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There are lots of reasons to want a home camera system but most of them boil down to either security and/or piece of mind. Some people feel the need to monitor the activity in their home and while that’s their business, I’m the kind of person who would want something like this for less Orwellian motives. You see I now have two cats. While I’m not one of those crazy cat people who needs to see their cats 24/7, I would appreciate the ability to check up on them from time to time.

When we go on vacation, we often leave a set of keys with a friend and ask them to check on the house and feed the cats. I’m lucky to have great friends who are very responsible and the cats are always fed, but people do make mistakes from time to time. It would be really nice for me to be able to check in and see how the cats are doing with their food. Aside from that though, when you spend so much time with your pets, you can’t help but start to miss them a little when you’re away for any extended period of time. So it would be nice to be able to see what they’re up to every now and then while we’re out and about on vacation.

So how can HomeCamera.com help you with your home camera setup? Well the simple answer is that they take care of all of the technical stuff for you. It’s one of those services where they’re going to take something that’s currently technologically challenging, package it in an easy to use framework, add a few extra features and voila! Successful product. I’ll start off by pointing out that there’s nothing that HomeCamera.com offers that an individual can’t replicate on their own if they can run their own web server from home. That being said, the amount of time an experienced technical person would spend doing this would hardly make it worthwhile once they kick in their paid subscriptions. Then add the fact that it’s currently free and you’d be nuts to try and do this on your own today.

The features they offer are fairly straightforward from the user’s perspective. You install their software on the webcam machines and then you can log in from any web enabled device to check in on things. That means your laptop, cell phone, PDA, etc… If you’re one of the paranoid types, you can set up notices so that whenever motion is detected by the system, you’ll get an e-mail. Toss a Nazbatag into the mix and you could keep cats out of places they’re not supposed to go. Once motion is detected in an area they aren’t supposed to be in, the e-mail could trigger the Naz to tell them to get out of there in your voice

The one major downer though is that their software only works on XP and Vista. If you’re running a Mac with OSX on it or a Linux box, you’re out of luck with this system. The big downside there is not so much that I care what a webcam machine is running since I’d hardly interact with the OS, but rather the stability of both XP and Vista as compared to OSX and Linux. I just don’t want to have to reboot the webcam machines every week.

Aside from that though, some of the extras that they offer include online video archiving for your cameras as well as sharing with other people. That way you could share a particular camera with the grandparents so that they could see their grandchild. Be sure to remember which one you’re sharing though to avoid any embarrassing moments. All in all, the product looks well packaged and they offer enough extra features to make it worthwhile. Those extra services go a long way towards increasing initial adoption as well as asserting and maintaining your stance in the market. While it may just sound like icing on the cake, remember that the difference between a $500 wedding cake and a $5000 wedding cake is often all about the icing on the cake ;P

This posted was sponsored by the folks at HomeCamera.com who explicitely asked me to be fair and impartial. While overall the tone here is positive, it’s because I think they’ve done a pretty decent job putting something together that people will use.

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