GoPro: How Tiny Camera Reinvented Epic Adrenaline Junkie Moments

Even if you’ve never heard of GoPro, you’ve definitely seen the footage it captures of extreme snowboarding shreds, death-defying leaps and epic wipeouts from impossible angles.

“It continues to blow our minds that GoPro is what it is today,” said company founder Nick Woodman.

For Woodman, the journey from guppy to Goliath in the camera world began on a surfboard in 2002.

“The original goal for GoPro was to produce a camera that the average surfer could use to capture themselves and their friends while they were surfing.”

And now, eight years after rolling out their first finicky prototype — – a wrist-mounted 28 mm film camera – Woodman took “Nightline” on a four-day research and development road trip to the shores of Nicaragua, a surfer’s paradise. They are beta testing their newest camera, the HD Hero3, which was released last month. Some of Woodman’s old surfing buddies are now the company’s top officers.

GoPro claims to be the world’s best-selling small camera maker, with over three million GoPro HD cameras sold since 2009. It is success that could arguably be credited to the hordes of bruised and unpaid stuntmen out there, trying to live up to the product’s name: Hero.

The vast majority of GoPro videos out there – with over 190 million views on the GroPro’s Youtube page — are user generated.

“YouTube has helped make GoPro what it is today, Facebook also,” Woodman said. “Our customers going out and capturing interesting footage with it is really what’s driving GoPro’s growth. It’s a virally grown brand in the hands of our customers and it’s awesome.”

Since 2009, the company has grown from seven employees to nearly 300, and signed some the country’s most famous athletes, including Olympic gold medalist snowboarder Shawn White and world surfing champion Kelly Slater. But the camera, which costs up to $400, has become much more than a gizmo for the self-admiring surfer.

“GoPro makes it possible for people to have professional-quality footage of their life during their life’s most meaningful moments,” Woodman said.

The versatile camera has even become part of the essential kit of journalists covering a wide range of breaking news events, from oil spills to catfish hunts to lightning strikes. It is also good for experimenting with one of GoPro’s latest innovations, the follow-cam waist belt, in the Nicaraguan surf.

Watch ABC’s Matt Gutman’s full story on “Nightline” tonight at 11:35 p.m. ET

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Video conversion service YesVideo can now send your preserved memories to Facebook Timeline

YesVideo converts vintage media into a digital format, and it's adding new social features that will allow customers to publish indexed footage to their Facebook Timeline.

If you have old VHS tapes, 8mm, miniDV, or photos, you’ve probably looked for a way to digitize the priceless memories from your life — and one of those ways is YesVideo, a conversion service that takes your ancient media and brings it into the 21st century. And starting today, YesVideo is adding a new feature that will allow you to publish those memories and any other archaic media to your Facebook Timeline.

You can submit your vintage videos at any of YesVideo’s at CVS/pharmacy, Walgreen’s, Walmart, and Costco retail locations. The footage is sent to YesVideo’s San Clara or Atlanta locations, where it’s digitized and uploaded to the platform’s cloud for you to view and share. While YesVideo’s primary focus is its cloud hosting service, the company sends you a DVD copy, alongside the original media as well. 

To make the experience more social, YesVideo’s Facebook Timeline integration will show up on your profile in a couple ways. First, if you log into YesVideo using Facebook Connect and comment or like a friend’s video, those actions will be published to your Timeline. Second, YesVideo is using Facebook’s Open Graph to offer you a quick way to share clips of the converted footage on your own Timeline. To share a video, you just click the “Share” button on your YesVideo profile page, add whatever metadata your choose, and publish the media to the corresponding date on your Timeline. It’s worth mentioning that the visibility of content published from YesVideo to Facebook is restricted strictly to your friends.

YesVideo is also introducing a feature that indexes your video algorithmically so your content is easily digestible. What this means is that your converted videos uploaded to YesVideo will automatically be broken down into bite-sized clips (called chapters). You’re more likely to share shortened footage than publish the 65 minutes of video that’s converted on average for each YesVideo customer.

YesVideo’s Timeline integration was a natural progression for the company, says CEO Michael Chang. Chang says that based on initial testing, the company has “really seen some explosive growth on Timeline.” Users were already publishing an average of three times more videos in the last two months alone. In August, users shared just 2.3 YesVideo videos on Facebook, and during the Timeline integration trials this month that figure jumped to 6.7 videos. YesVideo users seem to appreciate the collaboration of these two services in general, as 37 percent of them have been logging into the platform through Facebook Connect, so tying the two closer together is a natural next step. 

There’s a spillover effect for Facebook as well, as the partnership will help fill out the Timeline. While the last five or so years of your Timeline might be bursting with content, years prior are likely fairly empty. Facebook encourages you to share important historical events in your life including your new job, marriage, or even your birth using the “Life Events” tab. These are all moments possibly documented through video or photographs that YesVideo can seamlessly port over to the Timeline, while also digitally preserving. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

“We’re posting content like your birth, your first steps, playing with grandma, first birthday, second birthday, and third birthday,” says Chang. “We’re getting that kind of stuff posted to Timeline.”

According to Chang, YesVideo digitizes over 1.5 million videos per year, and with its indexing feature, turns that into approximately somewhere between 75 million and 150 million clips a year. The company is on track to make $60 million in retail revenue (this being YesVideo’s brick-and-mortar operations), which makes up 95 percent of the business.

Next on the agenda is offering an open API so third-party developers can create additional tools, like video editing. “We think of ourselves as more of a platform, so we’re going to start opening up the platform to third-parties,” says Chang.

Chang also hinted at a few features on the road map: “This idea that you have all your home videos and access to your extended family’s old home videos and you sit down and log into your Google TV for instance or your Roku box and voila, you’ve got your home videos that you can share with your family or on your mobile device.” The future of YesVideo, he says, is the idea that “personal home media is an entertainment category for customers.”

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Rumor: Dark Knight Rises Blu-ray includes 30 minutes of new footage

Will the home release of The Dark Knight Rises include a bunch of footage cut from the theatrical version? It seems likely.

There’s a new rumor swirling about the Internet that claims the upcoming Blu-ray release of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises will include a full half-hour of footage originally cut from the film for its theatrical release. If that seems like the kind of thing Nolan and the suits at Warner Bros. would likely do, that’s because this concept is not all that uncommon. We already told you about the upcoming Blu-ray release of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers which includes a massive amount of superfluous footage, and the idea of an extended “Director’s Cut” of any given movie is nearly as old as theatrical film releases themselves.

What makes this particular rumor so intriguing though, is that despite a lack of official confirmation that this extra footage might find its way onto a Blu-ray disc, the arguments supporting the idea are very convincing. Those of you who read us regularly may recall a piece we published last month which claimed that Bane’s origin story was originally intended to be a significant part of The Dark Knight Rises, but that it was removed during the movie’s editing process. At the time we posited the idea that this extra content might appear on the movie’s inevitable Blu-ray release, both because that sort of thing is increasingly common, and because Nolan’s departure from making superhero movies will likely push Warner Bros. to “market any extraneous scraps from the movie that were left on the cutting room floor.”

Apparently that idea made a lot of sense to the fine people over at Nuke The Fridge. Not only do they make the same claim in an article published earlier today, but they also claim to have corroboration from an unnamed, supposedly reliable insider source. While that alone wouldn’t be enough to convince us of this rumor’s validity, in reporting on NTF’s claims, the likewise fine people at Collider have offered a crucial thought on the topic:

Nolan is the effective spokesperson of IMAX.  One downside to his love of the format is the time limitation, and that 165-minute runtime pushes right up against the limit of what can fit on 70mm IMAX prints.  So there is a plausible reason for this to be the one Nolan film that could not fit every scene he wanted.

If — and we’re still working in the hypothetical here — Nolan had been stymied in his attempts to tell the full story of The Dark Knight Rises by a physical limitation of his beloved IMAX format, it would only make sense to include the full version of the film on Blu-ray. Those discs have massive capacity, and if the excised footage is just lying around, why wouldn’t Nolan (and more importantly Warner Bros.) want to include it on the film’s official home release? That extra content both appeases fans who want to see more of Nolan’s Batman universe and offers a handy bullet point for the PR people who have to sell the Blu-ray to your average consumer.

Again, this is all rumor and speculation, but we’re growing increasingly inclined to believe the whole thing. Please, draw your own conclusions.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Kim Dotcom raid footage released as Megaupload.com trial continues

Footage shot during the raid of Kim Dotcom's mansion in New Zealand has been released.

The Apple vs. Samsung courtroom battle isn’t the only trial of interest going on at the moment, as in New Zealand, MegaUpload.com chief Kim Dotcom is facing his accusers too.

Arrested at the beginning of the year for crimes including copyright infringement and wire fraud, Dotcom is fighting for the return of his equipment and possessions seized during the January raid, after the New Zealand High Court recently ruled the search illegal.

According to Bloomberg, 123 items were taken from Dotcom’s mansion, mostly electronic devices such as mobile phones, hard drives, routers and computers. It has since emerged that one of the reasons for the amount of equipment taken, was that the US authorities hadn’t made it clear to the New Zealand police what it was they wanted.

Dotcom estimates that this includes at least 350 hours of his own, personal photo and video collection.

Video footage of the early morning raid has also been released, and it’s eye-opening to say the least, given that it shows a police helicopter arriving at Dotcom’s mansion, a number of heavily armed officers and several police response vehicles all on the scene, which appears a little over the top for a non-violent alleged criminal.

“Deliberate force”

Dotcom has accused the officers of using heavy-handed tactics, which he described as “deliberate force,” during the arrest, despite the fact officers confirmed there was a low-level of threat, and they were primarily interested in stopping any destruction of evidence. This was something Dotcom says he couldn’t do, and that the FBI had already secured Megaupload’s data center prior to the raid anyway.

Kim Dotcom has called the ongoing legal battle a “political thriller,” and as more information becomes available, the general opinion of Dotcom appears to be changing.

Initially a shotgun-toting megalomaniac, then a rich, fun-loving playboy, and now a wronged family man battling against a giant corporation; he has gone from the file-sharing equivalent of Tony Montana to the Internet’s Erin Brockovich in a matter of months.

It’s going to be fascinating to see if evidence appears later to change this back again.

You can see the raid footage, cut together with excerpts from the trial by New Zealand’s 3News, in the YouTube video below.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com