At the Google I/O developer conference today, Mary Lou Jepsen bemoaned the lack of hardware innovation in the tech world.

“There’s no more silicon in Silicon Valley. It’s all iPhone apps.

“For the devices we use … the funding models are completely screwed up,” she said. “Angel funding isn’t sufficient for hardware.”

And that’s at least part of why she’s working on a hush-hush hardware project for Google X.

Google X is the division of Google that produced Google Glass. It’s run by Google cofounder Sergei Brin and operates as a skunkworks within the company — a sort of magic factory where ideas are shoot-for-the-moon big and projects are shrouded in secrecy.

Jepsen said she’s not too comfortable with “the sharp elbows and politics of larger companies.” But we’ve heard that Google X operates a bit more like a startup within Google. Her coworkers at X include Android founder Andy Rubin and former Google Maps chief Jeff Huber.

“Google X is the hardware division of Google,” Jepsen said. And while she couldn’t say too much about the hardware followup to Glass, she gave the I/O audience a few clues.

“For me, it all came together in displays,” she said. “How do we get data to all the people of the world, not just the rich people?”

That sentiment alone echoes Google CEO Larry Page’s keynote yesterday, a speech that was all about creating global opportunity and equality through technology. For Jepsen, that principle is the backbone of a huge part of her career, One Laptop Per Child.

Jepsen founded OLPC, designing the first the $100 laptop in the process. “It was just me for the first 18 months, then we grew to the massive size of four,” she said.

Her next move was Pixel Qi, a display company that uses existing manufacturing lines to make screens with vastly lower power consumption needs and increased readability in sunlight.

When it comes to making hardware, she said, “There’s not much competition, so there’s an advantage.” Unfortunately, the competition that does exist is more likely to come in gargantuan form — giants like Samsung and Sony. Her advice: “Don’t do something small.”

She also told the entrepreneur-heavy audience, “VCs don’t have the core competence to fund or even do due diligence on hardware. … You have to be creative to fund it.” While Google’s warchest funds the new projects for Google X, she suggested looking to the more forward-thinking superangels and hackerspaces for resources and funds.

One interesting difference in Jepsen’s entire hardware experience and the modus operandi for Google X/Google Glass is the country of origin for devices. Google Glass is made in the United States; so was Google’s other homebrewed hardware project, the Nexus Q.

Jepsen, on the other hand, has a huge amount of expertise in Asian manufacturing. In fact, she actually moved to Asia and learned Chinese as part of her founder experience for OLPC.

“These days, the manufacturing is controlled by a small number of countries, primarily Taiwan and South Korea,” she said. “You need to figure out how to deal with cultures, but it’s freed me for the last decade .. Basically, all I have to do is get a whole bunch of people to say yes. They say no 99 percent of the time.”

Image credit: Pixel Qi

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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A Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and a Hollywood actor cross paths at a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Financial District.

You’d never know by appearance alone, but one of these men will sleep on the streets tonight.

Scott Glover and Marc Roth are feeling quite comfortable at this branch of Peet’s Coffee. Roth tells me that the homeless spend hours on end in coffee shops, which offer optimal shelter on chilly days like this one.

Scott Glover and Marc Roth (L-R)

Glover is in town for a three-day gig providing protection detail at the annual Veteran’s Day Parade. His current employers don’t know he’s homeless. Roth is no longer living in shelters, but he can relate to his new acquaintance’s transience. Until last year, he was living in his car, in hostels, the BART (for one night after he missed a curfew), and in shelters around San Francisco.

But Roth is a startup founder now. And in true startup fashion, he reels off ideas for future business ventures minutes after I arrive.

His ideas are in various stages of development and include a food delivery service, a laser company, and a hardware accelerator program. But they all have one thing in common: Whatever he does next, Roth intends to hire from within the homeless community, which he views as a hotbed of untapped talent.

How did he move out of the shelter and into TechShop?

One wintery morning in 2011, Roth awoke after a rough night in a homeless shelter in San Francisco.

It was Christmas, and Roth was determined to make a change for the sake of his two kids living with their mother in Las Vegas. He had originally relocated to San Francisco to build a better life for his family, but had developed nerve damage and a condition called Meralgia Paresthetica from standing for hours on end at a pizza restaurant. This condition left him with medical bills so steep, he was soon unable to pay rent and return to his job, and he found himself on the street.

Source: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

A quilt and printer at San Francisco’s TechShop

When he spotted a business card for TechShop in the shelter’s garbage bin, it seemed like a sign. Intrigued, he fished it out.

TechShop, a membership-based do-it-yourself workshop, provides tools, equipment, and classes for the community. The San Francisco venue is one of the hubs of the burgeoning “maker movement,” the trend to employ DIY techniques to develop unique technology products.

For a glimpse inside TechShop, don’t miss our gallery below. 

“I had these inventions in my head but didn’t know I could make them myself,” Roth explained. So he spent his remaining dollars on a membership and a few introductory courses.

Roth’s goal was to pick up basic skills like woodworking, laser cutting, CNC machining, and welding. His first core discipline was 3D printing, the process of making a solid object from a digital model, as members don’t need to pay for the materials.

“I was studying 10 or 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” he recalled.

This drive was born of necessity, but Roth soon discovered he had a natural aptitude for it. The opportunity to “make something” appealed, given that he had spent much of his career as a C Sharp programmer. C Sharp is considered a bit outdated today; the most popular and employer-friendly languages are Java and Python. ”My skills didn’t port to the cloud,” said Roth.

Fortunately, TechShop was catering to a different kind of entrepreneurship, and fueling a kind of “Renaissance” for hardware startups. So it didn’t take long before TechShop’s most dedicated member began to receive requests for help.

A number of other makers desperately needed an extra pair of hands to get their prototypes developed and products shipped on time. Many of them were freshly-minted after successfully raising funds for their projects on sites like Kickstarter. A dab hand with a laser cutter, Roth could charge upwards of $20 an hour.

Within a few months, Roth was able to move into a house for startup founders. Chris Fornof, a TechShop member and community builder at 3D gesture controller company LeapMotion, paid his rent for several months “purely out of the goodness of his heart,” Roth said.

He sent a good portion of his earnings to his family in Vegas and started making plans to relocate them to the Bay Area.

OpenROV cofounder David Lang at TechShop

“Marc had this tenacity, commitment to learning and re-skilling,” said David Lang, a member of TechShop who started taking classes around the same time.

Similarly to Roth, Lang’s living situation was unstable. For the past year or so, he had resided on a sailboat in Berkeley, Calif. After discovering TechShop, he saw an opportunity to reinvent himself as a maker.

Lang learned how to build robots and work with machines in less than six months. His first project, a mini submarine for amateur ocean exploration called OpenROV, raised $111,000 on Kickstarter. Lang would later hire Roth on a contractual basis.

By this time, makers were starting to get mainstream media attention. Lang recently launched a second Kickstarter campaign to fund a book on his experiences.

A maker, remade

Fast forward a few years to spring 2013. Roth is now an entrepreneur with a funded laser company. He threw himself into design with such gusto that he’s an Autodesk instructor, consults for LeapMotion, and teaches seven classes at TechShop.

Most importantly to him, Roth still regularly interfaces with the local homeless. He’s a living testament that the right program can make all the difference.

His dream is to build his own version of TechShop called “the Learning Shelter” that specifically caters to the homeless. He envisions a venue with shower facilities (a desperate need in the city), accommodation at a nearby church, computers, equipment, 3D printers, and an openness to any and all ideas. He claims to be already in the early stages of discussions with Autodesk about potentially donating computers.

Roth and business partner Matt Stollenwerk unload a laser cutter for new business “SF Laser.”

But the maker movement is no quick-fix solution, in part because existing homeless programs aren’t ready to embrace it. “With few exceptions, I’ve heard nothing but resistance from shelters,” said Roth.

One of the exceptions is Project Homeless Connect, a nonprofit that caters to the roughly 6,500 homeless people in San Francisco, according to a recent count (I use the word “count” in the literal sense; the actual number is thought to be far higher.)

Director Kara Zordel said the main goal is to help the homeless develop the skills they need to take job openings at tech companies. “If they were just given a little training, they could apply,” she said.

Can the tech industry be a true “meritocracy?”

Zordel believes the tech community has a responsibility to its most underserved population. After all, technology is supposed to level the playing field; we often hear the term “meritocracy” bandied about.

However, homeless people have scant access to computers. To make matters worse, it’s exhausting to simply secure housing. If a homeless person isn’t lucky enough to win the lottery for a 90-day bed, they are forced to queue up for a one-day bed. Those with the best shot have stood in line since 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. the previous night. Good luck competing in a meritocracy if you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a safe place.

Glover, who met Roth through a mutual friend, has not been lucky enough to secure a bed for the night. At this juncture in our conversation, he hands me a resume and shows a video reel for his acting work. He doesn’t ask for anything but a job. “It feels like we’re stuck in this cycle,” he said.

And there’s another challenge — the lack of self-belief after being told “no” for so many years. Roth tells a revealing story about a friend from a shelter who needed to be coaxed just to admit his life’s goal to open a chicken restaurant. “People aren’t comfortable seeing themselves as creative,” he said. “They just don’t see their own potential.”

With the Learning Shelter, Roth’s goal is to shine a light on the true face of homelessness and a community that is plagued with misconceptions. “I worked hard all my life, but the world changed,” said Roth. But he adapted — it just took $49 for a month’s membership, a 3D printer, and an open door policy.

As Roth wrote on his profile in TechShop’s meetup group, “I haven’t had a bad experience with anyone I’ve met here. I’m so at home here.”

• Want to help the homeless? Attend the next meetup for homeless innovation. Zordel tweets one request a day for a homeless adult or child — search and share via the hashtag #EDCDailyNeed. 
• Interested in joining TechShop? Check out our feature here. 
• Eager to learn more about the Maker Movement? The Maker Faire takes place on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California. 

TechShop images via Dylan Tweney; Marc Roth and Scott Glover images via Christina Farr

This is a guest post by designer Jim Clark 

When I first found out about Kickstarter, I thought it was a great idea. I’ve been making things all my life. As the owner of a visual effects and imaging studio, designing, rendering and visually developing creations is right up my alley. I wanted to use Kickstarter to prove the popular viability of my creations. If the crowd funded my ideas, there was a good chance that the market at large would also be interested.

When I came up with the concept for the UNRULY line of GoPro cases and accessories, the Kickstarter crowd loved the idea. Our two primary products, the Headcase Pro and HeadGear, hit $36,000 in funding — $9,000 more than our original goal — in 30 days.

I thought I understood the process that came after funding was complete. Prior to Kickstarter, I’d taken multiple product lines from concept through manufacturing and delivery. These products were sold in high-design outlets, including Fred Segal and MOMA San Diego. It turned out that those previous victories had little bearing on what happened with Kickstarter. Funding was only half the battle.

With Kickstarter, everything that came after the funding was unexpected and frustrating. Here are my lessons learned.

It’s not a hobby, it’s a company

Creators often overlook the fact that funding a project can quickly become a serious game. You might launch on Kickstarter as a fun way to finance a fun project, but when you start executing that little project, it can easily balloon into a $1 million proposition. At that point, it’s no longer a hobby. It’s a company.

In order to manufacture and distribute your product, you end up beholden to suppliers, manufacturers and everyone else along your supply chain, as well as investors. With Kickstarter, your funders aren’t given any information about how hard it really is to pull off the successful delivery of your product. They’re continually reminding you of what they want and need, and you’re scrambling to assuage their fears.

This became a real problem for us. In general, if you’re successful, Kickstarter funding is only equal to one-third to one-quarter of the sales that you get through wholesale and other retail. While 200 people ordered our products on Kickstarter, we also ended up with a tremendous amount of sales outside of that.

We’d raised $36,000, but in order to pay for everything, we had to raise another $100,000. It could take up to three weeks after your Kickstarter is fully funded to get your money, so it’s not uncommon to find yourself scrambling for additional funds.

Delays are the norm

That lag is one reason that roughly 75 percent of Kickstarter projects are delivered late. Another reason is that Kickstarter doesn’t provide you with any resources beyond your initial funding. If you get into trouble later, you’re on your own.

Many creators face unexpected costs. Our injection mold, for example, relieved us of $25,000. Other creators run into problems because they don’t have the know-how, the expert advice or the resources to produce their products. Without the support of outside entities, creators can run their entire business into the ground before they even deliver their first product.

In our case, the manufacturers delivered all of our products to us three months late. Because of that delay, we missed our primary summer sales. By the time we shipped to our customers, GoPro had changed their entire product design. That obsoleted all of our products, which were designed for the previous model of GoPro, and we’re still paying for it today.

Some policies can stifle creators

Kickstarter’s lack of ongoing, post-funding support is one of several problems that have turned the company into a non-starter for us. Kickstarter has several other policies in place that stifle creators.

They deny projects without explanation.

Kickstarter turns down 25 percent of project applicants, but is notorious for not providing an explanation as to why. The process appears to be subjective and opaque. They won’t allow any projects related to pets, for example, but they’ll let a guy raise $5,000 to hire a skywriting plane to write weird things in clouds. 

Creators aren’t allowed to show virtual renderings, only finished products.

In today’s Apple design society, the design component of any product is critical to its acceptance, regardless of the technology. It is imperative that we show our idea as a visualization. The key to a succesful design project is the visualization stage. Kickstarter is against this because it doesn’t want backers to confuse photo-realistic renders for a final product. The platform does allow drawings and CAD designs, but virtual renderings are important to a lot of pitches.

Because Kickstarter is an important step in testing an idea and funding it, it’s really important that the creator is able to use all of the tools possible to communicate what the end product is going to be. This includes photo-real renderings to communicate the message or idea of the product. Without the ability to use these visualization tools, the creator is forced into taking an idea further down the road than they may be comfortable with, before they test the waters and acceptance in the market.

For example, our newest product, the Reactor, is very technically challenging and cost-prohibitive to put into production. If we’re not allowed to show potential designs before manufacturing the product, we wouldn’t be able to proceed, because there’s no way to communicate what we’re trying to make.

They eliminate the ability to buy more than one of an object

Kickstarter says “we are not a store.” Yet there are a number of projects that were successful on Kickstarter precisely because consumers were able to buy them in quantities. Kickstart is kicking themselves in the butt by wiping out the ability to buy more than one of something. They’re alienating their user base of entrepreneurs by dictating how those creators should create a message around their product and how many to sell. There’s a sort of idealism in that dictum that doesn’t sync with Kickstarter’s user base.

There are greener pastures for crowdfunding

A crowdfunding site should be designed with the highest regard to the needs of the crowd, not of the founders of the site or the people programming it. Kickstarter is trying to fit its creators into a format that isn’t the best one for building a sustainable business. Their rules aren’t necessarily for the benefit of the people paying the bills.

Starting a business is a commitment. In leaving Kickstarter, I’m looking beyond the dating phase of a funding-only platform. I want a crowdfunding platform that can give me a long-term commitment. There are other fish in the sea, so for the Reactor launch we’re casting our funding nets from a better-built vessel.

Designer, inventor, animator and entrepreneur — Jim Clark pushes the digital industry envelope, from tech product creation to innovative visual effects techniques. Jim’s industrialist momentum derives from his finite attention to detail, insatiable curiosity, and sincere desire to create and improve design as a whole. With a true appreciation for virtual and tangible products that look aesthetically pleasing and exude sentient excellence, Jim approaches his day-to-day with an eye to achieve perfection and his mind’s eye is already envisioning the next best thing.

Jim has developed and launched a number of high-design and high-tech products, leaning on practicality, design aesthetics and creative branding efforts. Along the way Jim also founded Hive-FX, a successful visual imaging studio, with the credits of Grimm for NBC, NIKE and HP, and the brands MONSTERCINE, UNRULY, NOWWATCH, Pinata and Ruins, which Jim developed.

Little Riot is a Newcastle, UK-based startup that makes one of the more intriguing hardware products we’ve come across.

It’s called Pillow Talk, and it lets you hear your long-distance loved one’s heartbeat.

So, it’s like an iOS/Android-powered baby monitor for adults. Weird, right?

Here’s a video showing more about how it actually works:

In a word, you and your special someone each wear a wristband, which picks up your heartbeats. The wristbands then transmit that heartbeat to a speaker inside a pillow, via a smartphone app, so you can lay your head on the pillow and hear your lover’s actual heartbeat, in real time, from far away.

Little Riot founder Joanna Montgomery got the idea while working on a degree in interaction design at Dundee University in Scotland. Her project proved so popular that she started a company to turn it into a marketable product. It hasn’t always been easy, as she says, but she’s making her dream into a reality.

We interviewed Montgomery last week at SXSW Interactive to find out more about what makes her company work. She showed us a prototype and a 3-D printed mockup of what the finished product will look like (shown above).

“It just uses a light, and a sensor, and measures the change in density in your arm when your blood pulses,” Montgomery explained.

“I realized that existing methods of communication are very two-dimensional and they’re all screen-based… They all require active participation,” Montgomery said. “Whereas when you’re actually with someone, physically, you can come home and you can sit in the same room with someone and be connected to them but not have to actually engage with them.”

She’s a bit of an accidental entrepreneur. “It started as my university project, and then it got picked up by a technology blog, and quickly went viral on the Internet,” Montgomery said. “The reception’s been phenomenal.”

While she acknowledges the challenges of setting up a hardware startup straight out of university, she’s been helped by a very favorable climate for startups in the UK. According to the World Bank, it takes just 13 days to set up a business in the UK,  compared to the OECD average of 15 days.  In addition, the UK has the lowest barriers to entrepreneurship in the world and has the third least barriers to trade and investment in the world.

Montgomery also got help from UK Trade & Investment, which sponsored a number of events at SXSW aimed at highlighting UK-based companies and the investment opportunities in the UK, and which facilitated introductions “across the pond” for companies eager to expand their business globally.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Fresh launched its social product testing and review platform today that connects young hardware companies with people to review their products.

For a long time, hardware was out of fashion. Now, due to developments in design and manufacturing technology, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, and the rise of trends such as the Quantified Self movement and the Internet of Things, it is back in style. It seems like cool and connected gadgets are infiltrating every part of our existence, whether it is to fix posture, protect your home, or play video games, or sous vide a pork chop.

Product reviews are a key part of the consumer electronic industry. Retailers, journalists, and expert reviewers test out new products and share their feedback as a reference tool. However, community-generated reviews are growing in popularity as people begin to doubt the veracity of ‘expert’ recommendations (CNET). Amidst all these changes, fresh founder Stephan Svajian saw an opportunity.

“We are disrupting the way traditional companies launch physical products,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Changes in the manufacturing process make it easier to produce hardware, but it is risky for these companies to go to market without customer reviews. In order to cross this chasm, we need a much broader signal about the quality of the products.”

Fresh partners with hardware startups that are interested in putting their products in the hands of product reviewers. People interested in working as a reviewer sign up and receive a notification if they are invited to test out a product. Testers must be verified through their Facebook profiles and can move up in the line by digital referring their friends. Manufactures send their products to the people at the front of the line. They then take the products for a test drive and provide their feedback.

The most popular products featured on the site now include highly buzzed items like Pebble, Lytro, Leap, Lockitron, Fitbit Flex, LUMOback, and OUYA gaming console. Users can “be the first kid on the block” to access hot new gadgets and hardware startups get the benefit of direct user feedback and exposure. After just three months, the company already has 36 products on the platform and the financial backing of Yammer’s CEO and CPO, David Sacks and James Patterson.

There is no business model on the horizon. Rather, Svajian and cofounder Geroge Truong are committed to bringing as many “amazing products” on the platform to add ensure that the popularity of hardware startups isn’t just a passing fad, but rather an established and thriving corner of the tech world.

This company officially emerged out of stealth mode, is within days of shipping its first batch of devices, and announced $6 million in its first round of funding. Connected Data manufactures the Transporter, a piece of hardware that is “online, but off-cloud” for privately sharing, accessing, and protecting files.

The investment was led by a diiptych of gates- Floodgate and Northgate Capital, who are paving the way for Connected Data to distribute their product nationwide.

The Transporter’s $100,000 Kickstarter campaign launched in December and successfully brought in $260,000 from 1,055 backers. Since then, Connected Data signed a deal with a large technology distributor and partnered with national retailers to bring the Transporter to market.

Using the Transporter, people can communicate and shares files with computers and other Transporters from anywhere in the world. It enables communication and global access, while also ensuring security. Traditional hardware storage is not connected to the internet which makes it challenging to share and sync data, while cloud options can be expensive and unreliable for people with large storage needs. The Transporter bridges the gap between the two.

Connected Data was founded in 2011 by “storage professionals” who were frustrated by the available options. Now, there are three versions of the Transporter available. A $199 device with no storage built in, a $299 device with 1 TB, and a $399 with 2 TB of storage.

The team is based in Santa Clara, Calif. Read the company’s blog post. 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Starting today, Verizon Wireless retail stores will start selling Square hardware — the nifty credit card-reading dongle for smartphones and tablets.

The craziest part: The iOS and Android dongles are selling for $9.97, which includes a $10 Square credit.

That’s right: Verizon is literally giving away Square readers. And there are no contracts required.

Of course, if you don’t already have an iOS or Android tablet for your small business, the Square card reader gives you a pretty good reason to snap one up (along with a contract) while you’re in the store, so it could turn out to be a pretty good deal for Verizon.

Square already gives away free card readers to any merchant who signs up. But taking the readers into retail makes it even easier for tech-wary merchants and small-business owners — the kind who are still so tech-wary they don’t take credit cards — to get onboard with the plastic revolution.

As Verizon exec Paul Macchia states on the company blog, “Now merchants have a better chance to close the sale when a prospective customer doesn’t have enough cash on hand but truly wants the product or service.”

Square’s mobile card readers can be purchased at more than 30,000 other retail stores, from the Apple Store and Best Buy to Target, Walmart, and even Starbucks, all with similar price points and rebates.

Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most well-known incubator, is finally getting onboard with the hackathon, an event trend so well-established it’s almost passé. But the YC twists keep the concept fresh and will definitely interest a bevy of developers.

The YC event will be centered around hardware, and participants will have a clear shot and becoming Y Combinator funded companies if their work is promising.

Hardware hackathons themselves are a relatively new concept; they allow attendees to design, hack on, and improve hardware of all kinds, from server racks to — well, one’s imagination is the only limit.

The hackathon is being run by Upverter, a DEMO-launched company we’ve been following with great interest. Upverter gives hardware hackers valuable software for creating, sharing, and collaborating around hardware designs.

Upverter recently conducted a two-day hardware hackathon for the Open Compute Project, a Facebook-led organization for open-source hardware — specifically, open-source data center hardware. Upverter co-founder Zak Homuth told VentureBeat via email that hackathon participants took their designs “all the way from idea to hardware in just nine hours. … All of the hacks are mostly complete, very demoable, and some ready to manufacture.”

Homuth said he expects the same for the YC hackathon. “[The] plan is to get 80 or so teams together, enable them with tools, then much like the OCP hack, we expect they will spend most of the hack designing new hardware, adding features to their existing hardware startups products, and most importantly meeting like minded hackers.

“Hopefully some future YC companies get formed!”

However, while the OCP hardware hackathon was all about servers, Homuth expects a wildly different focus (or lack of focus) from the YC crowd. “Imagine stuff like Fitbit, Pebble, Lockitron, Wattvision, Double Robotics, etc.

“I want to see more quantified self stuff. More sensors. More small distributed smart phone connected hardware 2.0. Cyborgs FTW.”

If you want to play ball, you’ll need to start working now to refine your idea, learn about the available tools for hardware design, start working on a design diagram, and get your laptop environment squared away for the big day.

Interested parties can apply online. The event will take place February 23, 2013, at YC’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. Accepted participants will be notified by February 8, 2013.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — This morning, Facebook and a slew of big names in cloud computing and data center hardware unleashed a whole boatload of news — new hardware designs, new jobs, and new partnerships — all around the Open Compute Project.

AMD and Intel both showed off some new hardware products. Rackspace announced it has customized its own server hardware around OCP designs — and contributed its customizations back to the project. And Fusion-io was talking about its new 3.2TB ioScale card, also an OCP product.

The Open Compute Project is the Internet and hardware industries’ attempt to make computing vastly more efficient by pooling knowledge and resources. Close competitors are actually working collaboratively to come up with a better motherboard, a better power supply. And it’s not just industry titans, either; anyone can download and modify the specs for Open Compute hardware.

Why should anyone with a day job and a social life care about this?

Two reasons: First, every time you click anything anywhere on the Internet, it takes a tiny toll on the environment — something with the impact of an ant’s footstep on a boulder. It takes electricity to power the machines that process the clicks and carry the data around the world, and most of that energy ain’t coming from wind farms.

Second, every click, every bit of data costs the companies behind web services a tiny amount of money, maybe hundredths of a cent, maybe thousandths of a cent. They’re paying to power the services, to store the data, and to employ the folks who keep the machines running.

In aggregate, those tiny costs add up to tons and tons of carbon and billions of dollars in bottom-line costs for companies like Facebook, Amazon, et cetera. So by putting aside their differences and competitiveness just long enough to make better, faster, cheaper, kinder-for-the-planet servers, these companies are ensuring a better environment for all of us as well as lower operating costs (and higher profits) for themselves — something Facebook in particular can’t afford to overlook.

This open-source hardware movement is still in its early days. Today marks the start of the Project’s fourth Open Compute Summit; while the first Open Compute efforts were driven by Facebook, today’s summit is thick with IT corporations from around the world.

“We’re seeing signs that the industry is changing, it’s becoming more open,” said Facebook hardware chief Frank Frankovsky (pictured above and below) today in his opening keynote. “Suppliers are seeing that there’s a radical change in this space.”

And as hardware becomes more open, not unlike the world of software, where open-source is the backbone of most systems, Frankovsky and others try to look into the near future and figure out where Open Compute and its network of partners should go next.

“Where it’s all headed in my mind is about breaking up the monolith … disaggregating the system design,” he said.

What that means, he continued, is changing the way data center hardware works. Instead of moving slowly and changing out whole stacks of hardware, Frankovsky says hardware should become — and is becoming — more flexible to meet consumers’ needs, more customizable to different configurations, and more quick to adapt to innovation.

“Today, one of the biggest challenges in hardware design is trying to predict where the software’s gonna be,” said Frankovsky. “There’s an impedance mismatch between the speed at which software moves and the speed at which hardware can move.”

He said “smarter technology refreshes and upgrades” is another challenge. So for OCP, breaking up the monolith means malleable configurations for data center gear, smarter tech upgrades, faster innovation for speedier components, and above all, openness.

New OCP members announced today include players in storage, telecom, and microprocessors: SanDisk, EMC2, Fusion-io, HGST, ARM, Tilera, Calxeda, NTT Data, and Orange. Cole Crawford, a Linux Foundation advisor and former Nebula exec, has been named OCP’s COO and is its first full-time employee.

Another exciting news item is the opening of OCP’s first international chapter, OCP Asia Pacific. With partners like Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba, OCP already has a significant foothold in Asian markets, which are themselves hugely important hubs for hardware design and manufacturing. Interest in the region has been so strong that Frankovsky said some interested parties had taken it upon themselves to translate OCP specs into Japanese. Plus, he pointed out, “Asia’s going to have their own way to focus on their own issues,” such as earthquake tolerance and high-density physical spaces.

For Facebook’s part, the company is open-sourcing cold-storage versions of OpenVault and OpenStack, which are in use in its new-ish Sub-Zero cold storage facility, as well as Dragonstone, a new database server for its Swedish data center featuring high availability with dual motherboards and power supplies.

For more specifics, check out the OCP’s blog post on today’s announcements, and stay tuned for more news from the Summit.

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Tech journalism’s annual festival of self-loathing is in full swing. I refer, of course, to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that will draw, this year, over 150,000 visitors and nearly as many blog posts complaining about how irrelevant and miserable it is.

I won’t argue about the miserable part. When you take people from all over the world, many of whom were just visiting with family members a week ago, and cram them into a single, shared space with industrial ventilation systems, you’ve got one of the most efficient systems for transferring pathogens ever invented. It’s crowded, the lines for cabs and coffee are long, and it takes forever to get anywhere, whether that’s from Caesar’s Palace to Mandalay Bay or merely from one side of the Las Vegas Convention Center to the other.

Plus, the news is weak and much of it is just boring. Nearly every so-called press conference is really a press briefing, as our copy editor somewhat crankily pointed out earlier this week: They are presentations with no chance for the journalists and bloggers present to ask questions, let alone handle the products being shown and form well-grounded opinions on them. They’re pseudo-events designed to crank up the hype on products that no one in their right mind would get excited about: large-screen televisions, incremental improvements to old computers, consumer cameras, tablets, routers, wireless adapters, and audio and video cabling. Yawn.

And yet, CES is still, for all its failings, one of the most important single events in the technology industry.

It’s not important as a press event, but it’s critical as a meeting place for manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of consumer electronics. I think of it as a temporary bazaar or souk on a grand scale: a huge marketplace where vendors compete to draw the attention of buyers, who flock up and down the aisles looking for a good deal, an angle, or merely an interesting distraction.

Maybe that’s why the press love to heap scorn on it: They’re not the main event. The buyers, middle-aged men from Arkansas who you might find out back sharing a cigarette, are for once the big wheels here. Sorry, disenchanted tech bloggers, you’re not the center of attention here.

But even for the media, CES is valuable as a meeting place, if not as a news source or a predictor of what will be hot in the coming year. Just showing up helps build relationships and establish connections that are hard to get any other way — and in many cases it does give you an early chance to get your hands on the latest ridiculous inventions.

CES is also a barometer for where the hardware industry is going. Yes, hardware as we know it is dying. Software is more important than ever, and there hasn’t been a world-changing product unveiling at CES for years. The action has shifted to apps and cloud services, and it’s arguable that those are all more important than the hardware used to deliver them to consumers. But the pendulum may be starting to swing back, and CES 2013 shows the first signs of it.

For the past few years, hardware-focused startups have gradually come back into vogue, attracted by the ease of utilizing cheap overseas manufacturers, the opportunity to enhance silicon and metal with clever software, and the margins and lock-in that a well-run hardware business can offer. The organizers of CES recognize this, and this year they’ve devoted an even larger section of the show to startups and emerging technologies. Called Eureka Park, this area is the one I’m most excited about.

I’m not at CES this year, for the first time in about eight years, but VentureBeat is: Dean Takahashi, Devindra Hardawar, and Sean Ludwig are tackling CES 2013 with gusto. They’ve already uncovered plenty of interesting technologies, from transformative products like Nvidia’s 72-core Tegra 4 processor to sublimely ridiculous gadgets like a smart fork and film cameras with brightly colored trim.

I’m glad to be missing the crowds and the inevitable CES disease that I seem to contract, year after year. But you know what? I kind of miss the action.

Photo: VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig is excited to head into CES Unveiled, the first overcrowded press event of the show.

When Honeycutt bought his first iPhone several years ago, he loved being able to use the earbuds to talk to a friend on the go, but he was irritated by the tangled-up iPhone cord. So he cut off two-thirds of the chord and linked the remaining part to a Bluetooth device, which can be neatly attached to your collar.

This week, the serial entrepreneur launched a Kickstarter campaign with a goal to raise $150,000 in funding for the mass production of his customizable bluetooth earbuds, known as “Elroy.” Honeycutt understands the risks and potential rewards of starting a manufacturing company. In the late ’80s, he was the one-man operation behind Timbuk2, making bags in his apartment in San Francisco.

Elroy is a bit of a departure from sporty messenger bags, but since selling Timbuk2 five years ago, Honeycutt has been looking for a new challenge.

“We’re going to do something different that can’t be done in Asia,” said Honeycutt. “The real excitement is when you build it [the product] and get it [to consumers] within a day or two.” Elroy will be produced in the U.S.

He was the first to implement an online ‘build-your-own’ mass customization, which would later become the inspiration for the NIKE iD customization program.

According to Honeycutt, the competition includes Skullcandy and Jawbone, but these players only offer a limited production selection. “With our domestic customization processes we will be able to offer a much, much wider variation of product and we will be able to keep retailers in stock on all models,” he said.

Elroy’s parent company is Snik LLC, which was founded in 2007 and is based in Berkeley, Calif.  Snik owns a series of patents addressing earbud cord management devices. Honeycutt told me that Elroy is a one-man show for now (although there are half a dozen contractors working on the product), but hiring will commence when they open a production facility.

Here’s the explanatory video:

This year, Silicon Valley had a few big moments of clarity and cooperation between entrepreneurs and digitally-savvy patients and doctors.

Outraged by the healthcare industry’s slow adoption of digital systems, some tech entrepreneurs questioned whether doctors could be replaced by machines altogether. Vinod Khosla likened modern medicine to witchcraft, and IBM supercomputer Watson was set to work to help oncologists treat cancer patients at Sloan-Kettering.

Encouraged by “meaningful use” incentives, healthcare providers and hospitals finally embraced the cloud. In 2012, 72 percent of office-based physicians used electronic medical record or electronic health record (EMR/EHR) systems, up from 48 percent in 2009.

To empower patients to monitor and track their health, entrepreneurs produced some seriously cool hardware: one Cambridge, Mass. startup developed an under-helmet skullcap that alerts a nearby physician when an athlete’s collision is potentially dangerous. Another created a biosensor that uses an iPhone or iPad camera to provide touch free heart rate measurements. MIT researchers produced Bandu, a small wristwatch-like device that will monitor the body for signs of stress then take steps to counteract it.

Many of these entrepreneurs were supported by venture capital firms for the first time. Venture investment in digital health grew by 43 percent year over year, according to a soon-to-be released report from Rock Health.

With so much activity in this space, VentureBeat sat down with Nate Gross, cofounder of Rock Health and doctors’ social network Doximity, to compile a list of the ten biggest health-tech stories that shocked and amazed us this year.

10. Scanadu brings vitals home

Scanadu recently unveiled three devices that can be used at home to monitor and track your vitals. One of them, Scout, is a sensor that people hold up to their temple; in less than ten seconds, it will collect data on pulse, heart rate, electrical heart activity, temperature, heart rate variability, and blood oxygenation. The device should be available by the end of 2013 for $150. The company’s founding team includes Walter De Brouwer, an academic and founder of TEDGlobal. De Brouwer was inspired to start the company after his son suffered a brain trauma and was hospitalized for a year.

The story: “‘People can get access information about health and connect to each other about health, but the piece that is missing is that people can’t get information about their own body,’ said De Brouwer. ‘By getting precision diagnostics into the hands of people, this can enable them to get early detection and to inform their conversations with their doctor in the ways that haven’t been possible.’

9. The rise of Practice Fusion

Practice Fusion, a provider of free, web-based EHRs, experienced a meteoric rise this year. It was no overnight success. The company launched in 2005, when there were few incentives for doctors to abandon paper-based systems. Company spokesperson Emily Peters said the stimulus plan and government investment in health IT kept them from going out of business during the economic recession. When Practice Fusion’s users (around 50 percent are doctors) started to receive meaningful use checks in March or April this year to adopt and use an EHR, the technology took off.

“This is the year we went from being the scrappy startup to a big deal” said Peters. A survey conducted by InterWest partners found Practice Fusion is considered the most likely EHR company to go public, followed by ZocDoc and Castlight. In July, the company raised $34 million at a valuation of $500 million, up from $100 million in its previous financing round.

The story: ”‘Ninety percent of doctors do have a computerized billing system, but 90 percent of doctors don’t have an electronic medical records system,’ said Practice Fusion CEO and cofounder Ryan Howard. ‘That means the focus is on getting paid, not on healthcare.’”

8. VCs open their checkbooks

Venture capital investment in med tech and health IT skyrocketed this year. According to Rock Health’s survey, 135 digital health companies raised more than $2 million in funding. Among the 177 investors that poured funds into these companies, roughly 10 percent are completely new to the space (based on a sample from a single quarter). Why this surge in interest? Morganthaler, the venture firm that invested in Doximity and Practice Fusion among others, saw it coming.

“As the requirements under both the HITECH Act and the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare] continue to roll out, there will be additional opportunities for startups in healthcare,” said Rebecca Lynn, a health-tech focused partner at Morganthaler. These acts change the incentives in healthcare with both a carrot and a stick. She explained, “As the incentives change, payors and providers will need to adopt new technologies provided by these startups to be efficiently compliant and competitive.”

In recent months, angel investors also stepped up their investment in health tech, in part due to partnerships like SecondMarket’s with Startup Health.

The story: ”‘Our members might be interested [in health tech] from a macro perspective, but they don’t feel comfortable enough to deploy capital,’” said Jeremy Smith, SecondMarket’s CSO. SecondMarket’s investors are encouraged to pour thousands of dollars into promising health tech startups as well as Startup Health’s new fund. According to a document available to SecondMarket’s network of accredited investors, Startup Health is building up a $7.5 million Innovation Fund to support up to 100 digital health and wellness startups.”

7. Health tech incubators proliferate

A growing number of startup accelerator programs this year specialized in digital health. Nike+ launched its accelerator in partnership with TechStars to encourage developers to build health and fitness applications. This year, the New York Digital Health Accelerator, a program with an initial investment of $4.2 million, also announced its inaugural class. This is indicative of two things: increasing venture capital investment in the space and a booming interest among entrepreneurs.

The story: “The catch: all the products these companies create will have to use the Nike+ platform and/or NikeFuel ‘to build offerings that inspire and assist people to live more active, healthy lifestyles.’”

6. The steady move to the cloud

By 2014, Obamacare mandates hospitals and practitioners with paper records switch to electronic medical records. It will not be a simple transition. However, physicians see the benefits of storing health records in the cloud, which makes it cheaper and faster to organize massive amounts of information. At Seattle’s Children Hospital, in one notable case, researchers were able to work with a huge amount of data to identify patients whose cells looked similar, and identify a rare bone disease called craniosynostosis.

The story: “‘The healthcare industry is fragmented, complex and paper-based,’ said Darin Brannan, president and CEO of ClearDATA, a provider of cloud computing services. In 2012, that began to change with the major shift toward web-based EMR technology.”

5. The Allscripts drama

One-time high flyer Allscripts seemed poised for success, given the EHR boom due to government stimuli. But the company landed in a steaming pile of drama in April after its chairman was fired in a board dispute and three directors resigned in protest. With shares plummeting, the Chicago-based company announced it would bring on a new CEO lured from its rival, Cerner. Then, the company experienced a sales slowdown when customers tried to upgrade to a new product — one that would actually let their doctors’ offices and hospitals share digital patient records.

The story: “The lesson for up-and-coming health IT vendors? ‘The meltdown showcased the rocky transition our sector is going through trying to get legacy vendors to quickly adapt to a changing marketplace and regulatory pressure,’ said Peters of Practice Fusion.

4. Human genome sequencing hits $1000

The quest to harness the potential of human DNA for the purposes of diagnostics and drug treatment hit a major threshold in January 2012: the thousand-dollar genome. Carslbad, Calif.-based Life Technologies introduced a machine to map an individual’s genetic makeup. The news inspired entrepreneurs to harness this data, banishing a one-size-fits-all approach to medicine.

The story: ”‘Every disease has a genetic component, and yet largely none of the available genetic information is being used today to treat patients,’ said Dr. Dietrich Stephan, cofounder of Navigenics. ’With the knowledge we have now about your genes, we are finding ways to diagnose sick people earlier and develop medicines to zap the core defect.’”

3. Khosla made THAT prediction

Tehc luminary Vinod Khosla declared at the Rock Health Innovation Summit that medicine is not so disimilar to witchcraft. The entrepreneur, who made his mark during the dot-com boom, said that machines driven by large data sets and computations power would be better for patients than the average physician and imagined a doctor-free future. Needless to say, this went over great with the medical community.

The story: “‘Eventually, we won’t need the doctor,’ said Khosla. Columbia University-trained doctor Bijan Salehizadeh was one of many critics who vocalized resistance, responding that he was ‘nauseated’ by Khosla’s remarks.”

2. Amazon unveils its free genetic database

Armed with data, developers with little or no medical training can help determine the underlying genetic cause for some of the most common diseases. Amazon’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, announced in March it would store for public use the entire contents of the National Institutes of Health’s 1000 Genomes Project, a survey of genetic information around 200 terabytes in size.

Developers can freely access the system and can choose whether or not to share their research. The people in the study consented to have their data made public, and there is no personal information linked to their genetic data.

The story: “‘It’s the only public data set like this,’ Lisa D. Brooks, program director for the Genetic Variation Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute. ‘It is an almost complete set of human genetic variants.”

1. Healthcare reaches government

Todd Park, cofounder of health IT juggernauts Athenahealth and Castlight, was promoted from CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services to CTO of the United States.

With this executive appointment, med tech entrepreneurs gained a powerful new ally. Park was instrumental in launching the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which invites innovators from outside government to work with the powers that be to solve socio-economic problems, particularly those facing health providers and hospitals. It should come as no surprise that one of the fellowships was awarded to a team building tech to enable millions of Americans to easily and securely download their own health information electronically.

The story: “‘We have an opportunity to make this country shine,’ Park said. The government’s official document on its Digital Government Strategy broadly sets out to ‘ensure that as the government adjusts to this new digital world, we seize the opportunity to procure and manage devices, applications, and data in smart, secure and affordable ways.’”

Image credits: lenetstan/Shutterstock, JCD/Shutterstock, Maria Ly/Flickr

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Trustonic is coming out of stealth today as a provider of security systems for smart connected devices. It aims to embed security deep into the hardware, software and services of gadgets from the top to bottom.

The company is creating a global trusted hardware platform with security designed into the very heart of semiconductor chips that provide the computing power for products and services. By making systems more trustworthy, Trustronic believes it can enable a new wave of electronic commerce, from entertainment viewing on any device to mobile and enterprise applications. With the technology, consumers should be able to enjoy a wider variety of entertainment on mobile devices that will be more secure than they are today.

By embedding the technology in chips, Trustonic says it can rise above “bolt-on security” measures. The new Cambridge, England-based company was formed by ARM, the designer of low-power processors; Giesecke & Devrient (G&D), a Munich-based company that creates payment systems; and Gemalto, a Dutch digital security company that creates apps and secure personal devices such as smart cards.

Trustonic wants to enable companies to create secure systems for companies serving the enterprise, commerce, payments and entertainment. Its partners include 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, Cisco, Discretix, Good Technology, Inside Secure, Irdeto, MasterCard, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, Sprint, Symantec, and Wave Systems.

Ben Cade, chief executive of Trustonic, said, “Trustonic builds upon decades of experience between ARM, Gemalto and G&D in developing secure technology for connected devices. The launch of Trustonic marks a turning point in our connected world. It will enable us to trust our smart connected devices to protect us as they deliver essential services and innovative user experiences.”

The company will focus on the development of a GlobalPlatform compliant Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which will offer a common security standard for connected devices. The TEE will be built upon ARM TrustZone technology used in today’s low-power microprocessors, which are used in smartphones and tablets. It will be combined with security software and management systems contributed by Gemalto and G&D. Services that require high trust in people’s connected devices can gain access to the TEE on demand.

The goal is to create a platform that starts out secure, from the chip hardware on up through the software and services. Consumers will be able to enjoy content on any screen and execute payments more safely and with faster speed. If all goes as planned, service providers will be able to trust the devices being used by consumers — something that they can’t always do today. Network operators will be able to offer new services such as enterprise security, payment services, and convergent service charging, to existing contracts. Gadget makers will be able protect sensitive data such as passcodes, fingerprints and certificates. And chip makers will be able to embed security in the core of their chips.

Trustonic says it uses an open business model, allowing device makers to incorporate its security technology into their own products while enabling service providers to activate these hardware-based security measures. Executives at the team include Jon Geater, chief technology officer; Olivier Leger, executive vice president of sales and marketing; Stephan Spitz, executive vice president of engineering; and Chris Jones, chief operating officer. Cade is a former executive of ARM, which licenses the mobile processor architecture used in billions of devices.

The company was founded earlier this year.

Onity, the maker of hotel key readers that are easily hacked and unlocked, may be in the process of subsidizing the cost incurred by its customers to replace the faulty locks.

According to Forbes, memos from some of its top customers indicate that the company is sending out patched circuit boards for its locks. Customers can buy the new hardware from Onity, which will pay back the cost once the customer sends in the compromised circuit board. Its top customers include Marriott and Hyatt.

The trade-in deal is only available for locks purchased after 2005.

Recently, reports circulated about a robbery in a Texas Hyatt involving the Onity locks. A robber stole a laptop out of an HP employee’s hotel room using a hack first uncovered in July. A researcher for Mozilla named Cody Brocious found a way to trick the card readers using an open-sourced piece of hardware he threw together for less than $50. He plugged it into an AC/DC power port below the lock, flipped a switch on the device, and the lock popped open.

We spoke with Onity at the time of the theft. The company reported that its “engineers quickly developed both mechanical and technical solutions to address the issue.” These solutions, according to Onity, have been tested by two separate security firms.  Here’s the full statement:

Onity places the highest priority on the safety and security provided by its products. Immediately following the hacker’s public presentation of illegal methods of breaking into hotel rooms, Onity engineers quickly developed both mechanical and technical solutions to address the issue.

These solutions have been tested and validated by two independent security firms, and are available to customers worldwide. All requests for these solutions have already been fulfilled, or are in the process of being fulfilled.

We are disappointed that hackers are targeting electronic hotel locks and publishing methods to illegally break into hotel rooms under the guise of protecting public safety. We always look for ways we can augment our customers’ security strategies and will continue to do so.

To learn more about these solutions, customers can call Onity’s dedicated customer assistance line, which is staffed with specialists who can immediately help select and implement the best possible solution for that customer’s specific property.

hat tip Ars Technica; Hotel image via Shutterstock

Today, Lemnos Labs held an event called Hardware 2.0 at its SoMA warehouse to bring entrepreneurs, investors, experts, and innovators together to stimulate discussion about the state of hardware. Lemnos Labs is a hardware startup accelerator that provides financial backing, space, tools, mentorship, connections, and guidance to its portfolio companies. It was founded by two MIT grads who wanted to create an empowering environment where these exiles and underdogs could get their ideas off the ground.

“The hardware scene is fundamentally changing,” said founder Jeremy Conrad. “Platforms like Kickstarter have made them a lot more popular, and startups are getting funding. But a lot of the talent and expertise still go to big corporations, and entrepreneurs and venture capitalists don’t know how to talk to each other. This event is about education.”

Conrad’s opening address was titled “What changed in hardware while you were tweeting.” He cited three major shifts: developments in information technology and design tools; rapid prototyping; and more varied and accessible sources of funding.

Regular laptops can run computer-aided design (CAD) software and tools and 3-D printing is everywhere these days. Cloud companies like DropBox make file transfers more efficient, eliminating lag times due to ground shipping, and machine and electronic shops with shared tools (such as TechShop) are cropping up in cities around the country, which cuts down on manufacturing costs.

Finally, Kickstarter has in many ways acted the “Cher” to hardware’s “Tai” in “Clueless.” For those of you who don’t catch that reference (which I guess is a lot of you), let’s just say it’s a hot and sexy consumer-facing platform that paved hardware’s entrance into the cool crowd. Companies like Pebble and Ouya grew to fame and fortune through their cult following on Kickstarter and were able to raise millions of dollars. On the institutional side, venture capitalists and angels are regaining interest in robotics, connected devices, biosensors, and the Internet of Things, which is a predicted tech trend for 2013.

During his keynote speech, CEO of Kiva Systems Mick Mountz, talked about the evolution of his company from an idea on a whiteboard in his living room to a company bought by Amazon for $775 million. Despite his impressive resume, filled with degrees from MIT and Harvard and work experience at Motorola, Apple, and Webvan, he struggled to find the institutional support he needed for his idea.

“After working in e-commerce, it was clear that there were serious issues in the warehouses,” he said. “Mobile robotic order fulfillment seemed so obvious, we couldn’t believe no-one else had patents, but when I traveled to Sandhill Road back in 2002, I had the door slammed in my face because it was a hardware company. Finally, we got a private round of funding and the snowball started [rolling].”

The Kiva Mobile-robotic Fulfillment System is a combination of robots, devices, and software that makes warehouse operations far more efficient. The company went through four rounds of funding and raised over $30 million before its acquisition. Mountz’s strategy was to focus on building the product, team, and assessing customer needs until he was able to get venture backing. The investor mindset can be obscure and befuddling, particularly for hardware entrepreneurs. To provide a bit of insight, three venture capitalists sat down for a panel discussion on what they look for in startups.

“Hardware is harder, and when there is an easier way to make money, people flock to that,” said Trae Vassallo, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “The laws of physics define how fast you can manufacture, and you can hit the death line a lot quicker and more easily. Showing a prototype is one thing, executing it is another. We are picky about choosing companies capable of bringing their product to market.”

That said, the prototype is an important component of the early-stage startup. At the final session of Hardware 2.0, seven of Lemnos Labs’ nine portfolio companies made short presentations about what they are up to:

Momentum Machines is setting out to revolutionize the fast food industry by cutting costs on labor, rather than quality ingredients, with its hamburger-making robot. This robot automates the entire process of cooking a hamburger, which the company claims is more consistent, sanitary, and efficient than having people do the cooking. The machine can easily be modified as well, to serve the needs of anyone from massive national chains to gourmet food trucks. Want a burger that is 20% bison, 80% lamb, made-to-order with sliced tomatoes? You got it.

Revolve Robotics is creating a desktop robotic stand for tablets called Kubi that can enhance video calling. Kubi can move, pan, and tilt, making it easier for people in different places to share experiences and communicate.

ParqPlace is a parking system that allows drivers to reserve parking spots in advance. It integrates multiple hardware components with real-time web and mobile technology to make funding parking spots in urban areas as painless and efficient as possible.”

Blossom Coffee is a connected coffee brewing system that tries to prevent people from drinking bad coffee ever again. It measures brewing factors like grind size, heat, and extraction time to quantify what makes the best cup of coffee. Since launching, over 100 units have been requested, and Blossom is working with a slew of specialty coffee roasters, including Four Barrel and Blue Bottle, which recently raised $20 million in venture capital.

Unmanned Innovation is the company behind a development platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that wants to make it easier to manufacture UAVs for use in a range of commercial applications, including agriculture, aid work, inspections, and industrial security.

Bia is “four businesses” that came together to create a unique fitness platform for women. Women are different physiologically and physically from men, and many of the biosensors and quantified-self products are geared to the male market. Bia not only offers an attractive, female-friendly wristband but also an inspirational, habit-forming tools, and data-driven insights into health. The team is trying to build an iconic lifestyle brand that capitalizes on the 45 million women who exercise three times a week and buy 85% of all sports apparel but only 25% of sports fitness devices.

Local Motion, which recently raised $1 million, manufactures a module that can be installed in any vehicle to make it more shareable. Corporations, university campuses, and municipalities often have fleets of vehicles available for their employees’ use but do not manage these fleets in the most cost-effective or convenient way. Local Motion’s “employee mobility programs” makes vehicle sharing more efficient. It is currently deployed at the Google Campus in Mountain View, with more contracts in the pipeline.

The final company to present is tackling nothing short of outer space. Nanosatisfi is a space imaging and data platform that offers “affordable and convenient access to space.” Its nano satellite infrastructure and data collection capabilities can be used for science education, weather analysis, and a range of military, commercial, and government applications.

Interestingly, many of these companies produce consumer-facing products, while it looks like the money may be moving towards enterprise and B2B companies.

Facebook’s Open Compute Project, a huge effort to create and promote open-source hardware, is hosting its first-ever hardware hackathon.

The hackathon will take place next month in Santa Clara, Calif., at the OCP’s Open Compute Summit. The hackathon’s goal is to create a set of open-source computer hardware building blocks — kind of like Lego for computing. These blocks would eventually be applied to real-world use cases in large data centers in ways that would boost energy efficiency, make repairs simpler, and reduce overall data center costs.

Hackathon participants will be limited to just 100 people, and hardware hackers will spend between 6 and 10 hours working on the project during the two-day conference. Hackers will work in teams and will present their results at the end of the Summit.

The hackathon is a joint project between the OCP and Upverter, a DEMO-launched open-source hardware startup we’ve been keeping tabs on since it launched back in September 2011. Upverter founder Zac Homuth told VentureBeat via email that hackers in the upcoming event will be using Upverter’s software tools for the hackathon. Upverter will also be giving participants plenty of reference materials, tutorials, and one-on-one guidance throughout the event.

The Open Compute Summit will take place at the Santa Clara Convention Center on January 16 and 17, 2012. You can register now for the hackathon and the Summit. The ideation phase — which Upverter will also help with — starts as soon as you register.

Top image courtesy of Smileus, Shutterstock

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The US is home to more than 250 million registered passenger vehicles, making it the largest market for cars and trucks in the world. Of these vehicles, how many are under-used? Left to wallow in dark garages or gather dust in lonely parking lots? I do not have numbers on this, but I do know that a startup called Local Motion is working to give these cars their chance around the block.

Local Motion is the first company to graduate from the Lemnos Labs hardware incubator program. The startup manufactures a module that can be installed in any vehicle to make it more shareable. Corporations, university campuses, and municipalities often have fleets of vehicles available for their employees’ use, but do not manage these fleets in the most cost-effective or convenient way. Local Motion’s “employee mobility programs” makes vehicle sharing more efficient.

“We are trying to build better transportation networks,” said cofounder Clement Gires. “There are 2 million cars in the U.S. in fleets and those cars are meant to be shared, but the existing infrastructure is not as efficient as it should be. We provide a smarter link between the infrastructure on the ground and the people”

The technology not only replaces keys, but also transmits and collects data. Users can see available vehicles from their smart phone and hold one for immediate use. When they arrive at the parking lot (or wherever), a little light indicates the appropriate bike, car, or scooter, and it can be accessed by swiping an employee badge. GPS, accelerometer, and other monitoring technology tracks where the vehicles are and their “health status.”

“We are trying to leverage all the data collected in field,” Gires said. “How long are the vehicles moving? Where are people going? How many times a day do people take them out? How many people are on board every trip? We use this data to understand and anticipate mobility patterns at different times of day, and tell companies where to distribute their cars, what types of vehicles to have, and how many. This will save businesses a lot of money.”

Local Motion began deploying the technology two months ago at the Google campus in Mountain View, which has 150 electric vehicles and 2,000 bicycles in its fleet. The team is also targeting universities like Standard, which has 400 small electric vehicles and 1500 cars, and other large, local corporations. Ultimately, the vision is to install the technology in the vehicles at the manufacturing stage.

When Gires and his cofounder John Stanfield first started out, they were working on accreting “the most shareable vehicle ever.” However, they realized that instead of adding more vehicles to the equation, they could have a greater impact by optimizing the vehicles that are already in the market.

Local Motion was the first company  Lemnos Labs invested in, and for a while, the 4-wheel, 4-seater electric golf cart lived in the incubator’s warehouse and shared work space in SOMA. Since officially opening its doors earlier this year, Lemnos has added 9 hardware startups to its portfolio. After developing the product and successfully raising a $1 million seed round, Local Motion has moved on to its own work space in Burlingame.

Lemnos Labs was founded by Jeremy Conrad and Helen Zelmen, two MIT grads who made the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley to found a startup. They were interested in creating a hardware company, but saw that there was not a firm ecosystem in place to support them. Instead of starting their own company, they chose to nurture others.

Participants in Lemnos labs receive warehouse space, access to prototyping and testing facilities, and equipment including a full electrical bench, irons, a light machine, drill press, a grinder etc… They also have access to legal services, introductions to suppliers, mentorship, design reviews, and guest speakers, as well as an investor network.

Even though the overhead expenses can be higher for hardware companies than software companies, Conrad said there is greg excitement surrounding the potential of these companies and platforms like Kickstarter are making it easier to bring a hardware product to market.

“Hardware matters because there are a lot of problems that can’t be addressed on the software side,” Conrad said. “We happen to live in the physical world, it will never go away. That is why we are passionate about this. The perception may be that is is too hard, but there has been a radical shift in the past 10 years of what it takes to get a hardware company of the ground. These companies are showing us what they can do.”

To be accepted into the program, a startup must demonstrate that it has a manufacturable, scaleable product with real-world applications. The goal is to give startups the resources to prove their concepts, create a working prototype, or sell production hardware. Basically, to make enough progress to raise funding and venture out on their own.

Now that they have raised a seed round, Local Motion intends to expand the product and deliver it more broadly. Gires said he would like to get 10 big, local customers in the next year with more than 50 cars each. This initial investment came from Tim Draper of Draper Associates, Jerry Yang of Ame Cloud Ventures, Ash Patel of Morado Ventures, and Tony Hsieh from the The Vegas Tech Fund.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Think Microsoft’s hardware efforts are just a hobby? Think again. According to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, hardware is set to become a core component of his company’s future.

“This is a significant shift, both in what we do and how we see ourselves — as a devices and services company,” he wrote in a letter to investors yesterday.

Ballmer’s message is an important one, as it comes two weeks ahead of the launch of both Windows 8 and the Surface tablet, Microsoft’s latest stab at hardware.

Both products are key to Microsoft’s shifting strategy, which Ballmer says means a more consistent integration of software, services, and hardware. This is a proven strategy that’s worked extremely well for Apple, and one that Microsoft has every reason to emulate.

But while Microsoft is stepping up its own hardware efforts, Ballmer also stressed that the company isn’t leaving its hardware partners behind.

“In all our work with partners and on our own devices, we will focus relentlessly on delivering delightful, seamless experiences across hardware, software, and services,” he wrote.

In all, Ballmer uses the word “partner” eight times in the letter, an emphasis that’s not particularly surprising  given some of the mixed reactions of Microsoft partners to its Surface tablet:  HP called it a sign of leadership, Lenovo doesn’t see it as much of a threat, and Acer is plain terrified of it.

While it’s too early to say which of these reactions is most justified, we do know this: Device announcements are going to be the norm, not the exception, for Microsoft in the future.

Photo: James Pickover/VentureBeat

Lark, the startup that makes those nifty sleep-tracking, insomnia-curing wristbands, has just taken its product a step further. Today, the company launched a new wristband that brings diet and exercise into the biometic fold.

Called Larklife, the new product combines hardware and software to track personal health factors such as how many steps you take, how many calories you burn, and how soundly you sleep. That data is gathered automatically and passively by Larklife’s dual wristband hardware: one band for sleeping, the other for waking hours.

Food tracking has been built into a one-click process; just tap a button on your wristband, and you can enter your nutritional info on the free Larklife iPhone app at your leisure.

The system then analyzes the data and makes personalized recommendations for your health and wellness based on the input of a team of scientists and sleep, diet, and fitness experts. For example, if your Larklife nighttime wristband knows you didn’t get much real rest last night, the Larklife iPhone app will remind you to eat an extra healthy, fuel-packed breakfast to keep your energy level and concentration up.

The wristbands themselves were designed by Ammuniton, the design shop that previously designed the Beats line of headphones bearing Dr. Dre’s moniker.

Here’s what the system looks like:

In addition to providing instant recommendations for better health via iOS notifications, Larklife pulls in gamification elements to incentivize users by celebrating their accomplishments.

In some ways, it’s a bit like Nike’s FuelBand or the popular Fitbit lineup. But adding the sleep component is Lark’s secret sauce.

The original Lark product was a simple wristband that tracked your sleep, woke you with a gentle buzz from a small vibrating component, and proceeded to make recommendations to help you sleep better.

Larklife is available for $149; the company’s sleep-only coach sells for $99.

Lark was founded in 2010 by Julia Hu; the startup is based in Mountain View, Calif., and has taken a grand total of $80,000 in funding to date — not a huge amount for any startup, let alone a hardware venture, which makes the young company’s progress all the more impressive.

Style and technology are like peanut  butter and jelly. Each is a disparate concept, but when their forces combine, magic happens.

Lexus is all about PB&J, so to speak. Which is why the luxury car company is throwing a startup competition for products that embody “the intersection of high-tech and high-style.”

The battle is called Lexus Ignition. Eight products will face off, two at a time, over the course of the next four weeks. It will take place on the xompany’s Facebook page, where visitors vote for their favorite. The winning team will receive up to $25,000 in funding to bring these ideas to market.

The eight featured products are:

• Carbon Fiber Folding Electric Bike – Lightweight carbon fiber folding e-bike that provides urban commuters with a grease-free, sweat-free commute.
• Vers 2Q – Powerful yet compact Bluetooth stereo sound system, wrapped in a handcrafted wood cabinet.
• Urban Fidelity Airflow Mini Speakers and Subwoofer – Fantastic sound featuring artwork from indie artists and eco wood construction (no plastic!).
• Stabil-i – The world’s first pocket-sized, video stabilization case for a smartphone that eliminates shaky video.
• SolarPOP – Portable solar-powered smartphone and tablet charger with built-in retractable cords.
• SOLOSHOT – Mobile video recorder mount that tracks movement without the need for a cameraman.
• Botiful X – Personal telepresence robot with edge detection.
• spnKiX M – A stand-up and sit-down scooter in one. Sleekly designed, lightweight, and foldable for easy storage.

Lexus is clearly on a mission to make machines sexy. On the last season of reality TV show Project Runway, it sponsored a design challenge where the show’s contestants had to create fashion-forward looks inspired by its cars.

This latest tactic is aimed at further promoting its latest vehicle, the Lexus ES, as well as its reputation as an innovative, chic, and trendy brand.

Read the press release.

You probably sit too much — I know I do. Given the sheer amount of time that our generation spends hunched behind a computer screen, chiropractors must be absolutely raking it in.

Parked on our backsides for hours at a time, bloggers and programmers may be the worst offenders of all. It’s no surprise that standing desks are the latest craze to hit Silicon Valley and other tech hubs.

Seeking relief from back pain, some of the most pragmatic solutions to hit the market were built by tech entrepreneurs in their spare time.

One of the most popular is the Standesk 2200, hacked by Colin Nederkoorn, founder of Customer.io for just $22. At the co-working offices at General Assembly in New York where he debuted the desk, word spread quickly. Soon all the cool entrepreneurs wanted one. Nederkoorn wrote on a blog post that the first users were fellow founders from hot startups like Stripe and Opani.

Nederkoorn hit a nerve with the community; his announcement received well over a hundred comments from fellow standing desk converts.

Meanwhile, serial entrepreneur, Dan McDonley, was able to exceed his funding goal on Kickstarter in just 24 hours to bring to market one of the world’s first portable standing desks.

McDonley gets to work, answers emails like a ninja

McDonley’s “The Ninja Standing Desk,” is designed for mobile, young professionals. It hangs from any door, wall, or cubicle, and folds up so you can carry it with you.

He told me he was experiencing debilitating back pain numbness in his elbow from sitting at a computer all day — he created a prototype for his personal use. It worked, so he began taking manufacturing classes at TechShop, the mecca for hardware folks, located in San Francisco and Menlo Park.

“I was assassinating my deadlines, slicing through my work day, while feeling healthier and nimble as a ninja,” McDonley explained on the project’s Kickstarter page.

After raising $30,000, a far higher sum than expected, McDonley is focused on keeping up with orders.

If a standing desk is for you, the Internet is filled with useful tips for you to build your own. Order cheap parts from IKEA, and you can assemble one on a $20 budget in a matter of hours. But if you’ve got dollars to spare, this piece in Wired’s Gadget Lab is the most comprehensive review of the best on the market.

I’m told by friends (my roommate, a tech entrepreneur, is a standing desk evangelist) that standing for hours on end takes some getting used to. If you stick it out, you can expect to shed calories and to see your energy levels to drastically increase. In fact, your doctor would tell you that even taking a 5-minute standing break every hour is an improvement.

If you’re not convinced, check out this article in the New York Times, suggesting that sitting is a lethal activity. If Dr James Levine’s hard-hitting campaign against our “chair-based lifestyle” doesn’t spook you even a little bit, I don’t know what will.

LittleBits is a maker/hacker startup through and through, and it’s just taken a sizable round of venture funding from a few of the bigger names in Silicon Valley.

Its product is half building block, half circuit board, and it’s intended both as a toy for kids and as a prototyping tool for hardware hackers. The “bits” each have a distinct function, whether it’s a blinking LED, an eight-bit beep, or a functional button; they snap together with magnets to make larger, interactive electronics projects.

LittleBits products are relatively affordable ($89 for a starter kit), and they don’t require a background in electronics, engineering, or computer science.

The funding, a $3.65 million round, is littleBits’ first institutional money; it was led by True Ventures with participation from Khosla Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Lerer Ventures.

As part of today’s announcement, LittleBits also revealed it is working with supply chain management company PCH International to put LittleBits products into mass production starting August 2012.

Here’s a video showing LittleBits in action:

“We spend more than seven hours with technological devices every day, yet most of us don’t even know how they work,” said LittleBits founder and MIT Media Lab alum Ayah Bdeir in a statement today.

“LittleBits aims to break the boundary between the things we consume and the things we make, and make everyone into an inventor. We want LittleBits to be an affordable educational tool that is used in schools everywhere, and our new funding and new relationship with PCH means that we can now expand our team of super stars and reach even more people around the world.”

LittleBits received its first funding in the fall of 2011 from a small group of angel investors, including Joi Ito.

“Open-source software lowered the costs of innovation for software and Internet services and pushed it from big companies to startups,” said Ito in a release today. “The same thing is now happening in hardware, and LittleBits is one of the companies leading the way.”

Prior to the seed round from Ito et al., LittleBits’ founding team bootstrapped the product development for three-and-a-half years. The startup is based in Manhattan.

The technology is applied to electronic devices and protects the hardware against water. While it won’t save a phone from full-on submersion, the protective layer which is invisible to the naked eye, can keep rain, spills, and short-term soaks from making major damage. It is compatible with a number of Apple, Motorola, Samsung, and HTC products.

This is Liquipel’s first SEC filing, with the investment being listed as equity. No other information has been disclosed. The company’s Form D has an amendment that states “Estimation of valuation among the parties of contracts and other assets exceeds $10,000,000.” Whatever that means.

On April 26, Liquipel won a Silver Award for Enhanced Functionality in the Material Science category at the 2012 Edison Awards, an innovation competition held in New York City. It also made a splash (pun intended) at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and earlier this year, it announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it had struck a licensing agreement with Australia’s Vita Group, expanded operations to Brazil and China, and added six new board members.

The company is based in Santa Ana, California and was founded in 2011. It faces competition from companies like HzO and NeverWet, which also showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show, where waterproofing gadget technology was a major theme.

See the filing here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Summit was strictly a software affair today, with the debut of Windows Phone 8. However, the company did mention who would be building the hardware for its new OS.

In addition to Nokia, which is now Microsoft’s premier hardware partner, the first devices will come from Samsung, HTC, and Huawei. Both Samsung and HTC aren’t a huge surprise, since they were also Microsoft’s initial Windows Phone 7 launch partners. Huawei’s participation could signal an eventual greater Windows Phone presence in its home country of China.

Microsoft also confirmed today that existing devices won’t get upgraded to Windows Phone 8, although they’ll get many of the same features in an upcoming Windows Phone 7.8 update. As if to allay fears of abandonment with its upcoming devices, Microsoft said they’ll get updated for at least 18 months after their release (which falls just short of a typical two-year cellphone contract).

When it comes to Windows Phone 8 devices, Microsoft needs to make sure its partners supply a steady stream of new and interesting hardware. One of the biggest issues with the initial Windows Phone 7 release was that the platform kicked off with outdated hardware, and there was nothing new for more than a year (when the Lumia phones launched). If Microsoft wants consumers and developers to take its platform seriously, it will have to get equally serious about demanding new devices at a regular pace.

Via AllthingsD

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Home surveillance camera maker Dropcam has been a prime example of how a fledging company can do hardware right.

And investors agree: The company has just secured $12 million in second round of funding led by Menlo Ventures and supported by Accel Partners and Bay Partners.

Dropcam’s Wi-Fi-enabled video cameras make it easy for users to remotely monitor their kids, pets, and homes from a variety of devices.

Hardware-based startups are a bit of an anomaly in Silicon Valley, so it’s always big news when a company like Dropcam attracts investor attention.

With the latest round, Dropcam’s total funding rises to $17.8M. The company says it plans to use the new cash to expand its software team at home in San Francisco and expand operations elsewhere.

It’s the combination of Dropcam’s hardware and software that’s at the core of its success, Menlo Ventures managing director Mark Siegel said in a statement. “This is a tough balance for young companies, and Dropcam is doing a commendable job at this,” he said.

Alongside the funding announcement, Dropcam also released its new Android app, which replaces the previous Adobe Air-based version that lacked full Android compatibility. Dropcam said the goal with the new app is to give Android users the same quality of experience as users of the iOS version.

Dropcam’s latest product is its HD Wi-Fi Video Monitoring Camera, which was announced in January and, according to Dropcam, sold out in three weeks. Running at $150, the device offers 720p HD video, improved low-light performance, and two-way audio.

Every year, my family looks forward to Maker Faire, a family-friendly celebration of DIY mayhem, with eager anticipation. But when venture capitalists get involved in the maker movement, you know something new is afoot.

One such VC is Brad Feld, who showed up last week at a “Hardware Innovation Workshop” hosted by Maker Faire organizer O’Reilly Media at Xerox PARC, the storied home of many magical inventions.

The “maker” movement owes much to O’Reilly’s Make magazine, which is like Popular Mechanics for a new generation of Arduino-enabled, LED-lit, UAV-launching DIY types. It’s a monthly magazine packed with hobbyist projects: Everything from making your own homemade cigar box guitar to building a laser CNC router for fabricating stuff. With last week’s day-long workshop, O’Reilly was making the case (pardon the pun) that making can be a business, too.

It was a small but focused gathering of about 150 people, some of whom had come from thousands of miles away. Makers, product designers, artists, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and venture capitalists talked about bridging the gap between home hardware hacking and building a real hardware business.

“We don’t give a shit about hardware, and we don’t do hardware investments,” said Feld, whose Foundry Group has invested in several hardware companies, including MakerBot Industries, Spheero, and Fitbit. “What we love is software wrapped in plastic.”

Later, Feld moderated his statement, acknowledging that he does care about hardware. But what matters to Foundry, in this case, is whether the company fits into one of its major themes: In this case, human-computer interaction, or the ways in which humans feed data to machines. For that to work, hardware depends on software to help it interface with its human users.

For instance, Fitbit is at first glance a pedometer, but it’s the software and web-based tracking tools that make it stand out as a tool for managing your life, improving your fitness, or even playing games.

Similarly, Sphero makes a rolling robotic sphere that you can control, remotely, with your smartphone, to make it go whatever direction you want. Inside, it’s got some fairly complex electronics, derived from military missile-guidance technology, Feld said. But it’s the intuitive smartphone control that makes it really engaging, he said. Plus: It’s a freaking ball you can control with your smartphone!

For hardware hackers, this is encouraging news, actually. If you can master the hardware and figure out the complexities of outsourcing your production to China, it’s your ability to develop software that will help you forge connections with customers and really stand out.

What’s more, you can make products that your customers can modify, by tweaking the code or writing their own code that works with your APIs.

“The maker movement … has really shifted this dynamic,” Feld said. “Users can create stuff that they care about.”

I suspect for many people, making stuff is mostly a hobby. But for a few über-makers, like MakerBot Industries founder Bre Pettis, making stuff turns into a fulltime obsession, a career, and a company.

Feld told the story of when his firm was first checking out MakerBot, with an eye towards possibly investing in it. Before he’d even met Pettis, Feld got so excited about the idea of 3D printing that he ordered a MakerBot of his own, had it shipped to the office, and spent a weekend setting it up and testing it out. By the time he met Pettis in person, he was already a customer and a fan.

That, Feld says, is a good test for entrepreneurs: “When you meet the VC, has that VC bought your product?”

If not — if the VC asks you to ship a free sample so they can check it out — Feld advises you to run the other direction as quickly as possible. You want investors who are excited about your product as more than just a chance to make money.

MakerBot went on to raise about $11 million in capital and now employs more than 125 people and will soon be moving to Brooklyn’s spacious MetroTech Center. Not bad for a project that started in a hackerspace.

So for a small number of increasingly dedicated entrepreneurs, the maker movement is turning into a platform for innovation and entrepreneurship — and VCs are taking note.

That, I think, is the key to revitalizing the industrial economy in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Related Dylan’s Desk columns:

• When craftsmanship meets tech, magic happens
• Saddle your horses and fire up the 3D printer

Photo credit: Jake Spurlock/Flickr

Flexible screens, wearable computers, conductive ink, wires that move like muscles: These are the materials that will make up the gadgets of the future, and they’re being dreamed up and developed in do-it-yourself hacker labs and garages all around the world.

Sure, large manufacturers are working on these kinds of materials, too, but openMaterials co-founder Catarina Mota says the real innovation is coming from the bottom up as makers, hackers, and DIY enthusiasts figure out how to do “the future” for themselves in their own home labs.

Smart materials have one or more properties that can be changed by external stimuli, such as temperature, moisture, a magnetic field, or an electric current. And these kinds of materials are changing how we think about hardware and what hardware is able to do.

At a hardware-hacking workshop sponsored by Make magazine today in Silicon Valley, Mota said she and a partner began looking for these kinds of smart materials for an art installation, but they ran into more hurdles than expected.

“We quickly realized the materials we wanted weren’t available in quantities or prices for makers like ourselves,” she said, noting that when they could get their hands on the materials, they couldn’t figure out how to use them, nor did they receive any instructions from the manufacturers, who were used to dealing with large-scale OEMs.

So, Mota concluded, she’d have to make the materials she wanted by herself.

“The only way to go about this was trial and error,” she said. “We’d make our best guess and change one thing at a time until we got the material to do what we wanted it to do.”

Eventually, the art installation fell by the wayside as Mota and her cohort became more and more fascinated by making and using these materials of the future. openMaterials is the result of their efforts, which include research and workshops on DIY smart materials.

Mota said that in 2009, she was only able to track down two or three manufacturers of smart materials. Today, there are many manufacturers of all sizes — and better still, the web is replete with information, instructions, and community resources for makers.

Here’s a gallery showing handmade smart materials and where you can find out more about them (or even learn how to make them yourself):

Top image courtesy of luxorphoto, Shutterstock

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Those glorious geeks at iFixit have gotten their hands on Apple’s new iPad, and are currently in the midst of tearing it apart to reveal its lovely innards.

So far, the site has confirmed that the new iPad is rocking a Samsung LCD, judging by its model number (a sign that we could see similarly high-res screens in Samsung’s devices soon).

Don’t be surprised if you have trouble accessing iFixit right now though, as the site’s live teardown is also tearing apart its servers. On Twitter, iFixit said: “We have never received anywhere close to this much traffic before; we’re adding servers like crazy.”

Thus far, the site has managed to take off the iPad’s screen and has found its way into the tablet’s logic board, revealing the Apple A5X processor above. Just like its predecessors, the A5X was manufactured by Samsung. The site also found that the chip was manufactured in the first week of 2012.

This is where teardowns get really interesting, because we may learn something new from one of the many chips on the logic board.

Other notable chips include the Broadcom BCM4330, which handles Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the Qualcomm RTR8600 for LTE, and the Broadcom BCM5973 I/O controller (which Apple has used previously in A4 and A5 devices).

We’ll be updating this post as iFixit’s teardown continues, check back for updates.

Via The Verge

General Electric set up a hands-on “garage” area at SXSW Interactive this year to get technophiles up to their elbows in hardware, including laser cutters, 3D printers, injection molders, and more.

Linda Boff, the company’s executive director of global digital marketing, took some time to chat with VentureBeat about how GE is partnering with some of the strongest forces in the maker movement to boost creativity and entrepreneurship and to celebrate the importance of making and manufacturing. The GE Garage at SXSW was just the first of its kind; the company plans to have more of these mobile pop-up garages in Houston and San Francisco during the first half of 2012 and will set up permanent GE Garages in Houston and Cincinnati later in the year.

Check out the clip above, and stay tuned for lots more from SXSW.

The idea that he and his partner, chief executive Van Burnham, have dreamed up is to use the creators of the best arcade experiences from the golden age of Atari in the 1970s and 1980s to create games for the “new arcade” on iOS devices.

“We are looking at the new arcade, and 99 cents on the iPhone is the new quarter,” Blackley (pictured above), president of the startup Innovative Leisure, said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “People are playing on all these new devices and are finding the joy of the arcade games.”

The “Jedi Council” team includes Ed Rotberg, creator of the classic Atari game Battlezone; Owen Rubin, creator of Major Havoc and Space Duel; Rich Adam, creator of Gravitar and co-developer of Missile Command; Ed Logg, co-creator of Asteroids and Centipede; Dennis Koble, creator of Touch Me and Shooting Gallery; Tim Skelly, the only non-Atari veteran arcade game designer who worked for Cinematronics and created games such as Rip-Off; and Bruce Merrit, creator of Black Widow.

“This is the dream team from Atari,” Blackley said.

All told, there are 11 arcade game creators who are banding together at Innovative Leisure. They are joined by young interns in their 20s who will work with the veterans to help design new apps. Altogether, Innovative Leisure has 30 employees — a big team for a fledgling startup. To finance the overhead, Blackley has invested his own money and raised funds from publisher THQ. Next week in Las Vegas, at the industry’s Dice Summit, Blackley and his team members will talk about their vision for “the new arcade.”

Supercade

The startup has been a long time in the making. Some of the Atari veterans participated in a Time magazine cover story on video games in 1982; it was titled, “Gronk! Flash! Zap! Video games are blitzing the world.” But a couple of years after that, Atari changed ownership and the golden age of arcade games came to an end.

Burnham got to know many of the creators from Atari while writing her 2003 book, Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984. She introduced them to Blackley. They realized that the small group of designers had a tight relationship, getting together on an annual basis for the Gonzo Invitational, a golf tournament for Atari alumni that began in 1998.

Blackley helped launch the Xbox in 2001 and left Microsoft in 2002. He worked at game-production startup Capital Entertainment Group before becoming an agent for game developers at Creative Artists Agency. There, he represented legendary designers such as Will Wright (The Sims) and Tim Schafer (Psychonauts), helping them get a bigger ownership stake in their companies and properties in negotiations with publishers.

Meanwhile, Burnham and Blackley began building their own arcade in a Los Angeles warehouse. Dubbed “Supercade,” it has tons of old machines that Blackley repaired and refurbished himself. It is a vast place with row upon row of machines with flashing lights and ringing bells. Walking down the aisles is a trip down memory lane: Every person who visits Supercade becomes a kid again as they find an arcade machine from their childhood days.

He and Burnham curated and hunted down machines that would best illustrate a history of gameplay. And when Blackley left CAA last summer after eight years, Supercade figured big in his plans for his next gig.

“We had that big collection of games, and we love the history of game design,” Blackley said. “I’m lucky because I love games and following that love has always done me well. Once we figured out the iPhone is the new arcade, that games from the old days fit this new audience and their on-the-go lifestyle, we knew what to do. There is already a group of people who know how to operate and innovate in this space. They had the longest string of hit games in history. And they wanted to get back together again.”

Getting the band back together

The idea, Burnham said, was to “get the band back together.” Many of these veterans went on to careers at Apple and other places outside of gaming, and most of them thought the arcade days were over. But they all considered their time at Atari to be the most rewarding in their careers and are reunited thanks to Blackley’s vision.

“I’m here because of Seamus,” said Rotberg (pictured right), who works remotely from Grass Valley and is excited to be working on games again. Like the other veterans, Rotberg is paired with an intern and are working on a new title together.

“These kids are thrilled to learn how to make games with the inventors of gameplay,” Blackley said.

The team came up with 30 game ideas and whittled them down to 10. They pitched them to THQ, which said that it wanted all of them. So far, seven of those titles are in the works. Most of them are already in prototype form.

“It’s been very easy to support Seamus and his team on Innovative Leisure because they are all super-smart dudes who care about games,” said Lenny Brown, vice president of creative and business development at THQ.

Blackley said that the creators of coin-operated games know how to do things like grab the attention of the gamer in the first few seconds and make him feel like he’s accomplished something in three or four minutes of play.

Coin-op games had to stand out in an arcade and generate money for weeks in order to be profitable, so the process of making them and refining them was very rigorous. And while the iPhone has far more computing power than the old machines did, it is constrained in terms of memory and processing resources compared to modern consoles. So designers have to know how to efficiently use the device’s resources.

While many other big companies have been accused of copying or making derivative titles, Blackley believes strongly in making original games.

“We are carrying on where Atari left off, focusing on innovation in gameplay,” Blackley said.

Blackley said the team can work together in the arcade warehouse and be inspired by the different games that are there. He says it is important that the group works in a collaborative way. They are divided into different projects, but, as at Atari, they are free to help — and offer criticism — on other projects.

“They have worked together before, and they have a development rapport that is magical,” Blackley said.

THQ has first right of refusal on the games, in exchange for financing. That’s a little risky, since THQ is on shaky financial ground. But Blackley said his team is low overhead, and it is a more efficient use of THQ’s money. And if THQ chooses not to publish a game, Innovative Leisure is free to take the games somewhere else. Indeed, companies like Atari itself might want to tap its former designers to make modern versions of its old games.

But Blackley says the focus will be on original games. He is knee-deep in the creative process. As a former game developer (and theoretical physicist) who created physics-based games such as Trespasser, Blackley likes to get technical. He feels at home writing code and talking about it with his team members.

“We have to create a quality experience, hone it, and tweak the crap out of it so that you get the same level of gameplay that people demanded in the arcade era,” Blackley said. “It’s scary as shit if you don’t understand gameplay.”

Blackley said his team of veterans had license in the old days to do “crazy stuff,” using a rapport to riff on each other and craft wonderfully creative games where you could shoot worms or missiles and play with roller-skating bears.

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