Memoto wearable camera took 10,000 photos during SXSW 2013 festival

Memoto founders announced that they have taken more than 10,000 photos since the beginning of the SXSW 2013 festival, with the help of their wearable camera.

South by Southwest, most commonly known as SXSW, is an annual music and film festival which takes places in Austin, Texas.

Memoto is a company started by Martin Kallstrom and Oskar Kalmaru. The pair revealed an interesting project called Memoto through the Kickstarter platform. They said that their device consists of a wearable life-blogging camera which can capture a picture every 30 seconds.

The Memoto wearable camera which took 10,000 photos during SXSW 2013, with the help of its 5-megapixel image sensor. Credits: All Things D.

Memoto reached its Kickstarter goal in less than a day

Photographers and bloggers were fascinated about the project and, as a result, the Memoto reached its Kickstarter goal in about five hours. This may not sound too impressive for some people, but they should take into consideration that the goal was to raise $50,000.

Eventually, the Swedish co-founders managed to raise more than $550,000 and they started refining the life-blogging camera.

The wearable camera comes packed with a build-in GPS to geo-tag photos

The Memoto wearable camera is a small device which features a 5-megapixel image sensor, 8GB of built-in storage, accelerometer, compass, and a GPS. It takes two photos per minute and it is aimed at telling the story of a person through photography.

The camera is now ready for business thanks to a Taiwan-based manufacturer, which will ship the units by the end of April or by early May. A unit will cost $279. The first users to get it will be the people who had pledged to the cause on Kickstarter.

10,000 photos taken in just a few days at SXSW 2013

Memoto CEO, Martin Kallstrom, and co-founder Oskar Kalmaru took the small device to the SXSW 2013 festival last week. In just a few days, they managed to capture more than 10,000 photos, which account for more than 14GB of storage.

The pair said that most of the photos were off-centered, blurred, or even dark, but the key lies in the Memoto software, which can organize the captured images in a timeline, by choosing the best pictures from an event in your life.

The company will also release a bunch of mobile applications, allowing users to organize their photos on their own, too. The algorithm will know how to group the photos from an event, in order to prevent crowding.

Users may ditch their smartphone or compact cameras in favor of Memoto

Kalmaru believes that many important things happen right in front of us. Not all users can carry a camera around at all times and by the time users take out their camera or smartphone, the moment may be gone forever.

The Memoto camera will solve this issue as it will capture images on a regular basis, making sure that wearers will not miss the opportunity to immortalize the most memorable parts of their vacation.

Privacy concerns have been raised, but co-founder Kalmaru says that the Memoto has been designed in such a way to be visible, not to act like a spy camera.

Although the wearable camera does not have a power button, it can be turned off by placing it face down.

Google Glass competitor?

The Memoto is a nice alternative to the more expensive Google Glass, which costs $1,500.

For the time being, Kallstrom and Kalmaru have not announced any plans for a next-generation wearable camera, but it remains to be seen what the future holds for their company.