Steve Ward had wearable cameras in his sights when he was a Seattle police officer on bike patrols in the late 1990s. Back then, he figured body-worn devices could show 100 percent of what a cop deals with on a daily basis, rather than the 5 percent or so that is seen on the dashboard camera videos that have become a staple of evening newscasts.

Yet, Ward had to wait for the technology to catch up with his ideas. “Now we have smaller batteries, longer life, and smaller image sensors,” he said. Ward now also has his own six-year-old company, VIEVU, and an initial body-worn camera that’s been successfully marketed to the law enforcement community.

That product is now used by 3,000 agencies in 16 countries. Ward’s newest product, the VIEVU2 (VIEVU Squared), is a response to requests he was hearing from a different marketplace as he was selling his first wearable camera.

“We’d get a lot of people coming to us saying, ‘hey, make us a camera that we can use to protect our businesses, or protect ourselves and our jobs,” Ward said. “So we listened to what the market said.” The VIEVU Squared is the result: a rugged, square-ish camera that fits in the palm of a hand, and is primarily targeting home service professionals, security personnel, or business owners.

“These are professionals that have liability in their jobs, or a business person who wants to protect their company. So we make a camera that they can have daily events recorded for later liability issues,? Ward said […]