Switched On: Hinging on success

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

The announcement of the Acer Aspire R7 was the best example of the company’s assertion that it was moving from computers designed with touch to computers designed for touch. But if having a fancy, even unprecedented, hinge is what defines a touch-optimized notebook, Acer is a bit late to the party.

Last October, Switched On discussed the role that laptop-tablet hybrids — namely convertibles and detachables — would play in the differentiation of Windows 8 devices. Both types have seen their share of support. Detachables have included HP’s Envy x2, ASUS’ Transformer-inspired VivoTab and Microsoft’s Surface. (Dell’s XPS 10 is available only with Windows RT.)

Filed under: Apple, Microsoft

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Backed Or Whacked: Reading And Writing Through Crowdfunding

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

An ancient and once-sacred bond between author and audience, reading and writing have become but two more tasks along with a multitude of other things that we do on a host of digital devices — watcing videos, listening to music, playing games, and really anything except using Facebook Home. Still, there are some for whom the intimate act of interface between pen and paper retains more magic than all the electrons powering all the devices in the world have not been able to recreate. For them, a trio of European crowdfunding projects have trotted out a range of products to improve both endpoints of analog document creation.

Whacked: LazyPete. Arrgh! Listen up, ye scurvy dogs, as I tell ye the legend of Lazy Pete, a pirate so wrapped up in his romance novels that he didn’t see a great white shark leap from the ocean to leave him with just one hand. ‘Tis in Lazy Pete’s honor that Philip Musche surely named his one-handed book reading contraption, which essentially puts one of those book stands that keep pages open on a beefy handle. Despite showing off the reading aid in nearly enough colors to cover the Seven Seas, Musche failed to capture enough crowdfunding booty, and the campaign ended with only £533 of the desired £30,000 treasure.

Backed: Idae. What the GoPro is to most digital cameras, Idae is to most pocket journals, even the durable Field Notes. The waterproof, tear-resistant notebook is just the thing for when you need to make that critical addition to your grocery shopping list in the middle of your next scuba dive, and a perfect match for your Fisher Space Pen. And if you needed any more proof of just how extreme it is, it has a hole for a carabiner.

That said, fire will consume it along with the haiku you were inspired to write on the slopes. And if you’re not planning to keep your notes around indefinitely, the notebook can be recycled. Developed in Milan and shipped to backers last month for between $20 and $30 depending on cover color, the 32-page thought preserver cleared its $7,200 funding goal with a couple of hundred dollars to spare, but you’d expect that kind of nail-biting excitement from such a tough guy.

Backed: Meteor Grip. The pencil has been thin enough to serve as a benchmark against which to compare high-tech electronics. While it’s comfortable for many, at least for short periods, it can be difficult to grasp for some. Receiving inspiration when his partner Zoë, a tattoo artist, began suffering hand pain in December 2011, Pontefract, UK-based Jai Dickerson Pierce developed the Meteor Grip. Few details are provided about what material is used to create the grip. Rather, the key to its uniqueness is being available in both right and left-handed versions. As the campaign page employs double negatives to claim, “No other manufacturer produces an ergonomic hand grip that is not ambidextrous.”

That said, the campaign is not above covering a spectrum of uses, claiming that the product is useful as a novelty gift while also proclaiming that it is “changing the writing experience forever.” Not yet changed for kiddies, though, as a potential meteorite grip is for now on the drawing board. With a bit over three weeks left to go, the Meteor Grip has collected about a quarter of its humble £875 goal. Seven pounds will marry your love of astronomy with hatred of thin writing tools, and ten pounds can get one for you as well as the cramping tattoo artist in your life as soon as this month.

Switched On: Three days without Google Glass

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

The television. The PC. The cellphone. We take the things in these sentence fragments for granted today, but they took many years to enter the mainstream. Could Google Glass herald the next great product that we will one day wonder how we lived without? Based on three days of not using the product, you may want to ask someone else.

Filed under: Misc, Wearables, Google

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Backed Or Whacked: Give PC A Chance

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

These days, it seems that anything that whiffs of the traditional PC has all the market appeal of a month-old banana. Microsoft and its hardware cohorts are trying to fight back against the image of the staid tower and notebook with touch-enabled, all-in-one computers, clickety-covered tablets and convertible notebooks that twist like a contortionist. With no stake in Windows to protect, though, device crowdfunders have taken a different tack, pushing Android and other mobile OSes into alien configurations. While a bit of old hat for tiny game consoles from OUYA and GameStick, the game is now on for more general computing tasks.

Backed: MiiPC ZeroDesktop is a more established business than your typical solo entrepreneur sailing off into crowdfunding waters. But its experience with cloud services, as well as remote access lend differentiation to MiiPC, an overgrown milk pint of an Android computer that features extensive controls for the pre-tween to tween in your household and a green under-light for no good reason except it looks kind of cool. MiiPC will feature a companion app that lets ever-watchful parents and guardians control access to apps like a boss regardless of the theme-song message of Malcolm in the Middle.

The MiiPC project wrapped up this week more than tripling its $50,000 goal for the mini-desktop that backers could scoop up for $99. As the device uses a similar chipset to the one in present-day Google TV boxes, the company is going to turn its interns onto it this summer to see what kind of alternative uses can be found for a small, albeit plug-tethered, Android device.

Whacked: Aurus Dual-Screen Tablet PC. What madness is this? A mobile device with not one but two displays? The unthinkable has been thought of with Windows PCs by Toshiba and Acer and an Android device by Sony. All failed in part because the underlying operating systems are not optimized for doing things like, say, putting a keyboard or game controls on one screen with the display of an email client or game on the other. The campaign page acknowledges the issue, asking, “Need some dual screen apps?,” assuring backers that they are developing some. Sony, for its part, said it was working with third-party developers. But, again, good luck with that without Google throwing its full weight behind multi-screen devices.

Backers could have nabbed the double-barrell Android tablet starting at €399, but it passed few consumers’ screenings. The project racked up little more than 1 percent of its lofty €200,000 goal.

Backed: CoolShip. It wasn’t quite the level of integration we see in today’s all-in-one computers like the iMac, but some of the earliest PCs had no separate tower enclosure, integrating the processor and memory into the same casing as the keyboard. Perhaps the slickest examples of these early designs were from Commodore, which used them in the rotund and popular Commodore 64 and VIC-20. Indeed, that brand and its tell-tale industrial design has been trotted out for pricey Windows-ready x86 PCs designed into cases appealing to the nostalgic.

The Android-touting CoolShip, on the other hand, is not only cheap at $99, but even upgradeable so you can swap in new, more powerful processors as they become available. The flexibility should also help address another issue with computers integrated into keyboards: death by spilled beverage. CoolShip sailed by its campaign goal of $10,000, nearly doubling that amount, and is expected to start shipping to backers this month.

Switched On: On iOS, Now is Google’s Time

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

In the early days of the internet economy, the saying went that webpages were created on Macs, served on Unix and viewed on Windows. In the iOS app economy, it’s often the case that apps run on devices by Apple, but connect to services by Google. With the exception of many games, at this point, apps increasingly strive to be internet services.

Google has been investing in more of these services for a longer time and in a way more directly tied to apps than Apple has. Google Maps has been the best example, but others include Google Drive (with its editing features), Google Voice and Google+. In contrast, Apple’s biggest consumer online service success (other than the iTunes store) has been iCloud, which is less app-like and more of a silent shuttle for documents and files among iOS devices.

Filed under: Software, Apple, Google

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Switched On: On iOS, Now is Google’s time

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

In the early days of the internet economy, the saying went that webpages were created on Macs, served on Unix and viewed on Windows. In the iOS app economy, it’s often the case that apps run on devices by Apple, but connect to services by Google. With the exception of many games, at this point, apps increasingly strive to be internet services.

Google has been investing in more of these services for a longer time and in a way more directly tied to apps than Apple has. Google Maps has been the best example, but others include Google Drive (with its editing features), Google Voice and Google+. In contrast, Apple’s biggest consumer online service success (other than the iTunes store) has been iCloud, which is less app-like and more of a silent shuttle for documents and files among iOS devices.

Filed under: Software, Apple, Google

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Backed Or Whacked: Bridging Worlds Without Words

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

One of the hottest areas of tech right now is the Internet of Things, wherein everyday objects communicate with each other. As doorknobs and clothing learn to communicate, we can only hope that they will protect their language better than the humans who have seen English reduced to abbreviated gibberish in the face of texting and Twitter. If Kickstarter campaigns are any indication, though, objects have a lot to say without speaking at all.

Whacked: Lively. As kids age into teenagers, parents often face the dilemma of balancing supervision and independence, a fine line that their children may increasingly find themselves karmically walking as those parents age. Placing security cameras around the home of an independent elderly parent seems too intrusive while relying on an emergency alert may provide critical indications too little too late. Lively strikes a great middle ground. In the tradition of Kickstarter-funded connected sensors such as Twine and Ninja Blocks, Lively makes use of vaguely cat ear-shaped sensors that serve as proxies for the fulfillment of routines when creatively deployed. These can indicate activities, such as eating meals, taking of medications and going outside. It’s sensors for seniors.

Lively isn’t just a one-way communique either. The offbeat part of the offering is a weekly printed LivelyGram that includes photos and updates from preselected loved ones. It’s somewhat like what was tried by the Presto printer, but without the local hardware (well, at least bulky, ink-consuming local hardware). Like the seniors it seeks to support, Lively is independent, relying on an integrated cellular signal like the original Kindle instead of a home network connection.

Lively raised less than $14,000 of its $100,000 goal, but little was ever at stake as the company had secured millions of dollars in funding prior to the Kickstarter campaign, which includes the confident phrase, “When we launch Lively…” And when they do, the basic set will go to $149 with a $20 per month fee, which includes a twice-monthly delivery of LivelyGrams.

Whacked: Good Night Lamp The backers of Good Night Lamp would likely argue that a house is not a home without a house that is an Internet-enabled light source. Consisting of a basic set level of a bigger and smaller lamp, the lamp lets distant friends and relatives send subtle signals to each other; up to four little lamps can be connected to a master big lamp. Turning on the big house light turns on the smaller ones. It’s a bit like having your own personal blinking red phone like the kind that connects Commissioner Gordon to Batman or Presidents Obama and Putin without the threat of the Joker or nuclear apocalypse.

The Good Night Lamp had a large funding target of £360,000, of which only about £40,000 was collected, but the team refused to go gently into that good night. Publicity from the campaign led to much exposure for the team, which found an alternate route to production. Preorders at eponymous Good Night Lamp Shop began in February for £99 and are expected to start shipping in September.

Whacked: TeleSound Not the most directly connected of Internet objects, TeleSound sought to be a small speaker closely resembling the speaker end of a classic desk phone handset connected via Bluetooth to an iPhone. Those with the appropriate companion app would be able to send sonic emoji to remote TeleSound devices via the recipient’s smartphone, promulgating the renaissance in flatulence simulations that we all miss from the golden age of fart apps.

Unlike Lively or the Good Night Lamp, the TeleSound team packed it in after reaching less than $15,000 of its $100,000 goal. Rewards for non-backers apparently included a free guilt trip as TeleSound’s website sounds off, “[I]f you wanted TeleSound to happen, you should have backed the project. If enough of you and your friends did, we would have been able to make it.”

Switched On: Microsoft’s small tablet trap

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Based on last quarter’s global PC shipment numbers, Microsoft continues to feel pain in making the case for Windows is a viable tablet operating system. Theoretically, the dual-identity (Windows 8/RT) operating system has everything it needs to be a contender, but the promise is ahead of the reality on three interdependent fronts: chip-level hardware, legacy support, and app software.

For example, if x86 chips were more competitive with ARM processors from a performance-per-watt perspective, then Microsoft wouldn’t be as reliant on Metro-style apps for functionality. And if more developers were creating Metro-style apps, then consumers wouldn’t have to go to the legacy desktop mode as much to get things done. (Until the company releases a Metro-style Office, Microsoft really can’t wag its finger too much at third parties.)

Filed under: Tablets, Apple, Microsoft, HP

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Backed Or Whacked: Fund These Undies

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

The mere mention of those particular articles of clothing that protect our private bits from coming into contact with our clothing (or perhaps vice versa) has long been enough to drive children into hysterics. As adults, the decision to abstain from them invokes the belligerence of a commando operation. Despite the choices of boxers, briefs, bikini bottoms and beyond, however, some still feel there is ample room for improvement. To prove this, some have been willing to break with convention and actually put videos of people in their underwear on the Internet.

Backed: Thinx. The three women  behind Thinx underwear spent nearly three years developing their product. Accepting their ingenuity is easy as they get through their nearly three-minute campaign video using a number of euphemisms to avoid directly mentioning menstruation, the main inspiration for raising the panty ante. By incorporating moisture-wicking and a dry outer layer into a microbial fabric, Thinx is designed to offer a woman protection against leakage and stains during that period when she might have need and to look good regardless of what time of the month it is. To the latter point, the New York-based project owners are not beyond dropping trou to show off the Hiphugger design. It’s one of four variations that include a lacy limited edition by twin designers Naven, whom you’re probably talking about right now. Funds from backers flowed freely, and the campaign beat its goal of $50,000 with nearly $15,000 to spare.

Whacked: Snowballs. Addressing a male concern regarding bodily emissions, Joshua Shoemake came up with the idea of Snowballs, “the cooling underwear for conceiving men,” a year after the birth of his daughter — a celebrated event for which he and his wife had spent much time and effort. After enduring the Sperm und Drang of infertility treatments, a doctor suggested that he apply cooling to his scrotum and get tested for a varicocele, an enlarged blood vessel in the testicles that can lead to raising their temperature and affecting semen. The proof was in the procreation.

Adding relief to the boxer brief, Snowballs was inspired by the difficulty that Shoemake faced cooling the center of his potency production for up to two hours per day. The recent candidate for a World’s Best Dad mug sought to create underwear that was “as close to nature as possible” (a redundant requirement in at least one sense). To fight against temperate testes, Snowballs accommodate a gel pouch that can cool the cojones for up to 30 minutes. However, despite the effort put into an animated campaign video, something other than oval organs were put on ice. The campaign cleared just over half of its $20,000 goal.

Whacked: Jockgods. New Yorker Sebastian Barone asks, “How well do you really know your underwear?” Were you once close but just don’t talk as often as you used to since you started going to therapy? Like the other undergarments featured on Kickstarter, Jockgods undies seek to be comfortable and stylish. And like many other Kickstarter projects in general, they are to be made in those North American states united. However, unlike Snowballs and Thinx, Jockgods is available for everyone. Barone takes advantage of his experience shooting underwear campaigns for 10 years by breaking into a steamy video in which two neighbors eagerly kiss and caress each other while keeping their underwear on. The video juxtaposes seductive glances with the insertion of keys into locks, which wins it the award for Least Subtle Metaphor Ever in a Crowdfunding Video.

With the absence of undergarment deities in major mythologies, Jockgods failed to attract divine intervention. However, it did attract the intervention of its campaign owner, which ended the campaign less than two weeks in. At that time, only five backers had pledged a total of $130 of the $22,000 goal.

Backed: HELUX Gear. If you’re searching for a personal underwear mantra, you could do worse than the one of Greg Donmayer. The Harrisburg, Penn., resident lays it on the line: “I believe the need exists for men’s underwear that is both comfortable and functional.” Indeed, instead of salacious appeals, the clothing designer takes bampaign video viewers on a relatively cerebral tour through the history of men’s underwear starting with the boxer and evolving past the boxer brief. Donmayer has addressed the oft-problematic fly with a new design that interweaves two pieces of fabric reinforced by elastic for what he claims gives men easy access to the room they need. Backers provided plenty of elbow room to accommodate for other body parts as the campaign finished up with nearly double its $2,500 goal.

Switched On: How HP learned to stop worrying and love Android

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Only those who were at the highest levels of HP at the time will likely ever know the full story of the spectacularly botched $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm and webOS. In the span of only eight months in 2010, the IT giant’s plans for the operating system underwent a titanic turnabout — from a foundation technology that would infiltrate every crevice of its device business to an orphaned open-source project ultimately sold to LG Electronics. Was the shift driven by core business softness that precluded further investment, the personal fiat of a short-tenured CEO or a justifiable reaction to disappointing sales? All three likely played some role.

HP purchased Palm because it was dissatisfied with the options it saw in the mobile operating system landscape. Beyond the deep relationship the company had with Microsoft for PCs, it had dabbled with Windows Mobile on a couple of smartphones such as the HP Glisten that never saw broad distribution. It had also produced an Android device, an obscure netbook called the Compaq AirLife 100 that lacked Android Market and was distributed exclusively via Spanish telecom giant Telefonica.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Nokia, Blackberry, HP

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