By
Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY
High-def is where the action is for Marc Barros and his helmet-cam company, Twenty20.
The Seattle-based start-up makes the ContourHD, a "wearable" video camera targeted to outdoor sports enthusiasts — skiers, cyclists, skydivers and motorcyclists. The camera captures footage from mounts for helmets and goggles.
At this point last year, as Twenty20 was about to enter its peak selling season — ski time — the recession whacked sales to the point where they were "non-existent," Barros says.
So Barros and co-founder Jason Green came up with something that their wearable-camera competitors GoPro and V.I.O. had yet to exploit: high-definition video recording. In the spring, Twenty20 released a Contour camera with high-definition 720p resolution; two weeks ago, it released a unit that records in full 1080p, called the ContourHD1080p.
Sales have "quadrupled" since the May launch, says Barros, the company's CEO. "We're selling them faster than we can make them."
He projects sales of 50,000 cameras this year, or just under 100,000 units since forming the company in 2003. The outdoor enthusiast market is 50 million people in the USA, and 100 million worldwide, Barros says — giving him a large footprint to sell to.
Jeff Smith, director of retail giant Amazon's camera and photo department, says the first ContourHD has consistently been in the top 40 of video cam sales, alongside bigger, established firms such as
Sony, Canon,
Samsung, Kodak and Pure Digital.
"With all the buzz on HD, high-def has clearly taken the Contour to another level," he says.
The tube-shaped camera — which sells for $279 for the 720p version or $329 for the 1080p — comes with a mount, and an on-off button designed to work even with gloves on. The camera, which is 4 inches long and weighs about 4 ounces, ships with a 2-gigabyte miniSD memory card, which holds about one hour of footage. The battery lasts three hours.
With the Contour attached to your helmet, you get a bird's eye, ultra-wide-angle 135-degree view of the world. The clips are in the .MOV format, which play in both Windows Media Player and QuickTime.
Luke Parmeter, a student at the University of Wisconsin, bought the ContourHD for motorcycle racing this summer. He wears the camera on his goggles.
"The quality is really good, awesome," he says. "People come up to me all the time (and say), 'What do you have on your goggles?' They can't believe it's a camera."
Parmeter had used a wearable camera from GoPro, but wanted more than standard definition. (GoPro has announced a $299 high-definition version, scheduled to be released this month.)
Gregg Stansbury, who runs a Seattle construction company, bought the Contour for skiing, and has since advanced to motorcycle and dirt-bike riding. "I'd tried hand-holding a camera to get video of my (son) skiing, but it's pretty tough," he says. "With a helmet camera, it's very smooth."
Student project
Barros and Green got the idea for the camera while they were students at the
University of Washington, as part of a business plan competition. Their wearable camera came in third, worth $20,000 in seed money. They started the company with that, plus $50,000 from a loan that Barros' uncle co-signed.
"We didn't have wives, families, homes or anything tying us down," Barros says. "So why not do it now?"
The first camera was bulky, made of several parts and had to be connected to a regular camcorder. Sales were decent but not fantastic, says Barros. Then he read an article about a successful design firm in nearby Portland, Ore., Ziba Design, and pushed to become a client.
Steve McCallion, Ziba's executive creative director, at first brushed him off, saying he didn't have time to take it on.
"We get so many of these kind of requests, the first response is usually hesitancy," McCallion recalls. "But we saw a guy who was very passionate about seeing an unidentified or unmet need in the marketplace. We saw an opportunity to help them deliver on their promise."
Ziba, which has helped design products for
Sirius Satellite Radio,
Logitech and
Microsoft, transitioned the camera into a self-contained unit.
Building community
While the company is called Twenty20, Barros says most folks know them as VholdR, the name of its first, and now discontinued, standard-definition camera. VholdR is the moniker for the website, as well.
With the new Contour in the marketplace, Barros and Green, the company's vice president of technology, realized they needed to make the website a sharing community to set it apart from competitors.
TALKING TECH:
Jefferson Graham checks out a wearable HD camera
Their customers wanted to see their action videos online, and in one place, so they worked at making VholdR.com a community for adventure enthusiasts.
Some 75% of buyers register for VholdR.com and share videos there, Barros says. "Every new camera sold brings six new visitors to the site."
The Contour software, which comes with the camera, offers tools for easy trims to make short online videos.
"They want to show their friends what they did — but only the good stuff," says Barros.
