raise $3 million in a Series A round, Glasse says he want to keep his company lean in terms of outside funding. “It builds discipline you can’t get any other way.” he says. “When you take $30 million and you don’t have a plan, you end up thrashing around.”
Currently Dot is only built to work with the iPhone 4 family of smartphones, though Glasse says work is underway to rollout versions for certain Android phones by the first quarter 2012. He says he will target Android smartphones with at least 1080p video resolution, such as the Samsung Galaxy S line rather than attempt to outfit all the models on the market. Though the iPhones shoot video at 720p resolution, Glasse says the sensors in those smartphones deliver the necessary quality for panoramic videos.
Kogeto manufactures its products in Rochester, NY, a decision Glasse says lets his company better manage quality than it could if it used overseas resources. Kogeto has a staff of 14 supplemented by consultants and contract engineers, Glasse says. Kogeto is looking to fill two additional positions.
While Glasse says his company can be more responsive by manufacturing stateside, there are still some challenges he wants to tackle. “I wish we were producing more units a day,” he says. “We also want to get the price of our materials down.”
Glasse is not overly territorial, however, when it comes to bringing Dot to the masses. Kogeto is open to working with third party manufacturers, he says, who would build their own products using Dot’s lens attachment.
More features are in development, Glasse says, including technology that would let users see when other Dot-equipped smartphones nearby are recording the same event. For example, users attending the same football game could capture and share the same play but from different perspectives in the stadium. That, Glasse says, would allow them to create a combined image shared on the Web and viewed from multiple angles, much like a special effects shot from the movie The Matrix. That sharing feature is expected to be ready by the first half of 2012.
Glasse says he hopes to develop the technology to the point where viewers feel as if they are sitting alongside the users shooting the videos. And he’s hopeful that by starting with the iPhone 4 line, Kogeto will quickly reach a large enough audience to give Dot a big head start in the market. “With one device,” he says, “we can target 100 million users.”
