> Wonder if there is a monetization method beyond hardware there...
Doesn't need to be.
If you want to be a Fortune 500 compan, go public and make your VCs rich, you want to control the entire stack form hardware through to data, "monetize" (i.e. hog) everything and hide your algorithms from your competitors and users. This is what movie studios are trying to do.
If you want to have a living and product that is useful to people, you can make enough money from hardware sales. You don't get to ring the bell on NYSE, but I can live without that.
Thank you for all the great feedback! I am Ari Krupnik, the guy in the KickStarter video.
My idea is to make and sell devices, and make the software free--as in freedom and as in beer. The business model is that stuff that costs money to make (hardware) costs money to buy. Stuff that users collect (data) I distribute for free. I want to make sure that data that individual users collect is available to users--for any use that they want for it. There are several closed systems on the market. These companies get people to collect data for them--and then lock it up. They create an artificial scarcity of data and try to make money from that scarcity.
There are limitations on what I can open-source on the microcontroller side. My NDA with Apple explicitly prohibits disclosing communications protocols connection details. There are no restrictions on open-sourcing the iOS side of the software, including drivers for the device. My intention is to GPL the iOS code and let people build whatever they want with it.
My idea is further to have an open RESTful API to the data that anyone can use. I want to make the data genuinely useful to other people. I want to have a GPL-style license for data as well.
SignalActive are in San Mateo. I've been to their office, they are real friendly people.
The detector in my video is a Cobra XRS9345. I am doing what mikeknoop and ruslan are suggesting: hacking into the LEDs and reading the device's idea of what it detects. The actual signaling is non-obvious and I intend to publish the code that interprets them once it's stable. One idea that I'm kicking around is building a kit that you can solder to your detector's LEDs.
I wonder how much market there is for a kit that requires the user to open up his detector.
Ari, aside from legal issues, I think it mostly depends on how hard the installation process is going to be. If you manage to design a very small PCB which will use bluetooth, can be fit inside radar and needs only three wires to solder (DGND, VCC and LED's anode), then you can easily get some users, especially in the Valley where ppl love gadgets which they can create or expand themselves :-).
BTW. For those who are afraid of openning up their detectors you can easily desing a special version which will hook up to the LED using photo-resistor. I.e. a kind of device you stick up to detector and put its sensor over detector's LED.
