Monument: Smart Product Design

It has become a natural reflex to record every moment that we enjoy with the people we love. With so many photos on our phones and cameras, it can become tedious and time-consuming to transfer and store them. At MAKO, we support product designs that can relieve stress and extra work for the users and give them better ways to manage their photos and videos. The Chicago-based start-up has developed a new cloud device called Monument that automatically syncs, stores, and manages all your photos and videos without having to resort to a cloud storage service on the Web.

A Smart Product Design That Manages Your Photos And Videos

Monument is your own personal cloud device. It uses WiFi to synchronize the storage of your photos and videos directly from your smartphone or video camera. Once your photos are collected in Monument, the smart product design equipped with AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms, organizes them according to several criteria: location, facial recognition, date and event.

This smart storage enables the user to easily search and browse through the device by these aforementioned criteria. The device uses facial recognition to find individuals in the photos. For example, if the users wish to search for photos with one specific person, they can do so by selecting the searching by face mode on their phone. This smart product design makes it possible to sort your photos and look for them when mentioning keywords describing what is going on in the photos (“ski”, “beach”, etc.). This is perfect for individuals who don’t want to waste time browsing through every photo on their timeline to find what they are looking for.

Monument also works well with cameras, it is designed with a built-in SD card slot for fast file transfer. Monument comes along with a mobile app that allows a seamless and fast relaying of the photos and footage. Photos and videos can be viewed on tablets, smartphones and even on TV through an HDMI connection. The new product design uses external USB drives allowing all content to be stored in an external hard disk for more storage flexibility. Monument has a sleek and sophisticated coat that comes in two colors.  With its compact form, Monument blends in perfectly in our homes.

The Monument Kickstarter campaign has already been fully funded, making it a promising device for everyone to use and enjoy. We love seeing practical and user-friendly product designs like Monument that offers a great alternative to using a fee-paying cloud service that doesn’t allow the user to have full control over their privacy.

About: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories. Also, our founder Kevin Mako hosts The Product Startup Podcast, the industry's leading hardware podcast. Check it out for tips, interviews, and best practices for hardware startups, inventors, and product developers. Click HERE to learn more about MAKO Design + Invent!