Future Think: Hi Startup Moment Mapping the World

That would be travel as an inspiration. Mod is a major traveler, and he corresponds for this story with Book Business just before he goes completely off-grid, "I'll be on dirt roads most of tomorrow."

More inspirations? "Cities, Italo Calvino, Pico Iyer, Paula Fox, Rebecca Solnit. It's also inspired by the idea of archives, their value in community resilience, of grounding story in place, of creating a 'savings bank' for moments in the world, and being delighted in unexpected ways on unintentional journeys."

Like such "unintentional journeys," this startup's new way of seeing the world helps us understand a place in terms of story. That street corner in New York City Mod spoke of, for example, means one thing for you, another for him.

At the moment, Hi is privately funded, Mod says. "We're very lean. We have a good runway. We have enough to see us through several iterations and push out all the features we're most excited about in the coming months."

Any tie-ins with major social media ahead?

"Oh, my, yes," he says. "We have a branch on our git repo that has Twitter and Facebook sharing buttons. We just haven't had time enough to test it (and create a UX we're comfortable with) and release it. So, yes, we very much see Hi as sitting closely with most other social networks."

Hi is available only by invitation now. "We'd like to open the service up to everyone eventually," Mod says. "As soon as we feel we've gotten everything to a solid place, we'll crack the floodgates. I'd love to have 100,000+ people sketching and writing daily."

And now, well, Mod disappears into that map. You can find him surfacing moments from many points on his journeys or, if you like, on his Twitter feed. And many friends are with him now, exploring this new way of “telling” the world, “narrative mapping,” “moment mapping”…even the terms are evolving with the tool.