Adam Beguelin thinks there's a good market among people who want to run Web cams 24/7 as surveillance cameras and then save and share some of what they see such as the captured moments of children at play.
Beguelin, chief executive officer of Sensr.net of Incline Village, and his team of scientists are getting a couple of years to see if their hunch is correct after raising $1.5 million in venture capital.
Sensr.net looks to create a mashup of two fast-growing markets.
Home surveillance, Beguelin says, is a $1 billion a year market that's growing at a 20 percent clip.
And social media? You may have heard something about the 200 percent average growth rate posted by Facebook, Twitter and the like.
"Save everything, show what you want," is Beguelin's shorthand summary of Sensr.net.
Beguelin's team raised $1.5 million from Spark Capital of Boston with participation by Charles River Ventures of Waltham, Mass., and some angel investors to see whether the cloud-based video product can be built into something more than a good idea.
The money, Beguelin says, will pay for staff and technology server-hosting costs, mostly to get Sensr.net running.
With some luck, he says operating revenues within a couple of years will be enough to allow the company to stand on its own. A second round of financing, or sale of the company, also are possibilities.
The company plans to be monitoring scads of video captured by Web cams focused on front doors and backyards. But it will store images only when the monitoring system detects motion a burglar at a back door, dogs playing in a side yard.
"Our bandwidth costs and our service costs aren't too expensive," Beguelin says. The company uses Amazon's Simple Storage Service.
More challenging: Creation of a pricing plan. The Sensr.net team expects to deliver a free, limited-service plan. Customers who want more service the ability to store larger amounts of video, for instance will pay a premium.
The company has yet to figure out where it will draw the lines between free and premium service and hasn't spelled out the prices of premium offerings.
Another head-scratcher, Beguelin says, will be marketing the service to small business owners who are likely users of Sensr.net services as a promotional tool.
"Reaching out to those people is an interesting challenge," he says.
Like Beguelin, the technology mavens behind Sensr.net Yacin Bahi, its chief technology officer and Thomas Sheffler, its chief scientist all hold doctorates in computer fields and have helped launch other startups.
Still, Beguelin says of Sensr, "The back-end infrastructure is fairly complex."
Somewhat less complex was venture financing for the company. It's Beguelin's seventh startup, and he's worked with investors at Spark Capital for the better part of a decade.
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