Smartphone app serves as video ‘black box’ for cars

We’ve seen a few different efforts to document the world through auto-snapping cameras—including both Yahoo’s photo-based marketing campaign and Vicon’s life-caching device—but recently we came across one that adds video to the picture, so to speak. DailyRoads Voyager is a free application for Android-powered mobile phones that enables continuous video recording from moving vehicles. DailyRoads Voyager is intended to serve as what’s essentially a video black box for cars, recording everything but allowing users to keep only what they’re really interested in. Whether it’s an encounter with unusual wildlife in the road or the sequence of events leading to an accident, the application works in the background to timestamp, geotag and save all videos on the SD card; as space fills up, it automatically deletes the oldest ones unless they’ve been tagged for longer-term storage. DailyRoads Voyager can also take still photos at user-selectable intervals; whichever format is used, it can upload all recorded material in accordance with the user’s preset specifications. The accumulated files can then be easily managed, played back and grouped in selections. For now, Romanian DailyRoads is still beta-testing the Voyager application. Integration with YouTube, Picasa, Flickr and others is coming soon, the company says. App-dev entrepreneurs: who will build the first interface for seamless accident reporting…? And insurance companies: how about partnering with them? (Related: iPhone app helps State Farm users submit a claim.)