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Capsule
p/capsule-5Automatic photo backup, sorting & sharing from your home
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Johnathan Zhuang

Capsule - Automatic photo backup, sorting & sharing from your home

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No more manual backups. No more cloud companies scanning your photos.

Capsule is a smart photo assistant for your home. Experience automatic photo+video backup from mobile, social, cloud. AI powered search, album curation and rule based sharing at your finger tips

Capsule Hunters can use instructions here for additional 15% off on Kickstarter!

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Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
Hi everyone. I created Capsule after losing months of my daughter's home videos 😭. Unhappy with having to choose between manual backup and Cloud companies scanning my photos. I decided to take matters into my own hands! What we came up with was Capsule. A product that backs up your photos from literally everywhere automatically - take a photo outdoors, it goes straight Home 🏠. Backs up photos from your camera, iCloud, Dropbox, Instagram, even Google Photos. Capsule also comes with smarts to automatically build albums and slideshows for you, as well as allow you to share your photos & videos with your loved ones around the world with rules (target photos of: who, where, event, etc). Of course you can search and access your photos & video on the go, on any of your devices. We're currently offering 15% additional discount on Kickstarter to Capsule Hunters (link in description ☝️). Happy to answer any questions!
Dan Siepen
@johnathan_zhuang awesome work Johnathan! Amazing product and know how hard you worked on it. Can’t wait to preporder and try one and have them arrive on the door!
Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
Thank you @dansiepen. We're so looking forward to shipping it. Keep creating & keep hustling! :D
Rita Viana
@johnathan_zhuang what if something happens to it? Get stolen, for example
Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
Hi @texviana. We deliberately made the decision to store your photos & videos unencrypted on the hard drive. As long as you have your hard drive, your memories are still safe. (btw, photos & videos are fully encrypted during transmission, so security is still guaranteed!) We're also working on means of redundancy, as in what happens when your hard drive fails - even know we have no control over that, we feel as a memory management company we share that responsibility, so stay tuned on that front too! :D
Nic Perry
Looks like no internal drive option right now. I like the expandability of external drives, but the aesthetic is pretty subpar. Any plans for a hard drive dock it sits on or a larger model that has some onboard storage? Seems like you made too pretty of an object to have a cord running to a hard drive. Also, the visuals from the video feel a little misleading. How many USB ports, can I plug in two drives for some redundancy?
Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
Hi @nperry302 Thanks for the comment. Apologies if we misled you on the video, I think it was done for artist merit - not that it's an excuse :p In short the reason to go with purely external storage was a commercial one to keep retail price affordable. As the person driving the aesthetic + overall product direction, I was really torn with this decision. I was keen to have onboard SSD (much more reliable over HDD especially for your personal photos & videos), but that would make Capsule too cost prohibitive for most people. We will never remove USB for storage expandability, but stay tuned we will make onboard storage work economically! Re redundancy. Capsule doesn't currently support real time redundancy (as in RAID set up), it's also something we will look at improving in the future. But require further improvement on the hardware side. Companies that claim software based redundancy using 2 hard drives (we've explored this) aren't being totally transparent with customers. So we're not prepared to even tote this feature till we're ready. Hope you understand. Some really good points though, I love how these comments mirror the early customer testing we did, showing us that: 1) we're solving something people care about - a bit of morale boost for us 2) there's a lot of work ahead of us to get this right. The team and I are very excited about the challenges & opportunities ahead!
Nic Perry
@johnathan_zhuang Thanks for the replies, all tough lines to walk, I definitely understand, and I'm positive I'm more sensitive to redundancy than average. and my art teacher wife more sensitive to aesthetics. :)
Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
@nperry302 totally understandable. Thanks for the questions. Good to know exactly what our users are thinking. We'll definitely tackle the redundancy problem a bit more post Kickstarter!
Austin Teague
I also agree with @nperry302. I didn't realize you needed an external hard drive to make Capsule work. Might want to make this more obvious in your videos or Kickstarter page.
Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
will do @austinteague, appreciate the feedback!
Art Mat 🇵🇱🇪🇺🇺🇸

The idea is pretty good.

Pros:

Great design :-)

Cons:

I will write suggestions after my delivery :-)

Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
Thanks for backing us @Art. Appreciate your kind words. We are fine tuning the software every week so it lives up to the hardware aesthetic!!
Jimmy Kwok

Let just hope that this is not another "Lima", that was totally messed up.

Pros:

Privacy, privacy and privacy. It is always better to host files at your place if you have good internet connection.

Cons:

It is hard for such hardware company to survive without ongoing monthly fee, and without software update it will be obsolete in no time.

Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
Hi Jimmy. I've "studied" Lima and other hardware startups extensively as part of learning process for Capsule. We hope to avoid a lot of the issues that plague these companies, and will be trying out a few things, including value added services as a SaaS model (more detail in months to come). I can only hope our core team's extensive delivery background (between us: 37+ years in building & shipping hardware & software, plus 4 previous startup experiences) will help us avoid some of the pitfalls. We're learning everyday though! And thanks for taking the time to Review the product!
MachineBox.io
I recently switch from Dropbox to iCloud because I was tired of scrolling through 30,000 photos/videos (yes... I have a lot of photos of my kids) and wanted to search by people, places and things. If you guys want to integrate face recognition and object detection really really quickly, try Machine Box; Dockerized, pre-trained and trainable machine learning models with a dead simple RESTful API!! Might be really helpful as people want delighters with their photo management software these days. Anyway - consider it, we've build our tools to be really really really easy to integrate and get to MVP fast. http://machinebox.io
Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
Hi @machineboxio thanks for that. I'll share it with Pece, our Head of software. We're currently using a combination of open source and our own custom tech to make this happen!
Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
Hi Capsule Hunters. Johnathan here from Capsule Corp.. er.. I mean Capsule Labs Inc. We added a new video for those who enjoy sweet love stories. So sweet, dipping it in syrup sweetens the syrup! Cue Chuck Norris jokes ;)
Jon Bjornn
Can you speak to how this is different from Lyve, apart from the external drive configuration? I owned a Lyve Home and the company went under/was acquired by Seagate. Essentially struggled to compete in a space that is very competitive from the big players. Like to see new ideas and innovation in this space though!
Johnathan Zhuang
Maker
Hi @jonbjornn. Sorry to hear about your experience with Lyve. This is fairly broad topic that could span both product feature, company operation / execution. I couldn't find much about Lyve from the internet (understandably). Would you tell me a little more about your experience with it - what did you like, didn't like, why you think they went under / couldn't compete?