Live feeds of public locations offered through crowdsourced video

Koozoo hopes to create a network of live video feeds to help anyone check locations before they go there.

Spotfav has already harnessed the power of webcams to help surfers check the weather at their favorite spots. Now, Koozoo hopes to create a network of live video feeds to help anyone check the atmosphere of locations before they go there. Rather than customers arriving at restaurants to find they are closed, heading to the beach to find it’s crowded or heading to the farmers’ market to find it has been cancelled, Koozoo will enable anyone to simply view a live feed of the location to easily make a decision about whether it is worth the trip. In order to do this, the startup wants to crowdsource video by getting those with old smartphones to set them up as webcams. The network would then act as a source for local information, allowing users to see what’s going on around them without leaving the house. Koozoo is currently in private beta and will be launching in San Francisco early next year. Although there may be privacy concerns in having neighborhood residents set up monitoring cameras in public spaces, the company believes the result would provide worthy benefits to everybody. How else can the power of the public’s smartphones be aggregated? Spotted by: Murray Orange