Memoto to ship first 2,500 life-logging cameras this summer
Swedish Kickstarter-funded startup Memoto will ship the first few thousand of its life-logging cameras by the end of summer. It expects to sell 10,000 of the devices this year.
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The cameras are the latest devices to hit the market in the wearable technology market, whose growth has been spurred by the arrival of Google Glass.
The device clips on to the wearer's shirt, takes snaps every 30 seconds and is designed to be always on. The hardware has a GPS and costs $279, which includes a one-year cloud subscription with a maximum of 1.4TB storage — calculated on the assumption it would take 2,000 2MB geotagged photos every day of the year.
The images can be accessed and shared through its Lifelogging app, which organises photos into groups of "moments".
Around 4,000 people who paid into its Kickstarter campaign will be the first to get the devices under Memoto's plan to build "a few hundred at a time" and then work through pre-orders that have come in since. The company pitched for $50,000 and ended up with $550,000 last November.
"We'll roll out the 2,500 Kickstarter 'pre-orders' as quickly as we can manage, and after that the 2,000 or so normal pre-orders collected after the Kickstarter [campaign]," Memoto's special projects manager Niclas Johansson told ZDNet.
He said the gradual rollout was more due its backend and customer support capacity than constraints on actual hardware manufacturing.
"Our aim is to sell 10,000 units during this year — again, we're looking to grow at a speed that we can manage, and will ramp up to a higher tempo after this initial period," Johansson said.
The company is using a batch of 75 finished devices it took receipt of this week to seek approval from the FCC and the EC to begin selling the device.
Memoto is also planning a line of accessories for the camera, including a wi-fi-enabled charging dock that will be like a "fully functional little computer" and will have an SD-card slot for swappable memory storage to offload images. An additional lens is also on the cards.
The current fixed focus lens has 70-degree viewing, but a a snap on lens in the pipeline will give it a 135-degree view and a fish eye perspective. It’s also developing a waterproof case and is planning on releasing an API for others to build upon.