Hasta La Gadget!

Munich-based startup and TechCrunch Disrupt NY Battlefield contestant KISI Systems is launching its Indiegogo campaign today. KISI and KISIBox together comprise a keyless entry solution that lets users provide timed, revokable access to their own apartments on an as-needed basis. It’s the perfect complement to collaborative consumption services like Airbnb and TaskRabbit and in general a very useful addition to any household.

KISI takes its cues from enterprise-grade tools that allow businesses to control who can and can’t gain access to a facility – co-founder Bernhard Mehl explained that he and his co-founders decided it was an idea that would make perfect sense when applied to a consumer setting, too.

The KISI system is a combination of hardware and software, with a set price of $479 up front when it hits retail. Initially, backers can get it for $249 for the first Indiegogo supporters, and the best part is that the service is included with the hardware purchase, so this isn’t something that you end up necessarily paying for on a continual basis. There is a SaaS model planned as well, for people who’d like access to premium features, but Mehl says that in general, they aren’t interested in making homeowners feel like they’re renting the locks on their doors.

“We stripped an enterprise product down to a consumer-friendly version, and provide very easy-to-use key-management tools, so we have a web app and you can manage or see who accessed your apartment, or who currently has access on their smartphones,” Mehl says. “It’s a more decentralized or democratized access, so that it’s not the house owner who controls all the keys, but the resident themselves.”

KISI is designed for apartment tenants primarily, and can be made to integrated with your intercom system to provide complete building access from a web-based dashboard. Mehl says that where in the past this has been accomplished through sharing of hardware keys, that’s a dramatically outdated prospect, since it involves granting a type of access you can’t easily revoke, at least not without changing your locks. The platform is why KISI isn’t just another Lockitron, providing things like integration with an intercom system, and a record of when keyholders have accessed your apartment, and for how long.

The big opportunity for KISI is to take advantage of the rise of services like Airbnb, Exec and TaskRabbit, and collaborate with those companies to help provide temporary access to service pros who might only need it for a few minutes, a week or an afternoon.

“All the hardware parts are installed in your apartment, and you can open even the front door of the house with your smartphone, and yet nothing changes for anyone else who has physical key access” he said. “Up to now, you had to change the whole system to get automated access, but the cool thing is that we’ve managed to accomplish that without requiring a complete overhaul.”

KISI has already impressed enough to win an entrepreneurial startup grant from the German government, and they’ve won various prizes, including from the NYCEDC, which provided them with $25,000 for the “Next Idea” award.

KISI will launch in New York City and Munich first, and will then expand to other markets after that. It doesn’t replace existing standards like Z-Wave, but works with them, and can also be used in combination with existing devices like Lockitron, so there’s opportunity for it to grow into existing home automation systems.

Chris Dixon, the entrepreneur-turned angel investor-turned general partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, today said that he believes the 3D printing movement has the potential to revolutionize manufacturing and that it is an area where he would like to make multiple investments in the future. In contrast, he described startups in areas like social networking facing “general fatigue”. Earlier this month, Chris Dixon and Andreessen Horowitz led a $30 million Series C round in Shapeways, a 3D printing company, where he has now joined the board.

Shapeways is indicative of an untapped opportunity in hardware, he said. “3D has been talked up a lot, but it’s received very little investment from traditional VC firms,” Dixon said today on stage in an interview TC Disrupt.

“For us, we think it’s a major, incredibly significant innovation. It will transform manufacturing and I can see us making multiple investments.” Indeed, a lot of the smaller hardware players have turned to platforms like Kickstarter instead not just to raise money but also to drum up consumer interest and profile for their projects. This has almost become like a testing ground, with the most successful then eventually converting that growth into more traditional investment routes for startups.

New York, he said, has become a kind of “hub” for hardware, and it has opened up the opportunity for new startups and new investing in the city. New York, he said, is at the center of what he calls a “hardware renaissance”, with the clever engineers who had in the past put all their efforts into working on social networks “now working on hardware devices.”

He said this is because social networks are in the middle of a “general fatigue” and so people have turned to wanting to do “something tangible.”

The huge rush of smartphone devices hitting the market has also had an impact on the larger market for hardware and wearable computing products, he said. “The smartphone explosion has lowered the cost for a lot of components and that has dramatically lowered the costs of producing devices,” he noted.

He points out that the kind of disruption that a company like Shapeways provides is “innovation at the high end.”

He also compared hardware developments to “the same forces that when you think about what the internet did for written work.”

“Before the Internet you had to go to a publisher and get an investment. Now you can publish you ebook or blog and it dramatically lowered the cost and enabled the long tail, democratized writing. We can see 3D printing doing that to manufacturing. You can cut a deal with manufacturing now and have a Shapeways printer and the batch size is one.”

Dixon also compared the general climate for startups in New York in general to life in San Francisco.

“There are plenty of great investors here and that attracts a lot of entrepreneurs. The one thing that is missing is a whole mid-level layer. If a company has a hit product and want to scale and hire employees 50 to 100. If you want to go international, or scale a sales force. If I want to figure out a monetization thing in San Francisco I can go to Google to get that.” That acceleration is still developing here in New York, he says.

San Francisco is similar to New York with a lot of consumer stuff. Down the peninsula you have infrastructure and hardware but San Francisco is pretty similar to the New York scene, taking technology and applying it to the real world.

Watch the full video of Chris Dixon’s interview here:

Spring has arrived in New York City. The sun is out (besides today). The snow is finally gone. It’s time to shed the winter layers and head outside. And in the spirit of spring, we want to give one of our readers a ticket to Disrupt NY and the ultimate outdoor toy: A Parrot AR Drone 2.0.

Disrupt NY kicks off later this month. The lineup is stellar and we have a new venue. The hackathon and conference will be housed in the Manhattan Center, located conveniently in midtown with plenty of access to public transit. Tickets are still available but we’re giving you a chance to win one right here.

The winner of this giveaway will walk away with one ticket to Disrupt NY (valued at $2,995) and one Parrot AR Drone 2.0 ($299.95).

Want a shot to win? Follow the steps below.

1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

• Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag), or
• Leave us a comment below telling us something fun – anything!

The contest will start now and ends April 22nd at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet or comment once, or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner once the giveaway is over. Please note the winner will only receive one (1) free Disrupt ticket, and it does not include airfare or hotel.

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Innovation. According to one Mads Thimmer, it’s a word that held a great deal of mystery some 10-plus years ago, but today, “it’s thrown around as a cliché.” When you really get down to it, though, the art of innovating is a hugely delicate and complex one, fraught with frustration and a curious passion for never settling on the here and now. In covering the world of consumer technology, I’ve come to form my own understanding of what innovation is, what it isn’t and how companies are embracing (or outright shunning) the idea. After an evening with the cofounder of Innovation Lab, however, I was rightfully ready to toss my own preconceived notions aside.

Continue reading Dreams, curiosity and a passion for what’s next: picking the brain of Innovation Lab’s Mads Thimmer

Filed under: Misc

Dreams, curiosity and a passion for what’s next: picking the brain of Innovation Lab’s Mads Thimmer originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Sep 2012 12:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Do you remember life before the Internet? Can you recall a time when meeting someone new took place serendipitously and was uncluttered with all the profile searching and stalking? A time when there was a little mystery in taking weeks or months to uncover the contents of a new friend’s music collection?

A time where, when you did meet someone interesting, you didn’t have every bit of information about them instantly available — where they studied, where they work, what food they like.

Let me be clear, the Amico Bracelet would not restore this earlier era. But this concept could possibly restore just a little bit of mystery to meeting people — when you are actively trying to meet people, that is.

The Amico, made by Trovare, is (or will be) a wearable Bluetooth 4-enabled bracelet. It will synchronize with a mobile app that aggregates your social network profile and port that info into the bracelet’s onboard memory. It will then broadcast an aggregate view of this social profile (at a distance of about 50 meters). Other people who are wearing an Amico will also broadcast their profile. When two profiles that are deemed to be a good match come within proximity of each other…both bracelets will vibrate. Boom! Fireworks.

There you have it. You will be notified when the girl/guy of your dreams is within 50 meters of you. But you won’t explicitly know what the person looks like or any other info about them. You will just know that a match is nearby and it will be up to you to get off your ass and work to find that dreamboat.

I mean, this is still cheating right? The deck is stacked in your favor and the device is doing work for you that you should probably be doing yourself — reading body language, searching for intangibles or absorbing pheromones. But still, there is some mystery here.

It’s a compelling concept, but what is at play here that makes this interesting? A couple of things.

Gamification
There is an element of gameplay to this concept. The thrill of an imminent meetup without a spoiler.

Runs In The Background
It pushes search into the background a bit and doesn’t require you to feverishly and addictively consult your mobile phone every five seconds to see who’s checked into the bar you’re in (but let’s be honest, you are still probably going to do that anyway).

A Second Chance
Most interestingly, the system is designed in such a way that if you did get a notification that a match is nearby, but you just can’t find each other, both profiles will show up back in the app upon your next sync. So you could get a second chance to meet.

The company has raised $250,000 in private funding, but is seeking another $750,000 – $1,000,000 to get the device into production.

When the Amico eventually comes to market, it should be priced at around $40 or so. A small price to pay to keep the one that got away from getting away.