Author Archives: Kim-Mai Cutler
MakieLab’s iPad App For 3D-Printing Your Own Dolls Has 70K Designed In First Week
Growing up, I pretty much had the standard dolls and toys everyone did — Trolls, Barbies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures. But with the advent of 3D printing, kids today have access to something truly special: their very own custom-made toys. A U.K.-based startup called MakieLab is making a bet that the rise of smartphones and tablets coupled with the decline of traditional retailers is making the iPad the right place to sell the toys of the future. And custom 3D printing will let kids have products that no one else does — toys they design themselves. The startup launched a Makies Doll Factory app last week that lets you design your own unique doll with special hair, facial features and custom clothing. You can then have it 3D printed and sent to you at a price that starts around 59 pounds ($88), excluding shipping. The app has seen about 70,000 dolls designed so far in the first week. (These are dolls designed, not ordered. MakieLab isn’t sharing stats on orders yet.) “People love the fact that these toys are on demand,” said co-founder Alice Taylor. “Because the child or adult has made the toy themselves, they’ve got a precious relationship with it. The doll has a heirloom aspect to it.” MakieLab has been running a web-based version of the store for about a year, but this is the first time they’ve transitioned to mobile platforms. Ultimately, they hope their business will offer a mix of real-world and virtual goods. You can design dolls to buy in real-life or eventually there will be options to dress them up with virtual accessories. Like the rest of the gaming world, Taylor says there is a “power curve” dynamic with a small minority of customers being very aggressive with purchases. One had even bought everything in the store twice, she said. The startup, which raised $1.4 million last year from seed investors, has been working hard to bring down the costs of manufacturing the dolls. At the beginning, it was about 99 pounds ($148). Now the most basic doll (sans hair) will be about 59 pounds, and then probably 20 pounds more if you want a simple outfit and a hairstyle. “This is a journey we’re on,” Taylor said. “The material costs are quite high with the type of plastic we have.” MakieLab has printers in the U.K. and Amsterdam and ship
YC’s iCracked Is Blowing Up With A New “Uber” For iPhone Repairs Service
Yes, you can fix that smashed iPhone on demand now. That means no visits to the Apple store, or intensive DIY efforts. A YC alum called iCracked launched a real-time, iPhone or iPad repair service a little over a month ago. Think of it like an “Exec” or an “Uber” for your broken iPhone that you can order straight to your door. With hardly any publicity at all, the service is blowing up: it boosted iCracked’s number of monthly customers by about 250 percent and the company tells me the business is eyeing “eight figures” in revenue for this year. The changes add iCracked to a growing class of startups like Exec, Uber, Zimride’s Lyft, Instacart and Postmates that are all trying to solve the logistical issues of delivering products and services in real-time in urban cities. “We want to be the ‘AAA’ for your device,” explains AJ Forsythe, the company’s CEO. “We’re doing on-demand repair and buyback for just about every major city in the U.S.” He shared some of the maps above and below with us, showing actual completed repairs in the last 30 days. Above is the San Francisco Bay Area, and just for good measure to show that this isn’t a Silicon Valley-only phenomenon, he showed us a map of South Florida (below). “We’re trying to get to a place where we can get someone to them in the shortest amount of time at the click of a button,” he said. He partnered with a 20-year-old from the U.K. named Martin Amps, who had built a dispatch system just months ago. Amps never implemented it because it was so specialized, but Forsythe found him on a Hacker News posting and thought the system could be of use to iCracked. Up until then, iCracked’s three-prong business model worked similarly. But it didn’t operate in real-time. Customers would have to mail-in their devices or schedule appointments with iTechs. iCracked earns revenue in three ways: it does 1) repairs, 2) buybacks and 3) sells do-it-yourself kits (pictured right) for people who want to fix phones themselves. The company has more than 350 “iTechnicians,” who work as contractors and are trained to quickly fix broken iPhones and iPads. They earn decent salaries of between $70,000 and $100,000 a year. Forsythe says he’s selective and he only ends up hiring about 2 to 3 percent of iTech applicants. While these “iTechs”
Gtar, The iPhone-Powered Electronic Teaching Guitar, Opens For Pre-Orders
The gTar, an electric guitar that makes it easy for anyone to play music with an embedded iPhone and LEDs, is now open for pre-orders. Incident, the company behind the gTar, has spent three years designing and prototyping the product. They launched on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York last year and had a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign that drew in more than 1,000 orders and $350,000. They released this video today, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the manufacturing process, which happens in Shenzhen, naturally. It’s a mini-documentary that shows the end-to-end process for making the gTar, which retails for $399. The gTar is a digital guitar that has interactive LEDs along the fretboard that can show you how to play songs. There’s a dock for an iPhone, where you can load in different songs or record your performances. The whole Kickstarter process was a real learning experience for the company. They had only anticipated about a few hundred orders or so. Instead they got demand for about five tons worth of product. It wasn’t difficult to scale up the manufacturing process, given the experience of the factories the company had partnered with. But managing expectations of backers has been a day-by-day learning process. “We got a lot of really, really mainstream backers, not early adopters. And the response they had was that they expected it to be commercial grade — something that you could put on the shelf and buy it ready-to-go,” said co-founder Idan Beck. “But the thing is that Kickstarter projects are still pre-production.” They had to refine the product in a couple of ways. They needed to make the strings more sensitive so that they could be used with standard guitar picks. They also had to make it easier to get firmware upgrades, with cartridges that you can pop in and out (so you don’t have to send the gTar back). They’ve also increased developer access so that more apps can be built specifically for the gTar. It’s still early though with only about a dozen developer packs registered. Incident is opening the online store today, and the company hopes to scale up in a sustainable way. “The key is to grow at a pace that you can control,” Beck said. Here’s the original video that shows how the gTar works:
A Little Sleuthing Leads Nexus 4 Enthusiasts To Estimate About 400K In Sales Of The Device
Google and LG’s Nexus 4 has been such a coveted item this past holiday season, that it’s been in and out of stock since its release in mid-November. Because Google doesn’t publicly comment on device sales, it’s been hard to understand exactly how much OEM partner LG produced for the device’s initial launch. However, a little sleuthing by some Android enthusiasts and Nexus 4 owners suggests that LG produced about 400,000 devices going into the end of last year. How did they do it? They’ve taken the IMEI numbers of their phones and backtracked the production number of their devices using an LG mobile link that’s usually used for finding new firmware. An IMEI number, or International Mobile Station Equipment Identity number, is usually printed on the battery compartment of the inside of the phone. It can be used to prevent stolen phones from accessing a network. If you take this link and put your IMEI number at the very end, this LG site will spit back out the IMEI followed by a long string of characters that looks something like this: “LGE960 ACAGBK 212KPHG188745 20121206 GLOBAL/GLOBAL N N” If you break this string apart, you get: LGE960 = phone model A = ? CA = Country where the device was sold. (Others include ‘US’ for the U.S., ‘HK’ for Hong Kong, ‘AU’ for Australia and so on.) G = Storage (G = 16GB, 8 = 8GB) BK = Color 2 = ? 12 = Production Month (November) K = Production Country (Korea) PHG = ? 188745 = The line or production number, showing that phone was the 188,745th device made. 2012121206 = The production date in YYYYMMDD format A number of Nexus 4 owners have been sharing and compiling the production numbers day by day (see below). It suggests that LG made about 70,000 devices in October, 90,000 in November and 210,000 in December. Google declined to comment on these numbers. Still, they’re interesting for a couple reasons. It appears that Google and LG have been conservative with the Nexus 4 launch. LG has previously said that the Nexus 4 “had proven extremely popular, and as such retailers have been met with huge demand.” Google’s U.K. and Ireland managing director Dan Cobley likewise has said there have been communication problems on both ends with managing supply for the Nexus 4. Keeping supplies tight have made the Nexus 4 debut
A Whimsical Seasonal Greeting From A Human Camera
One of the stranger things I came across while in Tokyo last month was a digital artist who built a human camera that requires touch from another person to snap photos. It is artist Eric Siu’s bit of rebellion against an increasingly technology-dependent world that distances people from real-life interactions. This effect is especially pronounced where Siu lives in Japan, as the Internet has allowed “Hikikomori” and “Otaku” sub-cultures to thrive. In “Hikikomori” culture, teens actually shut themselves in from interaction with the outside world. As social networking, e-mail and other forms of digital communication replace or squeeze out time for face-to-face meetings, Siu wanted to create a piece of technology that required the opposite — real human touch. The Touchy Camera, which he built using off-the-shelf parts for a few hundred dollars, is a wearable camera that requires another person to touch the wearer in order for it to work. Otherwise, the wearer is blind because the camera’s shutter doesn’t open without contact from someone else (see the GIF I made below). If you touch him for 10 seconds or longer, that camera snaps a photo that’s viewable from an LCD screen on the back of the his head. We walked around with it one morning in the Roppongi Hills area in Tokyo. And to make an understatement, the effect on bystanders was a bit magical. Some people would run away if they saw us come close, while others started asking questions. When some of them touched him and the shutters in front of his eyes opened, they gasped and smiled. The camera works when human touch completes a simple circuit. Siu hands you something that looks like a lightbulb to hold in one hand, and when you touch him with the other, it completes a basic low-voltage circuit. Siu only has one version of the Touchy camera, although people have asked him before about buying one as a toy. Since releasing it earlier this year, he’s performed all around mainland China and Asia and actually has gotten a bit of interest in it as a product. He says he would be open to making others if there was demand. He and his partner, another character named Margaret Toucha, just made a holiday video (above) filled with boxers, pole dancers and some meandering around downtown Tokyo.
Control Music Synthesizers With Gestures Through This Arduino-Based Saucer Called ‘The UFO’
Arduino has found its way into yet another musical device. I came across the 'UFO' while in Berlin. It's a MIDI controller that lets you compose music or control synthesizers by waving your hands about.
Its creator, a Finnish former game developer named Tommi Koskinen, built it for use in performances with his band Phantom. After co-founding a company called Audiodraft and building games for several years for companies like Digital Chocolate and GameHouse, Koskinen said he felt a desire to build something more tangible. He was inspired by a performance he saw at a Helsinki art festival a year ago.
Behind Valkee: The Profitable Startup That Shines Lights Into Your Ears To Cure The Winter Blues
Finland has produced Angry Birds and red-hot gaming company Supercell, but there's another profitable startup that's got a far unlikelier background and product.
One of the more outlandish-sounding startups I met in Helsinki last week was Valkee, a company that makes a device that shines lights onto your brain cells through your ear canals.
Whill, The Electric Wheelchair Add-on, Takes Home TechCrunch Tokyo’s Grand Prize
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 around 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 see waves of layoffs amid competition from Korea, China and the U.S.
Whill, The Electric Wheelchair Add-on, Takes Home TechCrunch Tokyo’s Grand Prize
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 around 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 see waves of layoffs amid competition from Korea, China and the U.S.
Meet Shine: The Elegant Activity Tracker That Has A Neat Trick For Syncing With The iPhone
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
