Tag: Chris Boyle

Occasionally I stumble across a Kickstarter product and I slap my head and say “I wish I had thought of that.”
Of course, I wouldn’t have thought of this one because I’m a photographer who faces many challenges in life like taking a photo without the batteries dropping out of my cheapo camera.
But I do like this product and its ingenuity and it’s based right here in River City that’s San Antonio, Texas.
The team members behind Soloshot are the kinds of bright, young minds that San Antonio is working so hard to attract and cultivate. The fact that their Kickstarter campaign already exceeded its $50,000 goal with more than 200 backers and 21 days to go shows that San Antonio’s creative community is alive and well.
Soloshot is a device that connects to your camera and automatically rotates it to keep it pointed at you while you surf, skateboard, kiteboard, bike, unicycle, pogo stick hop or whatever you like to do. It’s like having a robotic camera operator.
The team behind the invention are “sports minded artists and engineer” who created Soloshot so they could capture their own footage while engaged in a variety of sports.
The team includes Chris Boyle from Queens, N.Y. who thought up the idea while surfing.
“Chris studied biomedical engineering at Boston University. At only 22 years old, Chris filed his first patent and formed his first company focused on the development of a catheter delivered heart valve,” according to their Kickstarter campaign. “Opportunity came calling from the desert, and Chris moved his company from California to San Antonio, TX where he joined a partnership of talented physicians, scientists and engineers working on bringing semiconductor manufacturing techniques to the medical field. After this revolutionary technology was licensed by a fortune 500 company, Chris packed up his boards and headed back to the beach looking for some rest and inspiration. Chasing a wave he had only seen photos of, he headed to Tortola’s Apple Bay. The wave did not disappoint, the creative juices again began to flow and the idea for SOLOSHOT was born.”
His partner, Scott Taylor is originally from California’s Bay area and has degrees from the University of Michigan in Naval Architecture, Marine Engineering, and Chemical Engineering. He is also an expert in wakeboarding and owned two wakeboard and waterski schools. The partners met in the Dominican Republic where they were surfing and kiteboarding.
“One day, over a post kiteboarding beer, Chris told Scott about the automatic camera project he’d been working on. The two have been working furiously on SOLOSHOT ever since.”
The company is based in San Antonio because of Alex Sammons, its product development and manufacturing expert who has experience attaching cameras to remote controlled helicopters. Sammons has a chemistry degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Other team members include Ryan Savage and John O’Callaghan.