The story behind Event Flow
The story begins in December 2008. We were digging the Google Android API and we realized that an app could be notified in real-time of almost everything happening on the device including a picture shot, a text message received or a call being missed. We thought this would allow us to design an app which could store and search all the events occurring on the phone.
This led to the birth of Event Flow and we soon realized that the concept was nothing new. As a matter of fact, many R&D departments of companies such as Nokia or Microsoft had been working on the Lifelog concept for quite some time.
There were also movies that had been inspired by this idea. In the rather violent Strange Days (1995) directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron, the hero, Lenny Nero, is a dealer of data-discs containing recorded memories and emotions. When the disc is played, the user experiences the memory as though he was actually living it.
As far as we know, the idea was actually first introduced by Vannevar Bush in his famous As We May Think essay, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. In this essay, Bush described a device called Memex that an individual could use to read a large self-contained research library, adding or following associative trails of links and notes created by themselves or recorded by other individuals. As you may imagine, the Memex technology was not available back then. Now, we have Internet and Search engines which serve some Memex function.
As you can see, Event Flow is just a new step towards this vision and is part of the family of tools that help us remember what we have lived and reignite the emotions locked up in in old pictures and text messages.