Despite half a million dollars in crowdfunding support in 2012, and millions more in funding in late 2013, lifelogging camera company Narrative announced today that they have filed for "voluntary dissolution." In other words, the company is going out of business.
Memoto, the company behind the wearable camera that automatically documents the user's life by taking a photo every 30 seconds, has a new name, $3 million in fresh capital, and plans to start shipping product next month.
Memoto has been making an appearance at the SXSW 2013 festival over the past week. When founders arrived at the show last Thursday, they wore two of the tiny lifelogging cameras they've been developing. The devices snapped one photo ever thirty seconds, and the duo soon amassed tens of thousands of point-of-view images capturing the things they were experiencing in Austin, Texas.
If you're curious about the image quality of the wearable cameras, the company has published a set of initial sample photos.
One of the big emerging ideas in the camera world is the idea of wearable cameras that automatically capture your memories for you. Memoto is the wearable camera project that caused the biggest splash in 2012, but a month before it was announced, there was another camera that made a quieter entrance. It was the Autographer, a camera shaped like a pack of gum that uses a number of different sensors to intelligently snap photos during interesting moments in your life.
To demonstrate its potential for documenting life's memories, the company asked renowned photographer Rankin to document a photo shoot using its prototype cameras.
There are a number of lifelogging camera projects racing to be first movers in the emerging industry of cameras …
One of the big ideas that seems destined to explode over the next decade is lifelogging, the ability to automatically capture and store one's life and experiences for future reference. Memoto is a new camera that's trying to be a pioneer in this emerging market. Its name and tagline should give you a good sense of what it does: "Memoto Lifelogging Camera: A tiny, automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory."