When Martin Källström took to the internet to raise money for his start-up Memoto, little did he think he would get $250,000 in a single day. The Swedish entrepreneur wanted to develop a life-logging camera, a tiny clip-on camera that could document a user's life on the go. He created a campaign on crowdfunding site Kickstarter hoping to raise $50,000. Within 24 hours, $250,000 had poured in from people around the world and by the time his campaign came to an end, he had raised more than $550,000.
That was November 2012. Two years and one name change later, his idea is a reality. The business, now called Narrative, has sold more than 10,000 of its wearable cameras, which retail at $229. "I lost both my parents to cancer. When I looked at the photo albums I saw we were always happy and smiling. I wished we had some ordinary everyday photos too," Kallstrom says. "I wanted to create the world's first truly wearable camera, one that could take photos but allow the wearer to participate in life," he adds.
He says people have their phones and cameras out constantly, taking photos at parties, concerts and other events which can be annoying and distracting. Wearable cameras are a potential solution to this.
The Narrative Clip is a tiny, automatic camera with a storage capacity of 4,000 pictures and has battery life for two days of use. It is designed to be worn on the person and can be clipped on to a lapel or neck of a T-shirt or sweater.
It works with an app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory. “The camera takes two photos a minute all the time. You can also double tap the camera to take a photo out of sequence. It is the first camera in the world which has no buttons. There isn’t even an on/off button.”
“Some people are memory collectors taking photos for themselves. Some are social sharers. We realised we had to make a camera but also an online storage service,” he says.
But what about privacy concerns? Källström says the camera has no buttons, not even an on/off switch, to get users into the habit of taking it off and putting it away at inappropriate times, such as when they enter a gym changing room.
To recharge the batteries, the user simply connects the camera to their computer. At the same time, it will automatically upload all the photos. The camera also has a GPS chip so you can see where the photos were taken.
Källström, who also founded blog search engine Twingly, says the Narrative team has raised a further $12 million in venture capital funding since the original Kickstarter campaign three years ago. “We did a series B funding round in September which raised $8 million.”
The company, which employs 35 people, changed its name from Memoto to Narrative in October last year.
