Should You Ever Compete Against the Market Leaders and Industry Giants?
So our, close-to-launch, startup is a Digital Time Capsule.
We are trying to solve the problem of the sheer volume, dis-organisation and
legacy management of digital media.
We help users create, curate, and share their precious memories with their loved ones.
The traditional Time Capsule is typically an airtight container that is filled with objects representative of the present, and buried in the ground to be discovered in the future. The concept is that you are capturing a piece of time, the present, and sending it off into the future.
It's a romantic idea. It makes us think about time, the past and the future. It helps us feel that the future is a reality. A Time Capsule goes where we can only dream to go. If we choose the right content, we might reveal some of our culture. The right content can be a live history lesson and a gift to the future.
A time capsule is about history, tradition, preservation, change and perhaps on a more sombre note, man's mortality and the inevitable passing of time.
So, what then is a Digital Time Capsule? And how is it different?
We are all aware of the 'Digital Age' that started in the 1970's with Personal Computers, and since then has given us the ability to produce, transfer and store, increasingly bigger volumes of information quickly and easily. The 'Digital Age' has taken us from LPs to MP3, from Floppy Drives to SSD cards, books to Kindle and Videos to Netflix. It brought us Google, Amazon, FaceBook, iPhone, AirBNB and Uber to name a few.
In today's 'Digital Age', everyone generates huge amounts of data, including personal media, photos and videos. The problem is we are overloaded with media. And unless you are a meticulously organised person, it is likely that your phone and laptop are both stuffed with enormous amounts of disorganised media. Or at least, different qualities of media. Have you ever tried to find one of your favourite, in-focus, valuable photographs to send to someone?
We have all these lovely memories and they are as disorganised as that big old box of photos in the attic used to be. The very technology that gives us the power to generate and store large amounts of valuable (and not so valuable) digital media, is causing a different problem. How do you manage your most 'precious memories' out of all your 'Digital Assets'.
Digilooms recognise that there are a few problems with managing Digital Assets that could be solved with the Digital equivalent of a TimeCapsule. Voila, the Digilooms Digital TimeCapsule.
A Digital TimeCapsule allows you to store (bury) your Digital Assets for the future much like the traditional TimeCapsule. But it also allows you to Create new memories, Curate existing memories, Save Heirloom records and store and protect these precious assets for the future. Better yet, you can choose when your Digital Time Capsule would release these memories for your intended recipients.
Now as the team have laboured away on Digilooms, we have been increasingly impressed by Apple's and Google's efforts to curate digital media. Witness their ability to recognise most items in your photos and to serve up different categories. 'Portraits through the decades' or 'Dinner Dates'.
This is impressive, and lovely, but a very generic approach, that sometimes gets photos and content out of place
At Digilooms we think we have recognised a few emerging trends and deficiencies which we can capitalise on:
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Yesterday there was an excuse for not knowing your Great Grandparents. Tomorrow there will be no excuse. Everyone will know where they came from.
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Family Stories that were informally passed from generation to generation, and were dying out, can now be renewed with vigour through our technology.
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Family Stories are a valuable and important part of the knowledge management, wisdom, family foundation and understanding of who you are.
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Interest in ancestors and descendants, is age related. You reach a certain age or maturity when you start to relate your own behaviours and circumstances to the generations, older or younger than you.
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People want to leave a legacy for family. They want to tell their stories. They want to wish their descendants well as they head into a future that they themselves cannot enter.
The Digilooms approach is all around stories, and helping users tell their life stories through, short video clips, curated content, beautiful questions and a teleprompter facility that makes production easier. We provide the possibility to attach photos and documents to videos and to add a reasonable amount of description. Finally, we let users assign an executor that make sure content is not lost.
The Digilooms site is very much still work in progress and our App is not been released yet for final testing. But if you take the opportunity to have a look, please tell us what you think.
Are we going to ride a wave of 'Improved Management of Digital media' and passing decent content to our descendants... Or are we going to get crushed by the momentum of the industry giants.
We would love to hear your immediate thoughts.
And if anyone wants to volunteer for beta testing, feel free to reach out.
