Narrative Clip

» see getnarrative.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Martin Källström had the idea in 2011 and built it in 2012 with Oskar Kalmaru and the designer Björn Wesén, out of Linköping in Sweden. The product was a 36-millimeter square with no screen and no shutter button anywhere on it. You clipped it to a collar in the morning and it photographed whatever was in front of you every thirty seconds until you took it off.

It went to Kickstarter in October 2012 under the name Memoto, hit its fifty thousand dollar goal in under five hours, and closed in November with $550,189 from backers who had paid $279 each. The company renamed itself Narrative in late 2013 and raised about three million more. First units shipped that autumn, months behind what the backers had been promised, which is the standard Kickstarter hardware story.

What the thing produced is the part worth sitting with. Two thousand photographs a day is not an album, it is a haystack, and the entire company was really the software that went through the haystack afterwards. The photos went up to Narrative's servers, got sorted into groups the apps called Moments, and were ranked so you saw maybe thirty pictures out of the day instead of all of them. The camera was the cheap half of what you were buying.

The Clip 2 was shown at CES in January 2015 with an eight-megapixel sensor and its own WiFi, and shipped in early 2016. By that July the company had announced a reorganization and what it called temporary financial difficulties, and had taken a loan from a Swedish state-backed lender. On 28 September 2016 it filed for voluntary dissolution.

~ the record ~

~ the haystack problem ~

Lifelogging as a word was around for a decade before this, mostly attached to academic projects and to Microsoft's SenseCam, which was a research device rather than a thing you could order. Narrative was the version you could actually buy, at a price a normal person would consider, and it arrived at the exact moment the phone in everyone's pocket got good enough to make the argument difficult.

Nobody I knew wanted this, and I did not want it either. In 2013 I was in my late twenties in Ankara and my camera problem was that I already had too many photographs, not too few. A device whose whole proposition is that it takes pictures without asking you is solving a shortage that stopped existing around the time phones got cameras worth using.

~ the dissolution ~

The September announcement promised customers an app to pull their content back off the servers before those servers went away, and the coverage at the time noted that the promised app had not been described in any detail. That is the part of a hardware shutdown that hurts. The camera in your drawer still works and the four years of photographs it took do not belong to you in any practical sense.

Third Dot AB, formed by some of the same people, bought the assets and the cloud service and kept it running, and carried on selling the Clip 2 for a while. It was a caretaking arrangement rather than a relaunch, and there was never another product after it.

~ what is at the address now ~

getnarrative.com still answers, and what it serves is the 2016 marketing site for the Clip 2, frozen. The world's most wearable camera, says the page title, in the present tense, ten years after the company that made it stopped existing.

narrativeclip.com went the other way. Somebody re-registered it and it is now a review site about wearable cameras, written by what it calls the NarrativeClip Editorial Team, running affiliate comparisons of products that are still on sale. One address is stuck in 2016 and the other one has been sold to somebody selling the competition.

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