Looxcie

» see looxcie.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The Looxcie was a camcorder shaped like a Bluetooth headset. You hooked it over your ear and it recorded the whole time it was switched on. A button on the side saved the last thirty seconds to your phone. The first one went on sale in September 2010 for a hundred and ninety-nine dollars, and that November Time put it on its list of the fifty best inventions of the year.

Looxcie Inc. had been formed in Sunnyvale in September 2008 and took roughly seven million dollars in venture money, with Romulus Pereira running it. The Looxcie 2 arrived in June 2011, slimmer than the first. The company then added live streaming, so the headset could push video to a phone and from the phone out to Facebook, which was enough to get it named in Popular Science's hundred best innovations of 2011.

I read about it and never had one on my ear. In 2010 I was twenty-six and in Ankara, and this was a US launch at a US price with US retail behind it, the sort of thing that reached me as coverage rather than as an object. What I remember is the category it sat in before the category had a settled name. Every gadget blog I read in the mornings was trying out a different word for a camera you wore.

In January 2014 the company took an enterprise version of the same hardware to CES under the name Vidcie, sold as a live field-video service. Three months later it said it was leaving the consumer business entirely.

~ the dossier ~

~ the rolling buffer ~

The design solved a problem GoPro did not have. A GoPro is a camera you decide to switch on, which means the thing worth filming has to announce itself in advance. The Looxcie was already running, holding the recent past in a loop and discarding the rest, so the decision was not when to start but whether to keep what had just happened.

That is a genuinely good idea, and it cost the company. Battery life on the first unit ran about four hours of continuous recording, long for 2010 and short for anything described as always-on. The harder problem was social. You were wearing a camera on your head in public four years ahead of Google Glass, without any of the Glass publicity to explain to strangers what you were doing.

~ the vidcie turn ~

Vidcie was not a side project. The pitch was live point-of-view video from a technician's shoulder to a supervisor's screen, aimed at manufacturing and aviation, markets that will pay a subscription for video and do not care how the hardware looks on an ear.

Looxcie had built a camera for people who wanted to record their own lives, and then found out that the customers who would pay every month were companies watching their employees work.

~ what the homepage said ~

April 2014 is the date Wikipedia carries, but the company's own homepage was more specific and stayed up long enough to be archived. Looxcie Inc. has formally announced that it is restructuring its operations and will exit the consumer camera and accessories business, it read. As part of this realignment, Looxcie will no longer provide updates or support after December 31, 2014. The notice went on to say that live video streaming to Facebook and the Looxcie mobile apps on iOS and Android would be discontinued at the same time.

So the hardware kept working as a camera and stopped working as the product it had been sold as, on the last day of 2014. looxcie.com does not answer at all now.

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