A Small, Versatile Way to Record Your Life: GoPro’s latest camera, the GoPro Hero 3+, has a longer battery life and higher-resolution camera than its predecessors

January 12, 2014 Leave a comment

JANUARY 9, 2014, 9:09 PM

A Small, Versatile Way to Record Your Life

By NICK BILTON

Among all the vast booths at the International CES displaying 4K televisions and devices by big names like Sony and Panasonic was GoPro, a versatile digital-camera maker that was mostly unheard of just a few years ago.GoPro was showing its latest camera, the GoPro Hero 3+, which has a longer battery life and higher-resolution camera than its predecessors. The camera can also connect to a free, downloadable application that allows users to control the GoPro Hero 3+ from a smartphone, change settings and shoot video and photos.

While GoPro’s cameras and the dozens of accessories it sells are impressive, what’s more spectacular is how quickly the company has risen from obscurity to being one of the biggest camera-makers in the US.

When I wrote about GoPro last year, Nick Woodman told me the creation of the camera was an invention that came at the “right place, right time.”

He made his first very crude GoPro when he went to Indonesia on a surfing trip in 2002 and wanted to take pictures of a friend in the water. Since then, GoPro has sold millions of cameras and now sells dozens of accessories that allow people to take the camera into extreme conditions.

Next to the GoPro booth was a smaller company that makes an accessory called the Steadicam Curve, which allows people to shoot very smooth and silky video with their GoPros using a counterweight built into the Steadicam Curve. The accessory comes in at least four different colors, including red, black, silver and blue, and costs $100.

Given how quickly GoPro is growing in popularity, I’m sure we’ll see even more third-party companies selling accessories for this camera in the future.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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