Present is a social video diary that just raised $370k. Do we really need it?

Social video apps are all the rage now. Snapchat kicked things off with an app for users to send video messages to one another. It made headlines as a sexting tool, but is much more than that.

Then there’s Meerkat, which creates live video streams on your smartphone that anyone online can watch. Twitter immediately jumped in, banning the app temporarily on its site and launching a competitor called Periscope.

Video content is exploding. Facebook is muscling into a space once dominated by YouTube, Netflix is giving Hollywood incumbents a run for its money with original productions, and hot media properties like Vice and Buzzfeed are betting big on the medium. Video consumption will spike in the coming years, as consumers gain access to faster internet connections and wider bandwidth.

It’s in this environment that we see the emergence of Present, a slightly different take on a social video app. It’s a Singaporean startup founded by Peter Draw (his surname is actually ‘Zhuo’), who’s a bit of an oddball because he’s an artist in a room full of techies – literally.

He made the Guinness Book of Records for drawing the world’s largest caricature, and according to his LinkedIn profile, “visited and collected drawings of love and encouragement from past survivors of earthquakes and tsunamis in China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Costa Rica and personally delivering them to children in Fukushima, Iwate, and Miyagi prefectures.”

He realized that he had collected memories from his travels and wanted to store them somewhere. That resulted in Present, which aspires to be a video memory bank for everyone. The company is in private beta, and recently raised S$500,000 (US$370,000) from angel investors like James Teo, executive chairman of Eastgate Technology, and Bobby Lim, executive director of Tai Sin Electric.

Think of Present as the opposite of Snapchat. While the latter is about living-in-the-moment with snaps that are no longer visible after they’re viewed, Present is about storing memories forever.

It lets users capture fleeting moments by immediately recording a video right after the app launches (future integration with Siri or Google Now make this even more compelling). Users can opt to stay in the present moment and upload a video later, after it is recorded. There’s also a feature for users to retrieve videos recorded in a vicinity, tapping into other people’s memories. And finally, users can upload videos that only they themselves can view.

The app, of course, has the requisite social features. I can follow users, tag videos, and share content on other social networks.

The problem now though is that it’s a pretty barren place. “I like the app, but none of my friends are on it,” said a user I spoke to, which highlights the typical chicken-and-egg problem that social network aspirants all face.

Of course, part of Present’s appeal is that it doesn’t need network effects to be useful. I was told moms like to use the app to take videos of their babies. And that could be key.

The success of Present depends on Zhuo’s ability to scale the product to reach a huge userbase. Storage costs will rack up in no time, given that Present stores its users’ videos in its servers. Here it compares unfavorably to Snapchat, which only stores metadata due to the ephemerality of its content. Further, Present allows ponderous videos of up to two minutes, and that could present a headache to the technical team.