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CE Week's Startup Pavilion Serves Up Bikes, Hydroponics, And Rotary Phone Photo-Sharing
In the Startup Pavilion at CE Week, there’s just as much diversity as there is similarity among the new flock of products and services hitting New York. We saw a number of bikecessories, bike services, and reached the other end of the spectrum by visiting a cloud-based hydroponics monitoring solution and a nice twist between new-school photo-sharing and old-school phones.
Join us, won’t you, as we journey through Startup Pavilion?
SocialBicycles.com
SocialBicycles is a company looking to disrupt the bike-sharing services sweeping the globe, namely in Europe and most recently in New York city. But rather than keeping all of the technology within the proprietary racks and kiosks, SocialBikes have a little tech package on the back that stores a locking system, GSM cellular chip, and a GPS chip. This lets each bike act as its own autonomous system. Just find a bike on the map, reserve it with your phone, and pick it up.
Right now, SocialBicycles is focusing on selling to universities, municipalities, and corporate campuses.
MyBell
What do you know? Another bike startup.
MyBell is a small digital bell for your bike that can be customized the same way that you can customize the ringtones on your phone. Simply move any .mp3 file over to the MyBell via a microUSB connection, and that noise (whether it be the Jaws theme or a line from a Nicki Minaj song) will thereafter be emitted from your MyBell each time a driver cuts you off.
Eventually, the MyBell will include LEDs, but it’s still in the development stage with plans for a crowdfunding campaign starting at the end of the summer. The founders expect the device to retail at $50.
Bitponics
To grow a hydroponic garden, there are a number of factors that require constant monitoring. BitPonics lets you monitor these things remotely, thanks to a $499 device that uses a suite of sensors to monitor things like PH, temperature, humidity, light levels, and more.
That device sends real-time information to the cloud, which is displayed in a web dashboard. Not only can you monitor and control your garden remotely, but the service offers up tips on how to keep your plants happy. And if that weren’t enough, you can connect with other growers to share and receive tips.
The web service is built on a freemium model, with a standard tier at $9/month and an enterprise tier of $49/month.
Rotobooth
Rotobooth is a product meant for events and parties that combines the old with the new. It’s a rotary phone booth, at its core, with souped up technology and LED bling. It’s fairly straightforward.
Dial your number into the phone dial, and you’ll be prompted to take four different pictures. Those pictures are then displayed on the wall of the party, and also sent to your SMS inbox with a link. The link lets you see all four photos separately, or as an animated gif.
Pricing for the Rotobooth comes on a quote-by-quote basis.
Mozilla Opens Its Firefox Social API To Developers
With the release of the first public beta of Firefox 23, Mozilla didn’t just introduce a new logo and kill the <blink> element, it also opened up its Social API for developers. This feature allows them to create new ways for users to interact with their favorite web apps through a persistent sidebar, notifications or toolbar buttons in the browser. With this release, Mozilla also adds a share panel to the mix.
Mozilla first launched this feature in cooperation with Facebook in Firefox 17 last year. Since then, it added a number of new partners, including Cliqz, Mixi (for users in Japan) and msnNOW.
All of these services add a small persistent sidebar to the browser windows. As Mozilla has told me repeatedly, the organization believes that social networks, web-based productivity apps and other sophisticated desktop-like web experiences have changed the way we use the browser.
It’s worth noting that Mozilla still hasn’t quite found a solution for using multiple services that rely on the Social API simultaneously. You can enable multiple Social API-based apps, but only one of them will show in the sidebar at any given time. That’s something the designers still have to solve, especially now that more developers will surely start to use these features.
Also New For Developers: Network Monitor
The other new feature that most developers will surely appreciate is the addition of the new Network Monitor in the beta. Chrome users, of course, are already familiar with this tool, which displays a graph for all the individual server requests it takes to load a given page. Mozilla says this is just an “initial” release, but also notes that it’s already “very functional.”
Google Trekker Gets You Off-Limits Access To Exotic Locations Like The Island From Bond's Skyfall
Google Trekker just announced the expansion of its street view hiking map project to outside organizations, and today it’s revealing another aspect of the program’s broadening: Getting virtual tourists behind velvet ropes at completely unique, remote destinations. On the Google Maps blog today, the team showed off a virtual tour of the island of Hashima, in Japan’s Nagasaki Prefecture, which providing the setting for Bond villain Raoul Silva’s hideout in Skyfall.
Hashima, otherwise known as “Battleship” island in Japanese, is a former coal mining facility and living area for its workers. It was abandoned completely in the 1970s, and then finally opened its doors to tourists again in 2009. But tourists aren’t allowed everywhere in Hashima, since it’s basically a toppling wreck of concrete and steel – pieces of buildings regularly fall off and might not mix well with the soft skulls of gaggle-eyed visitors.
The Trekker team managed to gain special access to off-limits areas, however, and even got in-building imagery to provide a near-complete virtual view of the strange, industrial-era island. You can see how they did it in the video above.
This expansion of the Trekker program will likely encourage tourism to the area, but it’s also a great example of how Google’s ambitious digital archiving project can preserve a digital record of sites unlike any other. Especially in a case like Hashima, where in 10 years time what remains there won’t resemble what’s there today in the least, thanks to the continued effect of ocean winds on the crumbling city infrastructure, that’s a valuable and previously unavailable resource, for researchers, students and the just plain curious alike.
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