April 6, 2011 – In today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, Nick Wingfield, features GoPro in his story on the company’s rise and adoption by the professional production market. The featured photo in the article is that of Dan Moore, a GoPro customer and previous “Photo of the Day” winner!
Camcorder Popular With Surfers Looks to Ride Professional Market
April 6, 2011
By NICK WINGFIELD
Even as cellphones put video cameras into pockets everywhere, one company is seeing brisk sales of a rugged video camera that turns ordinary people into the stars of their own self-shot action movies.
GoPro’s trick: a collection of mounts that allow its inexpensive cameras to be attached to everything from the tips of surfboards to ski helmets. The cameras have also started winning converts among professional cameramen, who have used the gadgets to burrow into cobra dens and shoot the insides of shark’s mouths for television nature shows.
Now GoPro’s closely held parent company, Woodman Labs Inc., is receiving its first round of funding from outside investors, including Steamboat Ventures, a venture capital fund backed by Walt Disney Co. GoPro declined to disclose the size of the investment.
GoPro is part of a category of products known as pocket camcorders that is thriving despite the prevalence of video cameras inside devices like Apple Inc.’s iPhone. The simple-to-operate cameras are more portable than traditional camcorders but lack many of their bells-and-whistles, like powerful zoom lenses.
In 2009, sales of all pocket camcorders were just over $2 billion world-wide, growing 21% in unit sales to 13.6 million in 2010 from the prior year, according to research firm
via gopro.com
Cool beans.