Memoto logs your life in pictures (#FMT @ #qseu13)

[00:00:13] Speaker A: Hi. Hi, welcome. Please, could you tell me who you are and why you're here?

[00:00:22] Speaker B: Thank you. I'm Niklas Johansson. I work at Memoto, and I'm here at the Quantified Self conference to learn about this domain. I've never been at a conference before. I know the movement of Quantified Self, and I've visited events in Sweden where I come from.

[00:00:41] Speaker A: And, well, you say it's your first conference. I see you wear this device, so you work in the field. What does Memoto do?

[00:00:52] Speaker B: So Memoto is developing a lifelogging camera, which is what I'm wearing a very early prototype of.

[00:00:59] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:01:00] Speaker B: And with the camera that takes pictures automatically every 30 seconds, we also develop an app and a cloud service. So as a user, you won't have to manage your data, but you'll get it presented very simply in a way that everyone can use and everyone can do lifelogging.

[00:01:21] Speaker A: Yeah, and what could be the use? Why would you want to log your life like that? Why would I want 30-second photos of myself?

[00:01:31] Speaker B: Yeah, as you're saying, you'll get a lot of photos, about 2,000 per day. And what we do when we capture without intention is we might capture the things that we don't recognize as valuable moments or special moments when they're happening, but we can see them in retrospect and look at them as memories or augment our memories with these photos. So

[00:01:57] Speaker B: it could be people that we meet for the first time and we didn't know that they were special then, or they were going to be special then, or we meet people for the last time and we didn't know that it was the last time then.

[00:02:07] Speaker A: Yes.

[00:02:08] Speaker B: Or it could also be used to In this Quantified Self setting, since we also stamp every photo with GPS and other data, you can look at your behavioral patterns and do some analytics if you're into that.

[00:02:27] Speaker A: But won't it take a lot of time to look back at them and to analyze them?

[00:02:32] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. If you would use it and just get the 2,000 pictures or so every day, it would be Yeah, because how much time would it take? Yeah, and that's where our software comes in, because we are actually dividing these 2,000 or so pictures per day into groups of photos, and we will present you with a timeline with one representative

[00:02:58] Speaker B: image per moment. So you will have a timeline of maybe 20 or so keyframes per day. So you will see what the gist of the day was by browsing through those.

[00:03:12] Speaker A: So you look at the pictures and you see, ah, this is when I was at the café, and then you get behind that frame, you get like 100 photos of that.

[00:03:21] Speaker B: Exactly, you can watch them as a time-lapse movie inside.

[00:03:26] Speaker A: But still the question is, do you think people want to use this? Would people like this?

[00:03:34] Speaker B: Yeah, so the Memoto actually launched via a Kickstarter campaign last fall, from October. And we hoped to get a response, like you're saying. We wanted to find out, is this something people are gonna like? And the campaign went well.

[00:03:53] Speaker A: How much money did you raise?

[00:03:54] Speaker B: We raised 10 times as much, or 11 times as much as we wanted to, which was $550,000. So we got an answer to that question. Yes, people do want to do this.

[00:04:07] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:04:08] Speaker B: And we've been talking to all of these thousands of people all through the campaign and after that and before that through this Quantified Self community. And we're absolutely seeing that this is something people are already doing on their own, taking lots of photos with using Instagram or Facebook to share them. You can do that with this one too, but

[00:04:33] Speaker B: these are photos for your own use.

[00:04:37] Speaker A: Yeah, so was this device— well, did it start out as a quantified self instrument, or is it something you later found?

[00:04:49] Speaker B: Well, Martin, our CEO and founder, Martin Källström, I actually visited Quantified Self conferences and events a bit before—

[00:04:58] Speaker A: Before you came up with the idea? Yeah.

[00:05:01] Speaker B: So it absolutely has part of its roots in the domain of analyzing numbers and so on. But what we want to do is to humanize this lifelogging activity and make it more about emotions and memories and people.

[00:05:18] Speaker A: So it's still in the prototype phase, I think. When do you expect it to be on the market?

[00:05:25] Speaker B: Yeah, we've had to push our release date a few times because we're building a pretty complex product of hardware, software, backend apps and everything. So right now we don't have a hard ETA. We're hoping to get it out before summer's end, but it could be later than that too.

[00:05:48] Speaker A: Yeah, because it is difficult— well, the photographs is probably quite easy, Quite an easy bit, but I guess the algorithm to divide it in events is quite complex.

[00:06:01] Speaker B: Yeah, both the hardware— there's a lot of technology in this. We have the accelerometer, the magnetometer, and other data and GPS besides the photos themselves.

[00:06:15] Speaker A: Are you thinking of expanding what it can do even beyond that? Because I can imagine if you take the photographs and you combine it with other vital statistics like heartbeat or blood pressure and things like that, that it can tell you things.

[00:06:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm just starting to learn about Quantified Self more. We did produce a documentary about lifelogging and lifeloggers interviewing many of these people that are here that you can watch at lifeloggersmovie.com. And we absolutely see the benefits of correlating data. Not every user will be about the numbers and figures and

[00:06:57] Speaker B: analytics, but we can enrich the photo data with both numerical data and maybe emotional and subjective data, such as just commenting on your own moments and writing notes.

[00:07:13] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:07:14] Speaker B: correlating with your calendar or with an Instagram photo. So in the future, we will be a lot about integrating with other services.

[00:07:23] Speaker A: Yeah, but first you have to get it out.

[00:07:25] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:07:25] Speaker A: So do you really imagine that in like 5 years' time everyone will wear a thing like this?

[00:07:32] Speaker B: Well, I don't think we can anticipate such a response just from the data we have now. It's probably gonna be popular. The reactions we see are of the kind that are strong emotional reactions. A lot of people love this, and a lot of people are also very wary of this. But this tells

[00:07:57] Speaker B: us that this is going to be big.

[00:08:01] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:08:03] Speaker B: And what you're maybe alluding to is the societal impact if everyone is Yeah. So not everyone will use this. But the fact is that you don't only log your own life, but you have other people in your photos.

[00:08:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

[00:08:23] Speaker B: And well, that's actually one theme of today and that we're going to talk about later today, about the societal or the social protocol, like a social code that will have to be naturally developed around this. The legal dimensions are one thing that I won't get into at all, but more about the social codes and

[00:08:49] Speaker B: how will we behave. A lot of times it will be natural for someone who wears this to put it away. This puts it in pause to show that, yeah, I'm respecting you if you're telling me or signaling to me that you're not comfortable with being photographed. So it's a mutual communication issue, really.

[00:09:14] Speaker A: So are you wearing it now all the time or just for this conference?

[00:09:19] Speaker B: Well, I've tried wearing it and we don't have battery life that allows constant wearing yet.

[00:09:31] Speaker A: So how long will the battery last?

[00:09:34] Speaker B: When it's done, it'll last 2 days of use.

[00:09:38] Speaker A: Okay.

[00:09:39] Speaker B: So you will be able to wear it all the time if you want to. But as I said, you will also put it in your pocket, put it on your table, not be entirely unaware that you're using it.

[00:09:52] Speaker A: So what about the response of people when they see— because I can imagine people At first not noticing, and then when they look at you close, they see, what is this thing?

[00:10:03] Speaker B: So the finished design of this will look way more like a camera than this does. So people will see that it is a camera.

[00:10:09] Speaker A: Okay.

[00:10:10] Speaker B: And yes, we will get lots of different types of responses, and as users, we will have to accommodate our use to our environment.

[00:10:24] Speaker A: Yeah. And the response you get?

[00:10:27] Speaker B: It's mostly, what an awesome thing, or, is this actually working? Or people are more excited than scared of it. But there's also been pretty deep discussions about—

[00:10:41] Speaker A: Privacy and—

[00:10:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

[00:10:46] Speaker A: And your thoughts? Well, you say if we have a code, it will be okay.

[00:10:51] Speaker B: Well, if we have a code, we will have a context to discuss the use of this. And we will more and more see sharp lines for when it's okay and when it's not okay. I mean, physically today it's possible to walk around with your phone and take photos everywhere.

[00:11:11] Speaker A: All the time. Yeah. So this is not much different, you say?

[00:11:16] Speaker B: It is and it isn't.

[00:11:19] Speaker A: Yeah, because it will constantly, without me noticing, take pictures all the time. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, we, we're looking forward to seeing it on the market and see what happens. Thank you very much.

[00:11:32] Speaker B: Thank you.