After seven years of existence, GoPro Inc (NASDAQ:GPRO) has finally developed a third-party app program for developers. I say finally, but apparently, it has been around for about a year but not in the public eye. With GoPro’s miserable 2015 that has continued into this year, it makes perfect sense that Nick Woodman, founder and chief executive of GoPro, would go out of his way to check the stock’s prolonged slide.
GoPro unveils the third-party platform
Speaking in San Francisco today, Woodman came clean about the year-old program saying, “This is our chance to celebrate and support third-party developers who are leveraging GoPro.”
“Over the last few years we’ve been excited by the creativity and enthusiasm other brands have demonstrated when integrating GoPro into their own solutions,” said Woodman. “The GoPro Developer Program is a way for us to celebrate the innovative work of our developer community and, more importantly, help enable what comes next. We’re grateful to benefit from the collective genius of the participating developers, and we’re excited to now officially support their efforts with our developer toolkits.”
And that is scaling, and precisely what the company needs. Woodman and a number of analysts are predicting a much better year for the action camera company, but after 2015, that bar is set quite low.
Third parties show their work
With this third-party agreement, developers have the option of either creating mobile apps that seamlessly work with the company’s product line or, perhaps even more importantly, allow developers to physically or via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connect additional peripherals to the company’s cameras.
“We provide these toolkits to these companies so they can integrate their products to our products,” said Adam Silver, head of the developer program.
In addition to the announcement of the existence of the developer program, over a third of the hundred developers involved showed what they have done as a welcomed third party including BMW, Fisher-Price, Telefonica and others including Timecode Systems which demonstrated their ability to integrate GoPro footage into television and film projects with an app called SyncBac Pro.
“We have been able to achieve so much with the SyncBac Pro due to the amazing sharing of technology offered through the GoPro Developer Program,” said Paul Scurrell, CEO of Timecode Systems. “To me, this is exactly what best-of-breed technology companies should be doing — taking the best of their own offerings and combining them to drive innovation and elegant solutions.”
