Digital Storytelling

GroupSmarts has announced MemoryMiner 2.0, a breakthrough update to their award-winning Digital Storytelling application for Mac OS X. A fantastic complement to the iLife suite, MemoryMiner is all about capturing and exploring your life memories. It allows anyone to zero in on the stories depicted in their photos by linking them to each other based on people, places and time. While photos are used as the starting point, the goal is always uncovering the backstory.

Developed from the ground up utilizing the latest Cocoa technologies, MemoryMiner features a natural, easy-to-use interface. Directly record audio or video to capture the backstory of a photo. Attach documents, web URL's, or other media to add depth and context. Each photo becomes a frame in an endless storyboard which can be browsed by periods in a person's life, where people overlap, by place, by time, or any combination.

MemoryMiner is targeted to consumers, but it has been used by leading museums such as the Magnes to create public installations for capturing, sequencing and publishing collected social memories. Users may create self-contained library documents to share with other MemoryMiner users, or export beautiful interactive web sites which can be automatically uploaded to a Mobile Me (.Mac) account or other web server. MemoryMiner also works seamlessly with PulpMotion in order to create stunning video presentations suitable for web, DVD or iPod/iPhone.


Most people have huge photo and media collections: MemoryMiner allows anyone to take the very best and brightest of this media and connect them into coherent narratives. Version 2.0 is the result of more than a year of intensive development, and represents an incredible leap forward in terms of overall performance, polish and elegance from the already breakthrough 1.x version.


Major New features in 2.0 include:

* Interactive Ken Burns style pan and zoom is available through a button that appears on every selection marker. Users can step inside a photo through the markers placed on photos. These markers can highlight a person or an object in the photo.

* Gorgeous new Maplines view that presents a single, chronological line overlaid on top of a Google Maps view. The line connects geographical marker points corresponding to all the distinct places where a person has been captured in a photo library. Clicking on a marker displays an overlay with a Coverflow style view that focuses on just the specific area of a photo where a person exists.


* Create ordered collections which can be published to the web via the totally revamped MemoryMiner web viewer. The data is published as a Geo/Media RSS feed. Collections can also be published as Flickr sets. In both cases, changes made on the desktop can be efficiently updated to the web viewer, or to Flickr with only what was changed. MemoryMiner RSS feeds are compatible with Cooliris.

* Read iPhoto faces info. When importing files from iPhoto that have recognized faces, the face marker is converted to a MemoryMiner selection marker, with a new Person record created as needed. Unlike in iPhoto, users can resize the markers as needed to capture more than just the square face area. There's more to a person than just their face.

* MemoryMiner directly supports Reverse Geocoding. GPS data embedded in digital photos from iPhone or other cameras can be used to automatically create MemoryMiner places.

* Optionally embed all annotation data directly in the photo files themselves using the open standard Adobe XMP/IPTC format. In addition to the usual title/caption/date/GPS location data, MemoryMiner selection markers with captions/person names are stored as well. This lets users share the results of their annotation work on individual photos with other MemoryMiner users or other XMP-savvy applications such as Lightroom, Aperture, etc.

* Directly record audio/video annotations using the built-in iSight camera or any other Quicktime compatible device.

* Full screen annotation using task-specific overlays that can be easily shown/hidden as needed, lets you focus on capturing the story.

"Over a 12 month period from 2003-2004, my father died, I got married and had a child," said John C. Fox, founder of California based GroupSmarts, LLC. " I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about the threads of my life, particularly how the choices my parents and grandparents faced were shaped by the larger historical events of the time. I also thought about the places I'd travelled, where I went to school, the people I knew but had lost touch with.

During a vacation at the beach with the entire extended family, my brother suggested that we scan as many of the photos in the family album as possible. If for no other reason, we should all have a CD copy of these precious memories. As he busied himself with the disassembly and scanning of the the albums, I noticed something interesting. As people came in from the beach, they started picking up photos and telling stories," continues Fox.

"It was so much easier to make these connections when all the photos were liberated from the physical albums and could be rearranged quickly and easily," said Fox. "Essentially, I wanted to capture and extend this shared experience where both the memory artifacts and the people who knew about them were all working together. MemoryMiner was first released at Macworld at the beginning of 2006, where it won a Best of Show award. Along the way, I've been joined by a small group of super talented folks, and we're cranking along."

Pricing and Availability:
MemoryMiner 2.0 is available as a single-user license for $40.00 (USD) and available as a full-featured, 21 day trial. It is a $20.00 upgrade for 1.x users. Higher education discounts are available. Version 2.0 is a major update delivering requested features and is a recommended download for all customers.


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