TechCrunch
MakerBot's $1,400 Digitizer Now Available To Pre-Order, Will Ship By Mid-October
The folks at MakerBot have been teasing their Digitizer desktop 3D scanner since this past March, but now they’re finally ready to push it out the door. For $1,400, you too can scan all the little knick-knacks in your life and turn them into 3D schematics to print or share with others.
In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on the Digitizer, here’s how the thing works: you place an object on its central turntable and fire up the device, at which point a pair of lasers (for greater accuracy, naturally) will scan the object’s surface geometry and turn that cloud of data points into a 3D model. MakerBot says the whole process takes about 12 minutes, after which you’re able to push the file to a 3D printer of your choosing and have a grand ol’ time.
There are, of course, some limitations to be aware of. The turntable can only support objects that are 3kg (or about 6.5lbs) or lighter, and you should ideally use the thing a very well-lit room.
When we visited MakerBot’s new 50,000 square foot factory in Brooklyn, CEO Bre Pettis referred to the Digitizer as a “game changer” for the 3D printing movement and it’s not hard to see why. For the past two years now, MakerBot’s efforts have largely been about making the process of 3D printing as accessible as possible. With a little bit of tinkering (and some patience for the occasional screw-up), 3D printing novices can get a feel for turning the contents of pre-produced files into actual physical objects.
It’s the other half of that equation that’s so tricky — if you wanted things to print you either had to trawl Thingiverse in hopes that someone had already modeled the thing, or figure out a way to model it on your own. To put it mildly, that’s a fair bit of work. With the advent of scanners like the Digitizer though, the barrier to creating those 3D blueprints and disseminating them to the world is almost nil… as long as you can afford it.
Of course, MakerBot isn’t the only company making it easier to turn physical objects into printable data — hackers and startups have harnessed Microsoft’s venerable Kinect to do just that, there’s a sea of crowdfunded hardware projects that aim to put their own spin on the experience. Still, MakerBot is easily one of the best known proponents of the 3D printing movement, and a device like Digitizer may just be what the movement needs to make 3D printing a fixture of the mainstream.
Former Windows President Steven Sinofsky Joins Andreessen Horowitz
Former Windows President Steven Sinofsky has joined Andreessen Horowitz as a board partner, according to an announcement he has posted to his well-known personal blog, “Learning by Shipping” this morning. The new VC will represent the firm on the boards of portfolio companies, as the opportunity arises, he says, but will not be a full-time partner.
He writes:
I’m relatively new to the VC world and have a lot of learning to do—and I am very excited to do that. I can’t think of a better place to do this than a16z, as they share the commitment to learning and sharing that learning, for example through all the blog posts the GPs write. I first got to know Ben, Marc, and some of the over 70 people at the firm starting late last year. What was so cool to see was the commitment to fostering innovation, product creation, and working with product-focused entrepreneurs.
Sinofsky also explained why he believes himself to be a good fit at a16z, saying that his experience in product development has been focused “learning and changing from within an organization as part of teams.” At Microsoft, he led product development for Windows and Office, and was once thought to be a candidate for the position of Microsoft CEO. But Sinofsky was also polarizing, and something of an outsider among executives. Eventually, he and Microsoft mutually parted ways, as Microsoft wanted someone who could work across product groups, and create a more elastic set of services for the cloud era.
Shortly after leaving Microsoft, Sinofsky took a position as EIR at Harvard Business School, which he now will continue. There, he teaches and writes about product development, planning, collaboration, and more. He says he will also remain open to other business and product development activities, as they come up.
According to AllThingsD, Sinofsky has been involved with Andreessen Horowitz since the beginning of the year, and has been advising its partners on various issues. This announcement now solidifies that activity into a more formal role. He’s initially focused on productivity software, but is open to other tech sectors, the report states.
Crowdtilt Launches Crowdhoster, A WordPress For Crowdfunding, To Let Anyone Create And Customize Their Own Campaign
Thanks to the JOBS Act, the rise of Kickstarter, Indiegogo and the parade of startups that have emerged in their wake, crowdfunding has gone mainstream. In tech industry terms, crowdfunding is practically old news. However, according to the minds behind Crowdtilt — the Y Combinator-incubated platform that caters to the many types of “group fundraising” that fall outside the purview of Kickstarter — this is just Phase One. The Crowdfunding Era is just beginning.
While the Kickstarters and Indiegogos continue to dominate headlines in the crowdfunding space, a growing set of niche platforms have emerged to handle the spillover from projects that don’t fit under the traditional umbrella. And some are bypassing platforms altogether: Star Citizen, a space-age video game, recently became the most successful crowdfunding campaign yet, raising a whopping $15 million — on its own site.
With projects like Lockitron, Basis and Myo also joining the list of projects that have raised big bucks without the help of traditional platforms, Crowdtilt founder and CEO James Beshara believes this is a strong indication of where crowdfunding is headed. The writing is on the wall.
That’s why Crowdtilt is today launching the first public version of Crowdhoster — its full-featured, open source, customizable crowdfunding tool that will allow anyone to launch their own campaign without having to touch a line of code. Built using Crowdtilt’s API, Crowdhoster gives both individuals or businesses the ability to set up and own their own crowdfunding page.
Unlike Kickstarter and Indiegogo, this means that your startup can now launch its very own campaign to fund the development of your Uber for cats app without having to cede control over branding, hosting and the ability to customize with all you favorite cat cartoons to someone else. At launch, Crowdhoster will enable individuals and businesses to not only launch and customize their own campaign, but also tap into a handful of themes that the site will offer to bypass the tinkering and get you up and running posthaste.
Or, for those who are in the tinkering business, because Crowdhoster is completely open source (the code will be available on GitHub in the next few weeks), developers can improve, modify and customize the platform until the cows come home. And for those not flying the old red, white and blue will be pleased to hear that Crowdhoster supports international crowdfunding at launch as well, Beshara tells us. Together, these features are indicative of the type of support and direction Crowdtilt wants to take its new platform.
Beshara tells us that Crowdtilt wants to build (the first) open consumer brand within the crowdfunding space, build on top of a platform with a built-in developer ecosystem. The Crowdtilt co-founder believes that payments are eventually going to become another form of communication and that crowdfunding has the chance to help make that a reality. But, to do so, crowdfunding has to become open and accessible — for any topic, for anyone to use — whether it’s a political fundraiser or a hardware development project.
The other key is that Crowdhoster campaigns come with all the moving parts one would find on traditional campaign pages out of the box, like the ability to include a description, video and reward tiers, for example. But the owners don’t have to share any revenue or branding with a third-party platform. This could have big implications for the types of businesses or use cases which might shy away from crowdfunding campaigns for these reasons, like for a senator who wants to raise money for her re-election campaign, or for multinational brands like Nike or Coca Cola, which likely aren’t too keen to share branding with Kickstarter, for example.
At launch, the free-to-use platform will enable users to run multiple, ongoing campaigns, customize the duration of their campaign, set reward levels and will offer project administration, checkout support and some basic, embedded CRM functionality to help manage communication with backers. Crowdtilt has a wait-list of 2,300 campaigns and, to get things started, the startup will be assisting people with setup and hosting it for them as well in an attempt to avoid down-time.
However, over the next few weeks, Beshara says, Crowdtilt will begin to automate the process, so that users will can point their domain to Crowdhoster and launch their campaign automatically, at which point users will be required to host the campaign themselves.
Although Crowdhoster has been in private development the last few months, Crowdtilt has been working with a handful of startups to test the new platform and has already had a few successes, including its first campaign, the much-buzzed-about nutritional drink, Soylent, which raised over $1 million through the platform.
While he’s more than a little biased, Beshara believes that there’s a huge amount of untapped potential in the wild and whacky world of crowdfunding, which has remained somewhat restricted by the predominance of vertical platforms. By bringing the same tools offered on the biggest crowdfunding platforms to the masses and by keeping it free, customizable and not requiring any technical knowledge to get a campaign up and running, Crowdtilt is essentially looking to do for crowdfunding what WordPress did for blogging and content creators.
Sounding like some kind of crazed crowdfunding zombie founder, Beshara says that his goal is to “infect the entire Web with crowdfunding” — presumably in the way that Facebook Connect infected the Web with your social graph — not in the way malware may be infecting your inbox or zombies want to eat your brains.
It’s too early to make any snap judgements, but it’s probably safe to say that these kind of open and accessible tools have been sorely missing in the Crowdfunding World. Crowdtilt is hoping that by getting this out the door now, it will give them a head start — because it’s only a matter of time before the crowd arrives and before the Joomlas, Drupals and Tumblrs of crowdfunding hit the streets.
Find Crowdhoster here.
India's Citizen Engagement Comes Online But Political Parties Still Operate Above The Law
India’s budding democracy has dipped its toe into the digital waters, as the government launched a website allowing citizens to file Right To Information requests online. It digitises a popular legislative mechanism which forces public officials to release documents and files relating to ministerial and bureaucratic decisions and taxpayer spending. Over the past eight years the RTI has empowered citizens and fostered transparency, and the new website could spark a wave of government disclosures.
Curious and suspicious citizens can use the site to submit a request, submit an appeal for a request that has been rejected, and also track the status of their application. It’s a relatively simple website but represents a significant cultural shift for a country where bureaucrats zealously protect their role as power brokers and information gatekeepers, operating behind a wall of red-tape woven paper.
India earned its independence 66 years ago but it is in the past six years, since the RTI Act was launched in 2008, that citizen engagement has flourished. RTI applications have been used by citizens to expose corrupt politicians who co-opted apartments built for war veterans, and siphoned funds raised for the Indian Red Cross. A visually-impaired student even forced the Indian Institute of Management to disclose its selection criteria, after her application was rejected without explanation.
Sunil Abraham, founder of the Bangalore-based research group the Centre for Internet and Society, welcomed the new portal.
“We must congratulate the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions for this critical accomplishment in the path towards greater transparency and accountability based on the RTI Act,” he said.
It has spawned an ecosystem of accountability. There are RTI activists probing the government on a range of issues and topics, and subsequently sharing this information with the media; there is a passionate discussion forum; and even an Android app.
But its reach will be limited in a country where internet penetration hovers around twenty percent. Also, there is no version of the site in Hindi, or any of the other local languages spoken by most disempowered Indians. The site won’t solve the problem of bureaucrats not complying with RTI requests and forcing applicants into a lengthy appeals process.
Abraham admitted the site’s effectiveness would also be limited by the government’s recent decision to exclude political parties — the cultivators of corruption in India — from the act.
“Greater transparency of the political parties would have been a key development to protecting our democracy,” Abraham said. “This was a missed opportunity. Even if the RTI Act did not apply in total, it would have been in the public interest if more disclosure of funding and other details were mandated for political parties.”
Last week, Chennai citizens protested over the decision to overrule the order by the RTI-arbiter, the Central Information Commission, which would have forced the major political parties to disclose their funding sources.
The protestors have more gatherings planned in the coming months.
Renegade Windows App Store Pokki Lands Lenovo As Its Latest OEM Partner, Will Preload On Its PCs
After securing Acer as its first major OEM deal, Pokki, an alternative Windows application marketplace and Start Button replacement, today secured Lenovo as its newest partner. The deal will see Pokki’s game arcade and Start Menu shipped with Lenovo machines, greatly boosting its marketshare in the PC ecosystem.
Pokki started as an application system that shipped a lightweight app experience on the desktop of PCs. It brought apps and games that resembled mobile titles to laptops and desktops. It also later built a Windows 8 experience that replaced the missing Start Button. Windows 8.1 will bring back part of that functionality.
Instead of retreating as Microsoft took away a key piece of its relevancy, Pokki has expanded its platform to include an arcade populated with titles from Zynga and others. Its deal with Lenovo expands that effort by bringing standard desktop Windows application inside its orbit, creating an application experience that rivals Microsoft’s own Windows Store on Windows 8, and builds out what was a missing element of Windows itself before app stores become normal: Where users get their applications.
Before Pokki and the Windows Store, desktop applications were bought in stores, the physical variety, or through online bazaars like Download.com. Pokki rivals both by offering a hybrid experience that will now land on Lenovo’s new personal computers.
The deal benefits Pokki, as it will ship on millions of new devices monthly, helps Lenovo monetize through revenue sharing on incomes that stem from the arcade tool, and assists users – provided they like and use what Pokki offers – by helping them find new apps to use.
Key to Pokki’s Start Menu and arcade is an algorithm that will track user predilection, helping them find applications that fit their interests. Also, Pokki has the ability to deliver paid advertising to relevant applications, perhaps tax apps during tax season and the like. OEMs, if they want ship timely apps pre-installed with their machines in advance. If instead Pokki is installed, it can more nimbly update what applications are highlighted on its platform.
This capability is how Pokki hopes to monetize, by selling slots to developers who want their apps to have higher profile. Pokki’s parent company, Sweet Labs, also generates revenue as its OEM partners do through taking a cut of gaming incomes that are generated through the arcade.
Lenovo is the current largest PC OEM, moving more than 12 million units in the second quarter of 2013. Combined with Acer, a current partner, Pokki will now be pre-installed on nearly 19 million PCs quarterly, leaning on IDC data. This makes Pokki, over the next few quarters, a large app ecosystem for developers that wish to reach Windows users, but might not find sufficient traction with the Windows Store.
Pokki’s OEM relationships remain either fresh, or new. Therefore, the model that the company is betting on remains mostly unproven. However, if the scale of Pokki’s new inherent distribution through Lenovo and Acer can drive meaningful download volume, the marketplace could demand developer attention. Those figures, however, are too nascent to test.
In short, Pokki has landed sufficient OEM interest to prove itself.
What’s next for the firm is interesting. Pokki wants to grow past the Windows platform. This, in my view, means that it will target Android next. Given the sort of applications that Pokki accepts, they could fit in there. So, Pokki’s early Windows gambit could grant it enough momentum to land on Android and grow its volume there. Sweet Labs is one of the few companies betting first on PCs, and then on mobile.
If Pokki can extend its platform to Android, it will be among the first – though I can’t think of another, frankly – to effectively unite the desktop PC environment and mobile distribution. Pokki has always been the odd duckling in its bets. However, so far those wagers appear to be bearing out.
Securing Lenovo is a big moment for Pokki, as it grants the yet nascent app experience enough unit volume to sink, or drown. In a few months, we’ll have the numbers to see if it has succeeded.
Top Image Credit: Pete Birkinshaw
Photo-Sharing App Cluster Snags Instagram Seed Investor Steve Anderson & Others To Lead $1.6M Round, Launches Version 1.0
Cluster, a mobile photo-sharing app which helps users collaborate on albums with their friends, is today announcing $1.6 million in seed funding in a round led by early Instagram investor Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. Also participating were Freestyle Capital, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, and Sherpa Ventures. The news comes alongside the app’s exit from beta and the debut of Cluster version 1.0, an updated iPhone release which adds several new features, the goal of which is to make it easier to invite friends, sign-up, and make the app more engaging.
Founded by Onesheet and Tiplist founder Brenden Mulligan, along with ex-Google/YouTube developer Taylor Hughes, Cluster is tackling a problem so many apps have tried, and yet so far, have really failed to solve: it wants to make it easier to mutually share your photos privately with a select group of family, friends and others.
Cluster 1.0 Features
Since the debut of the beta version of the application in February, the team has been busy rolling out updated releases to add new features like favoriting and commenting, a streamlined design, social sharing and more. But today’s launch of version 1.0 is the biggest app upgrade to date.
In the new version, which we were able to beta test briefly ahead of today’s launch, Cluster has added a number of smaller enhancements, including things like new activity indicators on albums, access to albums outside the iPhone’s Camera Roll, as well as the ability to tap to hide unflattering photos your friends share in a group album, the ability save the high-res version of shared photos, and more.
But the biggest changes speak to how the company is aiming to smooth out and shorten the sign-up process for new users, as well as make it easier to invite friends. Cluster introduces a smart invite feature – something that’s been somewhat necessitated after a surge of spammy social apps have taken advantage of users’ address book access in order to send out mass invites to their contacts. Now, Cluster allows you to choose whether it sends out the invites automatically with a default message, or whether you want to create custom invitation yourself.
If you choose the latter, you can send invites however you see fit – text messages, email, social media, etc. Friends are given an invite code which they can use to access the shared album. The benefit to this is two-fold. Not only does it allow users to personalize their messages, it also makes it easier to invite a large group of people to share and view photos. For example, at weddings, parties, or other large events, you could post signs or otherwise direct guests to use the invite code to join the shared album in Cluster.
While the app has been more focused on events previously, that also led to some challenges. There’s heavy engagement during and just after the event takes place, but usage dies out a couple of days later. However, Mulligan says they’ve spotted another group of Cluster users who are building shared albums around interests. “They’re ongoing Clusters around a subject matter, not necessarily an event. Our most popular and largest Clusters are in this category,” he says. “And once it gets to these more topic-based Clusters, we see a lot bigger age differentiation,” he adds. (Mulligan declined to provide downloads or active user numbers).
Though the app faces a lot of competition (see the list in this post, e.g.) overall, the experience of using Cluster is enjoyable. The design is simple, straightforward and iOS 7- ready, and it can even serve as an alternative to the default Photos app with its automatically organized albums, grouped by date and location. To share photos, you simply head into one of these albums, and tap the invite button, which then prompts you to title the albums and set the privacy.
Soon: Web & Android
Though today, that process directs recipients to sign-up and download the app to view the photos, that will soon change. Going forward, the product development continues with a fully featured web version due out next month, where users will be able to view and interact with photos, then optionally download the app. Beta testing on Android will also begin in September, to be followed by a public release on that platform by October. Longer-term, the company will begin to focus on its business model, which involves the introduction of photo book and photo gifts.
With the additional funding - also Cluster’s first outside investment – the plan is to hire three to five more people, mainly engineers and designers. One new hire, iOS engineer Rizwan Sattar, has already joined the startup from Avocado, where he had worked with Cluster co-founder Taylor Hughes.
Mulligan says he took a different approach to fundraising, by slowly talking to people over the course of a couple of months. “We didn’t do the demo day attitude of trying get oversubscribed, or trying to get everyone to feel like if they don’t invest right now they’re going to miss out,” he says. “We talked to people who we thought would really add value to our product.”
In addition to Anderson, who watched Instagram grow from the beginning, Mulligan says they loved Freestlye (Josh Felser and Dave Samuel) for the advice they can give on building companies; First Round (Kent Goldman), for its great network; Google Ventures’ Kevin Rose, who understands product; plus Sherpa Foundry’s Shervin Pishevar and Scott Stanford, who are treating their own newly launched Sherpa Foundry like a startup itself, and believe in iteration and experimentation.
The updated version of the Cluster iOS application is live now on iTunes.
Fitness App Hot5 Launches To Get You In Shape With High-Intensity, 5-Minute Workouts
Remember that scene in There’s Something About Mary when the dude is telling Ben Stiller about his great idea for a workout video, called 7-minute abs? Well, what if I told you that you could get in shape with just five minutes of working out, thanks to a new mobile fitness app?
This new app, called Hot5, is just the latest in a trend of apps moving its users toward high-intensity interval training. That is, rather than doing a bunch of slow exercises over a long period of time, condensing exercises into short bursts with little recovery time in-between. In the case of Hot5, that means a daily regimen of five exercises, each lasting just a minute. These exercises are guided through a series of videos with real-life trainers showing users how to do them.
The app, in short, is aimed at appealing to today’s modern lifestyle in which people have little time to set aside and workout every day. But with each workout being just five minutes long, there aren’t a whole lot of excuses you can use to avoid it.
Hot5′s trainers with a wide variety of workouts to appeal to different types of users. At launch, there are eight trainers available, each with a different specialty. They range from “Fitness Basics” to “Crossfit and Strength” to “Yoga and Pilates.” Each trainer has a series of five videos available to work through, with more coming as time goes on.
In addition to the video workouts available, Hot5 also employs a bit of gamification to keep users coming back and exercising every day. When you first open the app, you have 500 credits, which can be used to unlock different exercises. Once you’re completed a workout, you get more credits to unlock other exercise videos. The idea is that, as long as you’re exercising daily, you should never run out of credits.
The company was founded by CEO Vlad Margulis, who most recently worked as a product designer at Airbnb, along with director of content Jayme Boyle, who is a certified personal trainer herself. Advisors include Sam Shank, Sami Inkinen, Buddy Arnheim, and Adam Sliverthorne, and the company has raised $100,000 in funding to get started.
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