The Memoto Kickstarter: How the Narrative Clip Got Its Start

On October 23, 2012, a three-person team in Linköping, Sweden put a video on Kickstarter and started a clock. The product was a 36-millimeter square of plastic that took a photo every thirty seconds, all day, and uploaded the results to a cloud that would sort them into albums for you. The pitch was earnest, the renders were clean, and the price was $279. Within five days they had blown past their $50,000 goal and were closing in on half a million dollars.

This is the story of that campaign. It is also, in retrospect, the high-water mark of a particular kind of optimism about wearables.

The pitch

Memoto called it the world’s smallest wearable camera. That claim was defensible in 2012, even if the modifier doing most of the work was “smallest.” Other lifeloggers existed. Microsoft Research’s SenseCam had been around since the mid-2000s. The Looxcie ear-mounted camera had shipped. None of them were a 20-gram square you could clip to a shirt and forget about.

The product loop was simple to describe and surprisingly hard to build. Wear the Clip. It takes two photos a minute, every minute you have it on. Plug it into your computer at the end of the day. The Narrative cloud ingests the JPEGs, picks the best frames, clusters them into moments, and surfaces them in a phone app. You scroll your own week.

The renders on the campaign page sold this as effortless. The Clip was a postage stamp with a single tiny lens, no shutter button visible on the top, no screen. You did nothing. The cloud did the work.

The team

Three founders. Martin Källström as CEO, the public face of the campaign and the person who shows up in most of the press coverage. Oskar Kalmaru as CMO, who ran the storytelling around the product. Björn Wesén as CTO, who had the harder job: building a camera that was both small enough to be unobtrusive and reliable enough to survive a year on someone’s collar.

They had real backgrounds. Källström had previously co-founded Twingly. Wesén had spent years in embedded systems at Axis Communications, the Swedish company that essentially invented the IP camera. This was not a first-time hardware team, and it shows in the early prototypes that appeared in the campaign video. They looked like products, not student work.

The funding curve

The campaign launched on October 23 and closed on November 23, 2012. The goal was $50,000. The final tally was about $550,000 from approximately 2,871 backers. Funded almost instantly; oversubscribed by an order of magnitude within a week.

Kickstarter in 2012 was still in its early growth phase, well after Pebble’s smartwatch had legitimized hardware on the platform and well before the wave of failed campaigns made backers cynical. A Swedish team with a clean concept and a working prototype was exactly the kind of project that compounded. Press picked it up. The pitch video traveled.

The trademark headache

The first sign that things would be harder than the campaign suggested arrived in 2013. Another company held rights to a name close enough to “Memoto” to make continued use of the brand legally fraught. Rather than litigate, the team rebranded. By mid-2013, Memoto AB was Narrative AB and the product was the Narrative Clip.

The rename was clean, which is to say it cost time and probably money but did not visibly damage the project. The website moved. The cardboard box was redesigned. Backers got an email. The pitch survived intact.

The shipping reality

This is the part the campaign page does not prepare you for, and it is not unusual for Kickstarter hardware in the early 2010s. The original timeline promised units in the first half of 2013. The first Memoto/Narrative Clips actually started reaching backers in late 2013 and trickled out through 2014. By the time many backers had a Clip in their hands, the public could already walk into the website and buy one.

That gap, the year-plus between funding and fulfillment, mattered. The wearable category moved during it. Google Glass became a public story. Smartphone cameras became fast and always-on. The cloud-side photo organization that was novel in 2012 was, by 2014, a thing Google Photos did at a much larger scale, for free, on photos you already had.

What the Kickstarter got right and what it got wrong

The Kickstarter got the product photography right. It got the team credibility right. It got the pitch right in the narrow sense that the pitch was clear, sincere, and not overpromised on individual features. Two photos a minute, all day, into the cloud. That is what the Clip did.

What it got wrong was the timeline, which is true of most hardware campaigns, and the business model, which only became visible in hindsight. A $279 camera that depended on a cloud service to be useful needed either ongoing subscription revenue or huge volume to keep the lights on. It got neither at the scale required. By 2016 the cloud was off and the cameras were souvenirs.

You can still read the campaign page today. It is one of the better artifacts of the first wave of consumer lifelogging, before anyone had to learn that the hard part was not the camera. You can find the original here: Memoto: The World’s Smallest Wearable Camera.

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