The Richter Scale^®

About six years ago, I helped launch Caribbean WebCams, LLC (CWC) - a company I founded with my friend Dan Senie of Amaranth Networks. The purpose of CWC was to develop WebCam systems for deployment in the Caribbean for tourism purposes.

There’s a bit more history later in this blog entry, but I’m pleased to say that after nearly two years of trying to find better WebCam equipment we could use outdoors, at a reasonable price, we finally came up with a hardware solution that met all of our needs, and have deployed the first in a series of new outdoor WebCams on Bonaire.

This new camera is called the DonkeyCam, and can be viewed in large form here and in the regular medium size at http://www.DonkeyCam.com. The DonkeyCam is installed at the Bonaire Donkey Sanctuary and funds to purchase it were donated by a Donkey Sanctuary Supporter - plus, CWC kicked in money as well.

Below are some pictures of the DonkeyCam.

So, a bit of history about CWC now…

The first demo system we developed was the Bonaire WebCams, which featured (and still does to this day) the world’s only open-ocean, underwater ReefCam. Sadly, as neither Dan nor I like to be sales people, and didn’t have a lot of time to invest in the project, we didn’t manage to sell any additional WebCam installations anywhere else (yet). To pay for on-going support of the Bonaire WebCams, we started a membership site where all captures since December 2000 could be perused for a small fee ($24.95/year) and better bandwidth could be had for viewing image updates (which occur every two minutes). We also found a sponsor in Eden Beach Resort a couple of summers ago when the cameras had to move from my rented home to another ocean front location because I was moving inland.

The Bonaire WebCams have remained stable over the years, until now, with 3 top-side cameras and one underwater one. Locations have changed with these base four cameras, but not much else.

However, now that we have the new equipment package figured out, we are in talks with several businesses on Bonaire to add WebCams at their facilities, which will hopefully lead to the introduction of a downtown KralendijkCam and a WindsurfCam by mid-year.

And one very nice thing about these cameras is that they can capture imagery in very low light conditions, making night time shots appear almost as bright as day-time - just take a look at the DonkeyCam in the middle of the night as an example.