From the folks who brought us Reddit, Loopt, Scribd, and Airbnb, yet another exciting startup. Flutter was launched this spring, a graduate of Y Combinator‘s Winter 2012 class. This startup has gained an impressive seed funding of $1.4 million from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, and Spring Ventures. Start Fund and several other individual investors.
Flutter app for Mac was released just months ago and now the app is also available for Windows.
Using a standard webcam device, the technology behind Flutter allows for gesture detection and recognition. With the app, you can control the play function on several media apps, including iTunes, Quicktime, and Spotify by just waving a hand at the computer.
An Instant Success
Since the official debut in late May on the Mac App Store, Flutter has been quite popular worldwide. Within two weeks of their debut in the App Store, Flutter became part of the top 5 downloads in over 30 countries among all free entertainment apps. Users in over 90 countries have downloaded it. At one point the app was #2 in the United States, along with being the #1 free entertainment app in 14 countries, as well as the overall #1 free app in Korea, Italy, Sweden, and Taiwan.
Flutter App for Windows and the Future
All this was accomplished by a small company which currently only employs seven people full-time. However, if you ask co-founders Mehul Nariyawala and Navneet Dalal, they will tell you their company has many exciting things planned for the future.
They recently released Flutter App for Windows and they are also working on several new features to use with Macs, allowing it to recognize even more gestures as well as control a greater number of media apps.
Their vision: to eventually create an app that allows you to control certain features on all the electronic devices you use by using gestures. Instead of clicking a mouse or pressing buttons, they see a future where gestures in addition to our voices tell machines what to do.
About Co-Founder Navneet Dalal
With several publications showcasing his expertise in computer vision, Navneet Dalal is certainly an ideal leader to make this future a reality. A current San Francisco resident and native of Chandigarh, India, Flutter co-founder Navneet Dalal is highly interested in the research and development of computer vision systems.
He completed his PhD thesis at INRIA Grenoble (in Grenoble, France), titled “Finding People in Images and Video Sequences.” He then was a senior researcher at Like.com, which was a visual search engine for online shopping and was acquired by Google in 2010. Finally, Dalal and Nariyawala founded Flutter. With such positive initial acclaim and an exciting vision for the future, this will certainly be a technology and app to keep an eye on.
Mehul Nariyawala, Flutter’s cofounder, said, “Flutter wants to power the eyes of our devices — in the same way that Siri functions as the iPhone’s ears.”
