Joshua Pearce, PhD, is a researcher at Michigan Tech who rearches open source and low-impact solutions to engineering problems. He is also the founder of the Printers For Peace contest, an effort to bring together clever 3D-printed ideas that have loftier aims. You can win one of two 3D printers if you submit a winning project. We asked Pearce a few questions about his goals for the project and about the future of 3D printing. John Biggs: Why Printers For Peace? Joshua Pearce: I think it is clear that low-cost open-source 3D printing has enormous potential to do real good for the world – particularly for the poor as it radically reduces the cost of high-value products like scientific tools and consumer goods. This threatens a lot of entrenched interests because the average Joe can fabricate extremely complex products at home for pennies, which is disruptive to say the least. I have noticed a clear bias in 3D printing news coverage – any advances on the low-end of the spectrum are generally ignored or vilified. The media frenzy about 3D printed guns is actually having terrifying consequences – and I don’t mean the guns. A California senator has already proposed registration, background checks, and licensing for 3D printers! Michigan Tech and Type A Machines sponsored the contest to get the more positive truth about 3D printers into the conversation. There are over 90,000 open-source 3D printable designs available and only one low-quality gun. We do not want to lose the baby with the bathwater. Our aim is to raise awareness of the power of 3D printing to change the world for the better. JB: What do you think will happen now that the 3D printed gun is out of the bag? It was inevitable, obviously, but what does it mean? JP: The 3D printed gun is a red herring. Anyone who wants a gun can make a much better one using more traditional tools found in any machine shop and many garages — or just buy one. I am, however, very concerned that the debate about 3D printed guns will be used to squash the incredible technological development we are seeing in the open-source 3D printing community. JB: What’s the coolest Printers for Peace project you’ve seen so far? JP: The contest just opened, but there are some really cool designs already developed that I think would make good starting points for derivatives. I really like some of the small-scale 3D printed windmill designs – and there is a graduate student working on what looks to be a printable recyclebot. I would love to see a reliable 3D printed treadle pump as this is one of the most successful appropriate technologies for lifting rural farmers out of poverty in the developing world. JB: What’s next? 3D printed bazookas? 3D printed heart stents? Where do you see this headed, in either direction? JP: I think it is clear that existing manufacturers will continue to move from using high-end 3D printing for rapid prototyping into actual manufacturing creating entirely new classes of jobs (e.g. automobile parts, human body parts, etc.). This is exciting, but not nearly as exciting as what is happening on the low-end of the spectrum. As open-source 3D printable designs continue to grow exponentially the value of owning a 3D printer is climbing as their quality improves and actual costs continue to decline. Thus, low-cost open-source 3D printers will become ubiquitous household items, which people use to make a wide array of consumer goods, replacement parts, and highly customized products. Following shortly after I hope to see recyclebots become similarly widespread – with people recycling their waste plastic inhome to make their own products. The implications for improving human well-being are staggering.
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There’s plenty of buzz about the concept of making our cities “smarter” — that is, loading them up with sensors and data-driven services to improve efficiency and quality of life. Hell, even Google has taken to loading up its event venues with scores of sensors. Most of the discussion out there deals with how local governments are working toward this lofty, nebulous goal, but a team called Acrobotics Industries is trying to put with onus on the citizens themselves. To that end the team has kicked off a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign for a small sensor array called the Smart Citizen kit in hopes that people will start collecting and sharing their environmental data with the world. “There’s a problem with the way current cities were built,” Acrobotic’s COO Francisco Zabala told me. “Beijing’s air quality is insanely bad — we think we have it bad in LA — and it’s not getting any better. The heart (or brain, I guess) of the Smart Citizen project is an Arduino-powered kit that gets tucked away inside (or outside, if you’ve got the right kind of enclosure) of a user’s home to track local environmental variables — think temperature, humidity, air composition, ambient brightness, and sound levels. It’s arguably neat enough to keep tabs on the environmental conditions at your home while you’re not there, but the real value here is when a whole host of users set up their Smart Citizen sensors and fire up them up en masse. It’s the team’s hope that Smart Citizen kits will sell widely enough that regular people will be able to get an accurate glance at environmental conditions with a finer sort of granularity than you’d get by firing up, say, the Weather Channel app. For what it’s worth, Zabala concedes that the Smart Citizen project is largely geared toward making people aware of climate change and global warming without getting too political or divisive about it. “I believe that climate is changing for the worse, but our approach is more personal,” Zabala said. “By raising awareness we’re working toward a solution without banging on people’s heads.” As it happens, a few of those Smart Citizen kits have already been fired up. A quick look at a demo version of the sensor tracking website reveals that a handful of the little things are live in Zabala’s native Barcelona — the Smart Citizen team ran an earlier, more local crowdfunding campaign (Zabala called it a “proof of concept run”) that saw a number of users in Spain install and fire up their sensor arrays all around the city. Hovering over a bright blue spot displays the latest environmental data (users can define how often they want those updates to occur), while greyed out units haven’t been fired up lately. Thanks to how the Smart Citizen kit is constructed, users will eventually be able to monitor more than just the handful of environmental criteria this early kit supports. Zabala said that the Acrobotics team is currently working on swappable daughterboards that will allow the Smart Citizen kit to be used for soil and water testing too — perfect for you city-dwelling gardeners. If you’re suddenly itching to monitor your surroundings more acutely, you’ll be able to lay claim to a fully constructed Smart Citizen for $155 — the more handy among you can save a little money by springing for the $105 unassembled kit instead.
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Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, is poised to pass 10 million shipments next week less than a month after the device launched, says co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun, according to the Korea Times. The S4′s international release took place on April 27, after the phone launched in Samsung’s home market on April 26. “We are confident that we will pass more than 10 million sales of the S4 next week. It is selling much faster than the previous model S3,” Jong-kyun told reporters at an industry forum in Seoul yesterday the paper reports. “Samsung spent 50 days to pass the 10 million sales mark for the S3. The S4 will be Samsung’s first ’10 million seller’ device less than a month after its official debut.” Earlier this week Samsung confirmed shipments of the S4 had passed 6 million, describing it as the fastest ever sell rate for a Galaxy S smartphone, or any other Samsung smartphone. Company officials pointed to increased marketing spending as a key accelerator, according to the Korea Times. Samsung’s smartphone marketing budget dwarfs the other Android OEMs. According to research from Kantar media, reported in the WSJ, the company spent $401m in 2012 advertising its phones in the U.S. alone vs Apple’s $333 million. It’s worth flagging that shipments are not actual sales. Samsung does not report the latter, however channel shipments at least give an indication of how popular retailers believe a device is going to be. Apple does report device sales but does not break this out for individual iPhone models, so it’s not possible to compare the like-for-like sales of the iPhone 5 with the Galaxy S4 shipments but reporting its last earnings in April Apple said it sold a total of 37.4 million iPhones in the quarter.
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Calling all hardware hackers: the Raspberry Pi camera module has gone on sale online via Pi suppliers including RS Components and Premier Farnell/Element14, providing the eye required for all those computer vision projects you had in mind for the Pi microcomputer. The camera module actually went on sale yesterday and is currently temporarily out of stock on RS’ website (but Element 14 appears to have stock). The plug-in module costs around £17, or about $25. The camera module can be used with either the Model A or Model B Pi, and has a five megapixel sensor — the same size as you’d find in many a mid-range Android smartphone — and a fixed focus lens. The module supports 1080p/720p/640x480p video. Dimensions are 25 x 20 x 9mm. Weight is just 3g. The latest version of the Raspbian firmware supports the module so Pi owners may need to upgrade to enable camera support. The Pi Foundation has made a short video showing basic hardware set up for the camera module. Embedded below.  
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The Ouya is making its way out to backers even now (though my shipping notification still hasn’t arrived. Grrr.) and judging by early impressions, it’s no silver bullet to take down behemoths like Sony and Microsoft. The $99, Android powered console still isn’t fully formed exactly, but it’s doubtful that between now and June 25 it’ll take on giant-killer proportions. Likewise the recently-announced BlueStacks Android gaming console, which features a subscription-based pricing model, probably won’t alone topple the giants. But combined, these and a slew of other devices including the GameStick, smart TVs from manufacturers, Steam Boxes, and even Google and Apple hardware are eating away at what was once a fairly exclusive field. It seems a lot of people are waiting for a watershed moment to signal a significant shift away from traditional console gaming to a new paradigm, but increasingly, it looks likely that what we’ll see instead is an erosion that more closely resembles glacial shift, but on a less geological time scale. There’s evidence to suggest that console gaming is already losing significant ground, like quarterly results from Nintendo that show a dramatic decline in consumer interest in the recently-launched Wii U console. And while Sony saw its first full-year profit in half a decade, most of the good news was on the smartphone side, and PlayStation sales fell for the year. Microsoft is still doing fairly well with the Xbox 360, but growth of key accessories like the Kinect have slowed with time. Slower Kinect sales are a good bellwether for the industry’s overall health, if only because it and devices like it are where console makers are turning to try to inject some fresh life into a market that had recently started to look fairly stale. To some extent, Kinect, Move and other gimmicks like the screen of the 3DS are an answer to incursions by mobile gaming and other alternatives. Just like point-and-shoot cameras needed differentiating features like long zooms to prove themselves relative to smartphone cameras, video games needed something new to reel in new buyers. The new crop of challengers to the console gaming market, including Ouya and the new BlueStacks GamePop console, risks getting discounted by critics as just another round of devices like the GP2X Wiz or the Gizmondo, which had limited appeal and then faded into the background of video games history as little more than a minor footnote. But that’s taking too short-term and dismissive a view on what’s currently happening in the video game space. It’s true that, as ardent console gamers continually remind me, there will always be a demand for that type of content. Increasingly, however, there’s a growing contingent of players that are fine saying, “if I can get it on my phone, why do I need it anywhere else?” and that’s a market that’s ripe for a living room transition like the ones being attempted by Ouya and BlueStack. It’s easy to discount these ahead of their full consumer launch, and I don’t expect them to have an immediate impact on console sales, but they are signs of a sure shift, and one that won’t go away, even if doesn’t provide the sort of bomb shock disruption that we’re so fond of identifying and championing.
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Whether or not you think that Google Glass is something that you’d wind up using one day, you have to admit that the technology is impressive. Packed inside of the pair of specs is a computer running android, camera and all of the wireless capabilities you’d need. The idea of wearable computers is nothing new, and a team that explored Antarctica actually had their own pair of “Glass” long before it was en vogue. In a blog post chronicling the team’s experience, Tina Sjogren fondly remembers what it was like to pull together a wearable computer running Windows 98, paired with a “finger” mouse for controls and a glass screen as its display. It sounds a lot like an early version of Google Glass, but this was truly a technological marvel, considering that it was built and used at the South Pole in 2001. The specs of the device, which was called “South Pole Wearable,” are nothing short of amazing, including custom built software to share information and post photos. It was also solar powered, something that Google Glass could really use. It didn’t use 3G, 4G or WiFi, relying on satellites: Finger Mouse Wrist Keyboard HUD (VGA Heads Up Display, Eye-trek Glasses by Olympus) Wearable Windows 98 computers Daylight flat panel display Customized Technology vests Shoulder Mounted Web Camera Bluetooth near person network Iridium data over satellite Power converters Solar cells Control and Command voice software CONTACT blogging software Image editing, word processing The entire kit weighed 15 pounds, which is almost double what the original Google Glass prototype weighed, about 8 pounds. It now weighs about as much as an average pair of sunglasses. Tina and Tom Sjogren set forth to build something that allowed them to transfer all types of information as they skied through the snowy South Pole. Sharing this type of information in real-time was not something that many could wrap their brains around, therefore the pair didn’t get the type of attention for their device that Google is getting for Glass today. Tina says: We wore a computer on our hips, a mouse in our pocket, and the glass was our screen. We did it not to show off but because we had no other choice. She also sees a future for Google Glass and regular consumers: “New technology often needs time to catch on and I can see a future for Google glass today. It will come down to how sleek and useful they are. A stylish design paired with all the wonders of augmented reality – what’s not to love?” “Cool, maybe the time has come for this tech” Wearing Google Glass wasn’t the experience that Tina and Tom had back in 2001, as Tina refers to their display as “too bulky to wear all of the time.” The eye piece on their device had greenish text which, much like Google Glass, didn’t obstruct your view. It even had voice commands. The two even slept in their gear at nights, to keep it warm and protect it from the elements. In 2002, they became the first to broadcast live photos and sounds from the Antarctic ice cap. The trekkers counted on Ericcson as their sponsor during the mission, and here’s a drawing they made of a “future explorer” wearing their device: I spoke with Tina Sjogren today and she told me that the reason for building the device was based on their love of exploration: “Our specialty is to find and marry software and hardware for unique situations such as extreme expeditions, military, security and other.” The purpose of building the device was simple, yet profound: “We had a story to tell. There had never been live dispatches done from a skiing expedition on the continent before. We also helped General Dynamics with feedback on how this could work on aircraft carriers.” Twelve years after the Sjogren team set out on their adventure, Google is trying to make the world around us equally as interesting with Glass. It’s too soon to know whether it will catch on with consumers once they’re made available to people other than developers. If we’ve learned anything from Tina and Tom Sjogren, it’s that good ideas have this way of coming back year after year, getting better and more polished each time: As Google Glass has gotten more publicity, Tina summarized her feelings about it succinctly, capturing the true mentality of someone who loves to see new things, explore new places and share experiences: “Cool, maybe the time has come for this tech.”
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As tablet ownership and usage continues its upward trajectory, little surprise that more people are expected to be paying for more stuff on tablets in the coming years. But analyst Juniper Research has put out a new mobile content revenue forecast predicting that purchases on tablets will be the primary engine for growth — ergo: beating out smartphones — in the mobile content market over the next three years. The analyst expects annual revenue generated from content delivered to mobile handsets and tablets to rise by nearly $25 billion over the period — climbing from more than $40 billion this year to $65 billion by 2016. Music and video now account for nearly half of all mobile content revenues, according to Juniper. The analyst says growth in the mobile content market will “primarily” be fuelled by an upsurge in tablet users buying games, videos and ebooks on their slates. But it also flags up “increased opportunity” for content monetisation via direct carrier billing on smartphones as another factor helping to drive the market. “While the availability of direct carrier billing is patchy, the various benefits which the mechanism offers — higher conversion rates, opportunities to monetise unbanked customers — suggest that deployments will rise significantly in the medium term,” notes report author Dr Windsor Holden in a statement. Returning to tablets, the report found that ebooks are currently the largest revenue stream on slates, thanks to e-reader applications from the likes of Amazon, Kobo and Nook, but goes on to add that tablets are experiencing a sharp increase in both paid and free video applications. The analyst also expects consumer gaming spend to migrate to tablets from dedicated portable gaming devices such as the Nintendo 3DS and the Sony PS Vita — something Juniper has delved into before in a separate report. The mobile content report also notes that the convergence of gaming and social networking has been “one of the major drivers” behind the post-download monetisation opportunity — i.e. via in-app purchases.
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In all the discussions I’ve had with hardware makers about their products, one thing is becoming clear: in the end, the cheap part is never cheap. Take a look at this post about a Kickstarter project for example. A maker, Michael Ciuffo, had recently funded a very cool QR code clock that used a simple array of LEDs to display the time in QR code. He ordered the parts from an online supplier – 500 in total – and begin testing them. In all he saw 38 of the 500 fail in basic tests. In short, his “quick and easy” shipment of components from an inexpensive vendor resulted in a 7.6% failure rate. “I found out this week that sometimes goods and services purchased in China can be of low quality,” he wrote. In a similar vein, I once spoke to a hardware broker in Shenzhen who sold bargain-basement phones to the developing world. While his products were far from amazing, he did find similar failure rates in all of the phones he sold, resulting in the need to hire a separate QA tester who powered on and tried all the phones before he shipped them, thereby reducing his profit. I want to make it clear that this is no jingoistic rant, but this is, in short, the biggest problem with off-shoring hardware manufacturing. However, because the perception is that local – and by local I mean a general U.S. or European audience – is expensive, this quality problem is endlessly repeated. “When you off-shore hardware, every mistake, and there will be mistakes, causes a delay chain that multiplies by physically shipping prototypes, samples, tester units and more half-way around the world,” said Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries. “One of the best things you can do is keep your supply chain as close as possible.” It is telling, however, that the company just invested in a $175,000 pick and place machine for their SoHo office. “This is why we like to manufacture here in SoHo, have our injecting molding in North America, PCBs made in the USA and services like large volume laser cutting here in NYC,” she said. The proximity of a vendor to your assembly point allows you to, in a pinch, drive to complain. As it stands, Ciuffo’s vendor was kind enough to respond and resend extra pieces but after a 35 day wait on the original LEDs he had already added a month to his build time. While the price of the pieces was obviously low enough for him to consider the opportunity, the cost in time and potentially QA headaches becomes an intangible. But therein lies the problem: you can’t always source, say, an array of LEDs locally. Chances are the pieces are pulled from the same factory you’d be going to in Shenzhen and, barring a bit of QA on arrival, you might be running into the same problems. However, as companies like Adafruit begin catering to the hobbyist and local manufacturers begin catering to smaller batch hardware creators, I could definitely see it becoming easier to become a true hardware locovore. We, as consumers, should also require that the things we buy be locally sourced. While I am well aware that manufacturing is not all puppy dogs and rainbows, there is something to be said for a sourcing infrastructure that allows a Kickstarter project lead to make a few calls and flow a bit of money back into the community, state, or country. You either pay for cheap hardware up front or later on, in support costs. An active slow hardware movement would allow far more control over the process of making cool things and would, in the end, benefit us all by raising quality across the board.
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The Nook HD and HD+ got a great update late last night (via Engadget), as Barnes & Noble finally moved away from its closed and system-specific app and media ecosystem. The two Android tablets now offer Google Play, and new devices will ship with the app pre-loaded, while existing owners can get it via a software update over-the-air or via direct download. Other changes with this update include the introduction of some stock Android apps, including Gmail, Maps and Chrome (which replaces the Nook’s existing web browser as the default option). Essentially, Barnes & Noble is turning the Nook HD line into a very cheap Android tablet play, and not in the limited way it was doing so before. Where once the Nook brand was a reader first, with Android-powered full-color readers with some tablet functionality, now it looks like we’ll see Barnes & Noble embrace the tablet identity much more fully. Another sign that the book seller is banking on tablets as a much broader attempt at reaching customers is the fact that the Nook Tablet and Color don’t get the Play update, meaning we could see those left behind in terms of future hardware updates. John took a look at the updated Nook HD+, and found it impressive, especially at $269, or a full $60 cheaper than the cheapest iPad (16GB Wi-Fi iPad mini). The problem, though, was summed up in John’s conclusion: the Nook HD+ is a great upgrade as a reader, but not necessarily a real tablet competitor. Opening up the broader Android software market place and its selection of tablet apps definitely helps to change that. The Nook line could be the key to Barnes & Noble’s future, but right now it’s also a weight hanging around its neck, as slow sales of the Simple Touch e-reader prompted a fire sale to help move more HD+ inventory, and the Nook division lost cash in the most recent fiscal quarter. There’s still an opportunity for a cheap Android tablet to capture the hearts and minds of consumers, however, and Nook is now in a better position to capitalize on that now that its ecosystem wall has come down.
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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.
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A lot of people don’t carry cameras anymore, now that they have smartphones. But that means that you could miss opportunities to capture great moments, especially when you’re missing out on the great optical zoom available on some more expensive or specialized dedicated camera devices. That’s what Snapzoom hopes to fix with its binocular mount for smartphone cameras, and the best part is that it’s completely universal, meaning it fits a wide variety of both phones and binoculars. The project got started when Hawaii-based co-founders Daniel Fujikake and Mac Nguyen started using their own smartphones to film their surf escapades via a completely DIY, garage-made mounting device that they hacked together. They saw the utility, and other surfers asked them about it every time they went out, so they partnered up with a professional designer to form HI Resolution Enterprises and build a proper prototype using 3D-printed materials. The duo took to Kickstarter to fund a production run for Snapzoom, and has already blown past its $55,000 goal in just over a week. The funding will help the two turn the 3D printed prototype into a glass-filled nylon injection molded retail product, which the company hopes to manufacture both in the U.S. and overseas. “It’s going to be extremely tough, since it’s something that’s meant to be used outdoors,” Fujikake told me. “You can put it in your bag, you don’t have to worry about babying it, you can get it wet, you can drop it, it’s very very tough.” Already, before even closing its Kickstarter funding, Snapzoom has had a lot of interest from well-placed retail partners, including U.S. camera equipment and accessory retailer B&H Photo. Based on funding interest and prospective retail partner enthusiasm, the team seems to have tapped a strong, unaddressed consumer desire, even if it is a bit niche. And it’s not just voyeurs who are interested; this is great for nature photography and action sports, too. Snapzoom is looking to ship in September, and retail price for the mount is expected to be around $79.99, but currently pre-order backers on Kickstarter can get one for just $70. The team is working on stretch goals now, since it has already earned almost $10,000 more than its original goal.
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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.
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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.
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While you are riding into work on your daily bike commute, why not charge your phone? There’s a bit more to it than that, but ultimately that is exactly what the Siva Cycle Atom does. A brilliant idea. Reaching their KickStarter goal of $85,000 after only a week, the newly funded Atom is on display on the floor of Hardware Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. The Atom is a generator, complete with a detachable battery, that is fixed to the rear of your bicycle. As you pedal away, the generator is charging the attached battery. However it can also directly charge your phone too, using a smart switching system that goes back and forth between the device and the battery. For example, if your phone is hooked up to the device it will directly charge your phone while you are pedaling, however when you come to a stop, your phone will automatically draw from the battery to keep you topped off. Once you reach your destination, you simply detach the 1300mAh battery and take it with you for extra juice for your smartphone.
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LG’s Optimus G successor, the G Pro, is coming to AT&T on May 10 with pre-orders beginning May 3, the companies revealed in a press release today. LG’s Optimus G Pro offers a 1.7GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, a 5.5-inch 1920×1080 display with a pixel density of 400ppi, and a 13 megapixel rear-facing camera. The G Pro will be available on a two-year agreement for $199.99, and packs AT&T 4G LTE cellular connectivity. Chris checked out the G Pro back in February at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and came away with a decidedly positive overall impression. The phone’s high points seem to be its camera and light and slim design, as well as a built-in IR blaster that means it can operate as a universal remote for you TV and other home electronics. The phone’s arrival was hardly a surprise, having been leaked earlier by Android Central, which pegged the exact date. Then LG announced an event for today, May 1, and went on to confirm that this would indeed be about the Optimus G Pro late in April. For LG, it’s a phone that follows the Optimus G, a flagship device that has done fairly well so far, hitting the 1 million sales mark back in January of this year, after a release in September 2012. The G also provided the basic groundwork for Google’s Nexus 4 Android reference device, which reached 1 million in handset sales in February, according to an estimate based on serial numbers calculated by Nexus 4 owners. The G Pro will be going up against the extremely well-reviewed HTC One, and the Android juggernaut, Samsung’s Galaxy S4, so it’s got a lot to compete with. But for fans of the last two major LG-made devices, this looks to be decently attractive upgrade.
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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.
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A Columbus, Ohio woman found that her HTC Evo Shift had branded her after overheating while it was under her waistband. The woman, Jennifer Grago, reported that she was using the phone’s FM radio while she did yard work. “I didn’t have pockets so I just put the phone in the band of my sweats. Seemed like an alright option… I felt my phone getting warm so I moved it and trucked on. Figured sweatpants and 70 some degrees was a factor. Went to move it again and it hurt like a #%&@! and skin with it. I swear to god I almost passed out,” she wrote. Best Buy, where she purchased the phone, told her that phones need “correct ventilation” and should be placed in form-fitting casing. The phone left a clear outline of the casing on her skin. Phones, which are in essence compact radios, can easily overheat for various reasons but for a device to overheat so egregiously is frightening. The phone is two years old and is currently available for free with contract on Sprint’s network.
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Cincinnati, Ohio is best known for the Bengals, Bootsy Collins, and Skyline Chili but it’s about to become famous as one of the first cities with a true market for 3D printable designs. 3DLT, a small company based in Cincy and founded by a team of programmers, is bringing the free-for-all world of 3D modellers into line and essentially making an Etsy for ABS. The team consists of Pablo Arellano, John Hauer, Colin Klayer, and Tim Maggart and has raised $10,000 in personal investment thus far. Today they’ve announced a plan to give away $10 million in free 3D object credit. They are also going to build a network of 3D printers across the country to allow users to connect with printers who can build their purchases on demand. “We’re big fans of Graphic River, iStockPhoto and other content marketplaces,” said Arellano. “We felt that when 3D printing became viable, a market for 3D printable content would be needed.” “We are disruptive in two ways: We will accelerate the adoption of 3D printed products by the everyday consumer by offering a wide selection of well-organized, curated designs across multiple categories. We also make it easy for consumers – from your grandmother to your grandson – to purchase 3D designs they can print at home, online, or at a local 3D print shop,” he said. They also aim to commoditize 3D printing and make it more “financially accessible” by partnering with 3D print providers. The company launched on stage today at Disrupt in New York. “3D printing is already being used extensively in the $23 billion prototyping market and quickly gaining traction in automotive, fashion, toys and many other areas. In the near future, everyday items, from frames to furniture, sneakers to stilettos, will be 3D printed. 3DLT is what the industry needs to cause a tipping point,” said Arellano.
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The builders of a Wii hacking devices, Wiikey, have announced that they’ve found a method to hack the Wii U to play content via USB media. The kit also claims to work on devices from any region and requires no soldering. Because there is no mention of “homebrew” content like video players and the like, this looks to be a hack that enables piracy on the platform. Called the WiikeÜ, the device will connect to the Wii U via USB. The current WiiKey device allows you to hack the original Wii in a similar way. The quest to hack the Wii is not new. The homebrew community is also working on methods to run media via USB and there are ways to add a Homebrew Channel to the Wii U, allowing users to download apps not licensed by Nintendo. Users cannot yet burn copies of games onto recordable disks because the Wii U copy protection is built directly into the Blu-Ray drive, making a software hack difficult. While this is no good for Nintendo in terms of piracy, it could pique interest in the platform as a homebrew system. Sadly, piracy usually comes first and foremost in cases like this one.
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BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins seems to be among the most transparent executives in tech in terms of showing his hand regarding future product plans, which may be partly because he doesn’t have much to lose at this point. In an interview yesterday, he downplayed tablet computing in what looks to be an indicator that BlackBerry will drop the PlayBook, its own lame duck tablet and the first of its devices to sport a QNX-based operating system. Heins should’ve stuck to specifics, however, as he went way overboard and came off as though he was losing touch with reality in the interview as quoted by Bloomberg, with broad sweeping statements like “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” and “[t]ablets themselves are not a good business model.” Tablets may not be a good business model for BlackBerry, which took huge writedowns on BlackBerry PlayBook inventory, were forced to run massive fire sales with price cuts of up to $400 to clear out inventory, and even finally discontinued the entry-level 16GB version entirely. By any real measure, the PlayBook was and is a failed product. But to say tablets won’t last five years, or that they aren’t a good business model requires that you completely ignore Apple’s tremendous success with the iPad, including the 19.5 million iPads it sold last quarter, an all-time record that came in well above analyst estimates. Heins has recently made remarks that indicate BlackBerry may be experimenting with alternate device form factors, possibly taking a cue from hybrid gadgets like the Asus PadFone which combine a smartphone and tablet or mini-notebook style device in one. Once again, Heins said that he would need a BlackBerry tablet to be a unique device in an increasingly crowded market. BlackBerry may have blown it on the PlayBook, but trash-talking tablets in general is worse than sticking your head in the sand: it makes the company look hopelessly out of touch. There’s definitely a lesson to be learned in the fact that Apple is the only company that’s really been able to succeed with a tablet device, but that lesson isn’t that the tablet market is a write-off entirely.
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Disrupt NY 2013′s Startup Battlefield competition is underway, and now New York native Keen Home is taking the stage to present its first-round pitch. Keen Home is a home automation startup, which aims to follow in Nest’s footsteps by building remote vents for your central air conditioning and heating systems that can be controlled from your smartphone to optimally direct air where you actually need it — and away from places you don’t. Keen just launched its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. Keen Home is the brainchild of Ryan Fant and Nayeem Hussain, both of whom have experience founding companies in the home real estate and property-management space. The two believe their startup can appeal to consumers who want both more convenience in managing their home’s HVAC systems, and who want to save money and conserve energy. Keen Home’s debut product, the Keen Vent, accomplishes both. The idea came from Fant noticing that when vents were closed in other rooms, heating and cooling the one he was currently in became much easier. The problem is that those vents generally operate separately, and manually, in most homes. Even with some systems that provide a remote, like Activent, they aren’t centrally controlled in a way that makes them individually manageable from an existing device like a smartphone. “We found that just by closing four vents in an average-sized home, we’ve reduced the run time of the furnace by about 30 percent,” Fant explained in an interview. “So not only were we redirecting air to rooms that were actually in use by intelligently closing vents, we were increasing efficiency, as well.” Keen believes that the focus is always on the thermostat when it comes to home heating and cooling efficiency solutions, which is good but it ignores other parts of the problem. The Keen Vent solves that, by providing both a user-guided and automated way of opening and closing vents to change how air flows through a home. A homeowner can set a schedule for individual vents, too, and it can plug into weather data to respond intelligently to changing conditions. Fant says the Keen Vent can provide up to 32 percent reduction in run time for HVAC systems, which means lower monthly bills and less toll on the environment. Most heating and cooling vents in households are around 60 years old, Keen Home said on stage during their Disrupt Battlefield presentation on Monday. Individual vent covers will cost around $40 per vent, Keen predicts, with a $150 charge for the system in total. There’s also a recurring fee of around $4 per month for access to the cloud-based management platform, which also provides monthly reports. But Fant and Hussain plan to partner with utility companies and homebuilders to try to offer the tech initially at a discount price, perhaps with, say, six months of service rolled into a new construction. It’s the same model that satellite radio provider Sirius/XM uses to sell subscriptions with new cars. Keen Home is launching its Keen Vent product on Indiegogo today, and believes that seeking crowdfunding, as well as traditional investment, will help it get the word out and prove product viability. Its biggest challenges will be proving to users that a recurring subscription around centralized vent control is worth the cost, and in making sure that legacy players like Honeywell don’t swoop in and simply build their own similar systems. The team says that being aggressive with partnerships with big utility companies, the way others like Nest and thinkeco have done in the past, will be the key to making sure it can overcome both.
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Samsung introduced its latest tablet today, the Galaxy Tab 3, and it’s clear that the Tab line is destined to play a distinct second fiddle to the Galaxy Note brand. The Tab 3 sounds like it could’ve been released a year or two ago, with a 7-inch 1024×600 display at just 169 PPI, a 1.2GHz dual core processor and a 3 megapixel rear-facing camera. The Tab 3 also has cellular connectivity in one version, but caps out at 3G and doesn’t offer an LTE option, and it’s running Android 4.1. There are two memory options, at 8 and 16GB respectively, though that’s expandable via Micro SD. The Tab 3 improves on the Tab 2 7.0 with a thinner bezel, borrowing design styling from the Galaxy Note series. The Wi-Fi version will be available in May, and the cellular-capable model goes on sales in June. Samsung is clearly streamlining its tablet line here, since the Tab 3 naming indicates we probably won’t see a follow-up to the Tab 2 10.1. The Android OEM has moved a lot of the focus on its higher-end Galaxy Note line when it comes to tablets, like the recently introduced Galaxy Note 8.0. The Note 8.0 has a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and a 5 megapixel rear camera, plus an 8-inch 1280×800 display. There’s no retail price for the Galaxy Tab 3 as of yet, but the Galaxy Note 8.0 is $399 so expect it to come in under that, as it’s less impressive under the hood and also lacks S-Pen integration. The Tab line is likely Samsung’s way of staying competitive with cheap, small tables like the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire, but I wouldn’t expect this to light a fire under that many consumers.
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One of the hacks at Disrupt NY’s Hackathon this year employed hardware startup Leap Motion’s new 3D gesture controller, which unfortunately just ran into a delay. Leap Motion’s issues aside, this project, the combined effort of Chao Huang, Cedrich Pinson and Jorge Martinez, brings a Facebook Home-style experience to the desktop. With “Leap in Time,” Leap Motion is used to navigate through a Facebook timeline via hand gestures that are intended to be as natural and intuitive as possible. You swipe left and right to go through photos and posts, and there’s inertia built-in to make it feel even more immersive. Then there’s a motion to pause and focus on a particular piece of content, with a palm outward gesture, and you can simply make a thumbs up to like a post. Working with the Leap Motion was fairly simple, the team said, but does seem to experience difficulty with some environment issues like changing lighting conditions. It’s also crucial to maker sure that the Leap Motion app you’re building is cued to pay attention to certain things at certain times and to ignore specific motions in different settings. You have to cue the app to not pay attention to sideways hand waving when you want it to be able to recognize the thumbs up, for instance. The hack was surprisingly smooth given that it was built in fewer than 24 hours, and Huang said there’s plenty more they could do given more time, but they wanted to focus on what they considered the core Facebook experience. The project is also reminiscent of a recent concept design making the rounds of a Facebook Home app for Windows 8. Leap in Time is a simple enough implementation of Leap Motion, but it does act as a pretty solid example of how gesture control might actually work well for navigating apps and software that we use every day. I know that Leap Motion is eager to get as much software as possible into Airspace, the app store for the controller, but this team said they weren’t sure whether they’d actually pursue this any further.
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The floor at Disrupt’s NY Hackathon is filled mostly with people working on software projects, but there were also some interesting hardware endeavors underway. One in particular caught my eye: a robot built from open-source components build to help anyone subject their app or device to strenuous, physical testing in a non-simulated environment. The basic bot is built from an Arduino controller, along with 3D-printable components is a test automation device for iPhone, built by R/GA Technical Director Sune Kaae and inspired by Jason Huggins Selenium-based open source Angry Birds-playing robots. It’s a device that Kaae says is easily programmed via Node.js, meaning it’s accessible for software developers who are more familiar with web languages. One of the big remaining challenges facing hardware startups, Kaae says, is that developers are intimidated by a perceived barrier to entry in programming physical devices. They don’t have to be, though, he explained, since it can be made relatively easy to accomplish things with programming languages they already understand. Kaae’s robot, which positions a touchscreen-compatible stylus anywhere on a screen someone wants to place it, and can run tests that just aren’t possible via simulated virtual testing, or are too costly or boring to do human testing for. It can also help with things like testing movement for the Nike Fuel + Band, which R/GA helped design. Right now, Kaae’s looking for a mathematician to help refine the product, to make sure that when you input a coordinate to hit, it hits exactly that coordinate and not just roughly the right area. But the little bot is a great example of how some people are trying to make it easier to make and test hardware to begin with.
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Google felt it appropriate to highlight some of Glass’ specs earlier this week, but there’s much more to the company’s wearable display than just the 5 megapixel camera and its 16GB of internal storage. In case you were hankering for a taste of what else makes Google Glass tick, Android developer (and Glass Explorer) Jay Lee spent some time tinkering with his preview unit and managed to figure out what kind of hardware it has under the proverbial hood. Lee managed to confirm that Glass runs Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich (GEO Larry Page noted during the Google’s most recent earnings call that Glass “obviously” runs on Android), and also determined that it has a Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 chipset. In case you haven’t been keeping abreast of developments in the mobile chipset market, the OMAP 4430 was used in devices like the original Motorola Droid RAZR and Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab 2.0 — solid devices during their prime, but the chipset that powered them is far from new. Sadly, some of the particulars are still shrouded in mystery — Lee wasn’t able to figure out the processor’s clock speed (the 4430 CPU can be clocked between 1 and 1.2 GHz), and the device only reports that it has 682MB of RAM but Lee suspects the total is actually 1GB. Still, that’s not too shabby a spec sheet for a device that essentially lives on your face, and some recent reports reveal that the ambitious headset may be surprisingly to simple to root too. Liam McLoughin, an intern for Google’s Chrome team recently tweeted to note that gaining root access to the search giant’s curious head-mounted display seemed simple in theory, a development that prompted Lee to go digging in the first place. Meanwhile, Cydia founder and administrator Jay Freeman revealed on Twitter that he too had made progress in gaining access to the device, and even posted a picture to show off how far he’d managed to go. At this point we’ve already seen some companies embrace the Glass platform (Path and the New York Times immediately spring to mind) and others like Evernote are known to be crafting experiences for Glass, but some moderately powerful hardware and seemingly easy rootability could make Glass an even bigger hit for Android tinkerers.
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