Reading about FootfallCam, I can't shake the feeling that someone gave the project to a single, heavily inexperienced developer, the developer quit, and the manufacturer shipped the contents of that developer's home directory, as-is, as the final product. And the marketing was written before the product was developed, based on what they wanted the product to do, rather than what it actually did.
Looks to me like some developer somewhere made a RaspberryPI camera prototype and some dumb money ran with it creating a marketing campaign and getting the prototype in the market as if it were a complete solution.
There's an article over at TheRegister related to the FootFallCam saga: