Tackling bit-rot is long overdue
Help is on the way to preserve our digital visual memories
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What if, at some point in the future I – or my (grand)children – can’t open my JPEG photos or my MP4 videos any longer? Or if these files are stored on an ancient device running an antiquated OS?
It’s an issue we all worry about – before we shrug our shoulders and move on, as it’s hopeless anyway. Sort of how some – but fortunately not all – of us respond to the devastating reports of climate change.
But when Vint Cerf, one of the co-creators and founding fathers of the internet and currently VP & Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, thinks differently, we need to pay attention. He is one of the backers of Emortal, a British startup that wants to help you organize, protect, preserve and pass on your “digital legacy” and protect it from becoming unreadable, otherwise known as bit-rot.
(On a personal note regarding bit-rot, I still regret that I didn’t convert all my old articles written ages ago in versions of MS Word that I now can no longer open. And really, going analog by printing all my old Word, JPEG and MP4 (😁) files is certainly not the be-all-and-end-all solution either, as some of my friends in the printing part of the industry might think).
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Emortal automatically converts all your digital files - photographs, documents, correspondence, videos, interviews and more - to the latest formats and backs them up in Google Cloud. The idea is that this will ensure that as operating systems, devices and tech evolves, your entire digital legacy will remain safe, secure and accessible — to only those you choose.
Emortal also lets you create sharable photo albums and send messages in the future or receive messages from the past. In addition, it offers VideoMe Booth: a way to leave video messages “on life’s big questions” for future generations.
Emortal has been in engineering R&D for more than 10 (!) years and has raised $5.7 million from “friends and family,” while it is now raising $2.7 million in crowdfunding, following what it says was a successful beta test. Note that the company already received an acquisition offer of $12M by Microsoft back in 2010.
But what if Emortal were to go out of business? The company stresses that its solution has been designed to integrate preservation technology with a future-proof legacy fund to pay for the continuous updates needed to ensure that your digital family heritage lasts for generations to come.
Let’s just hope then that Google won’t go out of business anytime soon.
* Having any thoughts or projects in the make that cater to the long-term preservation of photos or videos? Drop us a note – we’re planning to cover this topic in the future in this newsletter and also at Visual 1st.* |
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2020 at your fingertips
Check out the mention of any 270 companies covered in any of this year's newsletters.
View the Table of Contents here
View the 270 company Index here
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Byte & Clash. Combining forces to monetize short-form video. Clash, founded by a former Vine star, acquires Byte, founded by the former Vine founder. The result will be combining monetization acumen with the creative power of short-form videos.
*Both companies will be covered in our upcoming Video Study (Have anything working on that we should know about? Drop us a note!)*
Phrenology 2.0. AI is getting us into scary territory. Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person’s political party with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. The study from a group led by Stanford University’s Michal Kosinski also showed in a previous study that sexual preference can seemingly be inferred this way. And in case you wondered, according to the study, “Head orientation and emotional expression stood out: Liberals tended to face the camera more directly, were more likely to express surprise, and less likely to express disgust.” The study was conducted before January 6.
Shutterfly & Lifetouch. COVID and school print products. But if your main business is school photography things are a lot tougher, as we also heard from Shutterfly’s GM, Beth Burkhart, at Visual 1st when referring to Lifetouch. Lifetouch is said to eliminate 700 positions; the rest of Shutterfly will shed 90.
Capsule. Raising $. Congratulations to last year’s Visual 1st Gold sponsor, Capsule, which raised $2M in pre-seed funding (we used an early release version of Capsule for Visual 1st attendees to share video introduction messages).
Beamr. Emmy Award. Congratulations to our industry friends at Beamr, who received a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) for their development of Perceptual Metrics for Video Encoding Optimization.
Nikon. Last year’s reality. At the same time, Nikon is expected to report a historic $720M loss. The response? Focus on mirrorless cameras, as was the case last year.
Best,
Hans Hartman
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