Man’s invention was inspired by burning pants, and now the market is ‘kind of exploding’
Gillian Shaw
Sun
VeriCorder Technology president and CEO Gary Symons shows his company’s software that allows the iPhone to be used for electronic news gathering, supplanting more traditional, heavy and expensive equipment. CHRIS STANFORD/ SPECIAL TO THE VANCOUVER SUN
Gary Symons’s launch as a tech entrepreneur probably dates back to the day his pants caught fire.
Symons, then a mobile journalist at a time when the term hardly existed, was covering a forest fire in the Interior.
Laden down with a laptop, a video camera and all the paraphernalia necessary to file a broadcast story, Symons caught a strap on a tree and fell over backwards, tumbling 20 metres down the hill.
His equipment scattered.
As he scrambled among the burning underbrush to collect his lost gear, his pants caught fire.
“That was my eureka day,” said Symons. “I learned, one, that I needed fireproof pants and, two, I needed a better mobile kit.”
It was the latter that spurred the creation of VeriCorder Technology Inc., a Kelowna-based startup that has been working for two years on the development of a system that can put a TV studio in the palm of your hand.
While VeriCorder has put out some iPhone apps, it was the release in May of MIMS (Mobile Integration Management System) AutoMagic that tipped this tiny company onto the world stage. The system allows media organizations to create, collect and broadcast video content from mobile sources anywhere in the world.
A media outlet could have its own reporters edit and file on-the-spot video stories or it could tap into Veri-Corder’s user base to find freelancers and citizen journalists for video content. The users’ database is due to go online this fall.
“Let’s say a plane goes down somewhere in the B.C. Interior, say Williams Lake,” said Symons. “You at The Sun would be able to look at a map or at a listing and see that there are four people with 1st Video [app] on their iPhones or Android phones who are close to the crash.
“You could contract with them to take a video.”
Rather than complicated passwords and formulas for feeding the video to a newsroom system, VeriCorder’s software delivers an eight-digit code for the videographer at the other end.
“You approve them and five seconds later they are integrated into your newsroom system,” said Symons. VeriCorder’s system, which also allows for live streaming video, launched to pent-up demand.
“When we released that around May 1, that’s when things went nuts,” said Symons, who has just hired the 16th employee for the fledgling company that had six people this time last year. And he’s off to Australia, where a media company has engaged Veri-Corder to deliver its system across its print and web media properties.
“The market is kind of exploding,” said Symons.
The company’s 1st Video app, for iPhones and Android phones, puts audio and video editing capabilities into smartphones and that output can be linked straight to a newsroom or broadcast centre, using VeriCorder’s customized corporate software.
“We’re a systems company, not an app company,” he said.
The arrival of Apple’s iPhone 4 with high-definition video is also proving a timely boost for the company that raised an initial $1 million in private placements, another $250,000 from the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program, $50,000 for Android porting work so the mobile app would work on Android phones and $1 million through B.C.’s Southern Interior Development Initiative Trust.
As a former broadcast and print journalist (he was once a freelance contributor to The Vancouver Sun among other gigs), Symons is acutely aware of the pressure on traditional journalism outlets to deliver up-to-the-minute news.
“There are now 400 million people in the world putting video to the Web on a regular basis, everyone from You-Tube to individuals are monetizing that,” said Symons. “The reason I got into this business a couple of years ago was that I knew unless newspapers and media chains could lower the cost of production to the same as that of individual bloggers, they cannot win that race.”
While mobile journalism is Veri-Corder’s initial focus for its technology, the system has been picked up by universities and other corporate users, like the real estate company that is plugging into the mobile system to deliver instant video content for potential buyers.
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