Have you ever watched a snowboarder launch 20 feet above a half pipe and execute a twisting 360 rotation, or a downhill skier fly off a mogul at 90 mph? How about a competitive biker cascading down a mountain path of air, stream and rock?
What could be more exciting?
How about seeing it through the eyes of the person who is taking it to the limit, and sharing the adventure just a few hours after it took place. That’s the adventurous story line of Twenty20, makers of the world’s first CMOS sensor helmet camera to be powered by a 9-volt battery, and the world’s smallest wearable camcorder capable of capturing and sharing HD quality video online in seconds.
VholdR, the camcorder system, answers the question of our modern digital video age. If an amazing event happens somewhere in the world that is not on video, well, did it really happen after all?
The vision for Twenty20 began in 2003 during the University of Washington business plan competition when Marc Barros and Jason Green devised a simple helmet camera to share video of the thrills and spills of their downhill skiing adventures with friends and family. A frozen mountaintop is not exactly the natural habitat for a video camcorder. So Marc and Jason realized they would have to design a system that could withstand the most rugged conditions and completely free a users hands to crash through trees, snow packs and whitewater.
Flash forward from prototype to production run. The Twenty20 Helmet Camera V1 was the first CMOS sensor helmet camera and the first to be powered by a 9-volt battery pack, capturing 16 hours of power (all competing cameras on the market required 4-8 AA batteries). The next generation Twenty20 Helmet Camera V2 brought a brand new CMOS image sensor with a single wiring harness so users had one power button and one cable running from the lens to the camcorder.
To bring it al together, there was VholdR, the first shoot and share wearable camcorder, an iconic single button record device with lasers for alignment, a click to share online experience, and an online international adventure sports community.
What’s next? We were fortunate to find Twenty20 CEO Marc Barros slowing down just long enough to field a few questions:
Seattle24x7: VholdR’s CoutourHD camera seems ideal for the extreme winter sports that took place nearby at the Winter Games in Vancoucer? Did your cameras record any of that action?
Barros: I wouldn’t know. I mean we’ve been used by 4 or 5 individual athletes. But the Olympics closely control any product content or branding if it is Olympic sponsored so there was no formal connection. We’ve seen a lot of people using the product who are in television. A lot of film companies within the sports segment, CNN, and the NBC TV show Dirty Jobs, to name a few.
Seattle24x7: How was wearable video used on Dirty Jobs?
Barros: They’ve used it a few times. The host basically wears the camera in these strange and adverse conditions. VholdR was also on the Stephen Colbert show, when Colbert did the segment about the Luge. For that whole series, the camera was on Colbert’s head. He recorded with it.
Seattle24x7: Who is the market for Twenty20, VholdR and ContourHD, and how do they use your products?
Barros: We’re focused on two different types of users. The primary one is who we call the Creator. They’re documenting the world through video and showing their friends what they did. A user may want to share 120 seconds of highlights of what they’re doing. We want to help them do that as fast as they can, and make them feel good about that whole process of sharing it. Today, the software basically lets you download the videos, clip out the best parts, and post them. Our goal is to make it fast to go from camera to sharing your experience with your buddies, and to keep it simple. Not an editing suite, Just an easier way to tell a story.
We’ve made it easy to shoot and share video around the US and in 45 countries around the world, We’re working to engage users online!
See VholdR for yourself at http://www.VholdR.com
