Martin Källström - Memoto - LeWeb London 2013

[00:00:06] Speaker A: Back to startups and products with Memoto. Martin Källström is the founder of Memoto, who is based in Stockholm, and he's going to show us the world's smallest lifelogging camera, which definitely would create some effect, I guess, with Larry's participants, because it takes a picture every 10, 20, or 30 seconds.

[00:00:31] Speaker B: Hi.

[00:00:32] Speaker A: I'm not sure exactly. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we should— I'm sorry, I'm a little confused. We should have Martin and then we'll have Ingrid. Let's do that. Are you ready to have Martin now? Okay, so let's have Martin now and do the Memoto presentation. How are you, Martin?

[00:00:58] Speaker B: Hi, David.

[00:00:58] Speaker A: Welcome.

[00:00:59] Speaker B: Hi. I'm Martin Källström. I'm the CEO of Memoto. I

[00:01:26] Speaker B: want to tell you a story about How you can create an idea that captures the world's imagination. Loïc and Géraldine invited me here because they wanted me to show what Memoto is, but I also want to talk about how you can create an idea like this and make it a reality. And I want to talk about how

[00:01:51] Speaker B: the Hunger Games of entrepreneurship is how you come up with ideas that work in the market. This is the Memoto lifelogging camera. It has a GPS inside and a 5-megapixel sensor that takes a photo every 30 seconds. Probably

[00:02:19] Speaker B: all of us in here Struggle to find out who we really are and how to best live our lives. Many of us have kids that grow up far too quickly, and some of us have relatives or parents or friends that we've lost far too early. It seems the moments we spend with the people we love

[00:02:45] Speaker B: always fade far too quickly in our memories. We asked ourselves, what if we create a true photographic memory? What if we build a wearable camera small enough to never be in the way and smart enough to capture your life as you live it? With

[00:03:10] Speaker B: the Memoto camera and app, your life every day or the special days are captured in photos, and your, your location as well, to make those photos possible to organize and search and share. Current technology doesn't

[00:03:36] Speaker B: allow a battery this small to upload 2,000 photos a day to the cloud. So that is why the photos are stored on the camera, and when you charge the battery, the photos are uploaded to the cloud. Thank

[00:04:03] Speaker B: you. When the photos are uploaded, they're analyzed on our servers by algorithms that determine what were the events during the day and what are the important

[00:04:28] Speaker B: keyframes you can identify that exemplify what you did during the day. So this is the Memoto app. And these photos currently show in a timeline the keyframes of today and yesterday and the day before and so on. If I tap into one of these keyframes, it will show me

[00:04:53] Speaker B: the full sequence of photos. This is the cab drive from my hotel to LeWeb this morning. I can scrub through them, or I can hit the play button to get a slideshow playing. This is my evening at the pub yesterday, and

[00:05:21] Speaker B: we Sweden We Swedish people, we are very sociable, but whenever we are abroad, we tend to flock with our own kind. We never meet with strangers. We just spend time with other Swedes. And looking through my day yesterday, I can see that it was filled with media interviews. I didn't get to see a single

[00:05:47] Speaker B: session yesterday, actually. These are photos captured by my daughter on her 9-year-old birthday party just a month ago. The photos she's taking with Memoto is captured from her own viewpoint,

[00:06:13] Speaker B: so instead of replacing her own memory, These moments, these photos, we keep her memories alive. If you're interested in Memoto, you can check it out on memoto.com. The issue of privacy was at the top of our list when we designed this product. We

[00:06:38] Speaker B: wanted to make the camera honest. In the sense that people should realize when they see it that it is a recording device. But we also wanted to make it subtle in the sense that it should convey that it is a camera, but it shouldn't be distracting once you realize that it's there. Our business model is

[00:07:04] Speaker B: not built on you being the product. You are the customer. The photos you capture with Memoto are yours, and they are stored encrypted in your private photographic journal. They are never shared with the public, and they're never accessible by anyone until you decide that you want to share them. Another

[00:07:30] Speaker B: example of how we think about privacy is that You shouldn't be forced to— people around you should be aware of if the camera is active or not. And if there is a small button with which you can turn the camera off, then people will not know if the camera is on or off. So

[00:07:56] Speaker B: the way we've solved that is that the only way to The way to take the camera— to switch the camera off is actually to take the camera off. So right now, when the camera is charging, it is off. If I put it in my pocket, it is off. But when I have it on, people around me know that it's capturing photos. If I walk into a dressing room, and there was a small button to switch off the camera, it

[00:08:22] Speaker B: will still be making people around me uncomfortable.

[00:08:25] Speaker A: Yes.

[00:08:30] Speaker B: We launched— we launched Memoto on Kickstarter this winter. We had a dinner with the team the day before the launch talking about our anticipation. We had set a goal on Kickstarter to raise $50,000, which was the minimum that we feel that we could go through with this. with this project. We

[00:08:56] Speaker B: have offices in both Linköping and Stockholm in Sweden, and I was staying at my sister's in Stockholm because I work at the Linköping office, and we had gathered the team in Stockholm. And I slept at my sister's place that night, and in the morning at 7 o'clock, I had set the alarm clock to wake up and to publish the Kickstarter page. And we had no idea what

[00:09:21] Speaker B: to expect, if this would be a success or a failure. There was no idea, no way to know beforehand. So I published the page, and after just a minute, I got an email saying that we had a backer on Kickstarter. And I thought to myself that it must be someone from the team because a

[00:09:48] Speaker B: minute is not quick enough to even look at the video we had put up. But then there came another backer and another, and it turns out that we actually reached our goal of $50,000 in only 5 hours. A month later, we had raised $500,000. On Kickstarter. And now since then,

[00:10:13] Speaker B: we've had pre-orders of another half a million dollars on our website on memoto.com. Since then, we also had hundreds and hundreds of news articles all over the world. We have been doing radio appearances, we've been doing TV appearances. When we were at South by, people were coming up to to us saying that we were the talk of the town. The

[00:10:44] Speaker B: moment you realize that you are onto something is when you go from, as an entrepreneur, going around pitching your idea to people, you go from that to a new way of life where you go around and people come up to you and pitch your idea to you, that have heard about your idea and are

[00:11:09] Speaker B: so excited about it that they have to tell you their version of how it's going to transform their life. When we were on the train from Stansted to London last spring, we had a couple of prototypes of the Memoto camera on the table at the train, and the train conductor passes by, and he sees the prototypes on the table, and he says, what

[00:11:34] Speaker B: is that? And he actually sits down with us for 5 minutes talking about the Memoto camera, and in the end, he says, you need to show this to my employer, Greater Anglia. This would transform my life. Every day, or at least every week, On the train back and forth from Stansted, I am harassed by someone. If I had this camera, it

[00:12:01] Speaker B: would not needlessly be about taking photos of people, but just being able to point to it and say, I have a camera here, and I think they would leave me alone. And a man called me when he had heard about Memoto, saying, in my family, our son has autism, meaning that he cannot tell us in the evening what he did during the day because he

[00:12:26] Speaker B: cannot express himself with words. So we gave him a digital camera to have in his backpack, and when he every once in a while brought home a photo of his day, that was the moment when we could have a conversation that every family takes for granted, the conversation about what the child kids did in school, did during the day, how they played with their friends. But in

[00:12:51] Speaker B: reality, he never takes a photo. With Memoto, my son could start expressing what his life is like. We could share his life. There was a man leaving a comment on a YouTube video about Memoto, and this is what he wrote: Being a black man in America, he wrote, means

[00:13:18] Speaker B: that this is what Memoto would do for me. I imagine a scenario that happens to me every once in a while where a police officer comes up to me for no apparent reason saying, son, where were you this time yesterday? And in this scenario, scenario, I would pick up my phone, show my Memoto photos, saying, well, officer,

[00:13:45] Speaker B: I was at my sister's place playing video games. And he writes, boom, life transformed. It is not only a privacy issue with cameras. is also an expression of freedom of speech. Sometimes you really do have the right to take someone's picture without

[00:14:11] Speaker B: their consent. If someone is stealing your bike or harassing you, then by all means take their photo with whatever device you have available. So now I'd like to spend a couple of minutes as well talking about how we came up with the idea of Memoto and how you could do the same. There

[00:14:38] Speaker B: are 4 things you need to create a successful business. First, you need the idea, and this is how you create an idea that can really capture the mind— minds of people and the imagination of the world. You don't strive to create one idea, You actually need a multitude of ideas that exist simultaneously

[00:15:03] Speaker B: in your mind. What we did with Memoto was that we had not only the idea of Memoto, but a huge spreadsheet of business ideas. And you create all those ideas because you want them to fight each other. You make your life and your mind into a battlefield of ideas. You want the ideas to hate each other so much, so they want to kill each

[00:15:28] Speaker B: other. And you don't pick an idea to build a business upon until it is the victor of that battle. Not until every other idea is dead, and there's one idea left that stands on top of the hill, bloody and sweaty and heaving from the battle and saying, I'm

[00:15:54] Speaker B: the winner. And that idea has to be strong enough to capture your mind completely. When you have that idea, everything you read appears to be about that idea. Everything you see, everything you talk about appears to have a connection to that idea. You cannot think about anything else, you cannot talk to people about anything else,

[00:16:20] Speaker B: and that's when you feel— that's when you start a business. You also need to have a team. And as an entrepreneur, you often feel invincible. I can do everything. I'm a software developer, and I'm a marketing genius, and I know how to build a company. But no one will buy that, and

[00:16:45] Speaker B: it's not true. So you need a team to help you with that. And the 3 things I pointed out is exactly what you need. You need technology, you need experience from engineers to build the— to build the product that you envision, and you may need marketing geniuses that can help you get the word out. And

[00:17:12] Speaker B: then you need help or knowledge on how to build a successful organization that can work efficiently. You also need to create a market for yourself. And there's a really, really easy way to get people excited about your product and to know about your product and to talk about your product. And

[00:17:38] Speaker B: the way you do that is that you get everybody to talk about it, to talk about your idea at the same time. So you work in multiple channels. It's not about Facebook or Twitter or blogs or marketing or PR. It's about everything, all of those. Working in unison. So the day we launched— and what happened the day we launched

[00:18:03] Speaker B: on Kickstarter was that we had already 9 tech blogs that had written an article about Memoto that published them the moment we published our Kickstarter page. We had a Facebook event set up with 2,500 participants waiting for our Kickstarter page to be published. We had a mailing

[00:18:28] Speaker B: list of both journalists and enthusiasts wanting to hear about the news about our launch. And the day we released all that, everybody saw in all their channels, on Twitter, on Facebook, in their blogs, that everybody was talking about Memoto. And that's how you create attention Because that's the moment when someone, one individual, sees the

[00:18:54] Speaker B: same thing mentioned, something that is new to him mentioned in every channel that he reads. That's when he starts to talk about it himself, and that's when the channels fill with the messages of your company. Lastly, what you need is colorful socks. You cannot go around the world

[00:19:19] Speaker B: with black or white socks or boring socks. You need to have some joy in your life as well. So with the Memoto app and the camera, We feel that we can provide

[00:19:46] Speaker B: value for people. And this is really how you should think about your business as well. You should think about how to create value, not about how to create success. Before— because So if you manage to create success without value, what have you really

[00:20:11] Speaker B: accomplished? But if you create value but are not very successful, then you still have created something. This is how we think, and this is how I hope that everybody thinks about their business. Thank you very much. Thank you, Martin.

[00:20:37] Speaker A: Thank you, Martin. You can leave it here if you like, because I'd like one of them.

[00:20:41] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:20:43] Speaker A: I like it. It's very cool. It's great to see European startups creating new, new products.