Martin Källström
knowledge / projects

Narrative Clip 1

The Narrative Clip 1 — born as the Memoto camera on Kickstarter in October 2012 — was a postage-stamp-sized, 5-megapixel wearable that clipped to a shirt and took a photo automatically every 30 seconds, with no shutter, no viewfinder, and no off switch beyond removing it or turning it face-down (kickstarter-com ↗, petapixel-com ↗). It shipped to backers in late 2013 after nearly a year of delays, retailed at $279 in white, gray, and orange, and by the time production stopped had been built in exactly 25,000 units (techcrunch-com ↗, ▶ 19:48). Reviewers were consistently torn on it — genuinely charmed by the idea of an automatic photographic memory, consistently let down by grainy low-light photos, a narrow field of view, and a battery that rarely matched the spec sheet (wired-com ↗, cnet-com ↗) — while the device itself became a small, contested object in the culture's early argument about wearable cameras, privacy, and what "always recording" should look like. For the company-level story — funding, the Memoto→Narrative rebrand, the 2016 bankruptcy — see Narrative.

Specs at a glance

Inside the box: engineering under real constraints

The GPS antenna's echo chamber. The team's first GPS antenna was a 2×3mm design etched directly onto the PCB — flawless on the bench. Sealed inside the actual camera casing, the metal shell turned into a resonant echo chamber and killed the signal outright. Swedish antenna specialists were brought in to redesign around a wire antenna, and components were shuffled iteratively across the board until the interference cleared. slashgear-com ↗, allthingsd-com ↗

A camera built around a 6.5-year-old sensor. Answering a question on how startups choose hardware, Martin explained the choice is less about the best spec on paper than what a small company can actually source and get supported. The Clip 1's image sensor was already about five years old when design started in 2012, and roughly 6.5 years old by ship date — a technology-access penalty he said only eased once Narrative became a recognized brand able to reach newer components. ▶ 37:45

The software: turning random photos into "moments"

Two photos a minute, all day, produces something closer to raw material than a photo album — Narrative's answer was a cloud pipeline that clustered roughly 2,000 daily images into 20–30 "moments" per day using light, color, and GPS signals, then surfaced one representative photo per segment. fastcompany-com ↗, slashgear-com ↗

Designing an honest camera

Solving the third-eye problem. Early prototypes centered the lens on the device, which testers instinctively read as an eye — people found it distracting and some avoided conversation with whoever was wearing it. The team's fix was to shift the lens into a top corner, which read as far less confrontational and was "much more pleasing to people." ▶ 21:38, fastcompany-com ↗

That single redesign carried the whole philosophy behind the object: a circular, centered-lens prototype had actually been chosen first because it made recording obviously visible and hard to disguise as covert surveillance — the eye problem was an unintended side effect of trying to be honest, not of trying to hide. The corner-lens rounded-square that shipped kept a silver ring around the lens deliberately styled after the iPhone 4 (and, for Clip 2, the iPhone 6) specifically so bystanders would recognize it as a camera on sight. fastcompany-com ↗

From Kickstarter to shelf: a year of delays

Memoto's $50,000 Kickstarter closed at $550,189 in November 2012 — full story at Narrative — but shipping the camera took nearly a year longer than promised. An original February–March 2013 delivery slipped repeatedly: a chip-installation error pushed it from February to April, the company spent that spring rewriting software and re-engineering the GPS antenna, and the Memoto→Narrative rebrand (forced by a Motorola trademark dispute) landed in the middle of it. nbcnews-com ↗, gizmodo-com ↗

The reviews: charmed by the idea, frustrated by the object

Coverage split cleanly in two: genuine warmth for what the Clip was trying to do, and consistent disappointment in the photos it actually produced.

Leo Laporte's secret month with the Clip. On his TWiT.tv show, Laporte revealed he'd quietly worn a Narrative Clip on his shirt for four weeks and no one on the show had noticed. Paging through his own photo stream on air, he was visibly let down — his belly kept the camera permanently tilted toward the ceiling instead of what was in front of him, and the shots themselves struck him as dull. He called the always-recording concept potentially "worse than Google Glass" on privacy, gave the Clip a hard "don't buy" on price and image quality, and said so alongside genuine praise for Narrative's founders and real gratitude that he'd backed the Kickstarter. ▶ 23:09

Living with the camera: privacy in practice

Privacy wasn't bolted on after the fact — Martin built the case for it point by point against Google Glass: Glass streamed to the web by default, risking an accidentally-public bathroom moment, while the Clip stored everything to a private diary with publication requiring an explicit, conscious choice each time. ▶ 26:07

Five years of wearing it. Martin himself wore the Clip on and off for roughly five years and was asked to turn it off only twice in that whole span — far fewer than he expected. He theorized Google Glass provoked stronger reactions partly because it felt rude to ask someone to remove their glasses, whereas unclipping a small camera felt socially normal. ▶ 19:27

Arthur Guy's review arc. A backer's own video review traced the same emotional path in miniature: delight unboxing a nicely packaged camera, then friction — GPS that didn't work indoors, gigabyte-scale daily files with no wireless sync, a wearing position that pointed the lens down when seated and up when standing, never quite forward. That gave way to real discomfort: his girlfriend refused to be in the same room while he wore it, and he acknowledged the device could "really freak people out" even while defending it as fundamentally personal-use technology. ▶ 2:07, ▶ 8:55

End of the line: 25,000 units

From 25,000 units to a succession of tens. Asked what happened after the Kickstarter-funded first product shipped, Martin revealed the first-generation Clip was manufactured in exactly 25,000 units before the company closed the line down and moved to Clip 2. He framed hardware startups as moving from an R&D phase into a sales-driven one, sketching an implicit roadmap in orders of magnitude — 25,000 for generation one, ideally 250,000 for generation two, 2.5 million for generation three — with no clean line marking when that transition actually happens. ▶ 19:48

Worth remembering