PastBook is an online platform that collects all your social network memories and puts them together in a tangible way, via a book or a poster representing your digital social content.
Back in the old days, families used to gather all together and go through the photo albums of their past. Who doesn’t remember the moments of seeing their parents’ pictures from their youth? Or even your grandparents? Those moments sound like a thing from the past rather than experience from the present.
We create more social content than ever before, using cameras on pretty much every electronic device we are carrying, real-time tweeting, you name it. This means that most of our modern memories are spread all over the internet, whether it be via Facebook, Google+, Twitter or many other sources. These are only a digital imprint, and have no value once you turn off your device. At the same time, just managing all this information is problematic, not even mentioning having it as a tangible product. So what if you could share your memories without the need to go online? What if opening a photo album could be possible again? Just in a cooler way. This is the problem PastBook wants to solve.
Started as an idea in Italy a year ago, PastBook is right now enjoying the benefits of Rockstart Accelerator in Amsterdam, where they are working on the product design, new features and other awesome stuff. They want to position themselves as a bridge between the social network sites and the traditional printing companies.
So what does PastBook offer? Firstly, it allows you to manage all your online content from social networks in one place. Sounds like a My Pictures folder on your computer? Not even close to that, as PastBook collects all the information that comes next to the photos, like comment and number of likes and, by using templates or customizing the design yourself, you can have a PDF file which contains all this data. You can share this with your friends, show it to your parents who might not be so interested in following your social life online, or just go through it to remember the good old days. If that was not enough, PastBook offers their most important service – a tangible product with all of the data collected.
In the end, social networks enable us to share our experiences easier than ever before, and instant upload functions, posting comments and many other options have simply maximized the user experience. However, people still love tangible, holdable objects and no internet site will ever be able to replace that. It is already possible to order your PastBook albums online, and for a more customizable design you should keep an eye on these Italians who promise the experience of going through your memories in a tangible brand new and cool way!
By the way: You can find out about other interesting startups from Italy in this list.
