100 cameras away from reaching a goal

We know it’s not a concept in the world outside of Kickstarter, but we love it and think it’s never too late for a stretch goal. So, if you’ve been here from the beginning or are just getting to know us, we’ve got some news regarding the $700,000 stretch goal! (For those of you who don’t know, stretch goal is a Kickstarter term, meaning that due to reaching a certain level of funding, we can allot an amount of funds towards projects that would otherwise have to wait until we have finished others.) The last stretch goal began when we became 1000% funded on Kickstarter and the reward for reaching it was developed from requests we received from very interested and vocal backers (if you have an idea, please let us a comment below, we’d love to hear from you). Even though our Kickstarter project has ended, we have continued the stretch goal through pre-orders on Memoto.com.

What does reaching this stretch goal mean?

The stretch goal will be achieved when the amount of our Kickstarter campaign added to our pre-orders on Memoto.com equal $700,000. Currently, we are about 100 cameras away from this goal! Reaching it will allow us to include room in the budget to start working on three different accessories: The Memoto Wifi dock, the waterproof case and the wide-angle lens. As soon as the cameras are out the factory door, we will start developing these gadgets.

Below are the original concept design of these accessories. The finalized version of the accessories may change during the design process and differ from these sketches.

The Memoto Wifi Dock will streamline the entire lifelogging process. There are no buttons to push, simply wear, charge and wear again! The dock will have an SD-card slot for exchangeable memory storage, making it useful for charging and offloading photos from the Memoto Camera even when there is no wifi around for syncing.

Waterproof Case – For all of you who imagine doing heavy duty lifelogging, whether it be swimming, hiking, scuba diving or doing hard work, we would like to develop a sturdy waterproof shell for the Memoto Camera. It will be made of hard transparent acrylic, have a really beautiful design but still be very functional, including a metal tripod mount.

The wide-angle lens will be a corner snap-on, most likely giving the camera a 135 degree viewing angle. And, don’t worry, we’ll make sure it fits inside the waterproof case!

(You can read about our previous stretch goals here and here)

Hardware

The testing and tweaking the Memoto PCB continues. The core camera functionality is in place, which lets us try the whole service chain (read on to see what that means).

Here’s a video of the PCB being tested by our engineers. Notice the excitement!

Software

More good news: the algorithms are working! What does that mean? It means the moments (the photo groups) are being sorted correctly, lighting is being evaluated, faces are being detected and the most interesting photos are ending up as keyframes on the apps’ timeline! Tapping on one of those keyframes plays a time lapse video of all photos from that moment.

Being such a crucial part of the whole Memoto service, we are extremely pleased to see it works so well but we will keep developing and improving the algorithms over time. Also, we are tweaking all form and functionality to deliver a really superb feeling once the app is released.

In total: from taking photos to viewing moments on the smartphone app, the chain is complete and functioning!

So the camera captures photos. It stores them on its memory chip. The desktop client uploads them to our cloud service. The algorithm does its magic. The best photos are shown on a working prototype of the iPhone and the Android app… It’s all there! This is huge!

A working prototype being used earlier this week by Björn!

We are eager to show you photos from the camera. In the coming weeks, as we move out of this alpha testing stage and begin working with prototypes that will have the exact same components as the cameras you will receive, we will release the test photos.

Now, we will keep working on the details: tweaking the hardware and firmware to make the camera take even better pictures, introducing more features and functionality to both the hardware and software, producing and testing the real camera case and polishing the design of the apps.

The Memoto Lifelogging Camera is available for pre-order on Memoto.com. Reserve yours today!

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