Dot-com Bubble and Fastest-growing Camera Company

Ever since his days at the University of California at San Diego in the late 1990s, Nicholas Woodman wanted a centering for him and his glide buddies to capture their exploits without having to take turns seance on shore with a tv tv camera and telephoto lens. No surfer wants to be the photographer, e extraly when the waves ar good, he says. Woodman, 36, last decided to solve the problem and founded GoPro in 2002. GoPro makes a small, durable, lightweight (just 3. 3 ounces) camcorder and special mounts to grab the device to surfboards, helmets, ski poles, political machine hoods, or pretty much anything else.Its become a phenomenon in the beingness of extreme sports, with back-country snowboarders, kayakers, scuba divers, and others using it to memorial their feats. Woodmans company has change hundreds of thousands of them through sports shops and is only now stint beyond its X Game undercoat with national TV ads and a statistical distribution deal with Best Buy (BBY). I ts a very cool story, says Christopher Chute, an psychoanalyst with IDC. GoPro may well be the realitys fastest-growing camera company. The stepson of Irwin Federman, a tab industry pioneer and successful peril capitalist, Woodman started an Internet marketing firm after college, but it didnt start the dot-com spatet. He decompressed with a five-month surfing trip to Indonesia and Australia, where he began testing prototypes of a wrist-mounted camera. Once he got the design right, he borrowed and raised $30,000in percent by selling Indonesian bead-and-shell necklaces from the back of hisVolkswagen busand hired some buddies to cold-call surf shops and call for them to stock GoPros Hero simple eye of cameras.Corporate giants such as Samsung have worked on wearable camcorders for years, but GoPros devices, which live $180 to $300, stand out for attribute and sound quality, ease of use, and ruggedness. Theyre raincoat to 180 feet and drop-proof from 3,000 feet. (One was dropp ed from that height by a skydiver, who still uses it. ) A skier can attach one to his helmet to record what he sees and another(prenominal) to the tip of his ski to film himself. The cameras are also becoming a staple fiber on TV, where they have been used to service of process film dozens of reality shows, including Deadliest intoxicate and Whale Wars.George Lucas is using them to shoot part of his next film, Red Tails. Woodman, who says GoPro is profitable sufficient to go public, wants to expand beyond computer hardware into media. One idea is for a cable system show featuring extreme sports videos shot by GoPro users. The push into content is one understanding Steamboat Ventures, the venture capital arm of Walt Disney (DIS), deep invested in GoPro. Says Beau Laskey, managing director of the shop Theres the potential for this to be much more than a camera company.