Oakland startup will help people preserve their pasts online
In 2013, he had just left his marketing job and was soul-searching for his next move when he ran across a set of dusty vinyl records owned by his late father.
The Oakland startup, founded by Lichtenstein and Ben Yee, allows users to upload videos, audio, photos and links to websites onto digital timelines and share them publicly or privately with friends and family.
[...] our digital content is great, but it’s getting so rapidly scaled and overwhelming to the point where our most meaningful moments are buried or cluttered in this fast-moving social media stream, Lichtenstein said.
The History Project joins a large marketplace of services that handle the storage and sorting of memories, including Google Photos, Facebook and other history-related companies like Ancestry.com.
The target audience for the product is Baby Boomers and their adult children, he added.
Ashish Soni, founding director at the Viterbi Startup Garage at USC, believes plenty of people will be interested.
The History Project doesn’t charge people to use its platform, but it plans to offer a premium version with more features like additional storage space.
For a fee, users can work with a freelance writer to set up a project, scan photos or make their project into a physical book.
“The minute I heard ‘concierge,’ I was so delighted and fearful,” said Katherine Kennedy, an adviser to Summer Search, a nonprofit that helps low-income high school students with summer programs.
Very few people have exhibited a willingness to pay for lots of online services.