Hasta La Gadget!

The affordable Raspberry Pi microcomputer just got even more affordable: the slated $25 Model A Raspberry Pi board has now gone on sale in Europe. The Raspberry Pi Foundation, which created the Pi on a mission to get more kids learning to code, announced the Model A’s arrival and said sales are being restricted to Europe initially but will be opened up to the rest of the world “very soon”.

The Foundation’s Pi distributors, RS Components and Premier Farnell/element14, are both selling the board. All Model A Pis are being made in Wales — presumably at Sony’s Pencoed factory, which has been producing an average of 4,000 Model B Pis per day to-date.

The Model A pie is $10 cheaper than the $35 Model B, which has sold more than a million units to date (15,000 of which are being bought by Google to give away to U.K. schoolkids). Being cheaper, Model A is slightly stripped back — there’s no Ethernet, only one USB port and just 256MB RAM (rather than 512MB). Model A also consumes around a third less power than Model B — making it suited to projects powered by a battery or solar cells. The board will still run XBMC, according to the Foundation — so can also be used to make a $25 media centre.

The Foundation said RS customers outside Europe (Allied in the US) can order a Model A now but noted there will be “a short delay” in processing their order — owing to waiting for compliance paperwork. “Farnell customers outside Europe (Newark in the US) will see Model A appear on their local sites when this paperwork has been filled,” it added.

“We are very, very pleased to finally be able to offer you a computer for $25. It’s what we said we’d do all along, and we can’t wait to see what you do with it,” the Foundation added.

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

Last week’s Backed or Whacked covered light-related products that could be controlled by a smartphone. Beyond making their way in the dark, though, modern humans have many other basic needs — maintaining well-being, feeling secure, and enforcing as much control over their domain as possible while exerting as little effort as necessary. The ability to achieve them with the aid of a smartphone, though, has arrived relatively recently, and the ability to crowdfund them via Indiegogo as per all of this week’s projects, even more recently.

Backed: Amiigo. Amiigo, which is Spanish for “friend in good shape who spells poorly,” is a chevron-shaped shoe clip that monitors movement, enabling you to know precisely how many calories you’ve expended repeatedly lifting the Boston Creme donut until it has been reduced to sugary crumbs. Amiigo enters the increasingly crowded contest for survival of the fittest begun by early entrants such as Nike+ and Fitbit. However, the trendy joint between the hand and forearm is where all the wriststers hang out these days. These include the Nike+ Fuelband, Jawbone UP, and other forthcoming entrants such as CES debutante Fitbit Flex and the HAPIwatch from HAPI Labs. To enter that club, the Amiigo shoe clip neatly docks into a wrist strap.

What the Salt Lake City-based team is counting on to set Amiigo apart from these rivals is more intelligence regarding the specific type of activity you’re doing. The idea of diving deeper into the nature of your exertion has been previously espoused by the developers of the $199 Basis, which employs fancy sensors to monitor the body’s reaction to exercise beyond motion detection. Amiigo, which has more than tripled its $90,000 funding goal with about 25 days left in its campaign, dispenses with the extra hardware and is due to ship to Indiegogo backers in June for about $99.

Backed: iSmartAlarm. ADT has run a legitimate business securing people’s homes and businesses. Recently, however, bigger bosses like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have told their capos that they want into the protection racket, see? Extracting a monthly fee for peace of mind, though, has heretofore taken place mostly within the customer base of those in multi-room dwellings. There have been a few alternative approaches, though, like the apartment-friendly but nonetheless professionally monitored SimpleSafe system.

For those who are comfortable handling alarms — false and otherwise — themselves, though, Raymond Meng’s team proposes iSmartAlarm, which includes a base station/siren reminiscent of the old Power Mac G4 Cube. iSmartAlarm, set to ship in April and starting with a basic package of only $79 with no monthly fees, has big plans for expansion. The company eventually seeks to include features such as sprinkler controls and GPS pet trackers.

For now, though, it is starting off with the basics — window/door-open sensors, motion sensors and, most importantly, that inert sign that scares away the bad guys. Should brazen intruders disregard the latter, the system can initiate taking successive photos of the perp and will send alerts to the smartphone owned by you or the vigilante of your choosing. iSmartAlarm’s campaign has been plodding along with over $30,000 raised of its $50,000 target with about 20 days to go.

Backed: Tethercell. Now that the crowdfunding world has provided the gear to convince you of your health and safety, it’s time to take it easy. Perhaps you want to turn on that FM radio on the porch a few feet away, but the thought of leaning forward displeases you. Debuting at CES along with the ultra-thin, time-telling bangle CST-01 that a future Backed or Whacked will discuss in more depth, the Tethercell may be your only hope.

Designed by aerospace engineers, the cylindrical device stuffs a Bluetooth radio into a AA battery shell, leaving enough room in the cavity to insert a AAA battery. You give up some device stamina, but gain the ability to remotely enable and disable all kinds of products either manually or according to a schedule. Tethercell can also alert you when the AA batteries in a device are running low.

Adding Bluetooth to products never intended to be controlled by a smartphone creates a wonderful twist on backward compatibility. While a shrinking number of devices that you might want to activate remotely take standard cells these days, the campaign’s Indiegogo page depicts small lamps, radios and baby monitors as examples. As Tethercell also works with some videogame controllers and many toys, the non-confrontational parent wishing for their kids to turn that damn thing off and pick up a book already can still pick one up for only $35 (although pairs are also proving popular). Recently charged above 47 percent of its $59,000 goal capacity, the Tethercell campaign has about 20 days’ worth of juice left.

U.K. startup onefinestay — which has attracted backing to the tune of $15.9 million from Index Ventures, PROfounders Capital, Canaan Partners and David Magliano – has been using some of that cash to develop a keyless entry system to make it easier for homeowners to manage comings and goings.

onefinestay is best described as an upscale Airbnb — its business relies on convincing high-end homeowners in London and New York to rent out their city abodes when they’re away. But convincing well-heeled types to let strangers sleep in the four-poster sounds like an uphill task. The startup had signed up 1,000 homeowners as of December, doubling the number of homes on its books in July 2012 — a growth rate that’s best described as steady but slow.

It’s clearly hoping to remove a few more barriers to potential home hosts — not to mention offering them a bit of a carrot — in the form of some cutting edge digital convenience. That and reducing the number of physical keys it has to manage (noting on its website that “onefinestay manages what is known in polite society as ‘one heck of a lot of keys’”).

So enter stage left onefinestay’s keyless lock system Sherlock, which it is currently offering to install in hosts’ houses for free during a trial period. onefinestay CEO and co-founder Greg Marsh told TechCrunch the startup has been developing the patent pending technology for more than two years. “We’ve conducted extensive field tests across a range of homes of onefinestay members in London — including the CEO’s.”

“Some hosts are naturally concerned about making copies of their keys,” he added. “Clearly, one of the major advantages of Sherlock is that it significantly improves the security for homeowners when they work with onefinestay.”

The promo video for Sherlock (see below) talks up the benefits in terms of no more wasting precious time sitting in waiting for the plumber or the delivery man — by allowing users to lock and unlock their door via an app or by sending a text message. Of course the super rich aren’t going to be doing any of that hanging around anyway — they’ll have staff for such drudgery and/or live in a managed apartment with a concierge — but there’s doubtless a swathe of high end homeowners that onefinestay wants to woo who still have to push and pull their own door hinges.

onefinestay’s keyless entry system also allows users to distribute single or multiple use virtual keys to friends or trusted individuals — so they can gain entry without needing to be given a physical key.

But why is onefinestay getting into the entry system making business itself? There are already smart keyless entry systems on the market and in development — Lockitron‘s Kickstarter springs to mind — but Marsh said that after evaluating what was out there the company decided it needed to build its own offering that does not require users to change all their locks (hardly convenient) and which also addresses the problem of unlocking multiple doors, so that homeowners who live in so-called ‘walk-ups’ aren’t excluded from using it.

“We extensively researched other solutions before committing to develop our own, and remain open to working with other vendors to offer a complete solution. However nothing out there today solves the whole problem. Most existing systems — including unsurprisingly the ones being sold by major lock companies — require people to change their locks (and sometimes keys),” said Marsh.

“While that’s not a problem if you live in a townhouse, the large majority of city inhabitants live in apartment buildings and walk-ups, and don’t have a doorman. That means that they have two front doors — a building door and an apartment door. Have you ever tried persuading all your neighbours and/or your building management company to let you change your building door locks, or install a device into the common areas of your building? That’s a tough sell!”

onefinestay’s keyless entry system does not require new locks to be installed (or new keys used), or a device to be attached over existing locks — it uses a wall-mounted box installed inside the user’s home close to the door to connect to the apartment’s door entry system, and to onefinestay’s servers to authenticate the unlock/lock request. If there’s no door entry system in the building, Marsh says the system can still be installed — by swapping out the standard strike for a “conventional electric strike component”.

There are still a minority of doors that aren’t compatible though — but 95 per cent are, according to onefinestay’s calculations. ”We’ve been testing Sherlock in a range of buildings with positive results, and are now starting to roll it out to onefinestay hosts in London,” Marsh added.

As part of its customer service offering the startup currently meets every onefinestay guest on arrival, but Marsh said he can envisage Sherlock helping it to be freed up from some of these face-to-face interactions in future — “possibly having trusted or repeat onefinestay guests use Sherlock to enter a home so that there is never a need to give guests physical keys”.

Beyond reducing key-based complexity, potentially cutting some customer face-time and paving the way to grow the number of home hosts on its book, the startup said it might end up selling Sherlock as a standalone product in future — hence the patent pending — “if all goes well”.

Sony is gearing up for a big announcement on February 20, according to invitations it sent out to the media on Thursday. The smart money was already on a next-generation PlayStation console being the topic of discussion, but the Wall Street Journal came out and blatantly declared that’s what we’d be getting. But while we have a good idea of what, generally, Sony will be talking about, it’s the specifics that matter most for Sony’s long-term success.

Sony said that we’d “see the future” at the special February event, and the WSJ’s sources say it’s definitely going to be a next-gen console, debuted ahead of a similar evolution of Xbox from Microsoft. The console will actually make it to retail by the holidays in 2013, just in time to compete with Microsoft’s offering, which is also rumored for release around that time. But video game and console sales aren’t at their best right now, with gaming-related device sales experiencing considerable dips ahead of last year’s holiday sales season.

Rumors about what the console will actually look like so far include retaining an optical disc drive, said to be a concession made to ensuring that large-sized games are still convenient for customers to actually obtain and play, and a move from the Cell chip that powers the current PS3 to an AMD-based design, which might complicate things in terms of backwards compatibility with current games. That will annoy existing customers, but alienating those customers isn’t even Sony’s biggest issue with fielding a next-gen device; it’s attracting new users from a young gamer population that has grown up on mobile.

Current console gamers have a hard time seeing how mobile could ever truly replace a home console gaming experience, especially when a next-generation console promises to improve considerably on the 10-year old tech found in the PS3 and really push the envelope in terms of graphics, performance and realism. But the spec race isn’t the key battleground in gaming anymore, like it or not. Apple famously shifted focus away from what was under the hood in computers and mobile devices and onto the end-user experience, and that had repercussions beyond its own primary industry. Gaming became a much more broadly defined category, one that includes teen and twenty-something males sitting in front of a TV with a controller in hand, but no longer one defined by that demographic.

People underestimate the effect of mobile gaming on the industry at large I think, especially when you consider that an entire new generation of gamers is experiencing gaming first on touchscreen devices, with instant availability, downloadable titles and much shorter average gaming sessions. Those experiences will breed different expectations, resulting in consumers in key growth demographics who might not be all that excited to see what kind of ultra-realistic water effects a next-gen console can reproduce, even as those of us who grew up dreaming of in-game fog you could virtually feel on your skin eat up whatever Sony wants to sell us.

Apple might not need to make a TV set to make a big splash in the television market: a brand new report from Bloomberg claims that the company is negotiating with Time Warner Inc. to bring HBO Go to Apple TV by the middle of this year, citing two people familiar with the plans. That would still mean that the ability to watch HBO shows on Apple’s set-top box would be limited to people who already subscribe to the network in cable and satellite packages, but it’s a promising step.

HBO Go currently provides mobile access to HBO shows and content, which would mean that Apple TV users who are also subscribers would have access to the more than 600 hours of video currently available on the service, which includes hit shows like Game of Thrones and True Blood. The move wouldn’t be unprecedented, as Apple already currently offers Hulu Plus and Netflix access on the platform, and HBO Go is already on Roku and Xbox.

And in the end, it would still mean that customers are shackled to traditional cable and satellite distribution methods, even if the delivery mechanism for their HBO content is actually Apple’s standalone streaming video player. But turning the Apple TV into a platform with access to a broader content library is a key step in making it a better value proposition for consumers: AirPlay is a good selling point, but content options are more plentiful on other devices, even given the fact that the iTunes library is among the largest for digital video.

Many have wondered also whether Apple would open up the Apple TV to third-party apps in a way similar to how it’s running on the iPad and iPhone. This sounds like just another hand-selected partner, however, so it’s unlikely we’ll see an opening up of the platform anytime soon.