Memoto, The Lifelogger

Thursday, October 25, 2012

301

Some people will hate this device; we love it. It’s a tiny, easy to wear, GPS-equipped 5MP camera that automatically takes a picture every 30 seconds. The picture gets geotagged and uploaded to a server for indefinite and limitless storage when you connect the device to a PC for a battery charge, thus creating a precise log of your life that you can revisit at anytime. Memoto does this as long as it has battery, and its small energy requirements means that this is a period of about two days. There are no buttons: it just takes pictures, tags them with GPS and orientation info (through its built-in accelerometer, so the pictures always come out upright), and uploads. And as long as you’re paying the small recurring fee for the service, you can access the timeline of your life, locate where you were, what you were doing, when, with who… A related application organizes the pictures for you, and groups them into “moments” that you can relive in a stop-motion type of animation. It’s. Just. Awesome.

Of course, there are privacy concerns. To address this, the uploaded pictures are encrypted, and only shared when you choose to do so. There’s also the creep factor. Well, the camera only turns off when you store it away in darkness, so your friends will know that as long as you’re wearing the Memoto, they may be photographed. This takes away the uncertainty that could come with some other similar devices, like Google Glass. If they really hate it, just put it away. As for the legality of it, the company says that as long as you’re not asked to stop taking pictures, it’s ok. We’re not so sure, but obviously there’s a context for everything. Don’t bring these to, say, a gentleman’s club.

It’s a Kickstarter project at the moment, and boy was it funded fast! Within 5 hours Memoto reached it’s goal. It’s now sitting at $243,000 after only asking for $50k. Clearly there’s a huge demand for this. There are still some places left on the second batch of devices at $249, though if you don’t get in on that, you’ll have to pay the full $279 expected retail price and wait until April. The 2nd batch has an expected delivery in March.