Hasta La Gadget!

Big things are coming for littleBits – the New York-based startup that makes lego-style electronics kits. The company, originally conceived by founder Ayah Bdeir in the MIT Media Lab (and backed in part by its head, Joi Ito), has already picked up traction for its first product: kits for children and hobbyists to create fun objects at home (see more in the video below). Today, it is announcing a Series B of $11.1 million to take that concept to the next level: building out a B2B platform for hardware innovation.

There are a number of science and tech partners already working with littleBits and its platform, although Bdeir says it will not be disclosing the names until next year, when the first products come out.

This latest round is being led by True Ventures and new investor Foundry Group, and it also includes new investors Two Sigma Ventures and Vegas Tech Fund (Zappos’ Tony Hseih’s fund); as well as Khosla Ventures, Mena Ventures, Neoteny Labs, O’Reilly AlphaTech, Lerer Ventures and other angel investors. Brad Feld of Foundry is also joining littleBits’ board. This brings the total raised by littleBits to over $15 million, including a $3.65 million Series A round; and $850,000 in seed funding. During the Series A announcement in June 2012, littleBits also struck a manufacturing and supply chain management deal with PCH International.

Moving to a B2B model from one targeting consumers was always on the cards, says Bdeir. “It was a part of the strategy ever since I raised the seed round.” It was a two step strategy: step one was inventing kits for kids/education “to lower the barrier for entry to make it easier to start with electronics as possible, and the platform is step two. It’s about raising the ceiling and putting the power in the hands of designers.”

That is because at its heart, Bdeir says littleBits “is a tool and platform for others to invent.” Focusing on B2B will help littleBits position itself as “a leading hardware innovation platform in the world that others can use to invent and make their products and designs.”

Interestingly, this is actually a part of a bigger trend we’re seeing in the hardware movement, to create products and platforms that help others realise their hardware visions. There is of course NYC neighbor Makerbot, and over in the UK, design agency Berg has launched Berg Cloud, a platform for those making connected devices – interestingly also a progression from a hardware product.

(In Berg’s case, it was their Little Printer project that inspired CEO Matt Webb and others at Berg to pivot the company. It’s also picked up a $1.3 million seed round from Connect Ventures, Initial Capital, and Index Ventures to realise their ambition of making it as easy to develop connected hardware as it is to develop for the web.)

LittleBits is not revealing any figures for how the electronics kids have sold (we have noted before that they are wonderful but are priced at a premium, with starter kits today costing just under $100). But Bdeir tells us that sales have quadrupled in the last year. In fact, part of the funding will be used to help make sure that the company can keep up with the demand its getting for the products – effectively that means more business development and sales people to close retail deals, and developers to continue making more things to add to the modular library to expand that offering. “The number of SKUs that we have is close to 80 and we have hundreds more on the way,” she says.

Back to the platform vision, the idea will be for new prototypes, and perhaps even products, to sit alongside those that are coming from littleBits itself. LittleBits will take a revenue share as part its business model. “We definitely want to support other businesses who want to start their own product lines,” she says. “A lot of game changers start in the hands of large companies these days, and then concepts get democratized and put in the hands of everyday people. But that is changing in areas like game development and manufacturing with the likes of Makerbot. We’re doing the same with electronics. It remains a very top down industry, but now we are bringing it into the hands of everyone.”

Below, a video of how littleBits’ kit works, and below that, a link to the company’s latest Synth Kit collaboration with Korg, which points to how third parties could work with the ‘platform.’

littleBits Synth Kit in collaboration with KORG from littleBits on Vimeo.

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When I was a kid I was amazed by advances in technology. I went to a friend’s house when I was in fifth grade and his father had a PC – an IBM PC, I believe – with a built-in hard drive. We loaded King’s Quest and Colossal Cavern in seconds and he even had a menu of apps that you could select by tapping a key. As a kid who grew up with tapes and later floppy disks, this was close to magic.

A few years later I got a dot-matrix printer and Print Shop. Up went the long, flowery banners (“Welcome home, Mom!”) and birthday cards. Fast-forward further and I was using a primitive desk top publishing app to make flyers for my “Acoustic Folk Poetry” band that I started with my buddy Rick. Then I mastered CDs, made DVDs of my wedding, and fired up a 3D printer that could churn out copies of my head. All of those were like making love outside Hogwarts – surprisingly close to magic. That changed over the past decade – I was probably most excited by the iPhone – but almost everything we see these days is an iteration of the old CPU/screen/input system paradigm. Nothing since has truly amazed me. Until now.

Now we have real magic. It’s here. It’s not always perfect nor is it quite consumer-ready but the $1,400 Makerbot Digitizer is one of the coolest things I’ve seen this decade.

The Digitizer is essentially a turntable, a webcam, and some lasers. It uses Makerbot’s conveyor app to control the motion of objects on the turntable and then scans the points generated by the laser during the rotation. It works best with light, matte objects like ceramics, clays, and non-glossy plastics but with a little glare-reducing baby powder you can scan just about everything as long as its taller than two inches and small enough to fit on the platform.

To scan you simply load up the Digitizer software – an excellent, intuitive system that should be a model for all 3D printer and scanner makers – and, once you calibrate the system using an included, laser-cut object, you press Digitize. Nine minutes later you have a scan. The system interpolates missing information which can be good or bad, depending on the lighting, and then asks if you want to take a photo of your object. You then slide away a filter over the camera to reveal the bare webcam, shoot your, photo, and then share or print your object.

The process is addicting. When you put one object on you want to put another and another. Sharing these objects is an amazing feeling – it’s essentially the equivalent of dot-matrix teleportation. It will be amazing, then, when we get to the laser printed version of object teleportation.
Are the scans perfect? No. Because of vagaries of materials, reflections, and ambient light a perfect scan is impossible. This scan, for example is far from a perfect replica of the original statute. The statue itself has tarnished to an even, matte finish but even with some effort I couldn’t get all of the detail. The Digitizer is like a mimeograph machine rather than a true scanner. It grabs only the important parts of an image and reproduces the rest the best it can. For example, the scanner couldn’t tell what to do with the lens on this OMO camera, below, and so essentially gave up, filling it in. I was able to scan the lens by turning the camera on its side.

Take a look at this statue scan. I printed it fairly small just as a test but it grabbed a certain amount of detail on the statue but elided quite a bit more. In the end I created an approximate, not an exact, copy of the statue. Or take this beer stein for example. The handle sort of disintegrated but I suspect I could have gotten a far better scan if I dusted it down in baby powder. Scanning requires work and trade-offs but, in the end, you get approximately what you’re looking for.

Is the system perfect? Yes and no. When it works it works wonderfully. However, I’ve had some minor hang-ups in OS X that the Makerbot team as seen and is working on fixing. That said, I got a good scan 95% of the time and most of the errors were my own fault caused by excitement or ignorance of good scanning technique. You can see more of my scans on Thingiverse.

At $1,400 the system is also expensive. While I didn’t take apart the case it’s clear that the R&D and engineering that went into this – plus the fact that it was made entirely in Brooklyn – add a premium price to what is essentially a solid webcam and some Class 1 lasers. The hardcore among you will scoff at the price but when you want your scanner to work the first time, right out of the box, this product can’t be beat. There are better, far more expensive scanners out there but this hits the sweet spot at the intersections affordability, usability, and utility.

Can you do this all yourself? Absolutely. A Kinect, a webcam, some lasers, and even your iPhone can create passable 3D models. But nothing I’ve seen can consistently produce quality results in a package that is nearly foolproof and surprisingly robust. I could imagine an archeologist taking this device to digs, an artist setting this up in a studio, or an engineer using this to model aerodynamics. It’s tough enough to withstand rough treatment by kids and adults and the quality, while in no way perfect, is close enough for the vast majority of uses.

What the Digitizer gets right is that it hides away all of the vagaries of 3D scanning and just leaves the magic. The system itself looks like something Jeff Bridges would use in Tron and the lasers, the ticking turntable, and the black case make it clear that this object is from the near future. This product leaves almost every other home computing advance in the dust and I feel like a kid again, amazed at hard drives, printers, and the ability to create things out of thin air.

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