Perth-based Cycliq is the brainchild of cyclist Kingsley Fiegert, who found himself the victim of an unprovoked slingshot attack whilst on a ride in the Perth hills.
Having nearly come off his bike at 50km/h, luckily having only a bruise from the ball bearing to show for it, he was left feeling exasperated that there was no way to hold these people accountable for what had happened.
On the back of this experience, and also having an appreciation for the limited real-estate on a bicycle, the idea of a combination bicycle camera and light was born.
After wildly successful Kickstarter campaigns to get the product development underway, the company grew steadily, culminating in an ASX debut in late 2016.
Cycliq‘s rear-facing camera and light, the Fly6, mounts to a riders seat post, and is now on its third generation. In response to overwhelming public demand, Cycliq has subsequently released its first-generation forward-facing product, the Fly12 (which mounts to a bicycle’s handlebars), in April 2016.
With a new corporate philosophy, the company has been building the Cycliq brand, expanding its global distribution channels, and developing their partnerships, including building corporate sponsorship programs with such global names as Ridley Bikes and Caleb Ewan.
It has also focused on improving their supply chain, evidenced by their formation of a joint venture partnership with a Hong Kong based manufacturer with aims to securing the long term viability of the company.
The company has recently announced the coming release of new Fly6 and Fly12 devices, adding to their growing product line-up. These re-engineered devices are the result of customer lead improvements, and the evolution of technology used in their manufacture.
They’re highly functional yet simple and affordable, and from what the company is saying about the new generation devices, expect them to be smaller, lighter and brighter.
While the devices sound simple enough – camera with a light – the tech involved in having these little devices work when needed most is impressive.
Cycliq is fundamentally a tech business, and they talk of four pillars for their product engineering of the Fly products: video, light, battery and device utility.
The video function needs to be able to capture cycling-related incidents. The lights need to light the way for cyclists and be seen by other road, path or trail users. The batteries need to be small, light and work extra hard to ensure the video and lights last longer than a cyclist’s best ride – we’re talking about hours and hours’ worth of battery being available.
As for device utility, the tech needs to work together under all sorts of conditions.
The cameras operate with Footage Looping technology, meaning that you never run out of space on your memory card – when the microSD card fills up, the old footage is simply over-written with new footage.
However, in the event of an incident, Incident Protection technology protects the footage of the incident so that you can use it for a police report, or any sort of action required.
They have also developed a clever new mounting system which makes the products really easy to install on bikes, and adaptable for use with other cycling devices like a Garmin.
Given all of the different types of bikes around the world, they’ve also been working hard on developing different mounting systems – this is a big part of the company’s product development work.
The company has quite a social following globally, with content generated by those who use the Fly12 and Fly6 shared among the community.
What the cameras also pick up along the way can be hilarious, and this is one of the strengths of the company – its ability to generate followers and users with user-generated content that comes from the thousands of the units around the world.
These are clever devices that have worldwide appeal, as can be seen in their recent market announcement. More than 80% of their sales are outside of Australia and the sales grew by 52% QoQ.
They may well become the go-to product for cyclists, changing road behaviour forever. That’s a good Australian tech story!
