This camera is going to change the world

At the end of the first season of the HBO tech comedy "Silicon Valley," the characters turn up at a conference where one CEO after another stands up on a stage and insists that their company is "making the world a better place." But the reasons these imaginary entrepreneurs give are intensely niche and jargon-filled, bordering on nonsensical.

That's a pretty good send-up of the real-life tech industry: Everyone insists they're changing the world. But true innovations — the smartphone, the global internet, self-driving cars — are uncommon signals in all that noise.

Rajiv Laroia is the rare technologist who can offer a compelling argument that his product carries that revolutionary potential. As the chief technology officer at a camera startup called Light, he's created a camera promising never-before-seen quality and functionality with a footprint small enough to fit (maybe a bit uncomfortably) in your pocket.

Light announced its first camera, the L16, back in October. Described rather obtusely in a press release as the "first multi-aperture computational camera," the small company nonetheless received so many pre-orders for a $1,699 camera still in its prototype stage that they had to shut down the pre-order program.

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