When they live There have been very few attempts to disrupt search engines, Rewind may be the first ever to revolutionize the way we search our online lives. One app at a time.
It was built by When Dan rocked, Co-founder and former CEO of Optimizely, Rewind wants to help people remember. The startup, which launched today, uses cutting-edge technology to record how someone scrolls and chats throughout their day. It creates a searchable record of who said what, who said it, and what happened at that escalation meeting and every time someone reports spending sprees.
“The content of discussions, debates and decisions is often lost forever once the meeting is over,” Sirrocker said. “With Rewind, you’ll never have to worry about losing that content again….you can go back to the exact moment in time by simply searching for the words that were spoken in the meeting you’re looking for.”
Sirrocker compares the app to a hearing aid, which he says changed his life after he started hearing in his 20s. “It felt like a superpower to lose consciousness and regain it,” Searocker said. After leaving Optimizely in October 2020, he began looking for ways to increase human capacity. According to LinkedIn, it launched a foundation in 2018 to “fund and conduct scientific research to accelerate our path toward simulating the human brain.”
In product form, this goal looks like Rewind. Syrocker says the startup “uses APIs to determine which specific app is focused on at any given time” and creates a timeline of that behavior. It also uses an API to allow deep interaction with websites, so people can open them directly from search results in Chrome.
Users don’t need to integrate with Gmail, Dropbox, or Slack, instead they can download and “go back” to start the app. In practice, for example, if you forget the landing page URL of a new competitor’s app that someone mentioned during a developer startup, you can go back – haha - find the meeting time someone threw during your day. The link on the screen, copy and paste the link.
As for the “why now” question, Cirocker had an immediate answer: “Apple Silicon (ie M1 and M2 chips). Without it, we couldn’t do what we do. Locally, we use every part of the system on a chip (SoC) to do everything on your machine.
Rewind claims to compress raw video footage up to 3,750x without losing quality. “This means you can store years of continuous recordings on even the smallest hard drives you can buy from Apple today,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch ahead of today’s announcement. (Apple is not an investor).
Return solves one of the biggest challenges of any app – user trust – go ahead. The copies are stored locally on individual Mac computers. In theory, it means that the company does not touch the data. Rewind says only users can access their data.
Sirrocker added that users can pause and delete recordings at any time without adding apps like Signal or 1Password or incognito mode, “by default we don’t record Chrome Incognito or Safari private browsing windows).
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There are still some risks in storing sensitive, comprehensive storage of everything you see, say or hear on a machine. If your computer is compromised, malware can affect sensitive data. There’s the awkward dance of a Rewind user recording someone on their screen without their consent; It is illegal in some states.
Sirrocker said he recommends that users ask for verbal permission from those being recorded, ensuring that only the user has access to the recording. Still, a user with Rewind might be less inclined to complain about their corporate parent or share personal stories knowing they’re recording somewhere (the delete button doesn’t work in retrospect, unfortunately).
“While the laws vary from state to state, we believe privacy is so important that we recommend that users of our products be held accountable to a level far above the bare legal minimum,” Searocker said in advance of recording permission. “This is not only the best and safest way legally, but also the right thing to do.”
As to whether this will make people better at remembering random things throughout their careers, rather than losing track of them, the jury is still out. If you look at it all day, that doesn’t mean you’ll remember more, it just means you have more stored memories on hand. I think it’s a memory aid, but definitely one that needs to be kept on your computer.
“The long-term view is giving people the perfect memory, the product today is about exploration,” said Sirocker. That’s where we can make the biggest impact. If you think about it, if we all had perfect memories in the past, we wouldn’t need to search our emails, texts, decos, etc. to find things we’ve seen before. We just remember them.
To date, the company has raised $10 million in a first round of capital led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and a $75 million seed round.
The app is currently free, Sirocker says, but there will be a freemium monthly subscription on the way. And, despite its history of helping companies better market advertising campaigns, Searocker Rewind “never sells your data or advertises to you.”
