MEMRY challenges Facebook and Instagram

Did someone just spam your Facebook or Instagram feed full with pictures and videos?

With the amount of content shared in social media increasing constantly, Swedish startup MEMRY wants to help their community share bundles of videos and pictures in albums within their social network.

The co-founders of MEMRY, Pelle Kjellqvist and Peter Jundin, first got the idea for their app after participating in a music festival in Gothenburg in the summer of 2013. While they were sitting on the train traveling back towards Stockholm, they were of course going through all the photos and videos they been taking over the weekend – and they figured out they didn’t want to share the content with anyone, anywhere.

It was cool in the past to have thousands of friends on Facebook, but people now have greater concerns about privacy and control of their content. And that’s how MEMRY was born. It’s a social platform where users easily can create beautiful albums, combining both photos and videos, that can either be shared with friends and family, or just kept private.

“There is approximately 180% higher interaction rate on the album format than single photos and status updates. People love albums, telling the full story of their travels, weddings or birthdays for example. Albums also add value to smaller events, like dinners, nights out with friends or spending time with your children,” describes Jundin, the CEO of MEMRY.

Alongside sharing, the startup wants to solve another issue for active mobile users: storing of photos and videos. All albums created on the app will be saved at MEMRY Cloud, so users always have their important moments safely stored, even if videos and photos are deleted off your phone because of lack of space, or by mistake.

The feed of MEMRY looks pretty much the same as an Instagram feed, except the pictures you see on the feed are actually cover photos of albums. When clicking an image, you’ll get to scan through a whole album of pictures which are sorted as private profiles. On MEMRY, the users are in charge of their own photos, while the startup is in charge of keeping them secure.

The app is already live for iOS and launching for Android this month. Jundin reports that they already have additional features planned to be added in the near future:

“The upcoming share function will be based on Snapchat functionality – sharing to all your followers, selected groups of people, or specific individuals.”

The future of MEMRY includes also a web based photobook function – printing physical photobooks out of the albums – which will be launched by the end of 2015 in cooperation with Elanders Group. This enables the users to be able to create photo books of selected MEMRY albums within 90 seconds, which will be sent to any location around the world.

Their ultimate goal is highly ambitious — to become the leading social platform in Europe and the US.

 

This article was originally posted on Arctic Startup.