Rebecca Paredes November 4th, 2016
A day before its scheduled shutdown, the Narrative camera has been rescued by a group of former employees. In a public Facebook group called Narrative Clip Lounge, a post states, “After a lot of work and negotiations, all assets in Narrative, digital and physical, have been acquired by a group of people from the team of the former company.”
Oh yes! Phew! The #NarrativeClip service is not shutting down tomorrow. Former employees MBO....https://t.co/TxA76UmzJv @getNarrative pic.twitter.com/aTkaNIYCZk
— Andy O'Donoghue (@ADODonoghue) October 31, 2016
First announced as a Kickstarter project called Memento, the wearable lifelogging camera made its debut in 2014. Since then, the company has had its share of startup-related challenges — notably, the funding of ongoing operations.
While the camera developed a loyal following, it did not catch fire with the general public at volumes that would sustain its business model, which relied on a device that required little to no ongoing expense for users.
Narrative First Announces Its Dissolution
The company attempted to reboot by releasing the Narrative Clip 2 earlier this year, which offered some enhanced functionality to entice new users.
Unfortunately, it was too little, too late.
In September, the company announced it had filed for “voluntary dissolution” and would cease operations. The camera could still be used to capture photos and download them to users’ personal data stores, but the company would no longer maintain their cloud photo storage service and app to access, edit, and share the photos.
Narrative users would have to download their data from the cloud, or risk losing tens of thousands of photos that had been stored on the company’s servers as a part of their camera purchase plan. Plans were announced for all unretrieved photos to be deleted on Oct. 31, 2016, and users scrambled to find storage space for anything they wanted to save.
Thanks #NarrativeClip
— hq_finest (@hq_finest) October 30, 2016
We Hope You Come Back Again. pic.twitter.com/srSYSOFQCr
Narrative Lives Again
Narrative set up the Facebook group Narrative Clip Lounge to provide a forum for discussion among users. Deep into the evening of Oct. 30, a Narrative founder announced in a surprise post that a group of former Narrative employees had banded together to acquire the assets (digital and physical) of the former company.
The company would not be shutting down or deleting photos, as previously announced. This announcement was echoed in a blog post on Narrative’s official page.
“Your photos and videos will NOT be deleted on October 31st, but there will be 1 to 2 days of downtime while it’s being transferred to the new company,” the Facebook post reads. “There’s a risk of further disruptions in the coming weeks while necessary adjustments are made.”
Details are still sketchy, but initial plans seem to call for a subscription fee for the cloud-based photo storage and access application. Customers are encouraged to share ideas with the founders via their Facebook page.
It looks like hope is still alive for the lifelogging faithful. Further details still to come.
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