Quilt was born just over a year ago, during an exciting night out in San Francisco. It was a night to remember with great people and incredible food. A group of my friends met up at a Night Market, which is basically a food rave where live music and street vendors converge inside a club. As expected, most of us were on our smartphones the whole time; capturing photos of the venue, the food, each other. We checked into the venue, Tweeted about the live music, even captured footage of a live pig carving. Then shared all of this content across multiple social networks. It was a typical 21st century, ‘share-happy’, digital overload.
The night evolved into one unforgettable event shared amongst an awesome group of friends. Unfortunately, I had prior engagements, so I ended up missing the last part of the night. The only personal reminders I have from that evening, were some scattered SMS messages from Niko Cunningham (now, my Quilt co-founder). The rest were scattered into the digital universe. To say the least, it failed to do the night justice. It failed to capture the memory.
At 3:30 AM, the first pieces of Quilt began to fall into place. I asked myself: how could a group of close friends all experience the same great event together, and still not have a single place to share our experience together? Why did reliving that one event, mean we had to search through several social media outlets, several different pages and accounts, just to piece together that one evening? Furthermore, how could each one of us have a powerful computer in hand, and still we were so disconnected? We were all sharing the same physical space, but digitally, we were worlds apart.
Our smartphones should have made that transition easier, not more difficult. Why should I miss the best quote of the night because I stepped away to greet more people? Why should I have to stalk a friend’s FB and Twitter and FourSquare and G+ feeds for all the photos, videos, thoughts and comments from the evening?
There had to be a way to seamlessly merge our digital and physical worlds together.
Life is a Collection of experiences. Things get interesting when you start thinking about how life and relationships really work. We are a collection of the experiences we share with the people we encounter throughout our life path, but we certainly don’t label everyone as a ‘friend’. I’ve shared incredible experiences with people that lasted only a night or a few weeks, while others have become lifelong friends.
Quilt allows you to collaboratively build rich, realtime scrapbooks of each of these relationships and experiences separately, keeping the content and conversations separate from your other quilts. While the end product is a beautiful ‘quilt’, them mobile app is a simple interface for interacting with Quilts that have the most recent activity (similar to text messaging).
Quilt’s big vision is simply this: to become the world’s memory bank. Ultimately you can ask Quilt to show you all the moments you shared with your sister while in Tampa, FL, or all videos from every birthday you’ve ever had. We believe this is a problem worth solving, but it all starts with helping you connect in a more meaningful way with the people you love.
