Capturing the Moment with Narrative

I have hundreds of photos saved on my phone. That’s probably dozens of events during which I stopped what I was doing, took out my phone, and captured specific moments.

We share and remember our lives in images, which capture a moment and enable us (and others) to transport to a specific time, place and situation. We can evoke the experience of that memory, recalling who we were with, what we were doing and how we felt about it. It’s pretty important, especially in today’s fast-paced world where it’s hard to remember what you did last week, let alone last year.

So if I only have a few hundred photos that represent my life, how many moments am I not capturing? What am I missing?

Enter Narrative (formerly known as Memoto), a Swedish startup building hardware and software services for remembering more about your life. Their first product—to be released November 1st—is a tiny, automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory. The Narrative camera is a wearable device that takes a photo every 30 seconds; the photos sync to the cloud and are organized for you into “moments” from your life.

At True, we love to support products that capture the imagination, which has led to our early investments in MakerBot, Fitbit, littleBits, 3D Robotics and OpenROV. We’re also strong believers in the hardware (i.e. connected device) revolution. So needless to say, we were enamored with the idea of a device that passively captures the moments of our lives, without requiring us to get behind a lens or a screen. And we weren’t the only ones: Narrative started as a Kickstarter project; with a goal of $50,000, they raised $550,189 in just 38 days. We were impressed not only by this early traction and obvious market interest, but also with the incredible variety of use cases for the device: travel, memory disorders, security and so many more.

The Narrative Founders, Martin Källström, Björn Wesén and Oskar Kalmaru, are highly regarded in the Swedish startup ecosystem. With hundreds of media websites as customers, Martin’s former company Twingly revolutionized the way bloggers and media connect throughout Europe, while also being the premier aggregator of social media content in the Nordics. With over a decade’s experience as lead camera developer at a world leading camera company, Björn is a hardware development rock star. And Oskar has a solid background in entrepreneurship and marketing from co-founding several innovative and successful Swedish startups and working with a major Swedish PR agency.

The Narrative team has truly created a product that captures the imagination, and we can’t wait to begin capturing the “narrative” of our lives.

Martin, Björn and Oskar: welcome to True!

Read more about Narrative in AllThingsD, engadget and TheNextWeb.