This week, me and Chris Velazco talk about using the Moto G for a prolonged period, Motorola trying to attract more Moto X shoppers with no-money-down deals, and Google going after shopper activity with a physical card for its digital wallet.
We have a grand old time, and for once a mid-market phone is the talk of the town, which is actually refreshing. Also Chris needed like fifteen takes just to get us started, because apparently he’s a completely ridiculous person.
As everyone knows, roadies are hired to set up gear, tear down gear, drink, and tune guitars. Now roadies can do one less of those things and do more of something else. The Roadie is an automatic tuner for any stringed instrument that uses the iPhone to listen to your guitar and a motorized accessory that turns the machine head to exactly the right position. It’s going to put a lot of real roadies out of business.
Created by Bassam Jalgha and Hassane Slaibi of Band Industries, the Roadie was incubated at Shezhen’s Haxlr8r and is nearly ready to ship. The product can tune almost any guitar or stringed instrument perfectly and can even support alternate tunings. A useful wind/unwind feature will spool the string off the peg in a few seconds, shaving off a few moments of downtime during your excessively loud guitar solo gone wrong. A pledge of $69 gets you an early bird model.
These sorts of tuners are nothing new but this is the first “smart” tuner that can do more than set up a guitar in one configuration. A feature called the Instrument Doctor can tell you if strings are going bad and whether the guitar needs repair or a tune up. It charges via MicroUSB and can tune 6,000 times on one charge. It’s compatible with iOS and Android and uses Bluetooth to communicate with the phone.
Jalgha expects to ship in June, just in time for summer rock season. Although I’m a tune by ear kind of guy – which usually fails – I’d use one of these in a heartbeat. At least my caterwauling git-fiddling will be slightly in tune.
The Apple Campus 2 is cleared for launch. Again. A unanimous vote by Cupertino City Council cleared the last hurdle for Apple’s so-called spaceship HQ.
“We’re really proud that you decided to stay here in Cupertino,” Councilman Gilbert Wong said, addressing Dan Whisenhunt, Apple’s head of real estate and facilities, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Yesterday’s vote was mostly a formality since the council approved the construction last month. This final vote reduced the annual tax rebate Cupertino gives to Apple. According to a deal struck in 1997 when Apple was on the verge of collapse, Cupertino gives back 50% of the taxes generated each year from Apple’s business-to-business sales. The new deal has the city returning 35% back to the company, generating an additional estimated $1.2m each year for the city.
Apple is expected to break ground this year. Apparently heavy equipment is already on site. The 2.8 million square-foot HQ will open in 2016. And as with every Apple product, expect a gratuitous amount of leaks and micro-analysis of every move.
Big things are coming for littleBits – the New York-based startup that makes lego-style electronics kits. The company, originally conceived by founder Ayah Bdeir in the MIT Media Lab (and backed in part by its head, Joi Ito), has already picked up traction for its first product: kits for children and hobbyists to create fun objects at home (see more in the video below). Today, it is announcing a Series B of $11.1 million to take that concept to the next level: building out a B2B platform for hardware innovation.
There are a number of science and tech partners already working with littleBits and its platform, although Bdeir says it will not be disclosing the names until next year, when the first products come out.
This latest round is being led by True Ventures and new investor Foundry Group, and it also includes new investors Two Sigma Ventures and Vegas Tech Fund (Zappos’ Tony Hseih’s fund); as well as Khosla Ventures, Mena Ventures, Neoteny Labs, O’Reilly AlphaTech, Lerer Ventures and other angel investors. Brad Feld of Foundry is also joining littleBits’ board. This brings the total raised by littleBits to over $15 million, including a $3.65 million Series A round; and $850,000 in seed funding. During the Series A announcement in June 2012, littleBits also struck a manufacturing and supply chain management deal with PCH International.
Moving to a B2B model from one targeting consumers was always on the cards, says Bdeir. “It was a part of the strategy ever since I raised the seed round.” It was a two step strategy: step one was inventing kits for kids/education “to lower the barrier for entry to make it easier to start with electronics as possible, and the platform is step two. It’s about raising the ceiling and putting the power in the hands of designers.”
That is because at its heart, Bdeir says littleBits “is a tool and platform for others to invent.” Focusing on B2B will help littleBits position itself as “a leading hardware innovation platform in the world that others can use to invent and make their products and designs.”
Interestingly, this is actually a part of a bigger trend we’re seeing in the hardware movement, to create products and platforms that help others realise their hardware visions. There is of course NYC neighbor Makerbot, and over in the UK, design agency Berg has launched Berg Cloud, a platform for those making connected devices – interestingly also a progression from a hardware product.
(In Berg’s case, it was their Little Printer project that inspired CEO Matt Webb and others at Berg to pivot the company. It’s also picked up a $1.3 million seed round from Connect Ventures, Initial Capital, and Index Ventures to realise their ambition of making it as easy to develop connected hardware as it is to develop for the web.)
LittleBits is not revealing any figures for how the electronics kids have sold (we have noted before that they are wonderful but are priced at a premium, with starter kits today costing just under $100). But Bdeir tells us that sales have quadrupled in the last year. In fact, part of the funding will be used to help make sure that the company can keep up with the demand its getting for the products – effectively that means more business development and sales people to close retail deals, and developers to continue making more things to add to the modular library to expand that offering. “The number of SKUs that we have is close to 80 and we have hundreds more on the way,” she says.
Back to the platform vision, the idea will be for new prototypes, and perhaps even products, to sit alongside those that are coming from littleBits itself. LittleBits will take a revenue share as part its business model. “We definitely want to support other businesses who want to start their own product lines,” she says. “A lot of game changers start in the hands of large companies these days, and then concepts get democratized and put in the hands of everyday people. But that is changing in areas like game development and manufacturing with the likes of Makerbot. We’re doing the same with electronics. It remains a very top down industry, but now we are bringing it into the hands of everyone.”
Below, a video of how littleBits’ kit works, and below that, a link to the company’s latest Synth Kit collaboration with Korg, which points to how third parties could work with the ‘platform.’
Here’s a noodle-scratcher for you: you have an iOS device and love playing games on it, but you’ve grown weary of effetely pawing at a touchscreen. What do you do? Well, now that iOS 7 is out on and has already been installed on a veritable crap-ton of devices, the answer is to explore the wild and woolly world of iDevice game controllers like the one Logitech just officially unveiled this morning.
It’s called the PowerShell and the general thrust of the thing will look pretty familiar if you’re an avid @evleaks follower (much like our own Matthew Panzarino). A leaked image of the device first made the rounds back in early October, and very little seems to have changed between now and then. The same textured d-pad sits to the left of the screen, the same A, B, X, and Y buttons rest to the right, and a pair of shoulder buttons round out the package. Thankfully, said package doesn’t appear to add too much heft to the iDevice ensconced within and Logitech has tucked a 1,500 mAh hour battery in there to keep the action going. Just be warned – it’ll only latch onto a iPhone 5s, iPhone 5, or 5th gen iPod touch, so 5c owners should apparently look elsewhere.
Now in fairness, the folks at Moga (who themselves are no stranger to smartphone gaming gadgets) pulled back the curtain on its first iOS 7-compatible controller doodad just the other day. It’s a far more complex affair, replete with dual joysticks and a layout that’s more than a little reminiscent of Microsoft’s venerable Xbox 360 controller. Oh, and Moga’s take even sports a slightly more robust internal battery to go with its identical price tag – on paper it looks like Logitech’s already running in second place. Still, even though it was the first to publicly tout its iOS-friendly controller, Moga hasn’t mentioned a specific release date for the thing, and Logitech is gunning to lock up the first mover advantage by peddling its own version today.
Then again, one could argue that being first is overrated. It’s being the first to really nail a formula that really matters and Logitech has remained relevant all these years because they usually manage to do just that. That’s not to say this competition is already over though – the floodgates are only now beginning to open and I’d wager gewgaws like this are going to be everywhere within a few months. May the best controller win!
A unique, nicely designed fitness wearable just hit Indiegogo. Called the Digi-Care ERI, this Shenzhen-made wearable can track your steps and, most interestingly, trace your activity route using a magnetic sensor rather than GPS, allowing you to see where you’ve been without reducing battery life.
The device comes in multiple candy colors and the company is looking for $50,000 in funding. They’re selling early-bird models for $39 and expect to sell the final product for $99.
I saw the device at the TechCrunch/Technode event in Shanghai and was duly impressed. While I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the location tracking, the company claims they can get one month of battery life out of one charge and that it can sense different activities including cycling, walking, and running. The company is also offering an open SDK to allow programmers to access various data points including temperature as well as build notifications and NFC interaction into the system.
Will they ship? The company said they product was ready and working and they demoed it live. It looks like a more angular Fitbit Force and has a bright OLED screen. In a world full of wristlets, it’s nice to see someone going a slightly different direction.
In today’s edition of “U.S. wireless carriers are dicks”, we’re going to look at the latest in how carriers and the CTIA are protecting valuable revenue streams by blocking features that would curb smartphone theft.
Over 1.6 million U.S. consumers had a smartphone stolen in 2012. One in three thefts within the U.S. involved a mobile gadget. Speaking to CBS This Morning today, San Francisco’s Attorney General stated that 50% of their robberies and thefts involved a smartphone. It’s an epidemic and wireless carriers are dismissing the solution.
According to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, officials from in New York, San Francisco, London and Philadelphia called on the wireless industry to present a solution. Samsung did just that earlier this year for its own devices, but the five largest U.S. wireless carriers denied it their customers.
According to emails obtained by CBS, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and U.S. Cellular, all decided to not include the feature in the Samsung handsets sold by each carrier. Meanwhile, the CTIA, the trade association for wireless carriers, helped the FCC and certain police departments create online databases for stolen phones.
In theory, this list – compiled for, managed by, and unique to each wireless carrier – would prevent stolen smartphones from being reactivated. But it doesn’t protect against data theft, and is largely useless if the phone is shipped out of the country. A kill switch is needed and placed in the hands of smartphone owners.
Samsung and Apple both moved to implement a kill switch within their devices earlier this year. Apple had more luck than Samsung. Since a staggering majority of Samsung smartphones sold in the U.S. run Android, wireless carriers are able to modify the software before selling the device to consumers. U.S. carriers simply removed the kill switch.
Apple’s solution is not perfect but is a big step forward. The Find My iPhone application allows consumers to locate and remotely wipe phones. Then, new with iOS 7, the original owner’s credentials have to be entered before the phone can be reactivated – even after the phone was completely reset. Meanwhile, Google offers a similar feature baked into Android, including the ability to remotely locate and wipe a stolen phone. But once the device is remotely erased, it can be reactivated under a new account.
It’s unclear exactly why wireless carriers denied thoughtful security features to their customers, but preserving profit is main theory. Each carrier offers insurance for stolen phones. And what’s a person supposed to do when their phone is stolen? Walk around unfettered like it’s 1995? No, they go get a new phone at either the full price, sign a new contact to get the phone at a discount, or pay the deductible on that insurance plan.
It’s too early to tell if the CTIA’s national database will curb smartphone thefts. Logic seems to dictate that it won’t, though. The thieves will just sell them overseas, out of reach of the CTIA’s databases and the wireless carriers they represent. Think selling internationally is hard? Replace Craigslist with eBay in that illicit workflow and voilà – thieves are good to go once more.
The wireless industry as a whole needs to let go and put more power in the hands of the owners. Give owners a native kill switch, a software solution baked into the core of the phone, which upon activation, would completely brick the phone if it gets stolen.
The auto industry was once plagued by stolen radios. The problem was solved when car manufacturers took a hard stance and made it so a stolen radio would not work outside of the original car. But don’t expect the wireless industry to take such a hard-line. An car owner with a broken window missing radio does not go out and buy an expensive new car. They buy a new window and radio.
In the late 1980s a select group of British teens were given (or saved up their pocket money to buy) a small, rubber-keyed home PC called the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. My brother was one of them. And that little box, with its blank canvas start screen that prompted you to try out a few lines of code (Spectrum Basic), set him on the road to becoming a fully fledged programmer.
Fast forward to today, and the machines kids get to play with – the iPads and iPod Touches – don’t actively encouraging that sort of computing. They’re slick, sealed boxes, with UIs that deliberately conceal complexity so they can wow with effortless capability. They’re designed to please (to ‘delight’ in Applespeak), not to make you curious. And that’s an important difference.
The disconnect between the creative platforms of the past, and the slick, hermetically sealed boxes of today was the trigger for the U.K.-made Raspberry Pi microcomputer to be created by a group of Cambridge engineers. And just yesterday the Pi Foundation announced it has shipped its two millionth board.
It’s also the impetus behind a new platform, part-inspired by and built on top of the Pi, called Kano (pictured above, and in kit form below). What exactly is Kano? It’s a build-it-yourself computer launching today on Kickstarter with the aim of pulling in $100,000 in crowdbacking to get 1,000 of its Kano kits to market by summer 2014.
The kits are the whole computing kit & kaboodle: an “end-to-end computer”, costing $99, which deliberately arrives in pieces so the curious can put it together, helped along by Kano’s easy to understand guidebooks, and then use the machine they’ve assembled to start sticking bits of code together and building virtual stuff.
“The initial idea was let’s create a simple, fun, step-by-step computer kit that anyone can use to bring a computer to life and start hacking up games, and start really feeling that sense of possibility… rather than intimidation,” co-founder Alex Klein tells TechCrunch.
“The original inspiration was my seven-year-old cousin, Micah, trying to set up a computer and trying to make the Raspberry Pi – and finding that the For Dummies guide was 400 pages long in this little tiny font, and saying ‘what do we do now?’.”
Kano’s founders decided there had to be a more user-friendly way to get kids cutting their coding teeth and so they came up with the idea of combining a DIY computer kit with easy to read guidebooks and plug-and-play coding software. The basic idea is to add an accessibility layer on top of the Raspberry Pi to lower the barrier to entry for hacking around with an open computing platform (even as it ups the cost a little).
The hardware heart of Kano is the Raspberry Pi microcomputer but unlike when you order a Pi, Kano comes with all the bits and bobs needed to turn the board into a programmable computer, namely: “Keyboard, SD card, makeable casing, case mods, an operating system, tons of games and levels, a DIY speaker, and Level books with dozens of hours of projects”.
Kano is not just repackaging Pi hardware; it’s also building its own software to go with it, including an operating system, Kano OS – built on top of Debian Linux (using the Debian Wheezy distro) – and a Scratch-esque visual coding environment called Kano Blocks that will let the user plug and play with graphical blocks to pull together lines of code.
This plug-and-play, trial-and-error software learning environment will also allow them to see lines of code being generated as they stick various components together, and view the resulting program in action.
Here’s a couple of videos of Kano Blocks in (sped up) action – showing how you can hack together a game of Pong, and generate massive Minecraft constructions:
“Kano OS is still a work in progress. We’re pre-alpha, and we’re hoping that our Kickstarter backers will get the alpha release, and they’ll get to test it. But we’re really excited about Kano OS because it’s based on Debian Linux… but it provides not only a front end experience that is more intuitive, more familiar to a generation raised on mobile and console games,” says Alex.
“At the same time we’ve done amazing stuff on the back end as well. So we’ve fixed dozens of known issues with Linux and the Raspberry Pi. We’ve done a seamless wireless auto configuration. We’ve made sure that the image is lean – less than 1GB. The image auto-expands to the partition so that you don’t have to worry about plugging it into your computer, burning an image.”
The original idea for the Raspberry Pi was to get more U.K. kids coding, but it’s fair to say that adoption has been strongest among the already tech savvy maker/hacker community. Likely because Pi is deliberately difficult – so if you’re an absolute beginner there’s a big hurdle to overcome to start being able to use it.
The Pi Foundation wanted a certain degree of difficulty so that users would have to stretch themselves to explore and figure stuff out. But they set the bar pretty high – which means there’s room for more accessible platforms, such as Kano, to sit on top of Pi and make it even easier to play with.
“In terms of Raspberry Pi, we love working with the board, and we share the same social goals as the Foundation,” says Alex. “And we really want to get as many of these kits out there as possible – the more Raspberry Pis and the more Kano kits out there in the wild, we think, the more kids are going to get excited about technology, instead of just consuming, consuming, consuming. Flipping through Instagram, downloading Angry Birds… I don’t mean to disparage any of these companies or products, because they’re brilliant, and it’s not as if our cell phones are broken; they’re magical. We need them.
“But at the same time if we have in our right hand the iPhone – a powerful device for consuming media, for communicating, and for any of the things these wonderful, closed, hermetically sealed screens can do – and then in our left hand we have something that is our own; that takes nothing for granted, that builds you up and makes you feel confident in altering technology – rather than just using it.”
“The example of Raspberry Pi shows, pretty unambiguously, there is a hunger for a kind of control and accessibility to computing that people didn’t really expect,” he adds.
Asked about Kano, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton told TechCrunch: “I think there’s value to platforms like Kano (Fuze would be another great example) which add some combination of hardware, software, peripherals and documentation to the Pi to make it more appealing to particular groups of users who are underserved by the standard offering.
“I’ve seen early versions of the Kano software environment, and I think Alex and the team are doing great work making the Pi more accessible to a younger audience.”
Upton also suggested the Pi Foundation has plans to move in this direction itself, in future. “Over time, Raspberry Pi will likely move in the direction of a more consumer-friendly offering, but there will always be a space for this sort of value-added offering,” he added.
Another difference of emphasis between Kano and Raspberry Pi is that Kano is starting with the idea of serving a global and emerging market need, rather than fixing a local developed world problem. Of course, although Pi started as a U.K. project, it quickly branched out beyond that – as hacker/maker community adoption generated broader momentum.
But Kano is hoping to target a broader geographical base right from the start, with English, Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin versions of its kit’s guidebooks planned in time for launch. It’s also working on adding more languages, including Hindi, says Alex.
“The computing platforms of the future are going to be shaped by the computing populous of the future and those people are predominantly going to live in places like Johannesburg and Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Delhi and Pune, and those people, we think – and if you look at the data it seems to bear out – that they’re looking for things that are affordable, hackable and open source. Free software that they can modify,” he adds.
“So there’s a huge untapped need. All you really need to do is add a layer of simplicity, fun and experience and you can hopefully get tonnes of people interested in open source.”
As well as taking to Kickstarter to raise funding, Kano has taken in seed funding from friends & family to develop the kit over the past year, including some funding from Index Ventures via one of its three co-founders, Saul Klein, who is a partner at the firm.
Foxconn, the gargantuan manufacturer of electronics, is experimenting in the hardware accelerator market by turning an underused Nokia campus in Beijing into its first small business outreach center. The plan, as described by Foxconn Chief Investment Director Charles Pan at the TechCrunch/Technode event in Shanghai, has led one small manufacturer to market and will help others over the coming year.
The incubator, which is not completely formalized, will work with small manufacturers by bringing them in for an intensive coaching and mentorship period. Tomoon, a smart watch company, worked with Foxconn on their T-Fire e-ink smart watch, a unique Android-powered watch with a curved screen. The company moved from a simple idea to a fully-fledged product in about six weeks.
“When they came to us it was like a toy,” said Pan. He said the company helped improve the design and offered manufacturing expertise to create the final product.
There is no date set for the accelerator launch but Pan said the company is writing up standard operating procedures for the new venture. He expects that Foxconn will take some equity in exchange for the hardware help.
How bad was the whole thing? Well, KlearGear really screwed up. The story begins when Jen Palmer of Salt Lake City whose husband ordered some junk for Christmas three years ago. The stuff never arrived and Paypal closed the order but Palmer wrote a scathing review on RipoffReport, a complaint site. Three years later the company contacted her husband and asked for $3,500, citing a disparagement clause that wasn’t actually in the terms of service three years ago. The terms, obviously, were egregious:
Non-Disparagement Clause
In an effort to ensure fair and honest public feedback, and to prevent the publishing of libelous content in any form, your acceptance of this sales contract prohibits you from taking any action that negatively impacts KlearGear.com, its reputation, products, services, management or employees.
Should you violate this clause, as determined by KlearGear.com in its sole discretion, you will be provided a seventy-two (72) hour opportunity to retract the content in question. If the content remains, in whole or in part, you will immediately be billed $3,500.00 USD for legal fees and court costs until such complete costs are determined in litigation. Should these charges remain unpaid for 30 calendar days from the billing date, your unpaid invoice will be forwarded to our third party collection firm and will be reported to consumer credit reporting agencies until paid.
That’s right – they’ll hold your credit history hostage if you say mean things on Twitter. As Popehat notes this is fraud.
This is pretty damning for a company that has a revenue of $47 million catering to an audience of cubicle dwellers and, presumably, Internet users. Like GoDaddy before them, social media behavior in the face of negative press can make or break a company. By retreating the company has essentially destroyed its own Internet reputation and, in honesty, I’m glad. These sorts of stories – company gets burned for being mean – are short-lived but important and each instance is a white paper in itself on how not to do business. In short, when you’re cornered apologize and make it right instead of committing business suicide.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
