5 Questions With Narrative CMO/Co-founder Oskar Kalmaru - EXCLUSIVE Q&A With Wearable Camera Company

Last week, I attended the first Wearable World Congress in San Francisco. Of the companies showcasing there, Narrative -- a Swedish-based, significantly-financed startup in the world of wearable cameras -- was one of my favorites.  Narrative's camera (a 1"x1" square) clips on to your clothes anywhere and, therefore, frees up your hands to ... well ... live, experience and spontaneously capture life's moments (rather than consciously record your living).  The small device for now takes only stills (although video is coming), and captures a still image every 30 seconds for up to 30 consecutive hours.  Just imagine the possibilities (artists, performers, moms, dads)!  I spent some time with CMO/Co-founder Oskar Kalmaru at the event -- and invited him to join my "5 Questions With" series.  So, on with the questions -- and Oskar's unedited answers.

(1) What is the reason your company exists (and what problem(s) are you looking to solve)

Narrative exists to help people capture and share, but not disrupt, their moments. Normal cameras need a lot of conscious actions – bringing them with you, deciding when to take a photo, pulling them out from the pocket and so on. Pulling out a camera also disrupts the moment: it makes people uncomfortable and the moment inherently “staged”. All in all, these  conscious actions that we associate with photographing actually make capturing true moments, the way they are really experienced, impossible. Only a wearable, automatic camera like the Narrative Clip can capture and share moments the way they happened.

(2) How are you different from your competitors?

Other cameras are either not wearable or not automatic. Action cameras are great for capturing action sports, but not really wearable in the sense that you could wear them on your wedding suit or weekend jacket. Other more wearable cameras have taken the approach to, while being wearable, still require interaction from the wearer. Lastly, only Narrative offers an extensive image analysis software with the camera, which helps you find the best images based on Narrative’s algorithm’s score on photo quality.

(3) Why will you succeed (and what is your single most important ingredient for success)?

Narrative is in the intersection of a number of mega trends. Social media has made content creation easier over time: blog platforms let you publish yourself by just writing your text and submit it to the platform, Twitter let you express yourself in just an SMS's length of text, Instagram is photo sharing with the press of a button. Narrative takes this further by reducing even the press of the button, but letting users constantly and effortlessly capture their moments for sharing.

Photography is a mega trend in itself. There are over 2 billion photos uploaded to the Internet everyday and people take more photos than ever. Still we suffer from a convenient way to organize them. Where most other popular content – text, video, music – have found their digital organization in blogs, YouTube and Spotify, our personal photos are still stuck in overfull hard drive folders or cloud services with terrible user experiences. Narrative’s software – its back-end image analysis and front-end apps – can possibly help solve this problem.

The third mega trend that Narrative is a part of and utilizing is of course wearable technology. Having started out early, back in 2012, we have already had time to build our second generation wearable camera, applying findings from user feedback on beta and first versions. Wearables will transform the way we interact with technology in the same way Internet and smartphones have and we believe Narrative has a strong position to be a part in shaping this future.

(4) What makes you unique (and what do you enjoy most outside of building your business)?

Narrative is unique in that we offer all three components required to effortlessly capture and share your moments: the hardware (the wearable camera), the backend (the image analysis) and the front end (the apps for Android, iOS and web). Other suppliers might offer one or at most two of the three, but without all three of them you will have a completely different experience.

(5) What digital media trend is most interesting to you (and what is the least)?

Outside the popularization of photography and the emergence of wearable technology, I would say that the merge of the digital world with the physical world is what I find most fascinating right now. So much we take for granted in their respective sphere – infinite storage and transport capabilities in the digital world and right to ownership of goods and personal space in the physical world for example – are challenged when they collide. It also opens for new businesses in a way I don’t think we’ve seen the beginning of yet. Uber and AirBnB are of course the two most notable examples, but I’m sure will se many many more very soon.

The least interesting? Cable-cutting. I can consume whatever media I want whenever I want, except for TV shows. It should just work by now. Fix this would ya?