Narrative - Martin Kallström (June 19th 2014)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: So hey, this is Robin from Tech.eu. I'm here in Stockholm, Sweden, and I'm here with Martin from Narrative. Martin, can you quickly introduce yourself and the company?

[00:00:09] Speaker B: Hi, I'm the CEO of Narrative, Martin Källström. Narrative produces Narrative Clip, which is a wearable camera with an app that organizes the photos into a lifelog.

[00:00:21] Speaker A: Right, which is kind of what you see on the wall behind you, right?

[00:00:25] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so you get— actually, the camera takes all by itself 2 photos a minute. That will be during a full day about 2,000 photos. We organize those into a timeline where you can both get like the overview of your day or can go in depth and see every moment captured in photos.

[00:00:45] Speaker A: Do people really need 2,000 pictures of what they've done in a given day?

[00:00:49] Speaker B: Absolutely not. No, so that's why we bring out sort of the captured moments that we see might be important to you with the people you met, The events you experienced, the places you experienced. And it's not about getting many, many photos, it's about being able to go back to any point in time to remember, like get triggers for your own memory

[00:01:14] Speaker B: to see what did I do there, what was the restaurant, what people did I meet, what did we have for lunch yesterday, like, or just like for work or whatever it is.

[00:01:27] Speaker A: Right.

[00:01:28] Speaker B: enhance your memory, get a photographic memory of your day.

[00:01:32] Speaker A: So you've personally been an entrepreneur before, but always on the software side of things.

[00:01:37] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:01:37] Speaker A: So this is your first venture into the, you know, difficult world of— but exciting world of hardware. So how's that been so far?

[00:01:44] Speaker B: It's been a tremendous learning experience. I have the opportunity to work with one of the best camera engineers available in Europe. Björn Rosén came from Axis Communications to work with us. And that's been just tremendous to learn how to build actual hardware. There's so much involved with creating a physical product, and

[00:02:09] Speaker B: that's what drives me. I want to learn new stuff every day, and building hardware has allowed me to do that to a large extent.

[00:02:16] Speaker A: So what phase as a company, what phase are you in right now? What's the status?

[00:02:20] Speaker B: Right now we are just clearing our backlog of pre-orders, going into regular sales. We have a tremendous user community now with thousands of users actively using our product. We are recruiting people all the time. We added 8 people into the team, gonna add at least 20 more people into the team during the year.

[00:02:44] Speaker A: Right. So you've had a successful Kickstarter campaign, you've raised funding from investors in the US as well.

[00:02:51] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:02:52] Speaker A: You're shipping the product, so you're Turning into a real company, I assume you can say. And obviously you don't have to describe your whole roadmap, but what are some of the things you think you'll be working on most for the remainder of this year?

[00:03:06] Speaker B: It's all about creating user value out of the baseline technology that we have now. So we are going to focus on looking at exactly what are people doing with our product and enhance the use cases that we see are worthwhile. So we will add lots of stuff into the software to make it more useful for the use cases that we actually see people using the product for.

[00:03:29] Speaker A: Right.

[00:03:30] Speaker B: And people are inventing so many different kinds of ways of using this, like putting it on their pets or using it for family outings or for travel or go kayaking or climbing. Like, it's so relieving to be able to capture memories or photos of your memories without having to use your hands or your mind. You can keep doing what you do but get

[00:03:55] Speaker B: everything captured.

[00:03:57] Speaker A: Very cool. So you mentioned that the camera takes a picture every 2 minutes?

[00:04:01] Speaker B: Every 30 seconds, actually.

[00:04:02] Speaker A: Every 30 seconds, sorry. But obviously that creates a bit of an— well, not necessarily an issue, but it raises questions about privacy. Not necessarily for the persons who are using it, who are familiar with what it does, but for the people in their environment who don't necessarily know what it is and the fact that it's recording all the time. So how do you think about privacy?

[00:04:24] Speaker B: We wanted the product from the start to be designed to be respectful of other people's feelings. So we, for example, we made the design so it's very honest in the way that we made a lot of testing to make sure that people could recognize it as a camera or at least a recording device. And so if people notice it, They are not— they don't experience

[00:04:50] Speaker B: it to be like a spy camera. That was something very important to us. But at the same time, it shouldn't be distracting. So when you realize it's there, you should be able to accept it. It's not something that sits on your face and is distracting that way.

[00:05:06] Speaker A: Right.

[00:05:07] Speaker B: We also wanted to have, for example, allow the users to develop the habit of taking taking the camera off when it's not appropriate to take photos instead of switching it off. So the switch to switch it on or off is actually if it's light or dark. So you put it down in your pocket when it's not appropriate so people around you can feel comfortable with the

[00:05:32] Speaker B: product.

[00:05:33] Speaker A: So that deals with the user education and the level of creepiness that you want to avoid by design. But there's also the question of regulation and actual law against this type of recording, which is relatively new in the world. So do you foresee any problems in any countries with that?

[00:05:49] Speaker B: Hopefully not. We think that our views on how to use this product is very similar to how lawmakers view how you should use mobile phone cameras. If you want to buy a spy camera, there are hundreds of those on the web that are far more proficient in that sense than our camera. But still, we want users to respect each other

[00:06:14] Speaker B: when they use the product. So we built the product with respect of others, and we hope that that can reflect— be reflected in how people use it and perceive it. Right.

[00:06:25] Speaker A: Final question: you've shipped about 7,500 units so far.

[00:06:28] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:06:29] Speaker A: What's your goal for the end of this year?

[00:06:30] Speaker B: Oh, I couldn't tell. 100,000?

[00:06:33] Speaker A: 100,000, that's a good answer. Martin, thank you very much for your time, and best of luck.

[00:06:37] Speaker B: Thank you.