Atlas Recall, the first product from Seattle startup Atlas Informatics, just launched an open beta this morning. The app is designed to run in the background, indexing any information you want it to, in order to serve as your “photographic memory” for everything digital in your life.
And, as CEO Jordan Ritter makes clear, everyone needs a better memory.
“Our memories are strange and difficult — I can remember what I was wearing when I first played my favorite game, Homeworld 2, but I can’t remember the name of that great restaurant I had dinner at last Friday. I can tell you exactly where I was when my first company sold, but it takes me forever to find the picture my buddy took of that big moment,” Ritter said in a blog post. “I just have too much to sift through in my digital life and that’s why I founded a company dedicated to solving the problem of digital chaos.”
The average worker, Ritter states, wastes 20 percent of their time searching through old emails and calendar invites — a number that constitutes one day out of each work week. For its efforts to address this issue, Atlas Recall has raised $20.7 million from a collection of investors including Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold and Aspect Ventures.
How It Works
Atlas Recall takes secure notes on everything you do across all your devices. But don’t worry: You can tell it which applications to keep track of and which to ignore. One example Ritter provides: “I tell Recall to index all of my Slack messages, but I don’t need it to record what I’m watching on Netflix.”
The product isn’t designed to add yet another “extra layer” to the wide variety of productivity tools available already, the company’s CEO says:
“Instead, it works alongside your apps to make the data and information that is important to you easily searchable with context — all without APIs or needing your passwords. That means Recall will remember everything across all your services — yes, everything — the way your brain remembers. I may not remember that my ticket to the game was emailed to me, but I might remember that it was my sister who sent it to me yesterday. I can search for the ticket by using her name and the day.”
Atlas Recall is now available for Mac users, with an iPhone companion app, on the Atlas Informatics website. A Windows 10 version is in the works.
Image: Atlas Informatics