How This Ex-Googler Is Reinventing the Way Security Cameras Work Carter Maslan's app Camio only gives you the footage you might actually use.

Carter Maslan's idea for a smart security-cam app came about after he spent four-plus years at Google. As director of product management working on the Google Street View project, he learned through usability tests that people wanted the ability to access real-time video and search footage for noteworthy events.

"From the beginning, the idea was to make video smart and super-responsive," he says. The result was an app called Camio. "We like to think of it as an ad hoc security camera that gives you exactly what you want."

What distinguishes Camio from a basic webcam is that the app, which works with images gathered via a smartphone camera, leverages proprietary algorithms to be selective about what it uploads to its cloud-based storage. According to Maslan, the algorithms can differentiate between "ordinary" events (such as lighting changes) and "extraordinary" events (such as a rock thrown through a window).