MIIGEN, a website which serves as a “digital time capsule” where family photos can be archived, was set up by Craig J Lemmon when he was going through his father’s belongings after his death. The company provides a retrospective social platform that is fully private unless users want to share a memory. Lemmon hopes the company will eventually have more than 10 million users globally.
Name: Craig J Lemmon
Position: CEO
WHAT’S THE BUSINESS CALLED?
Miigen
WHERE IS IT BASED?
Stirling
WHY DID YOU SET UP THE BUSINESS?
WHEN my father passed away, I had the unenviable task of having to head up into the attic to deal with his affairs. I found a shoebox of old photographs that were the story of his early life, which I would loved to have chatted to him about before his memory faded.
I then started to look at how big this problem was and how could I stop other families experiencing what I did with my father.
It is clear we are going to live longer and many of our later years will be without an active memory – the statistics are terrifying as one to four older adults will suffer from dementia and we could live up to 10 years without our memories. Memories are the bedrock of our lives. Miigen is a liferaft of personalised memories build into a digital time capsule.
WHAT IS THE TARGET MARKET?
WE are focused upon enhancing the quality of later-life living and the mental wellbeing of our ageing population.
Given that we will have more than 1.6 billion over-65s living on the planet by 2035, we have a big challenge ahead.
HOW DOES IT DIFFER FROM COMPETING BUSINESSES?
MIIGEN is free at the point of contact for families and community groups. We encourage
inter-generational activity in the family to generate content that is valuable to the person the family and their community.
We do this through a collection of tools embedded into our Miigen Digital Time Capsule builder.
WHAT DO YOU ENJOY MOST ABOUT RUNNING THE BUSINESS?
THE most of the enjoyable part of building Miigen as a business is attending events and exhibitions and listening to people tell their stories, of their family and community.
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN RUNNING THE BUSINESS?
WE want to keep Miigen free for families and older adults. Building the right business model to support this has taken time and investment is paramount in us achieving our goals.
HOW HAS CORONAVIRUS IMPACTED YOUR BUSINESS?
SINCE we have a focus on older adults we have seen an increase in interest for Miigen from organisations who want to help reach out to our audience. We have also had conversations with US-based city officials about building solution for their residents.
WHERE DO YOU HOPE THE BUSINESS WILL BE IN 10 YEARS’ TIME?
I WOULD like to see Miigen with more than 10 million global users with a raft of tools, that are enhancing the quality of later life living which families can use to reconnect to their elderly family members.
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