Hasta La Gadget!

Internet-of-things startup, SmartThings, this year’s winner of the Dublin Web Summit’s startup competition, has closed a $3 million seed round. The round was led by First Round Capital and includes contributions from SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, CrunchFund, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, David Tisch, A-Grade Investments, Chris Dixon, Vivi Nevo, Alexis Ohanian, Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Kal Vepuri, Ryan Sarver, Jared Hecht, Steve Martocci, Emil Michael, Aaron Levie, Zorik Gordon, and Nathan Hanks.

The startup is building a platform for developers to connect everyday objects such as door locks and lights to the internet, allowing the physical objects to be controlled and monitored via apps and other digital interfaces — hence its talk of an “open physical graph”.

Individual smart object systems — such as the Philips Hue lightbulbs — are already popping up in the marketplace but SmartThings is aiming to build momentum behind an open platform approach, allowing multiple device makers to sit within the ecosystem, and multiple devices to be powered by the same core smart hub. “It will take a significant ecosystem and the participation of many of these innovators to realize the full potential of the physical graph,” it notes.

The startup said it now has more than 1,000 developers and makers signed up to its way of doing things. Growing that community is going to be key to SmartThing’s success. To increase support for its platform, SmartThings plans to use a swathe of the seed funding to launch the first SmartThings Developer and Maker Competition — to reward “innovation on the physical graph” — noting

Based on community feedback and more than 1,000 developers and makers that have signed up on the SmartThings platform, we’ll be choosing 5 key themes representing the most exciting areas of innovation on the physical graph. In each theme, we’ll be awarding a winner for the best software developer / SmartApp, and the best hardware/device maker. In April 2013, we’ll announce the overall winner.

The competition will be judged by a panel that includes First Round Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Matt Williams, EIR at Andreesen Horowitz, Loic Le Meur, David Tisch, and Alex Hawkinson, CEO of SmartThings. Winners will receive cash prizes — with $100,000 in total prize money, including $25,000 each for the top app and top new connected Thing — as well as “investor exposure, media coverage, manufacturing and design consulting and be[ing] featured across the SmartThings customer base and ecosystem”. SmartThings said it expects the amount of money in the prize pot to increase further in the near future via inbound sponsorship cash.

SmartThings has previously secured $1.2 million via a Kickstarter campaign, and is partnering with Instacube — to allow the cube to display notifications for things like visitors arriving or leaving the lights on.

SmartThing’s release follows below

SmartThings Announces $3M seed round and Developer/Maker Contest to Drive an Open ‘Internet of Things’

At SmartThings, we believe the next and perhaps most life-altering evolution of the Internet will be the creation of the physical graph; the digitization, connectivity and programmability of the physical world around us. Whether you call this the Internet of Things, sensor networks or home and life automation, the implications for how we live, work, and have fun are profound. At our core, we also believe that for the ecosystem to be healthy, it must be open. An open physical graph is the only way to bridge the innovation, inventions and brilliance of the many device manufacturers, hardware makers, developers, and everyday people who are working to change our lives today and in the future.

SmartThings sits at the center of this open ecosystem. We provide a platform that enables developers and makers to build smart and connected devices, an interactive and mobile user experience for consumers to manage and install apps into their physical world to make it behave more intelligently, and unique combinations of SmartThings and SmartApps packaged to solve real world problems, out of the box, with no professional installation required.

We appreciate the immense support we’ve received to date in making that open vision a reality. Our Kickstarter backers embraced this vision and made us the second largest technology project of all time, and the largest Internet of Things project by more than 2x when we closed. This momentum continued across the globe with SmartThings winning the Spark of Genius award at the 2012 Dublin Web Summit against a field of over 4,000 original startup competitors from 36 countries.

Today we’re announcing 2 significant events in our continued success and progress in bringing the open physical graph to the world.

The SmartThings vision is a big one. But it’s clear the world is ready. The entire Le Web conference in Paris this week is based around the Internet of Things, and new projects aiming to connect our physical world are emerging almost daily. It will take a significant ecosystem and the participation of many of these innovators to realize the full potential of the physical graph.

Fortunately, some of the best and most dynamic investors and entrepreneurs out there believe in our vision as well. Today we’re announcing the successful close of a $3 million funding round lead by First Round Capital and including SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, CrunchFund, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, David Tisch, A-Grade Investments, Chris Dixon, Vivi Nevo, Alexis Ohanian, Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Kal Vepuri, Ryan Sarver, Jared Hecht, Steve Martocci, Emil Michael, Aaron Levie, Zorik Gordon, and Nathan Hanks.

This is the perfect group to both help us in our direct growth and to make investments in the ecosystem of developers and makers who will create a breathtaking array of connected devices, intelligent and learning applications, and breakthrough innovations.

With this funding, and in direct support of the open ecosystem vision, today we’re also announcing the first SmartThings Developer and Maker Competition. Based on community feedback and more than 1,000 developers and makers that have signed up on the SmartThings platform, we’ll be choosing 5 key themes representing the most exciting areas of innovation on the physical graph. In each theme, we’ll be awarding a winner for the best software developer / SmartApp, and the best hardware/device maker. In April 2013, we’ll announce the overall winner.

The judging panel for this contest includes First Round Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Matt Williams, EIR at Andreesen Horowitz, Loic Le Meur, David Tisch, and Alex Hawkinson, CEO of SmartThings.

Winners will receive cash ($100,000 overall including $25,000 each for the top app and top new connected Thing), investor exposure, media coverage, manufacturing and design consulting and be featured across the SmartThings customer base and ecosystem. You can learn more about and sign up for the competition at build.smartthings.com.

We expect this to be the first of many competitions driving an explosive growth in innovation on the open physical graph. Thank you so much for your continued support. Together we will create an open physical graph and a smarter world!

Finland has produced Angry Birds and red-hot gaming company Supercell, but there’s another profitable startup that’s got a far unlikelier background and product.

One of the more outlandish-sounding startups I met in Helsinki last week was Valkee, a company that makes a device that shines lights onto your brain cells through your ear canals.

Yes, it does sound pretty strange, but the device exists to treat seasonal affective disorder, or that temporary depression that some people get during winter. Plus, Valkee has attracted backing from angel investors including well-known angel Esther Dyson, Playfish co-founder and EA executive vice president Kristian Segestrale and Jaiku and Ditto co-founder Jyri Engeström.

The company has an unusual backstory that marries hard science with consumer hardware. Co-founder Juuso Nissila had been researching the circadian rhythms of birds and found that there were light-sensitive proteins on the surface of the brain that could help regulate their sleep schedules. He wondered if the same photo-sensitivity could be found in human brains.

At the same time, a friend and Nokia researcher Antti Auino was putting lights up all around his home. He was trying to fight off Seasonal Affective Disorder, or the “Winter Blues” when people get depressed during winter months with the lower amounts of light.

“I told him you don’t need to your light your house. You need to light your brain,” Nissila said. The ear canal was the most natural and obvious way to shine light onto the surface of the brain. Within weeks, they had a prototype.

Called The Valkee, the device looks like an MP3 player with a set of fancy headphones attached to it. The earbuds actually have a pair of lights attached to them that run for 12-minute sessions at a time. The idea is that by shining light into sensitive areas of the brain, it will stimulate a special OPN3 protein in parts of the brain that help regulate serotonin, melatonin and dopamine production.

They’re initially marketing it to people with Seasonal Affective Disorder, but they’re planning to expand their consumer base to people who need to fight off jet lag.

“If I stop using it for one week, I start eating more and it becomes very difficult to wake up in the morning,” said Timo Ahopelto, who was CEO of the company before leaving to join early-stage Finnish VC fund Lifeline Ventures, which also holds a stake in Valkee. I’ve used it, and I can’t tell if there is any effect yet beyond making my ears feel warm in the morning. But I’m also Californian, so I’m not even really sure I suffer from seasonal affective disorder because we don’t really have seasons.

They’ve done some initial clinical trials. A study published earlier this year showed that about 92 percent of patients (from a sample size of about a dozen) showed full remission on the Beck Depression Inventory questionnaire and 77 percent saw full remission on the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression. Another controlled study showed that athletes who received bright light therapy for three weeks were able to cut their motor reaction times by about one-fifth. A third randomized controlled study with about 90 people showed that Valkee-treated patients were able to cut their scores on the SIGH-SAD, a scale that measures severity of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

All of these studies are fairly small and it’s still early, but Valkee is following up with more double-blind studies where neither the patients nor doctors running the studies will know whether Valkee headsets or placebos are being used.

“We were working with severely depressed people. We live quite north in Oulo. it’s only 170 kilometers to the Arctic Circle, so the darkness is very, very, very abundant,” Nissila said.

Ahopelto says that the company tries to be very open with potential customers. They don’t edit comments on the Facebook Page, for example, if anyone has anything critical to say.

“We don’t moderate negative comments out. There are some people who say they spent 190 euros on it and it didn’t work or that it was the worst purchase in their life,” he said. “Then there are others who say that it’s helped save their lives and winters.” You can see a recent sample of reviews here.

The comments range from critics who call it “snakeoil…” to actual users who say things like:

“My depression had become so severe that even during the summer it lingered this year. Not only has my suicidal thinking ceased, my ability to stay awake after dark, and even though I still have restless sleep, I wake up with a desire to get out of bed, and my pain has decreased. I haven’t had a prescription ibuprophen in 2 weeks now. I lived in constant pain in my back and everywhere. It may be the fact that I am better able to take my magnesium and vit D now that I have my Valkee, either way I am alot more functional and alot less miserable!”

Ahopelto adds that the company has a return rate of less than 1 percent, including people who order the Valkee on the web and return it within 14 days.

The first year, the company sold about 5,000 units. In the second, they sold 20,000 and they expect to sell perhaps around 50,000 units of the current edition, which has better casing. Like many other hardware startups, Valkee has benefited from the rise of Facebook, which has given the company a cheap way to find customers without having extensive retail or distribution partnerships.

While a device that shines lights into your ears sounds like it might be a niche product, Ahopelto thinks the potential market size is large.

“Maybe a quarter of people in New York suffer from Winter Blues and even in Southern Italy, you’ll still find about 5 percent suffering from seasonal affective disorder,” Ahopelto said.

The company is in the process of raising a Series A venture round and they plan to launch in the U.S. next year if they get clearance. Valkee has Class II(a) clearance in the European Union.

Here’s a Reuters video on the Valkee:

When I first saw this tiny gaming cabinet this morning, I was fascinated. Who was the creator, Sprite_tm, and why did he do such and excellent and thorough job of turning a tiny Rasberry Pi device into a little gaming cabinet? In short, how did he get inspired as a maker?

I sent him a few questions and he was kind enough to reply.

TC: I love the project. Why did you do it?

Jeroen: The intro to the article basically states that already: I had a Raspberry Pi and I wanted to get familiar to how it works. It’s a great tool to have in your toolbox: need a powerful controller running a standard OS for your robot / Internet-controlled doorbell / Twitter-based death ray? Just get one of these for a few quid. Knowing how they work means I can put them to work much faster the next time, which may come in handy if I actually try to make something useful.

TC: Who are you?

J: I’m Jeroen Domburg, nickname Sprite_tm. I’m a 30-year old software/hardware guy from the east of the Netherlands. I’ve been fiddling with electronics all my life and when I studied electronic engineering, I decided my projects should get a site of their own. That site became Spritesmods.com and I’ve been adding projects to it since. In real life, I have a job as a software engineer at a broadcast equipment manufacturer.

TC: What was the most difficult part?

J: I thought it would be designing the case; I’ve never designed something to be lasercut before, and immediately trying a ‘weird’ shape instead of a cube to try it on meant I’d have to learn about quite a few things. In the end, it did take up a lot of time to make sure I got everything right, but the process itself wasn’t as complex as I thought.

The most difficult part probably was the LiIon circuitry. Not only because the design itself is tricky (some components have two or three separate functions, making it hard to not break function A when you want to modify function B) but also because LiIon-batteries have the nasty habit of going ‘boom’ when you mis-treat them. It took some time and calculation to convince myself it was actually going to work OK all the time, and even if one part doesn’t do its job, I still won’t have an explosion on my hands.

TC: How did you start hacking?
J: I don’t know why I started it, mostly because I was probably too young to remember. It’s always been a hobby of mine, even in my childhood I’ve been tearing apart stuff to see how it works. I’ve never made hacking in itself my daytime job, although I’ve always been trying to get some overlap: hacking and electronic and software engineering go well with each other ofcourse.

TC: What’s your advice for folks trying to hack their own Raspberry Pi projects?

J: Just dive into it! Raspberry Pi’s are cheap as chips, and the community supporting it isn’t half bad. So, if you have an idea, just get one, read up on whatever you’re going to need and just try to make it work.

TC: Easy for you to say. What’s your favorite arcade game?

J: From a technical point of view, I really like the vector arcade games. It’s awesome to read the engineers had to almost build their own secondary CPU from scratch to get the vectors working, not to speak of the analog mess involved. I actually built one myself – Black Widow – just to see if I could do it.

Just to play, I have a soft spot for Dragon Saber. I ran into one of those on a holiday, and fell in love with the levels and especially the music. I also like Outrun, I was addicted to the PC-version when I was young and the arcade version is even better.

Jolla – the startup built by the team behind the smartphone OS that Nokia abandoned in favor of Windows Phone — revealed its first big smartphone customer deal today, the mobile operator DNA of Finland. Jolla also gave a first look at the UI of Sailfish, the mobile operating system they’ve created from the remnants of Nokia’s MeeGo project, and released an SDK.

“We need to succeed in our home market in order to succeed in foreign markets as well,” said Sami Pienimäki, a vice president at the company, in an interview with TechCrunch. The company also said that it’s partnering with ST-Ericsson on chipsets for the phones.

The brave startup, which raised about 10 million euros in capital from a private consortium of investors, is hoping that it will ultimately find success in Asia, and more specifically, China. The Chinese market, which now has about 200 million smartphones in circulation, has been more hospitable to operating systems that aren’t iOS or the standard Google-endorsed flavor of Android.

A number of Android variants like Xiaomi’s MIUI have flourished there and China has historically been one of Nokia’s strongholds. Jolla has signed a distribution deal with retailer D.Phone there and is also looking at direct-to-consumer sales online.

Pienimaki and chairman Antti Saarnio said they weren’t fazed by the billions of dollars that companies like Microsoft have poured into creating a third competitive mobile ecosystem beyond Android and iOS globally.

“Our operating system is very competitive. The UI is very consumer-friendly. The big difference in this situation with us from Microsoft or others is that Jolla doesn’t have any business legacy. We don’t have any market position. We don’t have a cost base to defend. We can have very flexible models,” Saarnio said.

The company hasn’t revealed any of its other hardware or carrier partners. “We are still in discussion with several partner candidates,” Saarnio said.

Pienimaki gave me a look at the Sailfish OS. Like Windows’ interface and Android, it has a number of tiles or widgets that can pull up contacts or messages. You unlock the phone by swiping upwards and notifications are discreetly hidden in the top right-hand corner.

“It’s done in a way that so that your notifications are private and no one can see them directly on your phone’s screen,” Pienimaki said. The OS also emphasizes multitasking with the ability to peek into other applications through these widgets. You can also change the look and the feel of the UI with different photos from your library.

The company should have a video up shortly, which I’ll add (because that’s probably a better explanation of how Sailfish looks and feels than I can put in words). Update: video is below.

Pienimaki says that while Sailfish can support tablets, smart TVs, cars and other kinds of devices, Jolla will be a smartphone company first and foremost.

“The Sailfish operating system is very scalable and we have ported it to many form factors, but we are mainly a smartphone company,” he said.

DNA, a number-three mobile operator that competes against TeliaSonera and Elisa among others in the country, is one step ahead for Sailfish but in a game where companies win on scale, it has a long way to go. DNA’s announcement of the deal notes that this is a sales and marketing partnership — terms of which have not been disclosed — that will kick in “as soon as [devices] enter the market,” and that Jolla will “target” further carrier deals going forward.

Lumawake, an innovative iPhone dock designed to work with both 30-pin and lightning dock connectors, today kicks off its own pre-orders in a self-run crowdfunding attempt to bring its product to market. The team faced rejection from Kickstarter just one short week ago, after that crowdfunding platform changed its hardware project rules to minimize their role in the overall platform mix. Now it’s back, and the team tells me they’re confident that going it alone in the manner of App.net and Lockitron will help make sure that Lumawake makes it to market.

So what exactly does Lumawake do? Well it’s an iPhone dock, which means it’ll charge your device, and it’s made to be used with replaceable modules to help make sure that it’ll work with both iPhone 4/4S and the iPhone 5, using either the legacy dock connector or the new Lightning port. And, as indicated by the “luma” portion of its name, it features a soft-lighted top, which you can customize through your device. But the real magic is in the Lumawake’s more advanced, intelligent functions, including its ability to monitor your sleep patters from a bedside table via IR motion sensors, wake you when you’ll feel most rested, and work together with home automation systems to ensure that as you’re waking up, your house will be, too.

The Lumawake is no ordinary dock. It has a built-in microprocessor, the aforementioned LEDs and motion sensors designed to be as accurate as wearable monitors, but without having to stay with you in bed as you sleep. Using a free app, it can be used to schedule wake and sleep events, like turning off lights or the TV as you nod off, or starting the coffee maker when it wakes you up in the morning. And thanks to those built-in lights, it can simulate a sunrise to try and ease the transition from bed to waking life.

Click to view slideshow.Already, Lumawake has partnerships with SmartThings and Belkin’s WeMo, two home automation solutions that should help it perform a variety of wake up and bedtime tasks. Lumawake’s Scott Roehrick, the company’s Chief Outreach Officer, told me in an interview that the startup is working on a number of other partnerships, too. Lumwake also is an existing Apple MFi licensee, meaning it should have no problem getting the devices approved from the perspective of Apple sign-off on its designs.

Lumawake is looking for pre-orders from early adopters of $149 per unit, using the Selfstarter.us open-source crowdfunding platform created by Lockitron for its own fundraising efforts. Lockitron was also turned down by Kickstarter, but went on to raise $1.5 million on its own for its remote home locking system. Roehrick says that going it alone should help Lumawake gain more attention, since it’s still an exception rather than the rule, and also says it means they can set additional rules, like the one they’ve established that says they don’t collect any funds from backers until they’re actually ready to ship a physical device to their homes.

“At the end of the day, I think we’re confident enough in our product that we can just go off and do it,” he said. “It’s kind of scary… it was incredibly intimidating, but Lockitron was the first to do it and they’re Y Combinator as well, so they have that advantage. It’s a calculated risk, and we’re not 100 percent sure it’ll work… but we think there’s going to be a movement to do this, and we want to be one of the first.”

The SmartDock is definitely an impressive-looking product, and one that goes well beyond your typical, relatively inert bedside smartphone stand or even speaker dock. The company is putting a lot on the line by trying to crowdfund itself, without the benefit of a brand like Kickstarter to back it up, but the possibilities it entails are exciting, and that’s likely going to go a long way towards convincing a highly motivated group of early adopter, gadget-loving risk-takers.