Hasta La Gadget!

Short Version:

The Ploom ModelTwo is a tobacco vaporizer that offers a healthier alternative to smoking traditional cigarettes, by simply heating the tobacco instead of burning it. But it’s real tobacco vapors you’re smoking, and not some synthetic alternative from a science lab. Because of this, you’re actually inhaling vapor as opposed to legit smoke, which is far healthier yet still relatively tasty.

Basics

• LED indicator light
• Inductive charging
• Anodized food-grade aluminum design
• Uses proprietary Tobacco pods
• Pocket-sized/pen-shaped
• $39.95

Pros

• Sleek, quality design
• Easy to refill with pods
• Battery lasts for five pods, which should be more than enough for the day (depending on habits)

Cons

• Looks more like a pen then an e-cig
• Hits a little hard
• Um… doesn’t accept other botanicals

Long Version:

Ploom is a startup out of San Francisco that started with a simple conversation. One future founder asked the other, “What do you hate about smoking?” to which the other responded, “what do you love about it?” With these dueling notions converging, Ploom sought out to merge the newest technology with one of the oldest traditions of our nation, smoking. The Ploom ModelTwo is the second generation of this company’s tobacco-only vaporizers.

That’s right: The first, and possibly most important thing, for you to understand about the Ploom ModelTwo is that, unlike big brother Pax, the ModelTwo does not (I repeat, does not) play nice with anything but Ploom’s proprietary tobacco pods. When it came in the mail, I made the unfortunate mistake of assuming I’d be able to smoke up at work… you know, for science.

Once I let go of the dream (read: found the Ploom Pax), needless to say I felt much better.

In terms of design, the Ploom ModelTwo is one of the snazziest tobacco vaporizers out there. It looks like one of those fancy pens your grandfather carries around to sign checks at the grocery store, and comes in both black and white. Midway down, you’ll find an LED indicator ring that keeps you abreast of the battery situation, when it’s heated up, and (you know) whether or not it’s on.

I’ve found that there are two schools of thought when it comes to smoking tobacco through a vaporizer: some people prefer for their e-cigs to look like real cigarettes, lest they be embarrassed for trying to get healthier. Others, however, prefer to smoke out of a device that looks as little like a cigarette as possible, perhaps to get the thought of cigarettes out of their mind.

The Ploom ModelTwo looks nothing like a cigarette, as I’ve stated, and is actually rather large when compared to an Njoy King or a Blu cig. However, it’s built well and feels solid in the hand.

Using the ModelTwo is quite simple. Pack it up with one of Ploom’s tiny, tobacco-filled pods, turn it on, and wait about thirty seconds before taking your first puff. The indicator light will pulse while the tobacco is heating up, and then go solid when it’s time to kick back and toke.

Loading the ModelTwo is as easy as screwing off the mouth piece, dropping in a pod, and closing her back up again. Wam, Bam, and thank you for smoking. Battery lasts through five whole pods, which should essentially get you through the day. Then, at night, slip your ModelTwo onto the inductive USB charger and drift into blissful dreams.

So, she looks good, she feels good, and she’s seemingly built well. But how does she perform?

As someone coming off of real cigarettes, the ModelTwo hits really hard at first. My lungs felt like they might explode at the slightest inhalation. Part of that has to do with the fact that the first hit is the hardest, and part of it is just because smoking tobacco through a vaporizer takes a little getting used to. If you’re switching from another vaporizer, as opposed to cigarettes, you shouldn’t notice much of a difference in the hit.

My one, and perhaps only, complaint is focused on the mouth piece. As opposed to having an opening at the very tip of the beak-shaped mouthpiece, the openings are small slits in the top and bottom. This means you really have to put your mouth all the way on that bad boy to get anything out, or else your lips will cover up the slits. This is a problem because the heating mechanism is right above the mouthpiece, and will burn you without the slightest hesitation.

It’s also slightly uncomfortable, especially when compared against the Pax (which has a hole right at the end of the mouth piece).

Still, the Ploom ModelTwo is an excellent vaporizer and a solid option for those who are looking to quit smoking, or simply upgrade to a nicer vaporizer. The little guy is available for pre-order now starting at $39.95.

Early leader in the 3D printing space Makerbot may have just been acquired for $400 million, but we still can’t forget about the Form 1 3D printer out of FormLabs.

It started as a Kickstarter project, which received 6x its $100,000 goal in just one day, topping $1.4 million in one week. Since, we’ve had the chance to review it and pit it against the Makerbot.

However, the two are quite different:

The Form 1 shines a laser onto a metal surface through a layer of resin. Using a process of photopolymerization, the slices are laid down one after the other creating a solid object that lifts out of the resin as it is built. Think of the Makerbot as a stalagmite maker — the material is laid down on a platform — while the Form 1 is a stalactite maker where the object hangs from the platform that slowly moves up.

They also have different price tags: The Makerbot Replicator 2 costs $2,199 where the Form 1 goes for $3,299. However, Biggs found that the Form 1′s resin-based approach offered much more precision and a higher resolution result.

Two flys.

Mobile virtualization startup BlueStacks only recently revealed the GamePop, its mobile home gaming console  that offers all-you-can play gaming for a flat monthly fee, but it’s already expanding the line. Today, the company is announcing GamePop Mini, a version of the GamePop that offers completely free hardware with a standard $6.99 monthly GamePop service subscription, with smaller hardware that’s yours to keep after 12 months even if you decide to cancel your GamePop account.

The GamePop Mini also runs Jelly Bean 4.2, and connects to your TV via an included HDMI cable. Just like its big brother the GamePop, it will provide access to the service’s curated list of 500 games (from both Android and iOS sources) each month, with titles from studios like HalfBrick (makers of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride) that are normally available only with a one-off purchase. The key difference between the GamePop and the GamePop Mini will be in terms of specs, which BlueStacks aren’t quite ready to reveal.

The $129 GamePop is currently available free to pre-order customers, but reverts to full price as of June 30. The GamePop Mini will become available as of July 1 for pre-order, and BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma told me in an interview that it will ship at or around the same time as the GamePop some time this winter. Sharma said a free console was always something that it wanted to do, and that the GamePop Mini is the first of a line of “forever free” options it plans to provide to gamers seeking to access its services.

“We were always planning this, because we think of GamePop as a service,” he said. “Just like when you think of when Netflix came out, they used to send you a Wii disc so you could run it on the Wii, and then you could run it on the PlayStation. And our goal is that you can run it on a number of different devices, and some of them will be from us, and some of them will be from other people.”

GamePop becoming a platform agnostic service would be a considerable departure from other mobile gaming consoles out there, like OUYA and the upcoming GameStick. It would open the door to integration in smart TVs, Windows computers, embedded devices and various other places. Once that happens, the value prospect of a subscription service with true portability increases dramatically; GamePop truly does become the Netflix of mobile gaming.

“It is in part to show how good the market is out there, and I would call it a showcase, but the pre-orders have also inundated us,” Sharma said. “So it’s not just a showcase. The direct channel is a very strong business, and one we plan to continue, but having it run everywhere is our vision.”

Sharma also talked about GamePop’s potential to eventually bring in media titles, as well as interactive experiences that aren’t strictly games, like the Talking Tom series, which is especially a hit with younger audiences. For mobile developers, that presents an option for getting a variety of mobile titles in front of a wide swath of users on a huge range of devices, on a subscription-based billing model that could upturn the pay-per-download revenue scheme that’s mostly driven the mobile software ecosystem to date.

GamePop Mini will be a way for BlueStacks to spread its service far and wide, especially since there’s no commitment, and you need only return the console hardware should you decide to cancel the subscription before the 12 month mark. It’s also super portable, and in fact pocketable, so it’s designed to travel (which has the side benefit of introducing new people to GamePop). I think it’ll be most interesting to see how users react to having both a free and a $129 hardware option for a brand new type of gaming device, but we’ll find out more come winter when they launch.

The Android-powered OUYA gaming console is celebrating its official first day of general retail availability today, a major milestone to be sure for the Kickstarter-funded piece of hardware. Many thought it would never make it this far, and that it would be vaporware before anyone actually got a chance to go and purchase one, but founder Julie Uhrman and her team have made good on making sure it hit store shelves in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, listed right alongside the marquee consoles by Sony, Xbox and Nintendo.

The $99 device offers over 170 games, all of which must have some kind of free-to-try component, along with media apps like Plex and TuneIn. OUYA also touts its large committed developer base, which has over 17,000 studios and game creators signed on to deliver content for the console, including Double Fine Productions. The console ships with one controller, and you can add another for $49.99. As of this writing, the launch seems to be going decently well, as Amazon.com is already showing the console as out of stock.

So far, OUYA hasn’t received the best of early reviews. Most have found its user experience lacking, and the pre-release version was definitely a “beta” release. Virtually everyone who got their hands on a backer edition expressed hope that the console would receive more polish, along with hardware fixes when it actually shipped. And now that it has, critics are going to go back to the well for a second drink, in the hopes that the OUYA team has made some considerable advances in the ensuing two month period.

Yet not all backers could even form an early opinion about the console. OUYA employed a staggered shipping strategy to reach all of its backers, with a timeline that was supposed to ensure everyone got a console before they become generally available. OUYA’s Uhrman sent out an update to backers this morning apologizing for not getting the console in backer hands before the public release, and shifting blame to their distribution partner, to DHL, and to backers with located internationally.

Delays for backer reward shipments on Kickstarter are nothing new, but it is very rare to see a product hit general market availability before getting out to the project’s first supporters. OUYA appears to be stumbling out of the gate in more ways than one, but at least now the product is out there in non-beta form, and ready to prove itself as a real consumer product, or, alternatively, to fail in the court of public opinion.

When Jufo Peltomaa and Tuomas Lukka were figuring out what to do next after selling Hybrid Graphics to Nvidia seven years ago, they knew it had to involve one thing.

Robots.

“Our business plan was — let’s do something cool with robots!” Peltomaa said.

The pair, plus their third co-founder Harri Volpola, are one of the most interesting entrepreneurial teams out of Finland today. Lukka is the country’s youngest ever Ph.D. after getting his degree in quantum chemistry at the age of 20 and Peltomaa is an early 1990s pop star from one of the country’s first rap groups, a past career he kind of wants to leave behind.

They didn’t know exactly what these robots would do, so they did hours and hours of interviews with different potential customers.

“The question we asked was, ‘How can we help you? What are you losing money on right now?’” he said. They looked at a number of industries like warehouse logistics and food companies.

They stumbled on a problem which wasn’t only just lucrative, but also interesting from a technical perspective. There were problems with getting machines to pick up oddly-shaped objects. They decided to settle on robotic recycling, with the European Union alone seeing 3 billion tons of waste each year and the regional construction industry generating 900 million tons of demolition waste annually.

They would build a system that would sort through trash and pick out things that could be recycled for extra revenue like wood or metal.

Their solution, which can cost anywhere up from a starting price of a half-million dollars, uses off-the-shelf industrial robots that are enhanced by artificial intelligence to determine whether trash rolling through on a conveyor belt is recyclable.

ZenRobotics’ system is also bolstered with several load sensors which detect things like surface area and weight.

The robots weigh trash as they lift pieces and calculate the price a piece could be redeemed for. There are also infrared scanners and metal detectors built into the system as well.

“These are the same kinds of robots that are used in Volkswagen factories,” Peltomaa said. “They are standard industrial robots. They are honed to be really reliable. What we are developing behind them is artificial intelligence software.”

They can also maintain the systems remotely so they can monitor if any parts in the system are starting to wear down ahead of time.

Peltomaa says that a client might normally pay 100 euros to get rid of a ton of waste. But if they can pick out a ton of metal, then they can sell that for about 250 euros.

The company has sold five units so far since they only started about a year ago, and believe that the total market size globally for what they make is about 8,000 units. They put together the systems locally in Finland and then deliver them to the customer.

The company just closed 13 million euros in funding from Invus, a private equity firm that has about $4 billion under management. They also pulled in a CEO who can scale the company in Juho Malmberg, who used to run Accenture in Finland and grew their office from 10 to 800 people. They also brought in Jorma Eloranta as a chairman of the board. He used to run mining and construction giant Metso, which pulled in 7.5 billion euros in revenue last year.

“We want to bring multi-billion euro thinking to our company,” Peltomaa said. “It will be our own fault if we don’t make it.”