Hasta La Gadget!

If you know me you know I like two things: sausage and 3D printers. While I primarily use FDM printers like Makerbot at home, I do love the quality and coherence of SLA – stereolithographic – machines. This new one, the Pegasus Touch Laser, is similar to the Form One in that it uses an inexpensive UV-cured resin to build surprisingly detailed models using laser light and a little elbow grease.

This model improves upon the average 3D printer in a few ways. First, it has a nice 7x7x9 inch build envelope and supports multiple colors of resin. It also has a built-in minicomputer and LCD that you can use to control the print as it comes out. Writes the Las Vegas-based team:

You can see the Pegasus in action over here and pledge $2,000 to get your own printer. It’s a slightly faster print as well thanks to the group’s efforts to build a 3000mm/sec laser path. And, unlike the Form One, the Pegasus uses more logical and less obtrusive supports as it rises out of the resin bath. It will sell for $3,499 after the initial Kickstarter run.

The company calls this a sub-$2,000 SLA printer which isn’t quite true. However, given that the closest competitor goes for $3,299.00 the price is just about right for a powerful SLA machine. While I still think FDM is great for beginners and hobbyists, a nice resin-based laser printer makes me all warm and resiny inside.

Making hardware is easy. Making sex toys and selling them on Kickstarter is, sadly, hard. Though sex toy makers have long been lumped in with pornographers and and other businesses of ill repute, there is a new crop of sex toy makers looking to get real and hit the mainstream. And we must remember that the sex toy industry isn’t some furtive little market. The industry is worth over $15 billion per year and, whether Kickstarter likes it or not, millions of toys are sold per year to millions of happy customers.

It’s time for Kickstarter to experience a sexual awakening. Here’s why.

These toys are far more interesting than some secret massager hidden deep in your dresser. Modern sex toy makers are enabling cloud features, adding powerful silent motors, and expanding their selection from the traditional to the downright exotic. But Kickstarter as a company still can’t figure out its relationship with these devices, despite the fact that many of them clearly fall within the stated guidelines of the crowdfunding platform.

A Brief History

In the past, Kickstarter has ejected a number of projects that went on to blow way past their funding goals on other crowdfunding sites. Yet other products, most notably this MUA sex toy storage box, are accepted on the platform.

For example, Kickstarter rejected Crave Innovations, a company started by serial entrepreneur Michael Topolovac who had previously raised over $35 million for his software startup. In September, some six months after Kickstarter rejected Crave, the company raised $2.4 million from more than 60 prominent angels and entrepreneurs. For the record, that was $400,000 more than Topolovac had asked for to fund his first batch of toys.

In fact, after launching the Duet (Crave’s first pleasure product) on an alternative crowdfunding site CKIE, Crave blew past its $15,000 goal in the first two days, landing $100,000 in six weeks.

Meanwhile, Kickstarter also rejected LovePalz, a Wifi-powered set of devices that mimic sexual behavior remotely AKA teledildonics. In other words, one partner could feel the movements of their partner with a boy version (Zeus) and a girl version (Hera). The company claims to have sold 10,000 pieces since February, when the product officially launched. Each sells for $189, which accounts for a little under $2 million in sales.

Vibease, a company that created app-controlled vibrators in 2012, first tried to go the Kickstarter route before being rejected and instead used Indiegogo. With a goal of $30,000, Vibease went on to raise $130k during the summer campaign with shipments heading out in January.

Vibease is currently raising a seed round.

It would be OK if Kickstarter were consistent with its no-sex stance. But even though sex toys are out, misogynistic pick-up artist guides are fine.

This summer, for example, Kickstarter allowed a seduction guide with ethically questionable advice for men. Kickstarter grappled with removing the book before letting it live on, deciding that the 2 hours left on the campaign wasn’t enough time to investigate.

It all started after a comedian named Casey Malone wrote a blog post about the seduction guide, posting offensive excerpts from it. The author, Ken Hoinsky, argues that these quotes were taken out of context and were meant to inspire confidence, not violence.
Kickstarter later apologized for letting that kind of content live on the site and banned seduction guides.

But it seems the cold winter of sexual squeamishness is thawing. A designer named Lidia Bonilla launched the MUA box. That product lived on Kickstarter and eventually reached its funding goal. In Bonilla’s defense, however, she paid careful attention to Kickstarter’s guidelines to ensure that the project would be accepted on the end-all, be-all crowdfunding platform.

So with all this back and forth and outright banning, what exactly do Kickstarter’s guidelines say about sex-related products?

Well, nothing actually.

Confused?

Privately, the company has told rejected parties that they don’t accept vibrators at all, but this isn’t stated anywhere in the guidelines. I spoke to Kickstarter representatives repeatedly about this and they refused to go on the record but suggested that they haven’t figured out the rules internally.

Kickstarter starts out by giving two overarching guidelines: First, everything must be a project, which means that it has a clear end, a completion date of some sort, and that something will be produced as a result of the project’s completion. The second is that every project must fit into one of the following categories: Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, and Theater.

Like any other hardware project on Kickstarter, the above sex toys would definitely be considered “projects”. They would also clearly pass muster of being either a technology or design project. Even both in some cases, as they evolve the original design of sex toys and include features never-before-seen in sex toys thanks to Wifi, various sensors, Bluetooth, and other improvements.

“We don’t curate projects based on taste. Instead, we do a quick check to make sure they meet these guidelines,” reads the website.

Then, the company moves beyond these main guidelines into more specific rules. None of them relate to sex toys at all, except for one:

No offensive material (hate speech, etc.); pornographic material; or projects endorsing or opposing a political candidate.

The pornographic material bit is unclear. One can assume that any Kickstarter video that shows sex or feigns sex of any kind is considered pornographic, but is a sex toy (independent from people or a sexual scenario) considered pornographic? And more importantly, should it be?

The MUA box, for example, shows various sex toys within the promotional video. They aren’t being used, but rather are stored in a pleasure product organizer. So what is the difference between the MUA video and, say, this video, submitted by Crave?

Both are informational, focused on the product, its design, and its viability as a business.

The LovePalz video is admittedly more racy than the other two, but does that mean that two people, fully dressed, in a bed together is pornographic?

Am I splitting hairs? Perhaps. But is Kickstarter’s policy on sex toys important? Absolutely.

Sex Toy Makers Are Makers, Too

It’s 2014, people.

There was a time when a woman’s sexuality was seen as a disruption to man’s harmonious relationship with God or the State. As recently as the fifties, Freud argued that women should only achieve vaginal orgasms. If they couldn’t, they were a failure. If they could achieve clitoral orgasm, on the other hand, they were considered masculine or immature. That is wrong.

Before vibrators were a key function of our smartphones or our sex toys, they were first invented to help male doctors treat female hysteria. Instead of wearing out their wrists masturbating women (yes, this happened), they just built a steam-powered vibrator.

And yet look how far we’ve come. In the U.S., we’re more sexually liberated than we’ve ever been. Sex toys are fun, flashy, and no longer objects of derision. Sex has driven almost every major breakthrough in technology in the past few decades. The internet speaks for itself — sex is everywhere. The invention of chat gave us cyber sex. The ubiquity of video on the internet started with the desire to digitize porn. Even new technology like Vine and Instagram and Snapchat left us with Vineporn and Nastygrams and Snap Spam.

So why should participants in the hardware revolution miss out?

Despite multiple requests to discuss the line between pornographic and not, Kickstarter offered no clarification. But that’s their right.

If they worry that a teenager might see a sex toy on the site, the company has every right to avoid that scenario, no matter how ridiculous the concern might be. (Most sex toy sites don’t have an 18+ gate. If a teenager wants to find sex on the internet, Kickstarter is the last place they’d go.) Still, if Kickstarter is concerned about sexual or adult content, the crowdfunding site can simply exclude sex toy makers from the service.

What’s not so cool is the fact that Kickstarter can’t give more insight into the line between too sexy and suitable. Why does a box that stores sex toys make it on the site but a discreet vibrator gets rejected?

Entrepreneurs for hardware companies have to be as frugal as possible because they’re building something physical that costs money to make and to distribute. Kickstarter has made that journey easier for many of them, who can afford to make a few prototypes, a nice video, and send in an application. But not for those who make sex toys. They are forced to go to other crowdfunding sites (and still succeed wildly) after wasting time and resources on Kickstarter.

Maybe Kickstarter isn’t the home for makers?

What Next?

The sex toy industry is worth $15 billion annually. Breakthrough technologies like the smartphone, various sensors, and the ubiquity of connectivity have paved the way for a true era of disruption in the sex toy industry, transforming what has long been a store full of awkward, dick-shaped vibrators into shelves full of connected, intuitive, design-centric pleasure products.

Kickstarter has the opportunity to be a part of this just as much as it has the right to avoid this sexually charged hardware revolution. That decision is entirely up to the company. Where Kickstarter shouldn’t have a choice is in the guidelines regarding what is accepted and what isn’t.

The Kickstarter business is entirely dependent on entrepreneurs. By alienating certain entrepreneurs, or being unclear about the guidelines of the platform, Kickstarter is ultimately damaging the key to its own success, as well as the success of these sex toy makers.

People want to get off. Why won’t Kickstarter let them?

Steam is working on its own virtual reality headset, but it plans to support any and all including the now much-improved Oculus Rift via a user interface tailored to VR devices that launched in beta last night (via Engadget). According to those in the know, the beta software for the Steam client essentially puts a VR-friendly version of Steam’s Big Picture mode (designed for TVs) in front of your google-encased eyes.

Our own Anthony Ha recently took the new Oculus Rift “Crystal Cove” prototype for a spin at CES, and he found it much-improved over versions past. The new Oculus Rift supports more types of head movement and tracking, doing away with any dissonant experiences that might’ve led to nausea in the earlier developer hardware.

Immersive VR is all well and good, especially now that you can game for longer periods of time without feeling weird about it, but popping back to a desktop user interface to manage your Steam library is bound to be frustrating and disorienting, so this new UI should help gamers who NEVER WANT TO LEAVE THEIR VIRTUAL PRISON.

Steam clearly wants to be everywhere gamers game, including on their own new Steambox partner devices. It’ll be very interesting to see what they bring to the table with a VR headset of their own, because for now at least, Oculus Rift is leading the charge pretty much unopposed for that type of gaming.

Sony is adding two smartphones to its growing stable of devices. Meet the Xperia T2 Ultra and the Xperia E1 — both substantial updates to Sony’s 2013 models. Best yet, both are offered in dual-sim variants.

These latest phones join the Z1S and Z1 announced last week at CES. However, it seems Sony held these close to its chest, as they’re somewhat mundane and not destined for the U.S. market. And, as Sony found out from years of experience, to “win” CES requires focused and streamlined announcements and not a proverbial conveyor belt of press releases.

Sony is up front about the T2 Ultra’s destination: This phone is for emerging markets like China, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific rim, touts the press release. But this phone isn’t lacking in any substantial way. It’s packed to the gills with the best Sony has to offer, including a near edgeless design with a 6-inch screen and a 13MP camera. The major downside of the phone comes in the way of a quad-core 1.4 GHz Snapdragon of an unannounced pedigree. However, the battery life is likely stellar thanks to this slower SoC and 3000 mAh battery.

The E1 is the budget phone in the mix. It leans on Sony’s audio brand and sports a speaker capable of hitting 100Db in case you want to share your love of Neil Young with co-workers in a different office building. Up front is a 4-inch screen, up from 3.2-inches found in the Xperia E released in early 2013.

There is no word on pricing or release dates, though. Sony is likely holding that information until Mobile World Congress in February.

With these latest models, Sony is continuing down the course of offering a simplified device lineup. The company is putting a lot of emphasis on just a few devices in each market unlike in the past when it would flood the scene with countless SKUs.

CES may be finished for another year, but one of the biggest themes of the show — that anything (cars, watches, mirrors, tables, whatever) can be ‘hardware’ — is just taking off. And today’s news of Google buying Nest for $3.2 billion underscores how Google wants to be the player at the front and center of hardware.

Google’s Nest buy may not be giving the search giant access to all the data that zooms across Nest’s apps, thermostats and smoke detectors (for now at least), but it will give Google something else: top-shelf design expertise for that next frontier of hardware, by way of a team of people brought together by two senior hardware veterans from Apple, one of whom is known as the father of the iPod.

This is a significant turn of events for Google.

Up to now, the search giant has cornered business — on desktop internet, mobile devices — through software, and then monetized those markets with data — specifically advertising data.

It’s been a fundamentally different approach from Apple, the quintessentially vertically integrated company that controls not just a platform and the services that run on it, but the devices they run on, too. (And with that, the lucrative margins that come from successful, premium hardware sales.)

Nest will give Google an opportunity to diversify its revenues by tackling a whole new market — connected home devices — with that vertical approach.

“This is the new hardware movement,” as one person described it. “Devices + services, product-market fit and research done through crowdfunding platforms, mix of retail partnerships and direct online sales.”

For Google, Nest is a particularly attractive example. Not only does it make an integrated piece of connected hardware for the home, but it’s designed with interoperability at its heart — in the initial case, by way of apps that you control on your iOS or Android smartphone, along with a well-developed, direct and online retail channel and loyal following.

It’s an area, in any case, that Google appears to have already been eyeing up for some time. In December, for example, The Information uncovered a test Google was running called EnergySense, which appeared to be a smart thermostat program that helped people lower energy consumption. This reportedly was being trialled on third party devices from Nest competitor Ecobee, but could now potentially find their way to Nest’s thermostats instead.

“Will Nest and Google products work with each other?” co-founder Matt Rogers asked in a hypothetical Q&A post earlier today. “Nest’s product line obviously caught the attention of Google and I’m betting that there’s a lot of cool stuff we could do together, but nothing to share today,” he answered.

Yet, to say that the acquisition is a boost for Google alone is not the whole story.

For months now, Nest has been facing a growing cacophony of criticism from customers that the software on its products was buggy. Leaning on Google’s software expertise could come in handy here (although the overlap between Google haters and Nest lovers could pose a problem in this regard).

And there is also the issue of Nest’s intellectual property and patent fights. Nest is facing patent infringement lawsuits from Honeywell and First Alert maker BRK. To help fight those and also to protect itself from copycats, it’s been aggressive on the patent front, with 100 patents granted, another 200 filed and a further 200 ready to file; and an ongoing licensing agreement with Intellectual Ventures. Bringing Google into the mix will be another major boost for safeguarding the company in these battles, too.

The Nest acquisition also raises questions of how Google’s other hardware interests may come into play going forward.

Motorola, which Google acquired for $12.5 billion in 2012, at one time looked like it could be a way for Google to take a new, vertical approach to smartphones and tablets. Ultimately, Motorola remained a partner among equals with other Android OEMs, and patents became one of the most crucial parts of the deal. Could the Nest acquisition, bringing a new focus on hardware creation, see Google bring in some of the IP and talent that Google picked up in that Motorola deal?