"Camio’s innovation is that the camera app is selective about what it uploads. Maslan says that it’s algorithms are smart enough to tell the difference between, say, lighting changes or a blowing tree branch, and someone walking up to your porch. By reducing the total amount of data uploaded and stored, Camio can use much less bandwidth than a traditional webcam, and the company can afford to offer a free version of the service. Once the footage is moved to the cloud, Camio’s computers analyze the videos to try to automatically detect things such as which ones have people and what colors are present, so that users can search the archives."