Hasta La Gadget!

Chef Sleeve has been selling its iPad-protecting plastic sleeves since 2011 to keep kitchen gunk off the iPad you’re using while you cook. They also make a dishwasher-safe, non-porous chopping board with a built in iPad stand (below right), and a smaller stand in the same recycled paper composite finish. But Chef Sleeve’s grand plan is to create a range of connected devices for the kitchen that link up with an iPad app to let people track their nutrition in a highly granular, yet low hassle, way.

To that end it’s just kicked off a Kickstarter campaign for its next product: a smart Bluetooth scale, which it’s calling Smart Food Scales, that will enable people to weigh ingredients and snacks and then determine the exact amount of fat, salt, sugar, vitamins and so on in the ingredients they’re using in recipes or the snacks they’re eating at home.

“This is our first smart product. We now want to activate these pieces of hardware and take the iPad even further and enhance the experience in the kitchen,” says Chef Sleeve’s Michael Tankenoff. “The Bluetooth scale will sync up with our iOS app on iPad or iPhone. Say you’re weighing strawberries. We house the USDA database of food information, so you select strawberries. Not only will it tell you the weight, but it tells you all the nutritional information.

“For example, you’re preparing a salad — you put your bowl on the scale, add your lettuce, select lettuce, reset to zero, add your tomatoes, select tomatoes, reset to zero, keep going, build this recipe and when you’re done, now you know exactly the nutritional value of that salad that you have every day.”

As well as the health conscious and people watching their weight, Chef Sleeve envisages the scales being useful for individuals with conditions such as diabetes to help them track their sugar intake, or people with specific nutritional deficiencies who need to make sure they’re getting enough of certain vitamins in their diet.

The company is looking to raise $30,000 via its Kickstarter campaign, which runs until the end of the month. It’s showing the following prototype screenshots (below) of the planned iPad software. It also intends to open up its API at some point in the future, so that third-party developers can build apps for the smart scales — although it’s going to be careful about how it does this, as it wants to keep any other apps wholesome (scales can, after all, be used to weigh non-foodstuffs too).

After the scales, Chef Sleeve says it will look to launch other connected devices that tie back in to its iOS app to keep adding to a range of smart kitchen devices. A thermometer could be next, says CEO Santiago Merea. A chopping board with an integrated scale could also be on the cards “at some point” — but he says the company is being mindful about its mainstream consumer buyer. “We need to be careful about our demographic. We’re not going to throw rockets at them,” he told TechCrunch. “We want the design to be very homey, very crafty.”

If the uptake of the scales is strong, it could end up generating some fascinating data for Chef Sleeve — such as what, when and how people eat — which it said it will look to feed back into its product development.

“Our pledge is going to be to not store any personal information at all — because we don’t need to but we also don’t want the risk of being hacked,” said Merea. ”Food is personal… So we’re not storing any personal information but we don’t need to. With that data we can also even help our customers. It’s going to be really cool what we can do with this.”

Chef Sleeve already has stores interested in carrying the smart scales, according to Merea. It’s hoping to get into speciality kitchenware stores with the smart scales, a shift of its retail strategy which, to date, has been mostly focused on selling via Amazon (and its own website).

Mozilla was keen to talk up the 3.0 version of its Firefox OS simulator back in March, but didn’t have much to share about when eager developers could start fiddling with it. Thankfully for HTML5 buffs, that six-week quiet period is over — the team just announced on the official Mozilla Hacks blog that the newly updated simulator is now available to download.

All of the features that appeared in the preview release are accounted for — think support for rotating displays and a mock geolocation API for testing location-aware apps — but the simulator suite has been polished a bit since we last saw it. Most of those tweaks are housekeeping changes: the size of the download has been reduced, which has led to snappier boot times, and the simulator now supports common OS shortcuts like Cmd + Q to shut down, but the simulator has also been updated to run newer versions of Firefox OS and the Gaia user interface layer.

With that said, prospective Firefox OS developers will probably use one simulator feature more than any other: the ability to push work-in-progress applications to connected test devices. Mozilla and its hardware partners Huawei, LG, and ZTE (who showed off its first FFOS device at Mobile World Congress) have been pointing to device launches in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela later this year, but the quality of the experiences found on those phones will ultimately determine whether or not Firefox OS flops.

Even so, strong early sales of Firefox OS developer devices may point to a promising official launch for the first set of consumer-facing phones later this year. Just look at Spanish hardware OEM startup Geeksphone — it began selling its Keon and Peak reference devices for $119 and $194, respectively, late last month, and the company was forced to limit the number of handsets sold that on launch day so the 20-person team could keep up with shipping.

That’s a promising start especially for a company as young as Geeksphones, but there’s no question that Firefox OS is going to face some serious competition in its launch markets. Android powers a staggering number of cheap smartphones, and Nokia has refocused its efforts to build low-cost devices based both on Windows Phone and the aging Series 40 OS. Meanwhile, persistent rumors of a low-cost iPhone continue to make the rounds — Firefox OS seemed like a novel option for new and adventurous smartphone owners when I first played with it, but we’ll have to see how the rest of the industry responds.

Dogs, drones, and digital controllers, oh my! This year’s Disrupt conference in New York was full of amazing webs services and software, but Hardware Alley brought out the best in hardware startups and showed the world that hardware is finally serious business.

Darrell Etherington and I wandered the halls of Hardware Alley today to meet some amazing companies. We met with Fitbark, a way to see how happy your dog is and Thermovape, a way to smoke without taking in harmful carcinogens. We saw Extreme Flyers zip and zoom around the room with their brand new mini drone and Social Bicycles with their new system for bike sharing.

We’ll call out individual hardware alley companies over the next few days but until then enjoy this quick look at the coolness that is Disrupt.

Recently, consumer electronics have tended to be more about closing things down then opening them up, but New York-based Adafruit is working to help reverse that trend, and to make it so that people aren’t afraid of what’s inside their devices, and instead become more comfortable with electronics components and the concepts behind how gadgets actually work. Adafruit founder and CEO Limor Fried was on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today, and talked about how her company is going about achieving that goal.

The mission helps the company generate revenue, by priming an audience early on to become buyers of the components, DIY kits and open-source devices Adafruit sells through its online store. The key is to start young, Fried says, and to take advantage of urges that children already have around exploring their environment and the things around them.

“At a certain age, they just want to be comfortable with it, and everyone here probably liked to take stuff apart,” he said. “That’s how we learn, we take stuff apart and then we learn from them. That’s how software works, too.” With software, we pull apart the code to find out how it’s put together, she said, and we should be doing the same thing with hardware.

“We open the box,” she said, referring to our instincts when young. “The gadgets you have now, tablets and smartphones, theyr’e not easy to open anymore, so we provide that.” The idea is to make sure that if the need to break something down and repair it does arise, we aren’t afraid of it, and we don’t feel like we need eight years of specific education just to replace a broken capacitor.

Adafruit recently launched a video series for children called Circuit Playground to help familiarize them with electronics at a very early age. The company also put out a coloring book for electronics, which you can print out and use under a creative commons license. This is designed less to provide a rigorous early-age electrical engineering education regimen, and more to help get kids comfortable with terms, designs and shapes early on so that they’ll find it easier to pursue that kind of formal training later on. Basically, it’s about planting the seed for a generation of makers to come.

Asked about Adafruit’s identity, and whether it’s an educational organization or a business, Fried said her company is an ‘educational, tutorial company” that then has essentially a gift shop at the end. The model works in the same way that art supply stores functions; you could technically make your own paint, she says, but most people don’t because it’s easier to buy. Budding electronics hobbyists can likewise build their own PCBs, but they instead turn to supply stores and pre-fab components like those supplied by Adafruit. But in the end, the emphasis is on education and open source.

Fried envisions a world where people treat hardware the same way they do software, by mostly leveraging open source tools to quickly start up their own companies. But that change represents a major shift that will require fundamental changes in how we think about hardware, and Adafruit is trying to bring that about starting as early in our educational lives as possible.

Bike sharing service Social Bicycles has raised $1.1 million to expand the reach of their social bike sharing service to new markets. The company, led by Ryan Rzepecki, reported the funding this morning.

The round was led by David Rose on behalf of New York Angels as well as Esther Dyson, Amol Sarva, and Karl Ulrich. David Rose and Brad Higgins will be on the company board.

The company, founded in 2011, began as a Kickstarter project and then turned into a solid rental product with a pilot launch at the San Francisco airport in December and another pilot at the University of Buffalo in March.

The company is helping launch a bike share in Hoboken, New Jersey and St. Petersburg, Florida is on track to buy 300 bikes.

The bikes have built-in GPS systems and can be unlocked via your cellphone. Users can leave bikes almost anywhere and then find and unlock them anywhere using the app. This allows bike sharing services to exist without central hubs that take up valuable sidewalk space.