Our daughter Ellie calls it peetaboo. PeetaBoo is the home camera system we built so the thousands of small moments like that one, already caught by the cameras in our house, get found, understood, and kept. Not scrubbed through. Not lost in a camera roll.
Ellie, almost two · 2.7 s · the reason for the name
These are real clips from the camera in our living room. Movement triggered each one, PeetaBoo found Ellie in it and described what happened, and I bookmarked the ones I wanted to keep. The notes beside each clip are what PeetaBoo wrote, lightly edited for the website.
Whether you're on a call upstairs or across town, most of playtime happens without you. Cameras already record it. Nobody has time to watch it. PeetaBoo watches for you and hands back the eleven seconds worth keeping.
The first peekaboo. The first time she climbed the chair. The first "op op op" at a blue cup. You won't have your phone out for any of them. This is how you store them anyway, in a library that stays organized on its own.
PeetaBoo is not a smarter baby monitor. It's a camera and a journal that work together, built to be right rather than fast.
A few photos teach PeetaBoo what your child looks like. From then on it finds them in every clip, even beside a sibling or a parent, and double-checks before it's sure. If it isn't sure, it says so rather than guessing.
For clips with your child in them, PeetaBoo writes a short, plain description: what they did, who was there, how they seemed, and anything a pediatrician might find worth knowing. Never a diagnosis. Never clinical labels.
Every evening, a journal entry on your phone: the day's key moment, how the time was spent, mood, and the clips. Bookmark a clip and it's kept forever. Everything else ages out on a schedule, so you end up with a library instead of a hard drive.
Climbed onto the armchair by herself for the first time, then sat there looking very pleased about it.
▶ Watch the clip · 0:19Mostly happy and busy. Calm after lunch.
This started as software for one family's footage. The rules we set for ourselves are the rules the product ships with. Your clips are handled inside PeetaBoo's secure, encrypted product, in a private space that belongs to your household.
We're running PeetaBoo in our own house and a handful of others. If you have a kid under three and a room they play in, we'd like to hear from you.
Thanks. We'll write back from a real inbox.
a human replies within a day · [email protected]