Hasta La Gadget!

New York Times tech writer Eilene Zimmerman did not come to Los Angeles to make friends, you guys. In her story and blog post about L.A.’s startup culture, Zimmerman manages to cram as many tired stereotypes as she can into a single sentence: "As a city, Los Angeles has been better known more for sprawl, gang violence and Botox than its tech start-up scene." Her point (and she does have one): L.A. has, like, too much traffic to have a real tech scene or anything, but, gosh darn it, these folks are trying!

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A Kickstarter project that launched this week wants to put a mic on your wrist, for constant audio monitoring, in a twist on the wearable tech and quantified self movement. The Kapture, as it’s called, pairs with an iOS and Android smartphone app that allows for quick sharing of audio clips recorded by the hardware wristband, which is constantly recording audio to a 60 second, recycling buffer.

The concept might sound somewhat familiar: An app called Heard debuted back in June that records audio in the background, capturing a 12 second buffer by default, or up to five minutes of the very recent past via in-app purchase feature unlocks. The Kapture differs by offering a hardware accessory, which is worn on the wrist, and from which you can flag a clip for saving instantly via a simple tap on the exterior of the device.

The Kapture hardware uses impact-resistant plastic and a silicone strap, with a battery that’s said to last a little over a day. It has a simple multicolor LED notifier, no screen, a vibrating motor and a waterproof, omnidirectional mic built-in. The accessory prototype is connected via Bluetooth 2.1 to your phone, but that’s being changed to Bluetooth 4.0 for production units, and there’s micro USB for charging along with an accelerometer for tracking motion.

Kapture’s founding team includes Mike Sarow, an engineer with over a decade of product manufacturing experience at Procter & Gamble, as well as Matthew Dooley, a marketing guy who knows the right recipe for product placement. The team is seeking $150,000 to get the Kapture off the ground, and is offering backers the chance to get one for a $99 pledge, in either black or white. Different colorways start to become available at the $110 level.

Unlike Heard, Kapture seems quite married to the concept of a set, 60-second audio buffer, so this isn’t going to be a device spies use to make sure they capture every juicy tidbit, and the Kapture folks are positioning it more as a way to make sure those organic memorable moments don’t just fade away into the ether. And the hardware has an advantage over Heard in terms of recording quality and being always in an optimal position to capture conversations.

But there are other issues with the idea, including battery that lasts only a day, as well as building the habit of remembering to tap a wristband thing to record a minute of preceding audio – hardly behavior that comes naturally to anyone. I also can’t help but cringe at the caption on this photo:

The Kapture is an interesting twist on the concept of lifelogging, to be sure, and one that does so with a design that is admittedly not too hard on the eyes, but the truth is that people only have a limited number of wrists and there’s an increasing number of gadgets vying for those, including smartwatches from big-name brands like Samsung. The Kapture is unique in design and interesting in concept, but it’s also quite niche. Still, this might be the best way to exploit sound as a social commodity in the end.

Dash Robotics is using crowdfunding to help build its first hobbyist robot for home robotics enthusiast, with the aim of providing advanced tech for very little money thanks to a unique combination of materials, design and manufacturing. Dash’s first robo is a smartphone-controlled, insect-like running robot, which can be shipped in a flat pack as a 2D kit, and then folded out “origami” style and assembled by consumers at home.

The Dash is designed by a team of Berkeley PhD students, including Nick Kohut, Paul Birkmeyer, Andrew Gillies and Kevin Peterson, who worked together in the Millisystems Lab on robots using small legs. The team worked out a revolutionary way to manufacture new prototypes quickly and cheaply, in order to help with experimentation, and were surprised to find that people witnessing them in action had a “strong, visceral reaction” (you can see if you feel the same when you view the video below) and wanted to know if they were for sale, Kohut explained in an interview.

“Dash is very engaging, we’ve seen boys and girls play with him for hours before being pulled away by their parents,” Kohut said, discussing not only the product’s appeal but also why he and his co-founders think it’s needed. “Dash is also dramatically low cost. ‘Low cost’ robotics today means about $150, but we’re pricing Dash at $65 [for an unassembled unit], less than half that. This is possible because of our unique flat manufacturing process, which allows us to build Dash out of affordable materials, and our animal-inspired design, which means we don’t have to compromise on performance at that price point.”

The Dash is available in alpha form (runs straight, doesn’t do much else) unassembled for $40, in beta form (navigable, more extensible) for $65, and fully assembled by the founders themselves as a complete unit for $100. Kohut says that it’s also highly hackable, and Arduino compatible, so that home hobbyists are limited mostly by their imagination in terms of what else they can make Dash do. The robot as designed can run at over 5 feet per second, and will run for over a mile on a single battery charge.

For Dash Robotics, this insectoid runner is just the beginning. Kohut says that they plan to expand their core product offerings in the future, as well as offer up a variety of accessories.

“In our past lives as PhD researchers, we’ve added wings, tails, and even gecko feet to these robots,” he said. “It would be really cool to see a “Gecko Dash” kit that can climb walls. Additionally, enabling these robots to talk to each other would open up all kinds of possibilities. You could have them race or battle and keep score, or cooperate to complete a mission, guided by your smartphone.”

Long-term, Kohut sees possibilities extending beyond the hobbyist sphere. The size, lightweight construction, all-terrain capabilities and cost of the current Dash would all be assets for use in search-and-rescue operations, he says. You can imagine sending in swarms up thousands of Dash robots into a collapsed building with CO2 sensors to located survivors, for instance. Minefield clearing is another use case that comes to mind.

Dash Robotics sees itself as part of a movement, which includes Adafruit and others, to inspire and grow the worldwide community of makers. The new crowdfunding platform Dash is using to launch the project, Dragon Innovation, is another player in that movement, with a Kickstarter-style platform aimed specifically at backing makers and their projects. Dash is also looking for traditional Angel investment to get to the mass production stage, and has been part of The Foundry @ CITRIS, a hardware accelerator operating out of UC Berkeley.

The UniKey Kevo has been a hot topic for the past year, its touch-triggered unlocking amazing the likes of investors, TV shows and retailers alike. The auto-lock system first appeared on an episode of “Shark Tank”, and shortly thereafter received a round of funding which brings the company’s total to $2.75 million.

We caught up with UniKey founder Phil Dumas at the ff Venture Capital office (ffVC is one of UniKey’s investors) to chat about the device being a pre-order and how to deal with competition.

But first, let’s clear up what exactly the UniKey Kevo does just in case you missed it. The Kevo uses Bluetooth 4.0 to identify you before unlocking your door, just with a touch. Unlike Lockitron, which can allow users to remotely lock and unlock their door, Kevo doesn’t support that function but rather focuses on proximity and convenience. Kevo users never have to reach in their pocket or wallet.

The company has a partnership with Kwikset, one of the largest lock manufacturers in the U.S. so that installation is quick and easy.

“We’re not the first company to unlock a door with a phone,” said Dumas. “But we are the first company to make the experience so much better than a traditional key. All you have to do is touch the lock.”

But what if you lose your phone? Well, Kevo is set up to let you log in through the web app or on a different device to gain access. Each Kevo also comes with a fob, with extra fobs available for $25 each.

Eventually, Unikey will move into other spaces, including automotive, air travel, professional settings, etc. to ensure that, one day, you’ll be able to throw out all your keys. There is also potential for Unikey to partner with home control and home automation companies in order to trigger certain events in the home based on a door locking or unlocking.

For now, however, the company is getting through its pre-order phase. If you’re interested in the $219 Kevo, you can pre-order at Amazon, Newegg, Home Depot, and Build.com. Shipping begins in October.

If you had any doubt that chucking in your entire life and building that iPhone case with a bottle opener you’ve always envisioned (the perfect design, honest) would be difficult, look no further than a couple recent Kickstarter failures that have been a long time in the making for proof. The Levitatr Keyboard and the Syre iPod nano Bluetooth watchband are both projects that were germinated in the heady wild west days of Kickstarter’s first beginnings, before it started to tighten the reins on hardware campaigns, and they’re both case studies in what happens if even the most well-intentioned hardware startup goes south.

Kickstarter has never claimed to be a storefront by any stretch of the imagination, so projects running into problems and failing to deliver should be familiar territory to any and all backers at this point. Anyone who has used it for any decent amount of time knows that you will get projects that just don’t materialize, and you’ll get ones that do finally ship, but that also massively under-deliver. But sometimes, you get projects where the founders are so transparent about the problems they encounter that it’s worth taking special note of what went wrong.

Levitatr Failed To Get Off The Ground

One such project is the Levitatr keyboard. Originally conceived in 2011 as an iPad and tablet keyboard accessory, this project by James Stumpf impressed with a design whereby the keys would magically appear out of slick flat surface once the accessory was powered on. Designed by Dayton, Ohio-based entrepreneur James Stumpf, it met and surpassed its $60,000 funding goal in 45 days and seemed to stand a reasonable chance of shipping by its November 2011 anticipated shelf date.

Stumpf declared Levitatr a failure via an update for backers posted to Kickstarter on August 12, 2013. He cited overly ambitious goals for the product, a shortage of funds, numerous failed licensing negotiations and his own general inexperience as the major motivating factors behind the project’s failure. The money he gathered to fund the project was all spent on attempting to build it, Stumph says, and he’s offered up an itemized list of just where it went to prove it. Stumpf also claims to have incurred considerable personal debt in the process.

Levitatr collapsed because it was more concept than concrete, with a physical prototype that promised one thing that ended up being immensely challenging from an engineering perspective to deliver. Stumpf blames a lack of willingness to compromise as part of the reason behind the project’s failure but that really engenders biting off more than one can chew: promise only what you know you’ll be able to build at project outset, in other words.

Many Kickstarter projects simply disappear into the night, but Stumpf has gone out of his way to publish a long list of supporting documents via Dropbox to support his account of how things went down, and he has been good about keeping backers up-to-date on his trials and tribulations via update. Kickstarter is designed to be a space where things can go wrong, and I think Levitatr is a perfect example of the best case scenario you could hope for in a failure, since it at least provides some guidance for others looking at building a hardware startup company.

No Crown For The Syre

Another decent example that has maybe done a bit too much apologizing and not enough explaining is the all-but-dead Syre Bluetooth watch band for the iPod nano. Right away, you see the problem; this is a project that was built for Apple’s last-generation iPod nano, the small square one that fit nicely on the average person’s wrist. The fact that it hasn’t shipped yet, well after Apple has stopped selling that device, is definitely Not Good.

The Syre was intended to solve the major oversight of the sixth generation iPod nano by adding Bluetooth to the mix via a simple, low profile dongle embedded in a watchstrap accessory. The mock-ups that the project raised funding based on showed an attractive compact device that helped the project raise nearly double its $75,000 target in August, 2012. Then, later updates to backers showed a much different device as a final engineering prototype, which was essentially a rubber nano strap case with a large, unsightly Bluetooth dongle sticking out the end – essentially, all the value of its sleek design went out the window, and backers were vocally disappointed in the change.

Syre isn’t dead technically, but it’d be fair to say the patient isn’t showing any brain activity. Project founder Anyé Spivey posted an update today that describes the project’s status and go-forward options, and both are pretty grim. Apple’s decision to change the iPod nano’s design and introduce Bluetooth to the new model had an understandably negative impact on demand both from consumers and potential distributors for the Syre: like any other 6th-gen nano-focused product, it essentially now has an extremely circumscribed potentially audience and exactly zero growth potential.

Kickstarter is meant to help get projects off the ground that wouldn’t necessarily make it to first production on their own, not to provide the funds to underpin a business in the longterm, so even with $133K in the bank Syre faced problems with money right away. The design wasn’t finalized, engineering was still only sort of half-conceived at outset, and Spivey says he was “misled” by Apple’s Mi team and also had to spend a lot on simply locking down nanos for backers who selected a reward level where the iPod was included.

Since both these projects were conceived and funded, Kickstarter has made considerable changes to the way it handles hardware projects. The site is much more cautious in approving hardware campaigns to go live on the site, and requires that a functional prototype exist in each case. Generally speaking, far more hardware projects over the past year have been production-ready on Kickstarter than ever before, which is a good thing for the site, for backers, and ultimately for founders and creators as well. New rules or not, however, failure is still bound to be a flip side of this kind of startup funding (just as it is with traditional methods), and there’s a lot to be learned from the projects that go wrong.