> Will it be possible to use the camera without ever uploading any photos to Memotos cloud storage?
> Yes. You can use the camera with local storage only if you want. You will however not be able to use the data from the GPS and you will have to manage and organize all the photos yourself. The data from the GPS is not converted into a useful position in latitude and longitude until it has been processed in our cloud service.
That doesn't sound right. Clearly, the GPS data must include latitude and longitude data. I wonder if they're doing some sort of encryption of the data, or if it's just an encoding issue or something.
EDIT: just read the answer after submitting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5010057. That's a neat approach! Sounds like it'd be straightforward to do the same thing that their cloud service does in a non-cloud process.
By offloading that computation to the cloud, it suffices to get a 200 ms snapshot of GPS radio data. It means we can have a duty cycle of about 500 ms instead of 30s or more, which is how the camera can have such an extended battery life.
Why can't owners get access to the same 200 ms snapshot of data though? To post-process that in similar ways (even if it needs reinventing the wheel if you decide to consider that a closed part of your business) later?
No data would be 'lost' and you'd be about hardware and convenience (backups, automatic tagging, whatever) instead of removing a core feature of a 'memento' device for users that want to run that thing standalone/offline.
Impossible? Will never happen? Maybe?
The poeple in this subthread seem to be interested in your product, as far as idea and hardware are concerned. Now to please the crowd that still cringes whenever someone mentions the 'cloud' you'd need to offer a way to opt out of your online services, without losing too much functionality or even data.
What is the point of any privacy argument here? If I buy that thing from you, it seems (your words) that I can access my images locally, without using the online service. How is 'can I access the data you use to compute the GPS position' any different, privacy wise? We're talking about a device that I would potentially carry around my neck after all.
We are receiving a constant stream of feature requests supporting different use cases. At the moment we focus on functionality that supports as many use cases as possible. To provide the same functionality with local storage would mean to duplicate everything we have developed into standalone software, and then support that forever.
Regarding the privacy aspect, if we allow third party apps to integrate to our API, we can allow the user to retain control over what those apps have access to. But if we would chose to make a development effort to allow locally stored data to be used as an integration point for third party apps, we can no longer provide that level of control. An app that turns out to be malicious can't be disabled across the entire user base, because it's probably installed as an executable on local computers.
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1726...