Hasta La Gadget!

Hardware startup Sensorberg just raised $1 million (€750,000) from Berlin Technologie Holding and undisclosed angel investors. Part of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Berlin, Sensorberg is one of the most promising iBeacon startups in Europe. As a reminder, iBeacon is an indoor positioning system developed by Apple to trigger and send relevant information to your smartphone when you are walking inside a shop.

As a retailer, you first have to buy a few Sensorberg Beacon sensors and place them in your store — for $120 (€89), you get 3 sensors. Then, you’ll be able to take advantage of the SDK and dashboard to implement campaigns or location features for your app.

Estimote is a serious competitor in this space. It has been chosen for Best Hardware Startup at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 and recently raised a $3.1 million seed round.

Beacons work on Bluetooth Low Energy to detect when a customer’s phone is close to a sensor. Sensorberg promises a 10-month battery and a 30 meter range for its devices.

While the devices are pretty similar, the two startups will probably differentiate themselves through their respective SDKs and sales teams. In fact, Estimote beacon sensors work with Sensorberg’s SDK. It is probably too early to tell which company provides the best implementation of iBeacon.

But there are many potential real world use cases, and this is what makes iBeacon interesting. For example, when you enter a clothing shop, you can receive a push notification with all the latest promos. When you enter a coffee shop, you could get the brew of the week on your phone. Or a shopping mall could display a map to help you find the right store. It could power a new payment system as well, essentially a Square Wallet on steroids.

The hard part is to convince big retail chains to use iBeacon. These customers have the potential to develop a good mobile app, get a large user base and integrate iBeacon features. In the U.S., Macy’s is experimenting with iBeacon. Apple will take advantage of its technology as well.

But for now, it remains a novelty. It can go either way and become a massive retail technology or end up like QR codes. Remember QR codes?

As the reality of the extent and invasiveness of the security services’ dragnet surveillance programs hits home, the pro-privacy movement has been cranking up its own ideas to counter spy-tech with pro-privacy tech. The Lavabit founder’s recent Kickstarter for a secure end-to-end open source encrypted email project called Dark Mail is one example.

Today, here’s another: meet Blackphone, a smartphone that’s been designed to enable secure, encrypted communications, private browsing and secure file-sharing.

The project is a joint venture between Silent Circle — which shuttered its own encrypted email service last summer in order to preemptively avoid having to comply with government requests to provide data — and Spanish smartphone startup Geeksphone, which has previously made more standard Android handsets, and more recently has been building phone hardware for Mozilla’s open web standards HTML5-based Firefox OS.

The pair said today they have established a new Switzerland-based joint venture to collaborate on technology projects, with Blackphone set to be the inaugural product. They describe the phone as “the world’s first smartphone placing privacy and control directly in the hands of its users”.

Despite that grand claim, Blackphone is by no means the first encrypted smartphone. For example, back in September TC’s John Biggs and I paid a visit to a German based secure phone maker, GSMK Cryptophone, which has been in the encrypted telephony business for 10 years.

Another recent project to build a phone designed with security, encryption and identity protection in mind is the Quasar IV, which is using a hybrid Android/Linux and Quatrix mobile OS called QuaOS as the foundation for secure telephony.

But while Blackphone is not the only secure phone game in town, there’s no doubt that last year’s revelations about security agencies’ consumer electronics and services powered data-harvesting habits — revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden — have accelerated interest in security and privacy. The fallout from Snowden’s big reveal is clearly attracting new players to what could potentially become a much more mainstream space.

Hence, presumably, the Blackphone makers’ reasoning about now being the right time to build a pro-privacy phone that doesn’t carry the stench of security geek. The tone and nomenclature of their announcement very much feels targeted at a mainstream smartphone user, not a security specialist. 

Their press release includes a statement from Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, who is also involved in the project, which sets this tone.

“I have spent my whole career working towards the launch of secure telephony products,” he says.  “Blackphone provides users with everything they need to ensure privacy and control of their communications, along with all the other high-end smartphone features they have come to expect.”

Blackphone’s website is also light on deep-dive security terminology which could alienate an average phone buyer. Instead there’s a slick marketing video and explainer text that takes a broad-brushstrokes approach to fleshing out the device.

Using the Blackphone is described as “the trustworthy precaution any connected worker should take, whether you’re talking to your family or exchanging notes on your latest merger & acquisition”.

The site goes on to add:

Blackphone is unlocked and works with any GSM carrier. Performance benchmarks put it among the top performers from any manufacturer.

It has the features necessary to do all the things you need, as well as all the things you want, while maintaining your privacy and security and giving you the freedom to choose your carrier, your apps, and your location.

The tools installed on Blackphone give you everything you need to take ownership of your mobile presence and digital footprints, and ensure nobody else can watch you without your knowledge.

You can make and receive secure phone calls; exchange secure texts; exchange and store secure files; have secure video chat; browse privately; and anonymize your activity through a VPN.

Details of Blackphone’s pro-privacy feature-set are relatively scant at this point, perhaps because they want to avoid it feeling too complex, but they do say it is being built atop a “security-oriented” Android build called PrivatOS.

Blackphone is due to be previewed at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona next month where the JV will also be taking pre-orders. There’s no word on exactly when the phone will ship to buyers, as yet.

It’s worth noting that making an encrypted phone call — or sending an encrypted email — requires the use of two encrypted devices/clients: both your own phone/email client and the phone/email client of the person you’re talking to. So the Blackphone’s security credentials will inevitably depend on how you use the device — who you place calls to and which device they use; who you email and which email client they use; and so on.

However, as with the Dark Mail initiative, the more encrypted products that are out in the market, the greater the number of secure channels that can be used for communications.

So the more mainstream security technology can become, and the more average Joes who can be encouraged to use locked-down products, the greater the chance for everyone’s privacy to survive the onslaught from overreaching governments.

[Introduction to Blackphone from BLACKPHONE on Vimeo.]

What comes after the selfie? It’s surely going to take a while to find something as effortlessly addictive as documenting our own facial features repeatedly. But perhaps the current narcissistic obsession with selfies can be expanded to encompass ourselves and everything around us.

That at least is the hope of the Berlin-based creators of Panono: a spherical camera that’s designed to capture a God’s eye, 360 degree view of everything that appears in a scene at the moment its shutters snap.  And judging by Panono’s current Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, the startup has successfully created a fair bit of momentum behind the concept.

Panono has been running its crowdfunding campaign since mid-November — with the aim of raising $900,000 to turn its ball-shaped, camera-clad prototype into shipping panorama-capturing product. With less than a week left of the campaign to run, they’ve passed their funding target — and broken through the $1M mark. At the time of writing, Panono is just shy of $1,050,000 raised.

What exactly is Panono? It’s an 11cm ball that has 36 tiny cameras fixed onto this sphere that are capable of snapping a 108 megapixel panorama photo.

To take a Panono panorama, the owner simply tosses the ball into the air and when it reaches the highest point of the throw its cameras fire simultaneously, capturing a complete, spherical panorama. The resulting image is then stitched together using Panono’s software so that it can be explored dynamically, by, for instance, viewing it on a tablet and physically moving the position of the tablet to see different portions of the panorama.  (You can see examples of Panono panoramas here, here and here.)

Alternative Panono panorama capture methods can include holding the ball up on a stick (in case you don’t want to toss it over a cliff, perhaps), or just holding it up in your hand and pressing a trigger button to fire the cameras.

Siting a series of cameras on a ball to capture comprehensive visual data of an environment is of course what Google does with its Street View cars (and its people-mounted Trekker cameras), so the concept of arranging camera lenses on a sphere is not new in itself. But Google hasn’t been interested in pushing Street View image capture technology into consumer electronic hardware itself — leaving room for others to play.

Panono is also similar to another spherical device startup called Bubl, with its Bublcam — which also recently took the crowdfunding route to get its own photo-capturing ball rolling. Bublcam’s campaign raised just shy of $350,000.

Panono looks to be offering its spherical hardware at a slightly cheaper price-point than Bublcam ($500 for Indiegogo backers; $600 retail thereafter vs $800-$700 retail for Bublcam) — but Panono is concentrating on capturing high resolution stills, utilising far more camera lenses (36 vs four) in its design. Whereas Bublcam intends to offer the ability to capture and stream spherical video too, as well as take (lower resolution — 14MP) still shots.

Regardless of Panono’s more limited functionality vs Bublcam (i.e. still shots and interactive panoramas only — no video as yet), it has managed to pull in considerable interest, with more than 2,060 backers thus far. It’s aiming to ship finished product to these backers next September.

As for viewing Panonos, it’s making an Android and iOS app viewer for panoramas (or these will be able to be viewed via the web on the Panono Cloud). It will also be possible for users to access the raw 36 unprocessed single images if they want to play around with the data in other ways.

The Panono sphere includes internal flash memory that allows for around 400 panoramas to be stored at any one time, i.e. when not sending the data direct to a smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Christmas Man. Daddy Christmas. Grandfather Frost. Yule Man. Yule Elder. Yule Gnome. Yule Goat. Father Christmas. Old Man Christmas. Biblical Magi. Christ Child. Christmas Log. All those names are names for Santa Claus in other countries around the world. Calling him just Santa Claus just seems so boring in comparison, doesn’t it?

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Many in the tech world and Washington have railed against the encroaching and limiting effect of patents on innovation, but when the chips are down, IP and patents remain key cornerstones in how tech companies and their founders are making sure they will be able to build their businesses and stick around for the long haul. Tony Fadell, the legendary former hardware supremo at Apple and now CEO and co-founder of new smart home device startup Nest, today revealed that Nest already had 100 patents granted, with 200 more on file with the USPTO and another 200 ready to file.

“At Nest what we did was make sure that we are putting [effort in] a ton of patents,” he said on stage today at the LeWeb conference on Paris. “This is what you have to do to disrupt major revenue streams.”

Nest, which first hit the market last year with a smart, design-friendly thermostat that you can control remotely with an iPhone app, this year added to its range with a smart smoke and carbon monoxide detection and alarm system. But the company has also had its share of patent heat.

It has been embroiled in a thermostat-related patent infringement suit brought by appliance maker Honeywell initially in February 2012, and in November 2013 saw another patent suit get filed from BRK, makers of the First Alert smoke alarms, for infringements related to Nest’s second product.

Nest has also taken steps to buy insurance from elsewhere to shore up its patent position. In September it announced a deal with Intellectual Ventures — one of the most well-known of the patent hoarders — for access to some 40,000 patents via IV’s “IP for Defense” subscription-based product. Nest can draw on these patents as a defendant or in the event of a counterclaim — as it happens to be in the case of Honeywell.

Part of the IV deal also included the acquisition of an unspecified number of patents, “in areas of interest to Nest, including systems and methods for automatic registration of devices.” It is unclear whether Fadell’s patent citation today — totalling some 500 in all if you count granted patents, those waiting approval, and those yet to be filed — include the patents that Nest would have picked up from IV.

You might argue that part of Fadell’s bullishness about patents comes out of necessity because of these suits, but on the other hand you have to remember that he comes from Apple, one of the most aggressive technology companies when it comes to using patents to defend its products, and also filing a lot of them almost as a smokescreen to mask what it may be planning next.

Patents are not the only game in town, of course. In talking about what he saw as important elements of building a business, Fadell also touched on the challenges of hardware startups, and the pitfalls of Kickstarter. You can get a lot of public support (and even financial support) for an idea, but “if you do not plant the seeds early enough” for how you will manufacture and distribute that concept at scale, he said, you will not go anywhere. (Yes, he said this last year at LeWeb, too.)

The other area that Fadell believes we are seeing a shortfall is in how disruptive products are being marketed to consumers.

“You have to communicate what the problem is and what the benefit of the solution is,” as well as giving people an easy way to purchase it, he said. That is part of how you build trust for new, intelligent devices. “If people cannot trust our brand, our things will never sell,” said Fadell. “The ‘Internet of Things’ will never take off if people do not trust the products.”