CRI听力:Germany IFA Exhibition Shows New Ways to Capture World on Video

The IFA exhibition in Berlin is one of the world's leading consumer electronics fairs.

More than 250-thousand people are expected to visit the exhibition grounds in Berlin over the next week to see the latest gadgets, home appliances and TVs.

This year over 1600 companies are exhibiting at the fair - many of them established giants like Samsung and Sony - but also hundreds of small startup companies that are hoping to make it big.

One of these companies is Panono, which is releasing its first product in September - the Panono camera ball.

The ball consists of 36 cameras, each with a 3 megapixel resolution.

Jonas Pfeil, inventor of the product, explains how it is used.

"So that's the Panono explorer edition. So you can for example throw it to take a picture, throw it in the air, and it took a picture. Or you can also put it on a stick, push it in, turn it and now you have it on a stick and you can trigger it with the button on the stick."

The photo is automatically stitched together by a cloud service provided by Panono - and the resulting picture is a 360 degree view of the world.

With the advent of live streaming online through services like Periscope and Meerkat, more and more people are walking around with their smartphones in the air streaming their walk to work, their lunch or anything else that someone might find interesting.

But the video and audio quality is often poor, something that Olloclip is hoping to change.

Steve Muttram, chief operating officer of Olloclip, explains the studio system.

"So this is our studio system, studio case. Olloclip is a manufacturer as mobile photography accessories, predominately lenses, for the last four years its all been about lenses, and making them easy, fun creative. With the advent of new technology, such as periscope and more people doing live broadcast on their iPhones, using our lenses, we decided we would try and see if people would really like a case to help them with that."

Another company aiming to improve video quality across the world is Removu.

The company claims its camera stabiliser is the world's "first raiNPRoof 3-axis gimbal for GoPro cameras, equipped with a Bluetooth remote control."

So maybe a ball camera will be the next big thing.

But the reality is that most start-ups struggle to make it big, despite there being plenty of available support.

Editor of MobileGeeks news website Nicole Scott estimates that some five percent of the start-ups will stand out.

"Venture capitalists have too much money right now and they are just making it rain on the startups. So there is just a lot of startups coming up right now that are just looking for money, and they have a lot of it. So, I think maybe 5 percent of them will actually succeed. But if they succeed they are going to make it big."

The IFA trade show runs through until September 9.

For CRI, I'm Luo Bin.