Hasta La Gadget!

WHILL TYPE-A

Bucking the trend of more software-centric winners at TechCrunch Disrupts in the U.S., a hardware startup named Whill took home TechCrunch Tokyo’s grand prize this week.

Whill, an electric add-on that wheelchair users can use to go longer distances, picked up the grand prize of 1 million yen (or about $12,500). It turns a regular wheelchair into an electric vehicle or something like a Segway that goes about 12 miles per hour. The company is one of a handful of promising hardware startups that are emerging in the country while venerated hardware giants of the past like Sony and Panasonic face waves of layoffs amid competition from Korea, China and the U.S.

Founded about two years ago with help from a rehabilitation center in Kanagawa, the company is made of designers that have worked at Nissan and Sony. They have two products. One is the original electric wheelchair add-on they showed off at the Tokyo Motor Show last year and then they also have a newer version of the idea that they’ll start retailing for about 500,000 Japanese yen (or about $6,100) this winter.

Sparta

The runner-up was Sparta, which makes 3D animation software. Animators can easily edit 3D models through a technology that turns them into clouds of points. Using a pen tool, graphic artists can delete or add bits of points to a 3D model. The video of the wine glass below demonstrates the technology better than I can explain it in words. There’s also an asset store where users can store and share data.

The company’s part of Open Network Lab’s seed accelerator and raised about 1 million Japanese yen (or $12,500) from them. They also took in about 590,000 Japanese yen from crowdfunding site Campfire, which is like Japan’s Kickstarter.

Shading Enhancement from sparta on Vimeo.

Meetrip

Meetrip is like a local version of Vayable, where users can sign up to find tour guides wherever they travel. The idea is to give people a more authentic travel experience with people who are actually from or know the place you’re going. The company has added 10 new cities in recent weeks and has about 1,000 local guides on the platform. For now, it’s mostly focused on Asia with availability in places like Jakarta, Taipei, Bangkok, Bali and Ho Chi Minh City. Tour guides usually cost around $10 to 20. Like Airbnb, Meetrip uses Facebook Connect to authenticate identities and build trust.

Gunosy Career

With Japan’s labor market becoming slightly less inflexible (after having a long cultural legacy where workers get lifetime employment), it’s inevitable that more services for job seekers are going to show up. Gunosy Career connects to Facebook and uses data mining to understand which openings might match a job seeker’s interests and experience. Instead of having to re-write your resume over and over again, users can just re-use their online profile like in LinkedIn. But LinkedIn doesn’t actually have a strong presence here locally, so that has left an opening for a more focused domestic competitor .

Smakul

With as much as 50 percent of all searches coming from smartphones, local businesses are increasingly missing out on prospective customers if they don’t have mobile-friendly websites. With Smakul, small enterprises like restaurants and hair salons can enter their phone numbers to automatically generate a smartphone-friendly site that scrapes information from their desktop-friendly webpages. The company has a freemium model with three tiers of service from free to 2,000 yen (or $25) a month to a fancier site that has an initial cost of 50,000 yen (or $625) and then monthly servicing costs.

C-FO

C-FO’s freee product is like Mint.com for small to medium businesses. It connects with the banking accounts to show inflows and outflows of cash, which helps cut down on paperwork. The product has yet to launch and the company is run by a former Google marketing manager named Sasaki Daisuke.

videogram

Videogram finds the most interesting snapshots from any given video to create a mosaic of stills. The idea is that Videogram will increase clickthrough rates and get users to watch more content. Right now, YouTube and other sites automatically suggest a still, but the company argues that it’s often not the best or more representative part of the video. Videogram analyzes brightness and other aspects in a given clip to find the very best ones.

Language Cloud

Language Cloud is a platform for language learning. It helps teachers manage assignments and tests. It also records audio of students practicing speaking and compiles all of the clips so that a teacher can quickly go through dozens of sound files to correct errors.

The company says it’s already in about 7,000 schools and is working with language professors at Tokyo University to deploy it more widely. The company is backed by 500 Startups and Japan’s Digital Garage. It recently closed a seed round. They plan to monetize the platform by offering premium apps in a store.

Several months ago, we found out that a company co-founded by Apple’s former CEO John Sculley and a couple of hardware veterans who make those iPhone-connected glucose meters popular with diabetics were working on some stealth wearable computing concepts. Their company Misfit Wearables raised $7.6 million in a round led by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures back in April.

Now we’re finally getting a peek at a close-to-finished product.

Called Shine, Misfit Wearables’ first device is a sleek activity tracker that records how much you’re moving like the FitBit or Nike’s Fuelband do.

The form factor is simple and elegant. The Shine is a small, circular disc that’s about the size of a quarter. It has an all-metal, aluminum casing that took the company months to perfect.

The company’s CEO Sonny Vu tells us they actually had to figure out how to micro-drill about 3,000 holes into the Shine to let activity indicator lights shine though.

They’re so small that you can’t see them when the Shine is dormant. But when you tap the device, a small circle of lights around the Shine’s edges will come alive. The closer you get to completing your daily goals, the closer you’ll get to a complete circle of lights. If half of the Shine lights up, then you’re halfway there. The Shine is completely waterproof and can track anything from swimming to biking.

The neatest thing about it is probably how it syncs with the iPhone. (Sorry, no Android yet.) It doesn’t rely on Bluetooth or any physical connectors. You open the company’s app, then put the Shine on your iPhone’s screen and the phone will automagically download the data from the device. Scroll to 0:50 in the video below to see it in action. Vu wouldn’t say how the technology works though, as it’s a proprietary secret the company wants to keep from competitors. It even works when the phone is in airplane mode.

Like many hardware startups that already have funding, Misfit is using a crowdfunding site to draw interest. They’re launching a campaign on Indiegogo today. Kickstarter, the other popular alternative, is reluctant to take health or medical devices. Vu talks about this as the “Lean Hardware” approach, a play on Eric Ries’ “Lean Startup” philosophy, where Misfit will prove consumer demand first through crowdfunding sites before manufacturing a final product.

They’re planning to launch the device early next year for $99. There will also be a wristband accessory that goes for $19 and a leather band for $49. The Shine already comes with a small rubber clip that makes it easy to hook onto belts, shoes or other straps. Vu says there will be an open API for third-party developers to play with data from the Shine.

As for the company itself, it has 30 employees scattered across the world in what is a truly global structure for a company. The industrial design is done in San Francisco and the software is done in Vietnam, where Vu found several talented and U.S.-trained machine-learning experts who relocated to Vietnam.

Vu and his other co-founder Sridhar Iyengar may not be super well-known in Silicon Valley, but their previous company is as legit as it gets. It’s not a consumer web or mobile company that can cheaply acquire users or grow virally. It’s a medical device company called AgaMatrix that Vu and Iyengar built into a $50 to $100 million a year business over a decade. AgaMatrix was the first third-party hardware add-on that Apple approved for the iPhone. It’s a blood glucose meter that diabetics use to manage their insulin levels. Think about it. Years of dealing with the FDA. That’s hardcore.

In 1987, as the first reduced instruction set computing (RISC) ARM chips hit the scene, programmers at Acorn Computers created RISC OS, a simple, ‘co-operatively multi-tasked’ OS designed for small computing environments. While it’s no Linux, it’s still a great way to get to know RISC computing and, more important, it boots fast and has a working GUI. Now, according to a post on Rasberrypi.org, it’s available for download for all Pi users.

You can download the OS here but the Raspberry Pi creators recommend a quick stroll around the OS using this PDF as a guide. You can also try the OS using an ACORN emulator for Windows and OS X (although the Mac version seems to be missing). There is also an interesting history and tutorial on the site.

People rave about the filer and the consistent UI, but I’m just excited to see seemingly dead OSes resurrected as teaching tools. It gets us back to the bare metal of the machine and, more important, puts budding programmers into a situation where not everything is a given.

Cyril Ebersweiler has launched one of the coolest incubators I’ve seen in a while. Based in Dalian, China, the incubator has already run one group through the ringer, and now they’re looking for hardware hackers to join them in their second round. This time, however, they’re doing it up nice.

The organization has just launched a new website, Haxlr8r.com, and they brought in a new program director, Zach Hoeken of Makerbot fame. They’ve grabbed some great mentors including a young man named Nolan Bushnell who, if I’m understanding this correctly, invented freaking coin-op video games, and Bunnie Huang.

The accelerator runs for 111 days and is based in Shenzhen and the Valley. Teams will have access to prototyping hardware, including laser cutters, 3D printers, and the like. Chosen groups get $25,000 in funding and are required to live in Shenzhen for the duration of the program.

Ebersweiler writes:

While SF is the center of the web services universe, Shenzhen looks to be the center of the hardware universe, and this looks like a great way to get right to the heart of it.

It’s inevitable, right?

With cameras becoming ever smaller and storage becoming ever cheaper, there will come a day when all of our life’s memories are digitally preserved.

Memoto, a Stockholm-based startup inspired by the Quantified Self movement, is taking a stab at this opportunity with a postage-sized camera that wearers will carry around with them constantly.

It snaps a photo every 30 seconds, keeping a visual trail of your everyday life. A companion online service will store everything, catalog it by time, date and place and even help you pick out the most visually interesting moments.

The company’s launching a campaign on Kickstarter to draw interest. They’re hoping to retail the camera for $279 next year in three colors of graphite grey, white and bright orange. Early backers will get the camera and a one-year web subscription for $199.

So questions: Isn’t that creepy?

Maybe, but actually the company behind Memoto thought about voyeuristic or awkward social situations carefully in designing the camera. For one, the camera doesn’t turn off unless you put it away in darkness. That’s so friends, family or bystanders know with certainty about whether they’re being recorded or not. That’s different from other wearable devices (potentially like Google Glass), where it might not be so clear if you’re being recorded or not.

Co-founder Martin Källström started Memoto after transitioning out of his last startup, Twingly, which monitors blogs, tweets and more to track what customers are saying about a company’s products.

He became passionate about the Quantified Self movement and the ideas of Gordon Bell, a Microsoft researcher well-known for his experiments in life-logging.

Kallstrom wanted a way to record unexpected moments in his life, like his children’s first steps. He pointed out that we don’t often remember to record moments or shoot videos as these memories are happening. At the same time, things that don’t seem important at the moment become profoundly meaningful as we look back. Memoto is about being able to retrieve these memories, even if we can’t completely appreciate them as they pass.

As for the camera itself, it takes 5 megapixel resolution images and logs GPS positions and timestamps. It also has a built-in rechargeable battery, which can last up to two days. You wear it with a small, stainless steel clip that attaches to your clothing.