LeWeb : Memoto Mori - capturing your whole life

What if you could capture your whole life as you live it? That’s the goal of Memoto. Martin Källström, Founder & CEO spoke at LeWeb London:

Many of us struggle to find out who we are. Our kids grow up too quickly, our loved ones are gone too soon. What if we build a true photographic memory? What if we build a camera small enough to capture you whole life?

The Memoto life logging camera has  GPS and a 5 megapixel sensor that takes a photo every 30 seconds, with the location captured, too. The battery isn’t powerful enough to allow all the photos to be uploaded to the cloud, so they’re stored and uploaded when you charge the camera. When the photos are uploaded they’re analysed by algorithms on their servers that identify the key moments of the day.

His day yesterday was filled with media interviews  – and he can see this through his stream. The photos his nine year old daughter takes are recorded from her perspective. She doesn’t end up replacing her memories with those of adults taking photos.

The camera is always on when it’s worn. That’s for social reasons. If there was an on/off switch people will suspect that it’s on when it’s off. This way, if someone walks into a changing room wearing one, you know she’s taking photos.

The speed with which they were funded on Kickstarter shows how much interest there is about it. They were on a Stanstead to London train last year, and the ticket inspector asked what the prototypes were, and ended up having five minute conversation about it. He thinks they’d be a great answer to harassment of train staff. An autistic son could share his life with his family better through this kind of tech. If you’re regularly questioned by police about where you were – the camera could prove your alibi.

There are freedom of speech issues as well as privacy issues. Sometimes you have the right to take a photo of someone else, even without their consent – when they’re stealing your bike, for example.

The battleground of ideas – and how to launch a company

The ideas you follow should be the one that emerges bloody and bruised from battle. When you find it, everything you read appears to be about that. You talk to everyone about it. That’s when you start a business.

You need a team. Sometimes you feel that you can do everything – but it’s not true, and nobody will buy it. You need technology, you need experience in build a product and you need marketing geniuses who will help you get the world out. It’s not about one channel. When they launched their Kickstarter, they had posts on tech blogs primed and ready to go. They had a Facebook event, they had contacts with journalists… They created buzz on every channel. When one person sees the same thing mentioned on every channel he reads, that’s when he starts talking about it himself.

And you need colourful socks. You need something beyond black and white socks – you need joy in life.