[kwb]

Canon's PowerShot Pick is a family oriented robot camera that finds, tracks and analyzes faces and facial expressions to take pictures automatically, and it costs you 40,900 JPY (about 390 USD) including 10% tax.

You Tube

You Tube

Seems like many people were waiting for something like that. Canon raised more than 100,000,000 JPY (somewhat less than 1 million USD) in 4 days, that's the record for Makuake, the cloud funding platform many Japanese manufactures including Pentax have used in the past. Shortly after that, they sold out all 3000 units and announced to accept 1000 more orders. As of now, their Makuake project page shows a total of 3499 orders at 125,309,100 JPY including 10% tax, or about 1.1 million USD w/o tax.
Project page in Japanese
Announcement that Canon raised 100,000,000 JPY in 4 days, in Japanese

I was surprised as my initial reaction about the project was like "haha good luck Canon, nobody wants your camera to judge if something is picture-worthy!".

I did understand that some people might want a covert camera that automatically takes e.g. candid shots of themselves and kids enjoying the moment. It was hard for me to take kids' candid shots when they were young, and I don't have many shots of myself with the family as I'm usually the photographer. But the Pick didn't really appeal to me. I don't have any point to make, I just wanted to share my feeling of amusement.

Oh, if I can make one point, it's this: If I ever say Company X should or shouldn't make such and such product, don't trust me. I probably would have told that PowerShot Pick will fail, and see what happened.

[ramseybuckeye]

I never understood the appeal of the Theta for non real estate or technical use, I was wrong. This one seems like a high priced gimmick. But, for the selfie loving crowd, this is groundbreaking

[gatorguy]

Did Google perhaps sell their Clips Camera tech to Canon? It sounds very similar.