WHAT GOES ONin your house when you’re not around?

当你不在家的时候，家里发生了什么呢？

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 you’re ready to go.

一家名叫Camio的创业公司提供一项免费的服务，该服务可以将任意一台andriod手机或苹果手机或平板电脑变成一台网络视频监控机，只需要安装一个APP，注册一个账号就可以实现。（不需要安装摄像头吗？？？）

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 you’re 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联合创始人Carter Maslan，前google地图项目负责人说，人们可以使用它用于家庭安全的方方面面，比如当没人在家时，家里的宠物一天过得怎么样。但是公司在去年成立不久，就遇到了一个问题。尽管系统只是抓取物体运动的视频，这样，在没有事情发生时，系统就不需要实时抓取和存储所有的视频，但实际上，人们对于系统的需求，没有那么强烈。“对于大部分用户来说，一天关注的视频不超过51秒”。

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.

Camio目前在云端只储存了30天的视频，这些视频抓取不留死角，用户可以看到家里各个角落发生的情况。如果你想看到更多的视频内容，只需要通过账号付费多连接一个摄像头就可以。（还是不明白摄像头问题如何解决的？？？）

So last week, the company launched a new feature called Camio Daily, an email digest of the stills that the company’s algorithms predict you’ll find most interesting, based on which clips you’ve watched before. Click a still, and you can watch the the video clip it came from.

上周，公司开发了一项新的公司，叫Camio Daily，根据公开邮件摘要显示，公司新的算法将可以预测，基于你看到的视频片段，你可以找到你感兴趣的内容。点击片段，你可以直接观看这段视频。（看上去，是加了搜索功能，应该是基于视频识别算法的，便于用户快速找到感兴趣的视频部分）

It’s 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 what’s 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.

这与目前互联网的做法有些不同。相比较与现在很多公司通过将传感器和wifi结合到现有设备上，从而来获得周边信息的做法，我们更想做的是通过手机录制视频，保留轨迹，这些视频会自动上传到云端，我们通过算法来学习分析在特定的区域正在发生什么。你可以通过使用习惯的语言和方式搜索到这段视频，并浏览到比如以下内容：有人正在靠近我的地盘。也可以针对特殊的事情设置报警，比如当有人进入你的房子时，系统会抓取图片。

From Street View to Home View

从街景到家景

The idea stemmed from Maslan’s time working on Google Maps Street View. “During literally every usability study at least one person would ask ‘Why isn’t 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 there—such as Dropcam, which was acquired by Google’s smart home company Nest last year—but they tended to capture far too much video to be useful. Plus, since they tended to stream everything they captured, they’d use a lot of banddwidth, which could slow down other video streaming services like YouTube or Netflix.

该公司的项目诞生于Maslan供职于google地图街景时。“在每一个可用性研究时，至少会有一个用户会问：怎么我的车不在那里，我早上停在那儿了，”他解释。他意识到，人们有现场监测的需求。市面上也有其它不少视频监控产品，比如Dropcam，去年已经被google旗下的NEST收购。但是他们希望抓取更多有用的视频。不过，因为他们希望抓取所有视频，系统会占用更多的带宽，这样会影响其它视频系统比如YouTube or Netflix的使用。

Camio’s innovation is that the camera app is selective about what it uploads. Maslan says that it’s 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.

Camio的创新在于，对于上传的视频内容，用户可以通过APP进行自主选择。Maslan解释说，他们通过智能算法，可以识别声音，灯光的变化或树影的摇动，有人靠近你的走廊。通过减少上传和存储的视频内容，Camio可以利用更多的带宽。公司目前可以提供一个摄像头的免费服务。

Once the footage is moved to the cloud, Camio’s 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.

当脚本上传到云端，计算机就会对视频内容进行分析，并自动判断哪些人和颜色存在，以便于用户进行搜索。

It’s hard not to worry about uploading video footage from your house to the cloud, but Maslan says that all the video is encrypted so that not even Camio’s engineers can access it (though it’s not possible to verify this without auditing Camio’s servers). For people uploading video that’s not particularly sensitive –such as publicly viewable areas such as their front yards — this might not be a big deal. Everyone else will need to take a leap of faith.

对于是否将家里的视频上传到云端，这对于用户来说，是一个比较大的挑战。虽然Maslan解释说，所有的视频内容都是加密的，连公司的工程师也无法看到。也许对于用户不那么敏感的视频内容，比如门口走廊等地的视频，确实是值得考虑的。在信任上，这里还需要一个飞跃的发展。

It’s not hard to imagine Camio being used for corporate security or other applications, but Maslan says that the company is completely focused on the home market, at least for now. But Camio did just announce a new API that will allow select partners to build new integrations, and it’s possible that project could lead to some corporate or government uses.

不难想象，Camio很可能会将此用于企业应用，尽管Maslan认为公司将只会专注于家居市场，至少目前是。但是Camio在不久前发布了一款新的API，允许新的合作伙伴加入合作，很可能他们未来往企业或政府方向发展。

“I came from Google Maps where we decided to focus on making a super simple product for consumers, but then open it up so that people could tie it into,” he says.

在google地图，我们希望为为用户打造一款非常简单的产品，用户打开它，并能一直使用它。

Or just spend all day watching yourself.

或整天看着你自己。（作者想表达的意思可能是，想专注的打造一款产品，使用超级简单，直到用户会一直使用它，在不使用它的时候，就只会看着自己。。。。。）