Lifelogging will quickly become a big business

“We want to give people the perfect camera memory,” says Martin Källström, CEO of Memoto. His startup is creating a tiny camera that clips onto clothing, snaps a picture every 30 seconds, and captures whatever you’re looking at, then uses algorithms to sort through the pile of photos to find the most interesting bits.

It's an unassuming plastic camera measuring 36mm by 36mm by 9mm, but it packs a lot of punch inside, most importantly a 5-megapixel image sensor originally designed for cell phones.

An ARM9 processor running the Linux operating system powers a program that wakes the device twice a minute to take a picture and a reading using the GPS sensor, accelerometer and magnetic counter, then immediately puts the device back to sleep.

Later that day, you get home, plug your camera into your computer, and download your photos. If you like, that's the end of the process. But if you subscribe to the company's cloud storage service, things get more interesting. The photos are fed into a photo-processing algorithm that starts sifting through your day's events. The photos are grouped according to their dominant color, and then "we generate a graph that shows how the color changes throughout the day," says Kastrum, whose 17-person company is based in Linköping, Sweden.

The process turns your photos into "moments" - 30 to 35 things that happened during the day. They appear as a collection on a smartphone app or on the web. The hours you spend sitting in front of your computer become a moment: a short coffee break. Each moment is captured as a single photo with great clarity and color - and if possible, with people in the frame. "It makes you see the good parts of the day and hides the boring parts."

Costrum believes it’s this smart filtering system that makes the Memoto more than just a camera. He calls it a “life-documenting” device — one that helps people remember what they’ve seen and experienced, and even leave a record for posterity. “I’d love to be able to say in my will what I want to be able to see in my life record,” Costrum says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ​​an easy way to document life.”

Kostrum, a 37-year-old software developer, came up with the concept of Memoto in 2011 and started working on it full-time the following year. Together with his partner Oskar Kalmaru and product designer Björn Wesén, the team raised $550,189 from the public through Kickstarter last fall. They promised to give a camera to anyone who donated more than $279 at a time.

That's a lot more than the $50,000 they'd expected. "We realized we had to make more cameras," Kostrum said, with typical Swedish understatement. He said that despite some unexpected delays in developing and producing the camera, he expects the first batch of 5,000 cameras to arrive from Taiwan, where they are assembled, later this year.

Life logging is quickly becoming a big business as consumers adopt wearable self-tracking devices such as Nike's FuelBand, a bracelet that measures movement and estimates calories burned. Sharing photos on services such as Instagram or Facebook can also be seen as a way to log your life. "It's already mainstream," says Costrum.

Many big technology companies are considering how to use wearable devices to collect more personal data. Google, for example, is testing a head-worn computer that can shoot video.

Recording devices like the Memoto are bound to challenge social norms and raise new privacy questions. When does your recording of your life intrude on someone else's territory? "It's still a little weird in a social sense," said Stephen Wolfram, creator of the software Mathematica, who has been testing a prototype of the Memoto since March. He added: "I'm not entirely sure what to do with the data, but it does generate a lot of data."

Over a 16-hour day, the camera snaps 2,000 photos, creating a roughly 2GB file (the machine has 8GB of flash memory). When he reviews the photos, Wolfram says, he can see the name tags of people at the conference whose names he had forgotten. “I can see things that I didn’t notice when I was actually there.”

Memoto is designed to automatically stop taking photos when it is removed and placed on a flat surface or in a dark place such as a pocket. Costrum admits that there are times when it might be better to leave it at home. "Technology forces us to make new ethical judgments," he said.

The company's business model is to sell the machine and charge about $8 a month to store the photos online. "It's probably a lot like the mirror in your bathroom," Costrum said. "You look at it in the morning and learn a little more about yourself."

via: techreviewchina