera. But once we dig into the technical aspects of what's going on with the watches, it was very clear that watches are not going to have cap serious camera anytime soon. Tons of reasons.

It adds a lot of cost to the watch.

Battery, technical issues in terms of placement.

I think the top of the list is Google Glass had an interesting fate in your shower there downstairs. And I think that you know that.

I promise I won't take any shower pictures. My PR chief says no more shower pictures.

That image is really like I think burned in so many folks mind. You know, I think a facial camera is going to be creepy for a while. But having a hyper accessible camera that's worn makes a lot of sense. The self facing camera I think is a big part of what's made the camera on the phone such a big deal. And so where else can you have a self facing camera and an outward facing camera?

Even if we got over the freaky factor of having cameras on our face and I personally don't think it was actually the camera and most people don't understand that it was the social factor of looking at somebody looking at an optic. I was at Coachella filming there and I didn't have one on but two guys in front of me said I need to get away from the Google Glass guys. Keep in mind I was in the middle of 10,000 people holding an iPhone recording them thing. So it's not the camera that's freaking people out.

I think it's a bunch of things. I think it's, I think it's first of all having some having.

But they were freaked out in the sea of cameras all firing, all recording, recording everything. Right. In fact professionals were recording. It wasn't a camera. It was seen that there was something between us.

Having a computer on your. On my face, you know, if we're trying to have like a normal human face to face exchange I think is always going to be a bit off putting having a camera.

You have one and I have one too. It's information asymmetry actually that's freaky. If you have one of these devices on your face and I don't have one and I don't know what you're seeing, my mind goes straight into Black mirror, right. And starts thinking that you're a robot and you have access to information about me that I don't have on you. But if we both have it, that front goes down. But anyway we're going to go off the rails. I don't care if you have a camera on your face or not. You can't take a selfie with the camera on your face.

Yes, that's another.

I think your product is badass for that reason. That's why I'm here. I usually don't care about camera companies anymore. I'm studying spatial computing which is these glasses, better reality and all that camera on your wrist is going to be a big deal.

I think so. It's been long imagined and now that storytelling and camera use Socially has really become the standard. I think having that type of always accessible camera that's not creepy. And then is super familiar and very similar to that smartphone experience. Self world facing camera. And then most importantly, really working with the whole Apple Watch ecosystem is now that's going to start to blossom and that Apple Watch becomes more and more independent, the screen size grows and you start to see an ecosystem of apps really reimagine themselves or come out of nowhere right on the watch. I mean, and it's already a big platform. You've got 55 million Apple watches on people's wrists. One out of seven people in the US is wearing an Apple watch. One out of seven iPhone people is very Apple watch.

One out of seven. And they've been out what, seven years?

Four years.

Four years now. Wow. It seems like longer. Can I see a preview from the camera on a phone or can I just see it on the watch face itself? Do you have an app that goes on the phone?

Yeah, we do. Technically you can see it on the phone, but that's. But I don't know that we're going to open that up to consumers. I mean it's really about the viewfinder.

You're really trying to make it tightly matched to the watch. That makes sense. Right? And the video is just as good. Here's a question, is it just as good as the 4K camera on my iPhone?

It's full HD.

It's full HD. Okay.

It's just, we believe it's enough. It's super high quality in terms of the optics, so it's great.

So pictures are going to look badass on Instagram or Facebook or whatever, right? Nobody's going to say, oh, that's a.

No, we're going to kill you. You could see we have great examples.

And how do I get the video? So let's say I capture a 10 minute video, right?

So the video officer is going to take a lot of space storage and the preview is obviously lower quality.

And.

For video there's only one real way to get it, which is through WI fi. That could be achieved either if you're not in a rush, you just go home, put it on a charger and then magically connects to your home WI fi and everything just gets there, typically to your phone.

And then you can do whatever you want with that.

However, if you're on the go and you want to share that, for example, the device becomes a 5G hotspot and then the phone would connect it. And through the phone you could do basically everything so you could initiate sharing of HD video from the watch. The only downside here is that the phone needs to be around versus all the other activities where you just use the watch.

Usually even when you're surfing or skiing, the phone's somewhere close to you. Yeah.

It could be in the bag or.

Or in your car or whatever. Right. And so after this. Or it's in my parka. Right. If we're skiing, it's in my parka somewhere. So we could get back to the restaurant, we could pull it out and start sharing photos from videos.

Right.

So this is an interesting product. 299. Huh? Comes out later this year. Later 2019. People watch this for a few years. Right. And I think it'll be an important product for a few years. Tell me a little bit about how you guys got funded. We didn't talk about how you started the company and how you build a hardware company because there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there who probably, or people who think are thinking about building a hardware company and wondering how this gets done.

It's super hard. Hardware is hard. I'm a mechanical engineer by training that deliberately got into software and then kind of found myself back in hardware. We pioneered instant video messaging. We raised tens of millions of dollars to pioneer video walkie talkie to talk video. Built up YouTube user base to millions of actives in the US and then really needed to start to turn this kind of large product experiment into a business. And then saw a big opportunity to watch. Got connected with one of the early engineers from the Apple Watch team who left Apple to join us and make this a reality. And so our original cohort of investors has been supportive of this project even through thick and thin. And then of course we've brought. You have to always be bringing in new investors as part of this game. If you're trying to do something big.

And prolific, it's not a scam. You're about to need acceleration and you're probably going to be on the store shelves at Apple Store at some point. So you're probably. That guy over there is probably working a lot on box design and marketing. Right. Making sure the brand is appropriate for an Apple Store, which is a whole other thing.

Totally.

And I think one of the things that's so unique about our team is we're less than three dozen people. We have an office here, we've got a large development office in Israel and we have a growing presence in China to make all this happen on the manufacturing side.

Side.

And then we've Got a world class creative team. So you've got, I think it takes world class execution on the creative side and the storytelling and the brand and the packaging. It doesn't just take great technical capabilities and a really nifty product experience that all has to be woven together seamlessly and then brought to market. If you're going to be successful in consumer.

Apple starts with the box. Right? If you don't have a beautiful box, they ain't going to put you on the store shelves.

We're going to have the most beautiful box.

I think so. I think so.

There we go. That guy's over there smiling because that's what he's working on.

Right.

I see all this work on the walls over here. Tell me, walk me through some of this work and talk to me about what it takes to build a product like this. Because people don't appreciate how much thought goes into.

Yeah. So this is predominantly our brand and creative and marketing office. So we've got what will become our experience or digital experience. We've got our desktop and mobile wireframes up low fidelity so you span left to right. You've got mobile and web side by side.

There is no left or right in this camera.

Early versions of some packaging concepts and we also are putting together working with some amazing CGI artists for video work. And then we've got some product iterations.

Going on around here.

Yeah, I just found it interesting because it shows the kind of level of detail that you guys are thinking back then. I mean, just the websites and thinking.

This room and the iridescence on packaging as you move through a store environment and you walk by and you get all the color. You know, part of branding and marketing and storytelling throughout an entire product experience is grabbing the attention. You know, breaking through any of those challenges or perceived mental challenges around is this interesting to me. And you've got to have it shine. And so we have zero expectation we're going to get some big giant spotlight, but we are going to create a really unique experience from unboxing moment all the way through the digital experience and the product experience to become socially acceptable and exciting. And especially if you have a wearable sensor, it's got to look good, it's got to feel good. And then we get social acceptance and more and more people using it. So Felix, our creative magician and I and team are taking every moment seriously.

What's the honor of meeting you guys? I feel like I'm seeing the beginning of something really interesting. I think people don't understand the importance of having things on your wrist. They will in 24 months when they start seeing the glasses that are about to come out. Not just from Apple, but Facebook and Magic Leap and Microsoft and others.

Right. We see ourselves as a tool, another utility. It's going to be your next toothbrush. You're going to wake up every day. You brush your teeth and you're going to start your day when you're putting your Apple watch on with your wrist cam. And the next thing you do, you watch your face, you're going to put your glasses on. As we think down the road, there's.

An app that asks you to take 10 seconds of video every day. Are you thinking about stuff like that?

Creating the daily habit. Right. 21 days to create the daily habit. So absolutely. Within the experience itself, to encourage people to go out and take action, the simple of just putting it on and capture that first day.

We're going to need a fifth ring on our watch. Right. You're going to be like the. You didn't take a picture today or you didn't take a video today.

Right. We're going to hook right into the activity.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm thinking. If that was open, that's what you would be doing.

Absolutely.

Honor meeting you guys. Thank you so much. And where do we learn more about it?

Right now you can find us@getcamera.com and then our new branding is for wristcam.com Very cool.