Hasta La Gadget!

What do you get when you put a pair of board gaming geeks who have worked at NVIDIA, Google, LucasArts, and Ubisoft together in the same room? It probably looks like Tangible Play, debuting at Disrupt SF.

Founded by Pramod Sharma and Jerome Scholler this lean startup aims to mix augmented reality, animated graphics, and audio with traditional board game elements. While this idea isn’t new, Sharma believes his team has created something special.

“In terms of social mission – we really think that we are connecting people through games,” he said. “Every time we demo our product to anyone, we hear that its super-cool. I think part of this is uniqueness and simplicity of the product.”

Sharma worked at Google in the book scanning project and spent eight years managing search and infrastructure. Scholler shipped Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Force Unleashed 1 and 2 for the 360 and PS3. He also built front-ends for Android. They’ve raised $350,000 this far from a team of angels. The company was part of the recent Stanford’s StartX accelerator group.

They launched their product today at TechCrunch Disrupt.

“About a year ago, the idea started when Pramod realized that his daughter has a lot of physical games / toys with very limited play lifecycle, while the iPad has unlimited entertainment power. We asked ‘How can we bring the long lasting engagement of iPad games to physical games?’” said Scholler.

“Something magical happens when you can grab things in your hand and can have a shared play experience,” he said.

After a bit of experimentation, Sharma used his computer vision experience to build a working prototype that could use the iPad camera to recognize objects and help play games. Scholler designed the game using his experience at Google. The game requires a very simple stand with a little cap that sits on the top of the iPad. The cap contains a mirror which allows the camera to see the playing surface and interact with the physical world.

The games are fairly simple. The box contains a set of parts – blocks, letters, and the like – and the app scans the playing surface for the objects. Each game can recognize certain shapes and, in the case of the word game, you spell words with tiles that you place in front of the iPad. The game app instantly recognizes the letters and displays them on the screen.

“The big innovation of tangible play is the elegant design of iPad accessory and extremely sophisticated computer vision / AI software that works with the accessory. It basically enables the development of whole new category of apps. We decided to focus on games right now but in future it will enable all sort of applications,” said Sharma.

The game will launch with two titles, a word guessing game and a puzzle game called Tangram. In its first incarnation the pair watched a mother and daughter play the world guessing game for an entire hour. They knew they had a hit.

“Our current focus for the project is to launch these two games and then open up the platform,” said Sharma. Once these titles gain a bit of steam, it will be fascinating to see Candy Land powered by robots or Connect Four that watches you in your sleep.

If you’re interested in signing up for the beta, head to www.tangibleplay.com.

It takes someone special to turn their company name into a verb. But that’s what GoPro founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman has done. GoPro is now synonymous with action sports. Skateboarders, surfers and overly enthusiastic parents don’t just film their antics anymore. They GoPro them.

The action camera company has made big moves lately, and with a recent investment from Foxconn, proved that hardware can be a viable startup business. I’m excited to have Nicholas Woodman join me for a fireside chat at Disrupt SF. Hopefully he’ll teach me how to surf.

The story goes that Woodman discovered surfers needed an affordable photography option on an around-the-world trip following the failure of an earlier company. Initially financed by selling shell necklaces and camera straps from his van, Woodman went on to found GoPro and eventually receive capital from Steamboat Ventures (affiliated with the Walt Disney Corporation), Riverwood Capital, Sageview Capital, Walden International, and U.S. Venture Partners.

GoPro and Woodman essentially created the action video camera market. Their runaway success spawned countless knock-offs, imitators just trying to capture a bit of the growing market. But despite stiff competition, GoPro has maintained its stance as the market leader. The company now employees around 500 people around the world. Foxconn purchased 8.88% of the company for 200 million dollars in late 2012, setting the market value of the company at 2.25 billion dollars.

Along the way Woodman has stayed true to the mission of creating a camera to capture extreme sports. The company didn’t branch off. It didn’t go downmarket or attempt to compete in other markets. Woodman had found his customer early on and remained dedicated to them.

If anyone can advise hardware companies, it’s Nicholas Woodman. He will kick off the final day of Disrupt, followed by another rockstar founder, Pebble Watch’s Eric Migicovsky.

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Nicholas Woodman
GoPro
Founder, CEO

While the eight-person staff of GoPro was enjoying the success of their first HD HERO camera in 2009, founder and CEO Nick Woodman realized one thing: to support his vision, he was going to need a bigger staff. But before Woodman could think bigger, he had to start out small.

After receiving a degree in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, Woodman founded an online promotions company, Fun Bug. In 2001, Woodman sold Fun Bug and took off surfing and traveling the world. The decision inspired more than the personal – Woodman’s passion for surfing sparked the idea to create the now-popular wearable and gear mountable camera and in 2002, Woodman founded GoPro. After years of research and planning, the company released its first product, the GoPro HERO, a 35mm film-based camera that was worn on the wrist.

Made up of some of Woodman’s friends and family members, the early GoPro team established the company as a true innovator by continually iterating on the product, moving from a film-based camera to a digital still and video camera. A lifetime extreme sports enthusiast, Woodman was learning how to race cars when he was compelled to move the camera from his wrist to the top of his car. This simple idea led to an array of camera mounting devices – for everything from helmets to surfboards, and even dog collars.