Memoryze: Do Not Forget The Human

You’ve had a tough week, but have a great dinner planned with friends. You’ve all been looking forward to hanging out and catching up, but when it comes time for the event, you find that most people are distracted by their phones. They’re spending that precious time you’ve carved out together to tweet about their day or instagram their food.
Sound familiar?
Technology is meant to be a tool to help people, yet we’re seeing more and more cases of technology being built as addiction, control machines. Social media applications are built to tickle our reward centres and bring people back again and again. Products are built to fail and be replaced on a regular basis. These implementations of technology are shaping our behaviour, often in negative ways.
We’re often making things without considering “should” we build this?
On top of social media, there are other less savoury issues caused by technology. Some threats are real, others speculative. The list is endless; rampant AI, high volume trading algorithms destroying economies, election manipulations. These concerns are valid and very real, but they don’t make technology evil by default. Call them…. poorly implemented uses. Luckily, we’ve also managed to make some pretty cool things as well.
The internet is one of the greatest inventions of the human race. We have revamped what it means to be a society. Never has there been such a great collection of human knowledge that is so accessible to people across the world. People can instantly connect with one another anywhere on the planet and the barrier to education has never been lower.
How do you determine what is “good”?
So we know technology can be used for the collective good of humanity. The “good” of humanity is hard to quantify though. How do you determine what is “good”? It’s a tricky situation as the answer is very subjective. Entire religions have been formed trying to answer that question.
Based on our experiences, we’d like to think that connecting with another person in a meaningful way is “good”.
Being able to let down the illusion of a perfectly curated life and genuinely share your thoughts and experiences without fear of judgement is “good”.
Being able to feel understood and accepted is “good”.
While those things may be “good”, it is very hard to create the kinds of environments that allow that kind of open and honest dialog. People are awkward, they don’t always say what they mean. There is often a tremendous amount of pressure to appear ‘perfect’. This is a problem we think is worth solving. If technology can be used in creative ways to remove this discomfort and give people a platform to communicate their thoughts and emotions genuinely, we can do “good”.
In our quest to create something worthwhile, we looked at the kind of stories we felt we could make the biggest impact in.
Imagine the father of a 5 year old. The father gets diagnosed with cancer. The prognosis says he won’t make it the year. He won’t be around to watch his son graduate high school. He won’t be around to give advice on how to date. He won’t be able to convey his thoughts and emotions in the time left to him.
Imagine an adopted 15 year old girl. She has a loving foster family and friends whom she loves dearly, but is incredibly shy. She wishes she could tell them how much they mean to her and how much she appreciates their love. But finds that she can’t say it to them in person.
Imagine a working 40 year old mother with three kids and a husband. Due to the nature of her work, she has to travel for large parts of the year. She would like to be there for her children’s birthdays, for her wedding anniversary and tries to keep in touch with them regularly. However, due to the demands of her role, her schedule is unpredictable and doesn’t always line up with her family’s. She feels guilty for missing milestones and anniversaries.
What if we could help?
Some common elements come from these situations.
First, is the issue of time, it is hard to package all of a person’s thoughts and feelings into a single conversation. Or to address all the different points of a person’s life in one go. Advice meant for getting a prom date will be appreciated at a very different time then how to raise a child well.
Second, we have the issue of face-to-face communication. While it is extremely valuable and provides the most meaningful connections, it does have a drawback. It is difficult be truly open and honest when you see the other person right in front of you. You could be too embarrassed, too self conscious, or any number of other issues that prevent you from sharing your full experience.
What if we built a way to pre-record these messages? What if we let a person say what they want to say in complete privacy and have the message delivered years down the line? Take away the pressure and urgency of the interaction? What if you could target the message to be released exactly when you think it would be the most impactful?
Memoryze is our stab at doing “good”. It’s best described as a video time capsule service. You upload your messages (which we call memories), onto the platform and choose release dates for them. Memoryze then takes stewardship of those messages, keeping them safe and releasing them to the designated recipients.
What we hope to do is provide people a way to be understood. A way to communicate and preserve their legacy; the unique collection of experiences that make them…them. The platform is designed to be as public or private as you want. Each time capsule has a recipient and a pass phrase associated with it. You choose who to share that passphrase with, whether it’s just an intended recipient or the whole world. You can modify or adjust your messages at any time. You can find video tutorials of each of the aforementioned steps on the site.
This is just the start. As we build out more products and ideas, we’ll continue to share how we’re implementing technology in thoughtful, meaningful ways. Until then, let us know how we can help.
