Hasta La Gadget!

UK startup DuoFertility is tackling a really tough problem: infertility. The company has built a sensor-plus-service business to predict the most fertile days of women who are having difficulty conceiving to improve the chances of conception — hence its tagline: “assisted natural conception”. There is no invasive technology involved, just a lot of number crunching.

The startup’s approach sits somewhere in the middle of the competition in this space. It argues its technology is more sophisticated than more basic over-the-counter physical products such as home urine tests or body-basal-thermometers (which are also cheaper than DuoFertility’s offering), as the data captured by its wearable sensor is more accurate. Data is also sent back to DuoFertility staff for monitoring and reviewing – so it’s being looked at by specialist staff using bespoke algorithms rather than generalised models.

On the other hand, the product is cheaper than a cycle of artificial insemination — and much cheaper than IVF. It’s also nowhere near as invasive as either of those alternatives. DuoFertility costs £495 with unlimited support vs around £800 for a cycle of artificial insemination (including drugs and tests) and around £4,5000 for a cycle of IVF, says CEO and co-founder Shamus Husheer.

“It is this combination of both automated analysis and expert review of this data that sets us apart from anything else out there, and probably to a large extent explains why our pregnancy rates are so high for patients who are well past buying something off the shelf at the pharmacy,” he says

“The really surprising thing is that, for only a relatively small increment in cost over the [more basic, competitor] at-home devices, DuoFertility gives a vastly higher pregnancy rate than artificial insemination, and even matches or exceeds that of IVF.”

Success is a little difficult to measure, however, as a variety of factors have to be considered – as Husheer explains: “Although 80% of normally fertile women will get pregnant within their first year of trying to conceive, infertile couples (those who have been trying for more than two years) have only about a 12% chance of getting pregnant over a year. Therefore simply saying x% of patients will get pregnant is meaningless (or worse, misleading) – this does not however prevent some less scrupulous clinics and products from doing exactly this.

“Therefore we publish our success rate data only on these ‘difficult cases’ of infertile patients, and specifically those who have qualified for or already been through IVF. We then break this data down by both female age and time trying for a baby, which are the most important factors in determining success rate. A peer-reviewed scientific paper on exactly this was published at the end of 2011, demonstrating a pregnancy rate that was higher than that from a cycle of IVF for every age group under 45 (the rates themselves ranging from over 40% to less than 15%).”

The Technology

So what exactly does DuoFertility’s technology do? The product consists of a wearable sensor, worn inside an adhesive patch so it remains attached day and night, which logs the woman’s “body temperature and movement thousands of times a day and night to calculate deep sleep core temperature”, plus a reader unit which receives the data from the sensor via a modified version of RFID. The reader calculates likely future fertility — based on “all of the information it has seen about you to date” (users can enter “a range of different parameters on the reader, from menstruation to ovulation pain to illness”).

The reader connects to a PC via USB to display past and near future fertility charts. Additional data can then be added by the user, such as medical or home test results and notes for DuoFertility’s staff to read. And all the data is automatically transferred to DuoFertility’s servers in Cambridge, U.K. for analysis and expert review.

“We use all of the data for each individual woman, and all of the thousands of others that we’re monitoring, to work out exactly which algorithms work for the woman most similar to this one,” says Husheer. “That allows us to dramatically improve the prediction of fertility, but also allows us to identify a range of underlying issues that may be preventing conception. There are of course many cases where the data does not perfectly fit any existing model, and so these cases are escalated to human fertility experts for review and, if necessary, a discussion with the patient or their doctor.”

DuoFertility aims to identify the 42-78 hour monthly window when couples should be trying to conceive — and says that by continually monitoring women it can pick up on signs that a particular cycle is similar or different to a previous cycle, as well as compare a cycle to similar cycles in its database.

“Basically, there is zero point in providing a prediction of ovulation down to the minute, if in fact it is five days wrong. Far better to give couples a realistic assessment of when they are likely to be fertile, and update this as we get more data. This means that for some couples ‘the goalposts move’ – they can quite literally see our algorithms updating the prediction when they connect to our servers. And if we recalculate something at our server, and they haven’t connected recently so might miss the newly calculated critical moment – we send an email or give them a call. That call has resulted in more than one baby,” adds Husheer.

Of course not every couple will be able to get pregnant — even after using the product for a long time — so customer relationship management is a “pretty critical” component of the business. Raising false hope is certainly not part of DuoFertility’s business model, says Husheer — although he notes that for couples who can’t afford IVF, continuing to use DuoFertility despite poor “absolute chances” may be their best hope. ”We find that being absolutely crystal clear about this often makes for a difficult but ultimately necessary and productive conversation with the couple,” he says. The startup also offers refunds to new users if it believes it won’t be able to help them, and reviews users after four to five months (and regularly after that) to ensure continued use still makes sense for them.

Starting up

The idea for Duofertility was conceived during Husheer’s PhD research at Cambridge University. The link is indirect, since his research was actually building instruments for particle accelerators. “I realised that several of the instrumental techniques we used could be applied to human physiology, and specifically to monitoring fertility,” he tells TechCrunch. 

Husheer (pictured right, with fellow co-founder Oriane Chausiaux) and a group of fellow graduate students – “scientists and medics”, some with PhDs in infertility – then got together and entered a university business plan competition in 2006, going on to win £20,000. The money funded a prototype and the filing of the first patent. “By mid 2007 we had brilliant data and several local Angel investors telling us to hurry up and graduate so that they could fund the project,” says Husheer. “Just 18 months and less than £1 million later, DuoFertility had been through design, development, trials, medical approvals and sold to the first customer.”

The first DuoFertility was bought in May 2009, although Husheer says the first pregnancy was “actually somewhat before that” — during early trials. “Sales really stepped up when DuoFertility was stocked by the largest UK pharmacy chain, Boots, in 2011 as the result of our participating in a reality-TV show hunting for innovative new products for the major retailers,” he adds.

Further funding came via the competition route, after DuoFertility won Qualcomm’s European QPrize in 2011. That in turn led to attention from Qualcomm’s venture capital arm. Husheer says the company has now raised a little over £2 million in funding from three Angel investor groups and from Qualcomm Ventures.

Growing In The U.S.

DuoFertility’s next big step will be raising its profile in the U.S. — by targeting key national medical conferences such as the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in May, and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in October to properly enter the market. Husheer notes the company “recently achieved FDA clearance”, and although U.S. users can buy the device via DuoFertility’s website and be supported in using it, he says the business needs to spend time introducing the product to the medical community to make doctors aware of it and ensure they are happy to recommend it.

“We have a small team on the ground in the U.S., calling on doctors in New York and California to introduce the product and make sure that DuoFertility fits into the way that they practice medicine. Over the next few months we will be hiring several more commercially focused people, both for activities directed at the medical community and the consumer — so any [TechCrunch] readers with experience in bringing similar technologies to market in the US should drop me a line,” says Husheer.

“From a regulatory perspective we are clear to sell anywhere in the E.U. or U.S., and in several countries that accept their medical clearances (e.g. South Africa and many Arab states). As a company selling on the Internet it will be no surprise that we have patients in almost all of these places – in fact we now have babies on every continent except Antarctica. That said, our primary focus is the U.K. and U.S.,” he adds.

Part of the issue with the U.S. market is that, for legal reasons, DuoFertility is not allowed to provide medical advice to the patient directly — but must work through the patient’s doctor. “This means their doctor is preferably included ‘in the loop’ from the beginning, however if the patient just uses DuoFertility without a doctor we can refer to a doctor we work with in their city if they need one,” Husheer adds.

DuoFertility has more than 30 staff at present, working shifts to ensure U.S. timezones are covered. The number of staff is likely to rise over the next year — especially if the company  replicates its U.K. fertility centre on U.S. soil so that American couples can be monitored by staff in the same timezone.

The company broke even in 2011 but has been ploughing investment into ramping up for the U.S. market so, overall, the business has not been profitable recently but Husheer says that’s all part of its growth plans: “Our investors seem to be very happy with this strategy, as everyone can see that the US will be the major market for us.”

It’s approaching three years since I emailed and got a reply from the late Steve Jobs. The topic of my caffeine-fueled missive that sunny day in June 2010 was the industry’s move towards touch-based interfaces and, specifically, Apple’s one-size-fits-all approach regarding the iPhone’s lack of a physical QWERTY keyboard.

I have a disability that can make touch and other physically demanding interfaces more challenging, I explained to Jobs, and whereas the mouse-driven GUI that he helped usher in with the Macintosh had inadvertently put me on a level playing field, were touch to ever become the dominant mode of input, it had the potential to turn that world upside down.

“That’s obviously a bit dramatic”, I wrote on TechCrunch at the time. “There will always be lots of different products on the market, but it’s a possibility nonetheless.” Fast forward to 2013 and what was only a possibility has all but become a reality. Survey the mobile landscape and it’s filled with people fondling their giant slabs of touch, happily typing away on glass.

At this point I know I’ll likely get ripped apart in the comments. In the battle of the physical vs virtual QWERTY, the market has spoken, they’ll say, and those who don’t favour touch are squarely out of touch. And sadly, the evidence is heavily stacked on their side of the argument.

Survey the mobile landscape and it’s filled with people fondling their giant slabs of touch, happily typing away on glass

In the first few years of the iPhone’s existence, a ton of hybrid physical QWERTY/touch smartphones from competitors entered the market, ready to differentiate themselves from Apple by talking up their superior typing experience. But they failed to stop the Cupertino juggernaught. Typing on glass, while not ideal, was good enough. Arguably it wasn’t until Android OEMs ditched their, largely, clunky slide-out keyboards and wholesale copied and then supersized Apple’s all touch form-factor, did they begin to turn back the tide.

Meanwhile, continues the argument, the likes of Nokia fell by the wayside, plagued by an antiquated user interface that, in a desperate and confused attempt to respond to the market, tried and failed to crowbar in touch before the company finally jumped onto Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, sans physical QWERTY.

Furthermore, BlackBerry, which seemingly built its whole business off the back of its physical QWERTY-touting credentials, chose to release its first comeback device as the BB10-powered Z10, another all touch grey slab, rather than the Q10, which combines touch with a physical QWERTY in the best BlackBerry candybar tradition. It’s also been suggested that the Canadian handset maker may even view the Q10’s hybrid approach as a way to wean its traditional customers off a physical keyboard entirely, a gateway device if you will.

So yes, putting aside the fact that the market can only speak to what is put in front of it — I can’t recall a single candybar QWERTY powered by Android that was anything more than a mid-tier or low end device — it would seem that the market has indeed spoken.

But it may not have had the final word yet.

That’s if — and it’s a big if — the BlackBerry Q10, when it finally hits the market next month, surprises everybody and sells in sufficient numbers to smash through the totalitarian all touch screen. And just like the Mac had ensured before it, for this hack and others like me, 2013 won’t be like 1984 after all.

Another established hardware startup is turning to Kickstarter to help fund its next wares. This time it’s the turn of Click & Grow, maker of the smart garden that lets you grow a plant indoors with little or no intervention. After selling over 50,000 units of its first device, the Palo Alto, U.S. registered company with an R&D lab in Estonia, is launching a crowdfunding campaign to get its second generation product — the Smart Herb Garden — off the ground.

Hoping to raise a minimum of $75,000, the money will be used to turn a functioning prototype into something production-ready, with a shipping date loosely pegged for September. The Smart Herb Garden builds on Click & Grow’s first product, but with several improvements following feedback from customers; namely that people want to grow more than one plant at a time and that the amount of natural light available in a person’s home is often not enough for healthy plant growth. The new improved version features a built-in LED light, as well as a change in the plant pot part of the design to make it easy to grow three different plants simultaneously, with the same ‘smart’ technology taking care of the heavy lifting. It also plugs into a power socket rather than relying on four AA batteries, while the new design negates the need for a pump or sensor.

The aim of Click & Grow’s smart garden system is to automatically provide the correct water and nutrient balance needed for indoor plants to grow. The company claims that 3 years of R&D has gone into the Smart Herb Garden, of which the core technology is the growth medium, a nanotech material engineered to “supply plant roots with the right amount of oxygen, water and nutrients at any time”. This is supported by the newly incorporated LED light. In practice, you simply insert the supplied cartridges and fill the reservoir with water. Then power the thing on and — bingo — in a matter of weeks you should see green shoots of awesomeness. If plants are your thing, of course.

“Very few can afford to launch a new product and fail”

The Smart Herb Garden starter kit will come with cartridges for basil, thyme and lemon balm. Refills will be available for various herbs, lettuce, mini tomato, chili pepper, and even strawberries, apparently.

Once it finally reaches market, the Smart Herb Garden is expected to retail for $79 but Kickstarter backers can bag it for $39 for a white model, or at the top tier, $1,000 for a “next generation interactive model”, though the latter is short on details.

As for why a VC-funded startup would choose to go down the crowdfunding route — Click & Grow has raised over €1.5 million from backers WNB and Primo Holding — founder Mattias Lepp tells TechCrunch that “for makers of novel hardware, Kickstarter is the best place to sense check your ideas before you start assembly lines”.

It’s hoped Kickstarter will enable the company to validate the market for its new product and get feedback on prices and colour options, dimensions, and the plants that people want to grow. “So I’d say it’s first and foremost a market insights platform,” he says. “And of course, the money also helps at our stage.”

For hardware companies like Click & Grow who have already had some success and raised funding, it’s not that they can’t afford to start manufacturing a new product, it’s that “very few can afford to launch a new product and fail”, says Lepp.

Nokia’s Asha line of less-expensive smartphones, not developed on Microsoft’s Windows Phone but Nokia’s own proprietary OS, is getting a new boost of attention today. The company is unveiling a new (and free) premium developer program for Asha developers. Modelled on a premium program started for Lumia developers last year, those participating will get extra developer resources, credits towards promoting finished apps in Nokia’s app storefront or via advertising in other apps, and a free device, so that they can boost numbers in the Nokia Store for content made for the Asha line of phones. Nokia tells me that there are now 130,000 apps, ringtones and wallpapers for Asha in the Store already, without breaking out the number of apps compared to other content.

Not only will this help to boost the number of apps in the Nokia store, but it furthers the idea of Asha as the “other” smartphone line being pushed by Nokia — and not just another high-end feature phone. As IHS analyst Ian Fogg noted after seeing the news: “Nokia builds the case for Asha to be considered a smartphone.”

Nokia says that for developers to be considered, there are some criteria to be met. For “stage-one productivity membership” (this includes extra developer support, the free device and expanded remote access), a developer need to have at least two apps built for any mobile platform and currently in any mobile store (not just those run by Nokia itself). For “stage-two” membership (this includes the promotional options of either app store placements or $500 worth of advertising), the developers need to agree to develop and publish at least one app for the Nokia Store to work on an Asha device.

The Lumia premium developer program, Nokia says, has proven to be its most successful developer program ever.

But if Nokia’s Lumia line is considered its “flagship” fleet of smartphones, then the Asha devices are the company’s ever-essential workhorses.

In Nokia’s Q4 results that it reported in January, the company announced 9.3 million Asha devices sold, more than twice the number of Lumia devices (at 4.4 million). While Nokia has been working hard to create Lumia handsets that are stretching ever further into the low cost segment — the most recent being the $180 520 handset unveiled at the Mobile World Congress this year — Asha devices were already there, with devices going for under $100 already unveiled last year.

This fact makes the Asha and ever-more important link in the chain that Nokia has to be careful not to break as it tries to bring its vast population of users in emerging markets on to Nokia smart devices, rather losing them to the rival Android ecosystem as led by Samsung, Huawei and dozens of other handset makers. Samsung in particular has approached the market with an aggressive device strategy across virtually every mobile handset price point (and feature set).

The developer program and its stated purpose to create apps for Asha devices is very much part of that strategy. As Apple has very conclusively proven both with the iPhone and iPad tablet, one of the biggest draws to a particular piece of hardware is the software that you will be able to use on it.

The idea, of course, are for those apps to be quality as well as in quantity. “We want to reward apps that really engage the user,” Kenny Mathers, director of developer programs and monetisation at Nokia, said in a statement. “We’ll be looking for high-quality graphics and user interface, plus great user reviews, with a minimum rating of four stars from at least 25 Nokia Store user reviews.”

HTC’s new flagship smartphone, the HTC One, will go on sale in the U.K., Germany and the company’s home market of Taiwan next week, HTC has confirmed today. The rollout will then ramp up “across Europe”, North America and “most of Asia-Pacific” before the end of the April.

The company had previously said the handset would start rolling out to customers “from mid-March”.

A HTC spokeswoman provided the following statement: “HTC has seen unprecedented demand for and interest in the new HTC One, and the care taken to design and build it is evidenced in early reviews. The new HTC One will roll out in the UK, Germany and Taiwan next week and across Europe, North America and most of Asia-Pacific before the end of April. We appreciate our customers’ patience, and believe that once they have the phone in their hands they will agree that it has been worth the wait.”

The One has a 4.7-inch 1080p screen — putting it close in screen size to ‘phablet’ territory — which is topped and tailed with aluminium trim. Inside it’s powered by one of Qualcomm’s new quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipsets, clocked at 1.6GHz, and also packs in 2GB of RAM.

In looks the One resembles BlackBerry’s Z10, and that’s not the only similarity between the two companies at this point. Both have a lot riding on their respective flagships as rivals have gobbled up huge chunks of the smartphone market.

HTC needs the One to fly, having struggled to make an impact in an Android space dominated by Samsung’s Galaxy series of devices. Earlier this month the company reported its lowest sales since January 2010. Sales for the month of February fell by nearly 44% to 11.37 billion Taiwan dollars ($384 million). But with falling revenues, HTC has fewer resources to marshal in its fight with Samsung — perhaps explaining the One’s staggered rollout — making it all the more important it gets a hit with the device.

Enders Analysis analyst Benedict Evans noted recently that HTC has now “given up every penny of revenue growth it picked up from Android” — illustrating the rise and fall on the following graph:

Evans added that while the HTC One “is a very nice phone” in the current highly competitive handset market nice hardware is ” insufficient to compete”. HTC will be hoping it can prove him wrong.