Every year I’m given the best job a guy could ever want: planning hardware alley, a one day extravaganza of some of the best hardware I’ve ever seen. This event, which happens on the last day of Disrupt, is a crowd favorite and I’d love to feature your gear. What is Hardware Alley? It’s a celebration of hardware startups (and other cool gear makers) that features everything… Read More
Learning to play the gTar, by Disrupt darling Incident, is about as easy as learning to ride a bike. A series of light-up LEDs, paired with an app on your smartphone, show the gTar player exactly when and where to strum to create beautiful music.
The only downside? There aren’t very many songs to choose from that are compatible with the gTar. Until today. Read More
Indiegogo co-founder and CEO Slava Rubin took the stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe 2013, and he shared some interesting stats about the crowdfunding platform’s progress to date, and he specifically addressed some of the company’s international growth. Over the past year, Indiegogo has managed to expand its business 300 percent in Europe over the past year, and international funding now accounts for a full 30 percent of its platform activity.
A lot of the hard work about that came around adding new languages, Rubin said, and then it was also challenging because of the various currencies that had to be incorporated into the platform. Most of the heavy lifting is around working out how to take and receive payments in different countries, Rubin said, and adding a number of new international capabilities in that regard has really helped speed up their growth.
The international growth is actually a core part of Indiegogo’s vision, for an open and democratized future of funding.
“It’s really simple, we want to democratize funding across the world, the only way to do that is to be open,” Rubin said. “To be open is hard […] The only way to create an open platform is to be totally global, if you only focus on one vertical or one country, you’re only creating liquidity in that space.”
It’s hard because you need to reach as many people as possible, you need to build a product that’s both open to all submissions but also reliable and consistent, and because you have to defend against fraud, which is hugely complicated when you’re trying to be open.
Yet defend against fraud is exactly what Indiegogo has done. The crowdfunding company has faced numerous fraud attempts since 2008, but Rubin says that they’ve had “virtually zero” actually carried out successful. Its net of anti-fraud detection, which includes community monitoring, advanced fraud detection algorithms, and people to track down and follow-up with flagged incidents, is so far pretty bulletproof, Rubin says.
As to what this means in terms of actually delivering funding to project creators, Rubin says that there’s now “millions” being distributed to between 70 and 100 different countries per week. Indiegogo may have strong competition in the form of Kickstarter, but it’s clearly focus on growing internationally quickly and covering as much ground as possible while Kickstarter moves a little more slowly on reaching new countries.
You walk up to your apartment building, arms overflowing with groceries, maybe your dog on a leash, backpacks, etc. Then you have to fumble for your key fob (or worse, an actual hardware key) just to open the door and get inside your own home. Disrupt Europe 2013 Battlefield Finalist Kiwi.ki wants to bring the same convenience that’s available to car owners via keyless entry to residential multi-unit complexes, making it possible for anyone who lives at one to just walk up to the door and open it, thanks to an RFID device carried in their pocket.
For a few years now, it’s been remarkably easy for car owners to gain access to their vehicles. More and more manufacturers are designing key fobs that let drivers simply approach their car door, and have them open instantly when you reach out to pull the handle. Yet no one has really built the same thing for residential housing. Kiwi.ki is doing that, and has already partnered with Deutsche Post in Germany to make it easy for mail carriers to gain access to apartments for simpler delivery of letters and packages. Long-term, the vision is to have keyless entry systems built into the entries of a majority of Berlin’s many residential complexes, and then to expand internationally, as well.
“We are the exclusive partner of Deutsche Post to install our system in these multi-storey buildings, and there about 3 million of those buildings in Germany alone,” Kiwi.ki co-founder Dr. Christian Bogatu explained in an interview. “Obviously, we are not stopping in Germany – we are also going to launch in other countries soon.”
It’s not only a solution that makes sense for apartment buildings; Already, Kiwi.ki has some corporate clients, including Allianz, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, and Factory Berlin, a campus and shared workspace for startups here in Germany. Bogatu says that despite those clients and a few others in the business world, the focus for the startup is firmly on residential customers – they don’t want to spread themselves too thin chasing multiple markets at once.
I asked Bogatu why there’s even a need for Kiwi.ki, when others like Lockitron are already offering connected home lock hardware, and companies like Schlage seem pretty well-poised to introduce their own similar solution and crush the market. He said that in fact, they’re partnering with Lockitron, and want to work with them to deliver a complete solution to users that offers both main door entry and individual unit locks. And big companies like Schlage are potential partners, too; Kiwi.ki doesn’t make the locks, just the hands-free wireless entry technology for existing installs. Offering Kiwi.ki services alongside its products would actually be an additional selling opportunity for Schlage and others, Bogatu says.
The technology itself doesn’t seem all that difficult on the surface, but it’s actually very hard to get it right and still preserve privacy and security. Bogatu says that Kiwi.ki has recruited the very hackers who would normally exploit a system like this to build it, charging them with making it resistant to their own attempts. They’ve done so, he says, and have also made it so that there’s no way to use a Kiwi Ki (the official branding for their RFID ‘keys’) as an identifier; each time it communicates with a lock, it sends a randomly generated number, meaning you can’t track it reliably from one moment to the next.
“In our system, because our hackers were really proud to develop a system that’s really anonymous, you don’t even have to take our word for it,” Bogatu says. “We’re making our source code open, so any part that is security and privacy-relevant, we’ll put up on the Internet and make it available for hackers around the world to really prove its level of security.”
The security aspect, combined with Kiwi.ki’s distribution model through mutually-benefited partners like the Deutsche Post, and a flexible direct-to-consumer sales model that Bogatu says will offer some customers a large, one-time lump sum payment, or charge others a small monthly fee, are all what he says set the startup apart from the competition.
Since they’re working with Deutsche Post to do the roll-out of their initial system and defray the cost for users, that’s going to roll out starting in Berlin along mail routes. They also want to make it available direct to home owners and renters, and plan to launch that within a couple of weeks.
Q&A
1. Why isn’t this the same as a thousand other things on the market?
A: We’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re just making this far more convenient, adapting technology already used in automobiles.
2. Do you have paying partners? You need partners to pay for this because end users won’t.
A: Yes, we have partners in residential housing management and Deutsche Post, etc.
3. How much time to recoup the cost invested?
A: Two to three years to recoup the cost of setting up a system, but it differs depending on the situation.
Sher.ly, you can’t be serious. But they are. This Polish company is building a way to use your own hardware and machines to create a secure, always-on cloud solution for small and medium-sized business. It’s the kind of enterprise solution that you’d think would be far easier to implement and, thanks to the founders Blazej Marciniak and Marek Ciesla, it is.
“It’s always-on smart access, not syncing everything: get the data you need, when you need it,” said Blazej Marciniak. “Sync makes no sense for big files and mobile. You use your own storage and network and nothing is shared anywhere. It’s secure by design: data, traffic is encrypted, and there’s invite only access.”
“We do not trust the public cloud,” he said.
The company started in November 2012 when it was called GVN Technology and the company built something called PrivacyProtector. Like many young products, the company quickly decided it would be best to pivot. Thye’ve raised about $200,000 in total to build their product. But things started out rough.
“We did run out of money, operated without for 3 months until the second seed deal finalized,” said Marciniak. “Sadly we have no other alternatives in Poland anyway so we want to move business to the States as soon as possible. We have established company and contacts there.”
The small team is working hard on new features and improvements. “Time is huge pressure, we iterate priorities on a daily basis,” he said. They’ve gotten 100 users so far and they’re unveiling an OS X version today. They are also opening public availability today at Disrupt.
“Great things are a team effort, no single person can achieve the same,” said Marciniak. “I want to work with great team no matter their location, in convenient way, without compromising my data security. Our goal is to eliminate all data delivery distractions and focus on the work.”
A year ago the guys at Nomad released a small, portable USB cable for iPhones and micro USB devices. Now they’ve launched the ChargeKey, a super-small “cable” for charging your device via any USB port.
The ChargeKey connects to your actual keychain and fits into any USB port. You can then charge your phone or device via USB power and, when you’re done, simply place the ChargeKey back on your keychain.
They launched their new product at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
The team is offering pre-orders of the charger for $25 and they’ll be shipping on November 30th. The creators liken the product to a “jumper cable” for your phone, allowing you to charge from any USB port. Team-member Noah Dentzel told us that he charged his phone via a USB port on the back of a TV at a bar, which is a pretty cool way to grab a little juice while getting juiced.
Two very important events went down this week. The first was Apple’s iPhone announcement, which we covered thoroughly (and perhaps exhaustively). The second was TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013, which was particularly off the chain thanks to appearances from Evan Spiegel, Marissa Mayer, Mark Zuckerberg, as well as an amazing Hardware Alley showing on Wednesday.
We discuss this, TechCrunch writer Greg Kumparak’s birthday, and more on this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Chris Velazco, Romain Dillet and myself, Darrell Etherington.
We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right here, as well as the TechCrunch Droidcast.
Click here to download an MP3 of this show.
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Intro Music by Rick Barr.
Here’s a question that more than few consumer hardware startups are struggling with these days: should they try and raise money from a slew of wary investors or bring their projects to the public in hopes of a Pebble-style success? GoPro founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman sat with down with our own Matt Burns on the Disrupt SF 2013 stage to address that same question, and his message to would-be hardware startup founders is to strongly consider another option.
“Bootstrapping is a really powerful thing,” Woodside said. As long as you can bootstrap without sacrificing a competitive advantage or moving so slowly that you’re “eaten alive by competitors,” the benefits of being able to stay devoted to your singular vision can’t be overstated.
“Everyone has an idea over time of what the business should be, and during the formative period too many opinions could be disruptive,” he added.
Frankly, that’s easier said than done. Woodman was fortunate enough to have some supportive family members ready to help after a surfing trip begat an epiphany about the need for small, rugged, wrist-worn cameras. Between his mother and the savings he had left over from a previous venture, Woodman had about $65,000 to get GoPro off the ground (and subsequent $100k investments from his dad didn’t hurt), and some savvy product development and marketing deals have eventually helped sculpt GoPro into the company it is today.
But would that sort of approach apply for everyone? Definitely not. The spectrum of complexity is a vast one though, and some hardware projects will require significantly more capital before they can make the leap from wild-eyed notion to consumer-ready product. And that’s to say nothing of how lucky Woodman was to have family members who threw their own resources behind his new venture.
Of course, there’s often a tipping point in situations like this, and GoPro is no stranger to taking outside money. Back in late 2012 the company locked up a $200 million investment in a deal with Foxconn that valued the camera at a whopping $2.25 billion, but Woodman said the deal wasn’t so much about padding the company’s coffers as it was about building a relationship with a world-class OEM and the man who runs it. What’s more, GoPro was originally planning for an IPO before then which was deferred thanks to that hefty investment (though Woodman confirmed that an IPO is still in the works). Even so, Woodman believes that his bootstrapping experience was absolutely critical to GoPro’s growth, and pointed to one particular moment when the lack of accountability to investors fundamentally changed the company’s direction.
“As soon as we could afford it we bought a race car,” Woodman said. It’s not the sort of use of company resources that would thrill investors, but Woodman maintains and it led “to one of the biggest ideas we’ve ever had at GoPro” — taking those miniature cameras off the wrist and mounting it to “anything imaginable”. Needless to say, the gamble paid off.
Wireless power. It’s less sci-fi sounding than it once was, thanks to induction charging like that based on the Qi standard, but that’s still a tech that essentially requires contact, if not incredibly close proximity. Magnetic resonance is another means to achieve wireless power, and perfect for much higher-demand applications, like charging cars. But there’s been very little work done in terms of building a solution that can power your everyday devices in a way that doesn’t require thought or changing the way we use our devices dramatically.
That’s where Cota by Ossia comes in. The startup is the brainchild of physicist Hatem Zeine, who decided to focus on delivering wireless power in a way that was commercially viable, both for large-scale industrial applications and for consumer use. Zeine has been hard at work developing his wireless power technology and refining its delivery for over a decade now, and has built Ossia under wraps, managing to raise an impressive $3.2 million along the way while also keeping the startup almost completely invisible to the outside world.
Today, however, Zeine is ready to show what Ossia can do, and he’s presenting the first public demo of the Cota wireless charging prototype on-stage at Disrupt and revealing his company Ossia publicly for the first time. Despite the fact that no one’s heard of Ossia, the Cota prototype in its current form already managed to deliver power wirelessly to devices over distances of around 10 feet, delivering around 10 percent of the total original source power to recipient devices using the same unlicensed spectrum that powers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and other wireless communication standards.
“I got fascinated by electromagnetic radiation, the way that light and optics and radio waves are the same thing,” Zeine said, explaining how he got interested in the subject while studying physics as a student. “And I got thinking about ‘what can you really do beyond this?’ there is something about the linearity of physics and the non-linearity of physics. most people are familiar with the linear version, which is the common sense version, where two apples are twice the weight of one, for instance.”
“In wave theory and electromagnetic systems, you don’t get linearities everywhere,” he added, describing the science behind Cota. “There are situations where double could mean for more, like double could mean square, or 3 plus 3 apples could result in a net total of 9 apples, so to speak. When you move from the linear version to the power version, things happen that were quite surprising.”
Zeine started doing computer simulations to figure out what he was on to, but says unlike Thomas Edison, for example, who started with a problem and tried to solve it but came up with many failures before success, he started out with a solution and found many problems that it does solve, including questions around health, safety, interference with other wireless signals, delivering power to multiple devices, non-line of site, around and behind walls and more. “I was always thinking ‘What’s the catch?’,” he said, “But sometimes an invention just solves the problem and goes all the way. This was one of them, we had something here that was much, much different than what people expect.”
When Zeine then decided to turn Cota’s wireless charging into a company, he faced understandable and considerable skepticism. Naysayers suggested he couldn’t deliver wireless power safely, or with adequate efficiency to be useful, or consistently, or any number of objections you yourself are probably cycling through at this moment. Skepticism aside, Zeine stuck to his guns and set about commercializing his discovery. In 2007, Zeine filed his first patent for the tech, formed Ossia in 2008 and continued to file patents, and he says now the company has a much deeper understanding of how it works. They’ve built the prototype they’re demoing on stage, and have another in the works to debut later this year.
“What we’re doing uses the same frequencies as Wi-Fi,” he explained. “It’s the unlicensed spectrum that’s used by Wi-Fi, and many phones, Bluetooth and Zigbee devices and so on in our lives. The nice thing about this frequency is that it’s just the sweet spot for our technology for distance, safety, for the size of the antennas and the hardware that we use, it’s just a perfect level. Also it’s well understood, since people have had Wi-Fi in their homes for a long time now.”
Obviously health and safety is going to be a foreground concern when it comes to new wireless tech of any kind, but something that’s designed to be able to provide enough energy to power up devices will definitely raise eyebrows. Aside from being at a late stage in terms of gaining FCC clearance, Zeine says Ossia also benefits from using the same kind of spectrum that Wi-Fi broadcasts at, and says Cota offers the same kind of health risks that Wi-Fi in-home does. Academic research on how much that actually is may differ, but consumers definitely seem willing to accept the risks associated with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other similar specifications.
“Cota is the only wireless power technology that can deliver one watt of power at a distance of 30 ft safely,” Zeine said on stage today at Disrupt, highlighting range as well as health and safety. During his presentation, Zeine showed an iPhone 5 being charged remotely from his version one prototype wireless power transmitter, which was greeted by plenty of applause from those in attendance.
The next step for Cota is delivering a commercial-grade product capable of replacing the numerous wired power connections for sensors and monitors in sensitive facilities like oil and gas refineries with wirelessly powered devices, which decreases risk by minimizing the number of potential opportunities there are for generating sparks, since there are fewer live cables lying around. Commercialized versions should be ready to ship in the next couple of months, Zeine says, with consumerized versions following in 2015. Neither would’ve been possible in terms of cost alone 20 years ago, he adds, but advances in the tech of Cota system components have made it possible to do with thousands what would once have cost millions.
Long-term, the vision of Zeine and Ossia is one where you’re never out of wireless charging range – charging networks spanning home, public spaces and offices would make it possible to build devices like phones and remotes with only small batteries, that are constantly topped off and that never need to be plugged in. He says the aim is not just to disrupt the battery, but eventually even to eliminate the concept of “charging” as a conscious act altogether.
1. Do you want to license your tech to OEMs?
A: Cota will provide licensing of patents, hardware designs, and also its own hardware and patent licensing.
2. What is the cost of this for consumers, and size of household device?
A: The Cota will be over $100, and be about the size of a large tower PC once consumerized.
3. Can the transmitter be smaller?
A: The size of the current device is due to using off-the-shelf parts, so it can be reduced tremendously using custom parts.
4. Does it require line-of-sight?
A: No, it can go around walls and through walls just like a Wi-Fi signal.
5. Is there some sort of identification, can a device take power from a system unauthorized?
A: You can configure the system to recognize only a specific set of devices, or open if you want to power all Cota-tech enabled devices.
Today Bitcasa, Disrupt Battlefield finalist, has announced a partnership with Samsung to offer Bitcasa’s infinite storage service to all Windows 8 devices sold by Samsung, save for smartphones. This includes tablets, desktops and laptops.
The company has had this partnership in the works for almost a year, according to founder Tony Gauda, but wanted to wait to share the news until consumers could actually go purchases these devices with Bitcasa pre-installed.
For those of you who haven’t heard yet, Bitcasa is a software service that opens up your hardware to have infinite storage in the cloud, with no lag to watch a stored movie or play a song. It works like this: Bitcasa only saves data that is unique to you, while saving only one version of all the redundant data in its system. You might think that the unique data outweighs the redundant, but it’s actually on the contrary.
As it stands now, Bitcasa charges users $10/month or $99/year for its infinite cloud storage, but users who purchase a pre-loaded Samsung device will get two free months of infinite storage space, along with 20GB for free over the lifetime of the device.
But what does this mean for Bitcasa’s revenue?
The company already has a huge influx of users interested in hopping on the service, as evidenced by the total of 30 petabytes of data stored on the site. But partnerships with major brands offers a more B2B-focused business model. This allows Bitcasa to focus on perfecting the service as opposed to bringing in new users, as the big hardware companies can now do that for them.
According to Gauda, Bitcasa has one of the highest free to paid conversion rates in the industry (without getting into too much detail), “but so many people don’t know we exist,” he added. In other words, the distribution here is critical.
Though Gauda didn’t specify the exact terms of the Samsung deal, he did explain that talks have already begun with other major brands to distribute the Bitcasa service. The idea is to have manufacturers spend less on their own hard drives and instead pay a small fee for every device sold with Bitcasa pre-loaded.
If you’re interested in checking out Bitcasa, head over here.
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