ShotSpotter has recently announced its ~$9m of funding and system for locating the origin of a gunshot. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle describes a potential trial of the technology to help prevent homicides in Oakland. Readers of the Chronicle are split on whether the system would save lives or be a half million dollar waste of funds.

The ShotSpotter system is nothing new. Vanderbilt University has shown a very accurate sniper location system that they had tested for urban warfare use. As part of the same DARPA project that originally funded the Moteiv founders when we were at Berkeley, the Shooter Localization project at Vanderbilt achieved accuracy of less than 1 meter in 3-dimensions, compared with 10 meter accuracy in the ShotSpotter system.

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