The company closest to my house is GoPro (the headquarters are literally 200 yards from my house) and so when I heard they are shipping a new 3D video camera system, mostly aimed at sports types, tomorrow I had to go over and get the details.

These are the cameras that the Discovery Channel used to stick you inside a shark’s mouth, amongst other things.

But don’t miss the entrepreneurial story behind this company: it was started in Nicholas Woodman’s parent’s house and his VW bus with his mom’s sewing machine and a few thousand dollars.

Anyway, this just ran on Rackspace’s Building43. Here’s the article and video first look:

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Whether through footage from the miners’ rescue in Chili, a heli-skier blazing through virgin snow or a surfer gliding through a barrel of water, chances are you’ve seen images captured by a GoPro camera. Today, we’re going to learn more about the company and get a sneak peak at their new, 3D camera scheduled for release April 4th.

“I started GoPro back in 2002 originally to make it easier for surfers to shoot photos while they’re surfing [via GoPro’s] wrist camera,” explains Nicholas Woodman, Founder and CEO of GoPro. “Now, almost 9 years later, GoPro is the world leader in wearable cameras for sports.”

GoPro’s original, waterproof camera was designed to be strapped to the user’s wrist. The thinking behind it was to have a camera readily available to capture those perfect shots in a way that didn’t impede on the user’s enjoyment of his/her sport. That philosophy continues to drive innovation today as GoPro is set to release its 3D Hero System, which uses innovative housing and synchronization cables to combine two HD Hero cameras in a way that produces 3D video and photos. The housing will be available this week for $99, which includes the synchronization cables and associated software.

“One of our goals is the build the world’s most versatile camera,” says Woodman. “There are so many sports, activities and passions that people have that we wanted to make a camera that you can use for anything but that works really, really well for anything.”

More info:

GoPro web site: http://gopro.com/
GoPro on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/goprocamera
GoPro on Twitter: http://twitter.com/GoPro_News
GoPro on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/gopro

As you know I didn’t like Color’s launch a week ago. I thought the app just wasn’t very good. Turns out I wasn’t the only one. It still has a two-star review on iTunes. It got an incredible amount of coverage in the press for a new startup, including multiple plays on CNN and lots of other places.

The funding of $41 million also caused a LOT of people in Silicon Valley to ask “huh?”

These two things made me incredibly interested in Color. I kept using their app during the past week. My experiences on that in a second.

But yesterday I visited the company at 215 Hamilton Ave., in downtown Palo Alto. Interesting, I used to work in that building upstairs back in the 1990s.

I did a 49-minute audio interview with Bill Nguyen and Peter Pham, co-founders . It’s long, but incredibly revealing.

What did I learn from these two?

1. They got funded without doing a slide deck.
2. Their reputations got them a personal invite to Sequoia to pitch them. But the story of what they were working on is what closed the deal.
3. They needed the money to “compress” the time they need to ship a very advanced technology and vision.
4. They screwed up the launch, according to Peter. How? Bad UI, bad timing, noise from funding level. He talks about what they are doing to fix the problem.
5. Churn levels are very high. Churn means the number of people who hear about the app, install it, try it out, and then leave and delete it.
6. There are real drivers behind the new valuation numbers that the startup industry is seeing.
7. The technology behind the app actually is interesting. For instance, when you take a photo it measures the audio profile of the room, captures the compass reading and other sensor readings, and pretty accurately knows other users in the room at the same time. I could go into that more here, but really you should listen to the interview because this technology lets them build a new kind of “social camera.”
8. They “tried too much.” Peter worked at Apple and tried to do a very simple UI. That was a mistake because the app was too weird and nearly impossible to figure out and use.
9. This is an app designed for the “post PC world.” We talk a lot about what that marketing term means for apps in the future.
10. The new approach they are taking lets them build a new kind of social graph — one that’s based on who you actually were at the same location or concert or event with. It’s a bit mind-blowing after you finally get it to work and use it around town for a while.

So, now that I’ve used it for a week and have had training on what the app does and how to use it I’m more interested in the future but it still is an unusable app. Even after seeing what it does from the founders I find it infuriating to use. That’s why it has two stars. They know it’s a huge problem.

But, if you look beyond the horrible UI and the bad launch, there really is something here. If they can fix the UI I think there’s actually some magic here. But right now? It’s for people who are willing to put up with major early-adopter pain.

Despite all its trouble, it sure has caused a lot of conversations. This morning I was with executives from Procter and Gamble. The folks who do Pampers diapers. Color caused a major discussion and most of the people in the room already had it on their phones. How many apps out of the 500,000+ in the iTunes store can say that they caused this amount of hype and hate? I can’t think of one except for maybe Twitter and Foursquare.

Anyway, this is one of the more interesting conversations I’ve had in 2011. I’ll let you know when Color becomes usable.

They do 3D ads. Videowalls that make anything on Google look boring. Catalogs that are beautiful.

I keep hearing good things about Cooliris and their team, so I wanted to get an in-depth look at this great company. Here it is. Quite long, if you watch all three videos, but there’s a ton of good stuff in here.

It’s split into three pieces:

Part I: LiveShare is a media-sharing experience (think about Color, but this app actually works). Sorry, my audio had some glitches toward the end of this part.
Part II: Immersive 3D advertisements (great for something like Zite or Flipboard).
Part III: Decks, a new buying experience on the iPad.

Thanks to CEO Soujanya Bhumkar, and his team members who gave me such a great look.

This feature is getting turned on 4 p.m. today (Pacific Time) but I’ve been playing around with alternative search engine DuckDuckGo. It’s different than Google, tries to use partner’s APIs much more than Google does. That makes it worse in some areas (local searches aren’t as good) but better in other areas (like searching for information on Twitter trending topics).

Anyway, since Jack Dorsey is back running product at Twitter (he really invented Twitter, then left to start a new mobile payments company, Square, and yesterday returned to help Twitter get to the next level), I wanted to highlight services that are using Twitter’s lists feature. Twitter really needs to refocus on lists to make them more useful.

So, what does DuckDuckGo do with lists? Well, starting this afternoon you can put on one your home page. Here, you can visit my “most influential in tech” list on DuckDuckGo. You can even set that to be your home page on DuckDuckGo. Pretty cool.

BBbbbbbbuuuuuuuuutttttttttt: there are sizeable problems with Twitter lists.

Here’s some:

1. No more than 500 members on a list. Most of my lists are already full and I can’t add more. This is ridiculous. There are more than 500 VCs in the world, for instance, yet I can’t add more to my list.
2. You can’t have lists of lists. I imagine lots of you would love to keep your own list of “most influential people in Tech” and add yours to mine. But you can’t.
3. No RTs by members of a list.
4. No way to search just folks on a list (would be VERY useful!)
5. No trends from a list.
6. No way to recommend people to be added to lists.
7. No public lists (like a wiki where anyone can add someone).
8. When you follow a list nothing happens to your main feed.

I could go on. But this is crazy. Why doesn’t Twitter do anything about lists? This is how you make Twitter much more mainstream and useful to other services like DuckDuckGo.

In the meantime, we’re stuck with an unimaginative Twitter R&D team. I really hope Jack gets that unstuck.

If you are into photography and haven’t heard of Trey Ratcliff, you should. He gave an awesome talk at Google about High Dynamic Range photography. It’s a classic, one of the best I’ve seen on photography.

But today he’s released 100 Cameras in 1 for iPad. Very awesome new iPad app that lets you take your photo, and see it edited into 100 different versions. Here he demos what his new app looks like and what it does (I met him at the recent SXSW conference).

You might have seen the “Will it Blend?” series of videos with BlendTec CEO, Tom Dickson.

I’ve been watching those for years and so, when my friend Jesse Stay said we could go see him when I visited Salt Lake City this week, I said “awesome.”

I had no idea how funny he’d be in real life. I also had no idea he is an engineer who designed a lot of the things that go into the blender.

But even more, I love hearing how he came up with many of the innovations that go into making a great blender. Mostly they are accidental. Just like the video show was an accident.

What kind of accidents? The winglets on the blade were designed because the blade didn’t fit. When he tried to get rid of the winglets the blender didn’t work as well. So he put them back.

Or, how about the patented “wild side” which makes the blender work better? Well, turns out he just needed room for his hand.

Happy accidents. Are you innovating by looking for happy accidents?

This is a long (about half an hour) video, but one of my favorite CEO interviews. Thanks Jesse for bringing me to Blendtec. By the way, I bought a blender and it just arrived. Anyone up for a margarita party?

Oh, and sorry for messing up the editing. It repeats at minute 34. Yikes, will try to fix that.