A couple of years ago, I wrote an Online cover story about "life caching" called How to save your life. Two of the people I interviewed for that were Christian Lindholm, who was then at Nokia, and Lyndsay Williams, from the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge. Lindholm was developing Nokia's Lifeblog for mobile phones, while Williams had had been working for some time on automatically capturing your life using a SenseCam 4 camera, which you wore round your neck. She called it "a black box data recorder for the human body".
Now WayMarkr neatly combines the two ideas. Instead of buying a prototype SenseCam (not available), you just hang a Series 60 phone round your neck.
You can also turn your stills into little movies -- another idea that Lyndsay Williams showed several years ago.
The account at we-make-money-not-art.com says:
Once the software is enabled, your phone will continuously take photographs of your events and perspectives. All photographs are sent to a remote server so your phone never runs out of space. You can then login to the Waymarkr web site, annotate and share your photos, see stop motion movies of your captured event and map out where your images were taken. You can also see other user's photos that were taken at the same time and place as yours.
It sounds like fun, but Williams was already researching serious uses. From my article:
"We demonstrated the SenseCam to people at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge, and they said it would be particularly useful for the partner of somebody who had very bad memory problems," says Williams. "It would also be useful for people who have to take their medicine at certain times and forget to do so: the SenseCam would provide a record."
There is a downside, which WMMNA mentions, and that I learned from using Lifeblog: I don't have much of a life. ("Do I really spend that much time in front of the computer?" Yep.)
