The future, for anyone who wants to tell their own story, has never looked brighter. That is because of the Atmel | SMART SAM9G25 powered Narrative Clip — a tiny, automatic 5-megapixel camera paired with an app that offers users access to a “photographic memory” which is both searchable and shareable. Clip it onto your shirt and let it snap away, recording all your daily activities in 30-second increments. Kind of like a GoPro but less obtrusive, always on, and of course, interconnected.
The Narrative Clip began shipping in January 2014. In just eight months, users have uploaded somewhere north of 100 million photos to the Narrative service. The photo sharing trend is only going up year by year, with around 1.4 billion photos shared daily in 2014. Currently, Narrative says that it sees approximately 700,000 photos uploaded daily by users from all over the world, as illustrated in their recent infographic.
Now, Narrative has announced that they have received $8 million in a funding round that was led by Khosla Ventures and followed by existing investors True Ventures and Passion Capital.
“We’ve experienced significant growth over the past year. With the opportunity to work with Khosla Ventures, we can continue to build on this growth and improve the Narrative Clip and our services,” said Martin Källström, Co-Founder and CEO of Narrative.
According to its blog announcement, the new funding will help spur development of the Narrative Clip and service, as well as support an accelerated growth of the team. “We are building Narrative to offer more features and an even better experience. Opening a U.S. office helps us better serve our North American users and partners. The new office also allows our fantastic support team to offer 18 hours of available support throughout the week and creates a base for maintaining and developing partnerships that will keep Narrative on top.”
This is not the first round of funding for Narrative but certainly the biggest to date. If you recall, the device had a highly-successful Kickstarter campaign during the earlier days of crowdfunding back in 2012. Launched by then Stockholm-based startup, Memoto, the life-logging camera garnered well over half a milllion dollars, surpassing its original goal of a mere $50K. As you can see in the photo below, even original prototype during the campaign was powered by the ARM-based Atmel | SMART SAM9G25.
Weighing in at 20 grams (0.7 oz) and measuring 36 x 36 x 9 mm (1.42 × 1.42 × 0.35 inches), Narrative boasts a storage capacity of 4,000 pictures and a two-day battery life. This makes it rather easy to tag along and log your experience in real-time. The device also features a double-tap function to more easily capture images, automatic sleep upon being placed face down, a specially coded companion smartphone app (iOS/Android) and cloud storage options.
A couple months ago, the Adafruit crew conducted a detailed teardown of the device – confirming it is indeed embedded with the Atmel | SMART SAM9G25 ARM-based MPU.
If you have come across an Atmel booth at any industry events (e.g. CES, Embedded World, Computex and ESC Brazil) or hop aboard our decked-out Tech on Trailer over the past year or so, there’s a good chance you’ve had the opportunity to demo the incredibly convenient device. For those who haven’t, head on over to Narrative’s official website now.
Just one of many next-gen devices powered by the recently-unveiled Atmel | SMART family, the Clip will be using the funds to dominate the world of wearable cameras – plus they opened up an office right down the street in San Francisco! Just in time for the holidays, this life-logging device should surely top your list!
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