You might remember a major success on Kickstarter late last year by the name of Memoto — a tiny, wearable camera that automatically captures pictures, locations, and other data all day, every day, giving you a searchable record of your life. Almost a year after being funded, the device is finally launching, but it's had to ditch the name due to trademark issues.
Henceforth, Memoto will be known as Narrative, and the Memoto device is now the Narrative Clip. Other than that, the device is still as promised: one of the smallest self-contained camera devices in the world, and ready to record everything you do — one picture every 30 seconds, forever.
Of course, the first question is, "Why would someone want to capture mediocre 5-megapixel images of their banal existence?"
We've seen in the reception of Google Glass that people are, for some reason or another, attracted to the idea of carrying an always-on device, whether it's recording, replaying, looking up news, or all three. But not everyone wants that device to be a dorky-looking headset, one that's permanently tethered to a corporation which already knows a creepy amount about your life.
Enter this little guy. With its understated design and tiny size, you could wear it on your shirt pocket, attached to a buttonhole, or anywhere else, and no one would even notice it, much less be wary of it. So you could go about your days as normal, and when you want to remember where you went to lunch on Tuesday, or what station you got off at to go to the park, or who was at the 10 a.m. meeting, you just check through the photos on your smartphone.
Aiming for $50,000 to pursue the creation of the device, the project received more than 10 times that on Kickstarter — but a planned "early 2013" launch was continually delayed. Thursday, however, the company announced not only its name change and $3 million in funding, but that it would be sending its first units out to customers in November.
How well the devices will work and how useful they will be, no one will know until they are actually in users' hands, but if the idea strikes your fancy, you can preorder one now for $279.
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.
