Rylo

360-degree cameras have been around for awhile, but it hasn’t been particularly obvious why a typical consumer would want to own one. Rylo has an answer. Its $499 pill-shaped camera captures a 360-degree sweep of the world around you, then lets you play camera operator after the fact, focusing the action on a particular spot or following a person or object as it moves through the scene.

Though Rylo is a hardware startup, its software--including an uncommonly elegant iPhone app--is a major component of what makes it distinctive. Its buttery image stabilization is software-based, and artificial intelligence technology lets it identify the elements in a video so it can track them.

This emphasis on software makes sense once you learn of Rylo’s pedigree: It was cofounded by veterans of the team that built Instagram’s Hyperlapse. That iPhone app itself incorporated advanced image stabilization and attracted plenty of attention when it was released in 2014.