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"With new technology often comes trepidation \u2014 people ask, do we really need this, and what's the worst case scenario? From the printing press to the radio and, of course, the Internet, skeptics find a way to spread tall tales of impending doom. But the fear is quickly set aside as we adopt new gadgets or programs, even if a little clumsily at first.\nThe same will be with Memoto, the lifelogging camera, a huge Kickstarter success from a Swedish startup by the same name. The device is available for presale now and will ship this fall.\n\nMemoto is a wearable device that takes a photo every 30 seconds. It essentially saves you from thinking, \"Should I take a picture of this?\" because no matter where the day takes you, you'll have a visual record. Imagine your future, and perhaps with this device, you may capture your first sight of the person you'll marry, or the purse thief you encounter in a crowded intersection.\nConstant camera surveillance isn't completely new, as we learned from dashboard cams in Russia. Still, the concept does initiate some interesting discussion on how it might impact human interaction.\n\"We need to figure out how to behave when wearing a camera and how to behave when others are wearing a camera,\" says Martin Kallstrom, CEO of Memoto.\nWhile access to a tiny photo-taking device like Memoto is new, the inspiration behind it \u2014 lifelogging \u2014 is not. Kallstrom's team released a short documentary earlier this year that discusses how passive photography embodies the qualitative self, in contrast to the collection of personal data, called the quantitative self.\nMashable spoke with Kallstrom about why he developed Memoto and what cultural questions such a product brings. How would you use Memoto? Tell us in the comments.\nQ&amp;A With Martin Kallstrom, CEO of Memoto\n\nTell me about lifelogging \u2014 is this a new concept?\nThere are actually over three decades of research on what happens when you have a camera with you all the time. A guy named Steve Mann that was at MIT in the '80s did some research and published papers on lifelogging, so the concept is actually not new. What we realized when we started out is that no one had adopted cutting-edge consumer electronics on solving the problem of getting a camera small enough to actually be wearable.\nThe technology existed, but smartphones made it affordable. It was only used by military \u2014 really expensive projects. But now that's really what drives this trend in hardware startups, is the electronics pushed by smartphones is now available for anyone else.\nWith this massive amount of photos taken each day, how can you prevent people from being overwhelmed?\nSo that's what has been the conclusion of the research in lifelogging as well, is that the difficulty is actually not so much in gathering the photos as in organizing them in a useful fashion. We are just with the first version of the Memoto app, we're just scraping the surface.\nTo solve the problem, there's two things that go into that. Photos need to be searchable, which is why we have a GPS inside, so you can search for a street name or city, and then we organize [pictures] on a timeline as well, so you can browse through them. But in that timeline, it would be far too heavy or consuming to see all of the photos, so we split the day into a natural sequence of events and then we find just one key frame for each event. So it's 20 or 30 key frames that end up in one timeline, and then you can tap into them and zoom into that moment, and browse through the whole sequence of photos.\nSo photos are grouped on similarity? I'll have one collection from when I'm sitting behind my desk all day?\nExactly, then that would just be one key frame on your timeline. Then if you pop up for lunch or take a walk in the park, that might only be 10 minutes, but that would also be a key frame. So that way we bring out the variation. When you look at your timeline, \"I'm in front of my computer for two-thirds of my day,\" that shouldn't be the feeling you get. So that's the reason we have chosen to use a clustering solution.\nSeems like Memoto might be a good way to prevent purse thieves \u2014 how might Memoto play into issues like crime and surveillance?\nIt's actually one of the reactions we get \u2014 it turns out Memoto captures people's imagination, so often when I talk to people about Memoto they end up pitching me their idea of how to use it instead of me pitching them, and exactly what you described. For example, we met a train conductor on a train in London from the airport and he was just pleading with us to go to his employer and ask them to adopt this for all their staff, because he said he's harrassed every week on his job, it would feel so much safer with a camera, not only for getting photos but just being able to point to the camera and say, \"I have a camera,\" would be very reassuring for him.\nThere is this notion we discovered \u2014 it actually comes from Steve Mann, who was the originator of the concept of lifelogging \u2014 something that he calls sousveillance. Surveillance in French means to watch from above and sousveillance means to watch from below. In a surveillance society, each individual should have the right to also have their own camera, that creates a symmetry. Someone, as it is now can, in fact, be incriminated by someone extracting the right sequence of footage from a security camera, while that individual should have been able to have his own camera, and the full sequence of events shows that he is perhaps innocent.\nI think that what you're getting at, at some level, is that one of the indicators that Memoto is about something new \u2014 it's very much true that the social protocols are not developed yet. We need to figure out how to behave when wearing a camera and how to behave when others are wearing a camera.\n\nWhat about Memoto gets you the most excited?\nFor me, its very much the possibility of being present in the moment, it's not having to think about, \"How should I document this or remember this for later?\" You sort of had the same thing as when you first got a mobile phone and started trusting it with the phone numbers of your friends \u2014 it's not that you don't have the phone numbers accessible anymore, it's that you don't have to remember them. It's the same thing when you start using Memoto \u2014 you no longer have to think about taking photos of stuff you want to remember. So you sort of get used to not having to think about, how do I capture this moment in photos. It's really about being more present with people and with my kids or family, I can capture the memories of those moments without having to think about it.\nWhy the name \"Memoto\"?\nWe had a long process of coming up with the name.\nMemoto comes from \"memory automatic\" \u2014 that was the idea. It turns out that Memoto actually means something having to do with the eyes in Japanese so that was part of the reason we fell in love with that name.\nAnd a fun fact about Memoto is that it was not until we launched a Kickstarter campaign that someone told us on Twitter that \"memoto\" actually means taking photos in Indonesia, and they said it as matter of fact, like, \"It's so cool that they chose an Indonesian name for the company,\" and we were like, \"What do you mean?\" It means taking pictures and it's the most common slang term for taking photos in Indonesian.\nWhen I talked to our laywers, they were not happy at all. \"That's a 700-million people market where we can't trademark your company name.\" So that was the downside of that. I'm still happy that we [chose] the name.\nImage courtesy of Memoto"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/06/18/memoto-lifelogging/>