Hasta La Gadget!

Disrupt NY 2013′s Startup Battlefield competition is underway, and now New York native Keen Home is taking the stage to present its first-round pitch. Keen Home is a home automation startup, which aims to follow in Nest’s footsteps by building remote vents for your central air conditioning and heating systems that can be controlled from your smartphone to optimally direct air where you actually need it — and away from places you don’t. Keen just launched its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.

Keen Home is the brainchild of Ryan Fant and Nayeem Hussain, both of whom have experience founding companies in the home real estate and property-management space. The two believe their startup can appeal to consumers who want both more convenience in managing their home’s HVAC systems, and who want to save money and conserve energy. Keen Home’s debut product, the Keen Vent, accomplishes both.

The idea came from Fant noticing that when vents were closed in other rooms, heating and cooling the one he was currently in became much easier. The problem is that those vents generally operate separately, and manually, in most homes. Even with some systems that provide a remote, like Activent, they aren’t centrally controlled in a way that makes them individually manageable from an existing device like a smartphone.

“We found that just by closing four vents in an average-sized home, we’ve reduced the run time of the furnace by about 30 percent,” Fant explained in an interview. “So not only were we redirecting air to rooms that were actually in use by intelligently closing vents, we were increasing efficiency, as well.”

Keen believes that the focus is always on the thermostat when it comes to home heating and cooling efficiency solutions, which is good but it ignores other parts of the problem. The Keen Vent solves that, by providing both a user-guided and automated way of opening and closing vents to change how air flows through a home. A homeowner can set a schedule for individual vents, too, and it can plug into weather data to respond intelligently to changing conditions.

Fant says the Keen Vent can provide up to 32 percent reduction in run time for HVAC systems, which means lower monthly bills and less toll on the environment. Most heating and cooling vents in households are around 60 years old, Keen Home said on stage during their Disrupt Battlefield presentation on Monday.

Individual vent covers will cost around $40 per vent, Keen predicts, with a $150 one-time charge for the system in total. There’s also another option, with a recurring fee of  $4 per month for access to the cloud-based management platform, which also provides monthly reports, plus a $25 sign up payment. But Fant and Hussain plan to partner with utility companies and homebuilders to try to offer the tech initially at a discount price, perhaps with, say, six months of service rolled into a new construction. It’s the same model that satellite radio provider Sirius/XM uses to sell subscriptions with new cars.

Keen Home is launching its Keen Vent product on Indiegogo today, and believes that seeking crowdfunding, as well as traditional investment, will help it get the word out and prove product viability. Its biggest challenges will be proving to users that a recurring subscription around centralized vent control is worth the cost, and in making sure that legacy players like Honeywell don’t swoop in and simply build their own similar systems. The team says that being aggressive with partnerships with big utility companies, the way others like Nest and thinkeco have done in the past, will be the key to making sure it can overcome both.

Keen said on stage that the majority of its audience would be people who don’t know what a smart home is, so they tried to make sure it was as easy to install as possible. That’s why they’ve made the install process as simple as possible, and setting up the online dashboard involves only entering a code and then doing a roughly 15 question survey. In addition, they’re planning to partner with HVAC contractors to take care of more complicated installs. Battery life is expected to be around a year for the vents, so it’d be roughly equivalent to changing the power source on devices like smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.

Image courtesy of NeoGAF

The countdown to Sony’s big event in New York City is officially underway as we’re about eight hours away from learning what the company has to show the press as well as the world through their live stream. We’re of course expecting Sony to officially unveil the PlayStation 4 this evening, but what we didn’t anticipate were additional unveilings of next-generation games as we thought Sony would have its plate full detailing the PlayStation 4.

The word around the ‘net seems to be EA is expected to unveil Battlefield 4 at tonight’s Sony press event. Just yesterday, GameStop’s CEO tweeted a message out through the company’s official Twitter profile saying he saw Battlefield 4 “and all I can say is WOW!” Hopefully that means Battlefield 4 is also in New York City and will make its big entrance during tonight’s event.

Considering a console is only as good as the games that are created for it, we think it would be safe to assume Sony would not only unveil the PlayStation 4 this evening, but also give some teases for its games. Either way, we can sense your excitement for tonight’s Sony event and we’ll be reporting from the scene to deliver all the information you’ve been dying to hear.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Sony’s Next-gen PlayStation Could Stream PS3 Games According To Report, Xbox 720 To Rely Heavily On Kinect 2.0; Able To Run Multiple Games [Rumor],

Robots can do almost anything – build cars, explore Mars, and run through the woods like a monster – but now they can sing and dance and even play songs after hearing their rhythm lines clapped out by their owners. Launching at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Tovbot is one of the coolest robots you’ll see today.

Tovbot is the brain-child of Gil Weinberg, Ph.D. We interviewed Weinberg in Georgia a few months ago and he told us that he was ready to commercialize and present his robots at Disrupt. Today he launched a Kickstarter for his project and you can pledge $149 to get your own Shimi Tovbot to be shipped later this year.

Click to view slideshow.

The Tovbot is a small phone dock that uses your phone’s processor to move to the music. It contains multiple motors that help it wag its arms, head, and feet. The program Weinberg created also “senses” beat based on clapping and can find matching songs automatically. For example, you can clap out songs like Coldplay’s “Yellow” and it will find a matching tune.

Thanks to smartphone and cloud robotic controls, Tovbot is highly complex yet surprisingly affordable. The robot builds choreography on the fly and can even follow you around the room using your cellphone’s camera.

The Tovbot is a toy but it’s also the future of home robotics. Designed to be like an iPod dock that mated with a Furby, the dock points to an interesting future where robots embed themselves into our daily lives in ways that are unique and uniquely fun. Pop over to Kickstarter to pre-order yours today.

Product Page