Tucked away in Stockholm's snow-covered Old Town, about half a dozen engineers with tech startup Memoto are making the final tweaks to the world's smallest, wearable camera.
Oskar Kalmaru, the firm's co-founder and marketing director, meets me outside in the frozen slush and invites me into the company's apartment-style office. He offers a round, Swedish sponge cake to mark the last day before the country's pseudo-secular celebration of Lent.
Kalmaru and his co-founders have built a device that could change the way people reflect and remember things. From the moment it is turned right-side up and uncovered, Memoto's camera takes a constant stream of 5-megapixel shots, every two seconds. It costs $280 plus a monthly subscription fee for server space.
By the end of each day, it will take 2,000 photos on average, and automatically upload them to Memoto's Amazon-hosted servers when it is charged via USB. Once the photos have been uploaded, they can be viewed through a mobile app. Till then, the camera itself has 8 GB of memory, which is about two-days worth of photos; its battery also lasts two days.
This whole idea might seem outrageous to privacy advocates and slightly creepy to everyone else, but the device has struck a chord. Last November Memoto raised more than $550,000 in a Kickstarter funding round that was 10 times over subscribed. Now its founders are racing to get its device ready to ship, having delayed shipping by more than a month to early April, from late February.
The reason: a supplier wrongly placed a chip in the device. Now that it's being reset, Kalmaru and other managers are testing the first "handful" of cameras. They are expecting another 20 from Taiwanese manufacturer Yomura next week, then another 100 in a few weeks for additional testing. Then comes the final batch of thousands to send around the world.
So how goes the initial testing? Kalmaru, who was the third person to come on board the company, says he is surprised at how easily he has become accustomed to wearing it throughout the day. Other people he meets also get used to it quickly, he claims. In a meeting, someone might ask what the camera is, "and after a few minutes it's all forgotten."
Memoto represents a development in how we document the world around us, a trend known as lifelogging. A few others companies like MeCam and (to some extent) GoPro, are capitalizing on it. More broadly, they are part of a series of new companies like the mobile app Snapchat, who are redefining the very role of photographs. Instead of capturing photos to flaunt to friends on
Looking back on a day's photos, which are automatically divided by the app into "moments" depending on light and composition, becomes an exercise in contemplation and could even be memory enhancing. The app displays each moment as a long film roll that users can scroll back and forth on, or watch as a time-lapse video.
Whether people would use this for work or pleasure differs from day to day. "I was out with friends for dinner last night and it was nice the morning after to relive the moment," Kalmaru says. He sees only a tiny fraction of Memoto photos making it onto social networks.
Marketing coordinator Joselyn Nussbaum recently made a thoughtful case for the device on Memoto's blog:
A few weeks ago, I had one of those Perfect Life Moments while walking on the beach with my family. We were spending a weekend away from home, engaging in the activities that typically revolve around eating, drinking, and being merry. I was so caught up in the sun, sand, and company that I completely forgot to pause and snap some photos – and was duly disappointed when I realized that my already-fading memories would serve as the sole testament to the fact that I was there and did those things. Even if I had bothered to capture a shot or two, I ran the risk of altering the mood of the environment. We’re all neurotic narcissists when the camera emerges, and this often turns a candid moment into a manufactured memory. I couldn’t help but think how convenient it would’ve been if some omnipotent (yet invisible) observer had been trailing me all weekend and documenting my experience."
Memoto says its device can capture moments that you can't predict will be important, such as meeting a future spouse, or the last days with a loved one before their death. There's also the lure of legacy. Kalmaru says he has a two-year old son who can now look back on a whole life (his own, or his father's) because it will be constantly recorded.
There are functional cases too. Kalmaru recently wore one of the cameras in a grocery store, and after failing to find a product he was looking for inside, saw it sitting on the shelf while looking through the photos later that night.
These sorts of field tests are crucial to finally put some real-world feedback into a device who's theoretical, life-changing potential can get a little ahead of itself.
It's why the Memoto team is scrambling to iron out kinks in the iOS and Android app, also due for release in early April. The app has a clean-cut interface, a little like Instagram's, and GPS tracking sees it zoom into a map at the bottom after selecting a "moment."
Memoto isn't releasing examples of the photos it takes yet, but from what I can see from a demo with Kalmaru, still shots come out crisp and well defined, though a little washed out in terms of color. The bigger problem is with movement, of which there is a lot when you're wearing this camera. Among the still photos of someone sitting on a bench at an airport, or an upward view of a man reading a newspaper on a train, there are multiple images of blurry streaks of light or fuzzy, diagonal commuters.
"This is something that will improve before launch," Kalmaru says, referring to tweaks Memoto is making to the device's Omnivision camera sensor.
Where did the idea for this come from? Original founder Martin Kallstrom says that years ago he tried keeping a journal with an SLR camera and a diary. He couldn't keep up either one. Once he had kids, Kallstrom wondered whether there was a way to document life automatically. He started looking at lifelogging, which has been around for a few decades.
Despite the array of enthusiasts like Bell, Kallstrom couldn't find any devices that used the latest micro controllers and other mobile technology to lifelog. "Grasping that opportunity and turning it into a business became Memoto," he says.
Since then he has raised a few thousand euros from the local Swedish government, 500,000 euros from London venture capital firm Passion Capital, and more than $550,000 from Kickstarter and early pre-orders.
Now he and about 20 staff have to avoid burning through too much investment before finally shipping those cameras and becoming profitable. "We realized we really have to speed up production now we have this many backers," says Kalmaru, who looks eager to get back to work as we wrap up our meeting.
The next few months may be the busiest of his life. And it will all be on camera.
Follow me on Twitter: @Parmy
