SXSW Interactive Accelerator 2013 Finalists - Memoto | Interactive 2013 | SXSW

[00:00:04] Speaker A: We are going to bring up our first company. You can make your way up here. Memoto from Stockholm, a tiny wearable computer that logs your life and still photos, and we will be hearing about them. You have 5 minutes, and it will start when you begin.

[00:00:18] Speaker B: Thank you. Many of us in here have kids growing up. Many of us also have relatives that we lost far too early. Seems the moments we spend with the people we love always fade far too quickly in our memories. From these happy and sad experiences came Memoto. I'm Martin Källström. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Memoto.

[00:00:48] Speaker B: These are photos from my daughter Lynn's birthday just one week ago. She turned 9. We threw a birthday party. She captured her experiences with Memoto. We asked ourselves, what if we create a true photographic memory? What if we built a digital camera small enough to never be in the way and smart enough

[00:01:13] Speaker B: to capture your life as you live it? This is the Memoto lifelogging camera. It takes a beautiful 5-megapixel photo every 30 seconds. A battery life of 2 days, 2 full days, allows you to capture all of your life in photos. And

[00:01:40] Speaker B: this camera is actually no fantasy. I have one on me right here capturing this very moment of my life. And supposedly yours. Last year, we raised $1.4 million in funding, half through equity and half through presales on Kickstarter.com and our own website. And

[00:02:05] Speaker B: one month from now, we're starting to ship the first units of the 4,000 preorders so far. You search and share your photos through the Memoto app. A GPS inside the camera allows you to actually search your photos even by street name or city. And the camera is actually just the tip

[00:02:30] Speaker B: of the iceberg of Memoto. Even more of our team's work went into the backend and image analysis that organize the photos for you.

[00:02:41] Speaker C: Yeah.

[00:02:46] Speaker B: Memoto produces just an astounding amount of photos. Me and my teammate, Oskar, here have captured over 10,000 photos each just over the few days we spent here at South by. That is big data, if nothing. We organize those photos for you and make it make it possible for you to

[00:03:12] Speaker B: access them without getting even close to being overwhelmed. And this is how it works. We segment each day of photos into what we call moments. We look at the GPS data and the contents of the images, which is for you, for knowledge in images, image analysis. What we do is clustering

[00:03:38] Speaker B: on color histograms to produce a segmentation of your day. And for each of those segments, we produce also automatically one keyframe. And those keyframes are what you see in your app. And when you tap into one of those moments, you can replay the full sequence of images that

[00:04:04] Speaker B: you have captured from that point in your life. You will also be able to search those moments on a map and through auto-tagging. This is the Memoto founder team. All in all, in the company, we are 17 employees. The 4 founders here have together started, including myself, 6 startups, made

[00:04:29] Speaker B: 2 exits. I would especially like to point out here 2 team members. Sebastian, who actually started the first and largest photo-based youth community in Sweden, and selling it actually twice, ended up being at 27 years old the product manager for 14 news websites in Sweden. A

[00:04:54] Speaker B: position that he just loathed. So we're very happy to have him on our team now. Going back to my daughter's birthday, she has a full stretch of 200 photos from the couple of hours her friends were over. Instead of having a few photos replacing all of her memories, with Memoto, she can

[00:05:19] Speaker B: actually remember every moment. Thank you. Thank you.

[00:05:31] Speaker A: Bob, start us off.

[00:05:33] Speaker D: Was it the famous Dr. Stephen Wolfram who was wearing your Memoto all this week?

[00:05:37] Speaker B: He was.

[00:05:38] Speaker D: He was. And where do I get mine? I was really jealous of watching him. You know, he claims to be the person who has collected the most data from his entire life.

[00:05:51] Speaker B: No doubt.

[00:05:52] Speaker D: So now you're raising it by a factor of 10, wouldn't you?

[00:05:55] Speaker A: We are.

[00:05:56] Speaker D: Yeah, we are. What's your secret sauce, by the way? Is there something magically Swedish about the camera or the algorithms? What is your secret sauce?

[00:06:07] Speaker B: Actually, the secret sauce and the Swedish secret sauce The secret sauce is just a lot of hard work. The amount of code and the places we— the number of platforms in which we need to have code running, from the camera to the docking station that uploads the photos, to the backend, to the apps, to the web, that

[00:06:32] Speaker B: is just a lot of hard work that goes into something as simple as having an iconic simple camera without any button and a very simple app. That's the user interface, and what goes behind that to create that user experience is a tech chain that is— has been a challenge.

[00:06:53] Speaker A: So before I kick it down to the judges, a few years ago we had a guy named Steve Mann who is the sort of Android guy, right? And he couldn't fly down here because planes wouldn't let him have his equipment on. So how do you deal with Privacy concerns where you can't go into department stores or stores that won't let you have cameras and things like that. Clearly, this is a thing you have thought of.

[00:07:12] Speaker B: Of course, yeah. So it's very easy to take the camera off and put it in your pocket. And it's actually something that you need to do to shut the camera off. We need people to feel this is a trustworthy device. It's not something that you need to think about— is this camera taking photos or not? There is no on/off button on it, so if you see it, it is taking your pictures. We need

[00:07:37] Speaker B: people to be comfortable with Memoto, even people around me. So I'm forced to take it off when I'm— it's not appropriate to take photos.

[00:07:45] Speaker A: And if you don't, what happens if I'm in a movie theater and I forget to take it off and it's taking pictures of the movie?

[00:07:51] Speaker B: Then you will be a lawful citizen and delete them when you get home.

[00:07:56] Speaker A: Thoughts down here?

[00:07:59] Speaker C: People have talked about the idea of lifelogging for a while. Why do you think now is the right time in terms of consumers adopting this behavior and in this form factor versus, say, glasses or some other technology?

[00:08:12] Speaker B: Yeah, so the form factor is enabled by technology becoming this minimized. And the usage pattern, I think, is a cross-section between sort of the the Instagram movement and the wearable technology movement that just has— just now coming together. And this is something that we're seeing a huge interest around. And in the cross-section of those 2

[00:08:37] Speaker B: trends, you find Memoto.

[00:08:40] Speaker E: You know, we at NEA, we are very, very enthusiastic about cameras that change the way people's behavior. We invested in a company called Lytro. It feels like How does this change people's behavior? It feels like you have a kind of a Heisenberg uncertainty principle where because you're always being observed or you're observing others, people around you will start acting different. So this is an innovative web category where you want to try to change the way people behave. What is the behavior

[00:09:06] Speaker E: change that you feel like Memoto is going to encourage?

[00:09:10] Speaker B: Personally for me, the one thing I would like to contribute to society is to allow for people to be present in the moment instead of thinking, how am I going to present this to my friends on Facebook? I want people to be able to play with their kids, be at work, be in a studio recording their next album, but still capture those moments for themselves and for others.

[00:09:34] Speaker E: That's a great answer. Thank you.

[00:09:36] Speaker F: It seems like you guys are trying to innovate on both the hardware and software side, and a little bit early on both. So on the software side, you have 10,000 pictures over the course of 3 days, putting that in context and organizing it is a challenge in and of itself. And your camera needs to be docked, recharged, you said every 2 days, and uploaded. And so there's an innovation there around battery life and sort of connectivity. Which one of those 2 are you going to solve, and which one are you going to let someone else solve?

[00:10:02] Speaker B: About the hardware? So—

[00:10:04] Speaker F: Or the software.

[00:10:05] Speaker A: I mean—

[00:10:05] Speaker B: Or the software, yeah.

[00:10:06] Speaker F: Which— are you a hardware or software company?

[00:10:08] Speaker B: We are a hardware plus software company. And that is something that I get knocked on about quite a lot. People want us to have the identity in either/or. We do the hardware in-house. Our CTO built this camera from scratch. There's no consultancy coming in and telling us how we should build this. We have all that strategic competency

[00:10:34] Speaker B: inside the team. The second thing is that we are a software company. Same with the software and the image analysis. Certain stuff which is available off the shelf, like face detection, we're not going to spend time on that. But the strategic portions of the software, the mix of components in the hardware, that's all our own property.

[00:10:57] Speaker F: Thank you.

[00:10:58] Speaker C: So to take your point about this technology enabling people to really be in the moment and kind of have this lifelogging scenario, versus necessarily taking artfully arranged photos to share outwards. That said, can you say a little bit more about how I might find the one photo amongst the stream in a given day or event that I want to share outward, keep, or differentiate?

[00:11:19] Speaker B: Sure. So if you decide to keep all your photos, they will just be there available when you want to drop in the stream. If you want to find that very special photo to share on on Facebook from your day or your week at South by, for example. We will— are just now in our roadmap putting a function for

[00:11:44] Speaker B: you to just see an overview of what are the absolute best photos over an arbitrary time period. So you will get, in that case, suggestions of these are the sharpest, most colorful photos probably with faces detected in the photo, and with our own symmetry score applied to it as well, as suggestions for photos to share.

[00:12:10] Speaker F: How many cameras are currently in the wild?

[00:12:12] Speaker B: In the wild? One. Steven Wolfram.

[00:12:17] Speaker F: What do you expect the churn rate to be on someone who buys a camera? How long do you expect them to use it for before they say, Too much, annoying, or sort of, that was cute, and I'm done.

[00:12:28] Speaker B: Sure, sure, yeah. So we are very realistic about this. We think that the mainstream use case is not to have a camera on every day going to the office, back and forth, and so on. We think that there are a certain portion of users, 5% or so, that are going to want to do that, but that most people will select the days that are worth capturing photos. That might be your birthday, when you're going to a party, preparations

[00:12:54] Speaker B: for a concert, and going to that concert. And that's how we envision most people using it.

[00:13:01] Speaker E: And what is the cloud play here? What's the data play? Are you going to store all of the photos in the cloud? And if so, where does it stop? Will you sell me a Tylenol when you see that I've woken up hungover from South by Southwest last night?

[00:13:17] Speaker B: We have a very much Dropbox-like subscription model, except that we have a flat fee. Because we have a cap on how much content you actually can capture, we provide a flat fee storage. It's included in the first year. The first year is included in the price of the camera. And then it's between $7 and $9 per month.

[00:13:41] Speaker D: OK.

[00:13:41] Speaker B: to store the photos. And the retail price of the camera is $279.

[00:13:49] Speaker E: But does it stop there? My question is, are you just selling storage, or are you going to view my life?

[00:13:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm sorry. So that is something that we are adamant about. You buy this service from us, and you are the customer of Memoto. There is no third party buying access to your photos. There might be third-party developers that build applications on top of our API where you can opt in to share your photos into something where you collaborate on, like,

[00:14:23] Speaker B: the public's Google Street Map or something like that. Those companies might have a revenue model that you need to trust and be aware of. We, Memoto, will never, never sell your photos or your content or your data.

[00:14:38] Speaker C: I'd like to go back to David's question, because I think it's a really important one here. But maybe take it from a different angle, which is the space is very early and evolving, and will likely evolve pretty rapidly. So let's say that you're able to affect the behavioral change that you want, and people start using your cameras in droves. And now other people see that and want to get into this market. When that happens, what are you going to be the best at? Are you going to be the best at coming up with new form factors of

[00:15:03] Speaker C: very lightweight, small devices?

[00:15:04] Speaker F: Yeah.

[00:15:05] Speaker C: To capture the photos and store them? Or are you going to be best at the software side in terms of analyzing the photos, exploring them, discovering them, sharing them?

[00:15:12] Speaker A: And you have 20 seconds to answer that.

[00:15:14] Speaker B: OK. So in the mix of what we're doing, the hardware is actually the easiest thing to replicate, for a certain level of easy. So we think we will see a range of devices cropping up doing approximately the same thing. And we will support them all in our app and software.

[00:15:32] Speaker A: All right, and with that, we are out of time. Thank you very much.

[00:15:35] Speaker C: Thank you.

[00:15:35] Speaker A: Very good, very good.