Category: Gigaom Roadmap

Brady Forrest of Highway1 San Francisco based hardware incubator

Posted by – March 19, 2014

Highway1, PCH’s SF-based incubator, works with hardware startups to help them de-risk the hardware & manufacturing aspects of their business, providing them engineering hours and etc.

Lapka Breathalyzer and PEM, Geiger, EMF, Organic and Temperature/Humidity Sensors

Posted by – December 31, 2013

Lapka releases this new Breathalyzer for iOS and Android, they also have their Lapka personal environment monitor PEM kit, that connects to your Android/iOS phone to measure, collect data and analyze your surroundings. Lapka’s PEM kit features 1 Geiger counter (measure radiation around you), 1 EMF (High Frequency and Low Frequency electromagnetic fields) sensor, 1 Organic sensor (nitrate measurement in fruits and vegetables) and 1 temperature/humidity sensor.

Excelitas DigiPile Proximity Sensor at 10µA (passive infrared) Veritas Detection Group

Posted by – December 31, 2013

Gregory Gallinat of Excelitas Technologies (a Veritas company), demonstrates their new DigiPile Thermopile Detector proximity sensor, ultra small consuming only 10 microamps, would for example enable a future smartphone to detect presence to turn itself on (not even need to touch the device like in the Moto X).

You can read more about these sensors here: http://www.excelitas.com/pages/product/Thermopile-Detectors-Sensors-and-Array-Modules.aspx

Google Glass app Glashion “OK glass, I want this!” buys anything you see

Posted by – December 29, 2013

Glashion is a Google Glass project that allows you to buy fashion products that you are looking at. Look at any fashionable bag or dress on a bypasser or in a store, and then the app queries the ShopStyle API for similar matches based on object recognition technology. You simply tell Glass when you see a product, “Ok glass, I want this!” and you can then buy the product with a blink. At least that is their idea.

DELTA Danish Electronics, Light & Acoustics

Posted by – December 23, 2013

DELTA stands for Danish Electronics Lights and Acoustics. DELTA began as acoustics company but today it helps products succeed in the market place and they test around 3,000 products per year. DELTA makes IdemoBits which are a form of electronic LEGOs which include stuff like sensors and actuators.

Unbound Robotics UBR 1, Robot development platform

Posted by – December 11, 2013

The Unbound Robotics UBR 1 is a robot that uses a combination of both ARM Cortex and x86 processors. The UBR 1 is designed as a platform for robotics development and uses ROS (robotics operating system) which is open source. The main processor currently in the robot is an x86 but it uses 12 ST Microelectronics ARM Cortex-M4 based microcontrollers to control each part of the robot.

You can read more about it here: http://unboundedrobotics.com/ubr-1/

Indiegogo Interview, Danae Ringelmann, Co-Founder, Chief Customer Officer

Posted by – December 8, 2013

Danae Ringelmann, Co-Founder of Indiegogo talks about the status of the crowd funding website at Gigaom Roadmap.

and you can watch her official interview at Gigaom Roadmap:

Miaplaza educational sites for kids always-icecream.com and clever-dragons.com

Posted by – December 7, 2013

Johannes Ziegler, CEO and Founder of Miaplaza shows his 2 educational websites for kids always-icecream.com for girls and clever-dragons.com for boys.

Bret Taylor presents Quip word processor

Posted by – December 3, 2013

Quip is a new social/professional online mobile-first word processor which is Bret Taylor’s new startup. He was at Google Maps before 2007, then made Friendfeed that got acquired by Facebook, then he was the Facebook CTO.

Here’s the official video of the full keynote discussion of Bret Taylor at Gigaom Roadmap 2013:

Jason Calacanis on the meaning of being an entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley

Posted by – November 22, 2013

Jason Calacanis co-founded one of the first main tech blogs Engadget.com which he sold to AOL in 2006 and then he did Mahalo.com “to compete with Wikipedia” and feed Google with content about all topics, he organizes the Launch Conferences and is an Angel Investor and organizes Angel Investing for start-ups in the silicon valley. He hosts This Week In Startups A few days after this video he organized one of the biggest yet hackathons rewarding the best programmers hacking apps and ideas over 3 days at http://hackathon.launch.co/. In this video, I try to ask him about the meaning of being an entrepreneur in the silicon valley.

Airbnb Interview, Joe Gebbia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Airbnb

Posted by – November 10, 2013

Airbnb is amazing. 500 thousand hosts are sharing their apartments, rooms, houses with possibly (my guess) ten of millions of guests already booking accommodations on Airbnb. If (my estimation) a third of these Airbnb accommodations are currently booked at an average of $50/night, that means perhaps $8.3 Million in revenues on Airbnb every day for hosts, of which Airbnb may be drawing $1.25 Million for it’s “Service Fees”, which may mostly be profits at this point. I may be underestimating this thing. Airbnb may be generating $15 Million in daily sales with more than $2 Million nearly pure profits for Airbnb daily, a current $730 Million profit per year. Of course Airbnb has a lot of employees already, and they spend money on Host Insurance, R&D and Marketing. Yet it’s pretty clear that Airbnb is a very profitable business. The question is how much is Airbnb worth now? At the Gigaom Roadmap conference, a guestimated valuation of $12.5 Billion was mentioned on stage by the interviewer. I ask Joe Gebbia jokingly at the end of the video if Google is going to acquire Airbnb. I don’t really mean it jokingly, I would like to see Google acquire Airbnb. And then properly guide it towards the total revolution of rental for people’s spaces worldwide, preferably with a smaller than 15% “Service Fee” on each booking and perhaps more trusted rankings and bookings system. The problem might be that Airbnb already is too expensive and that Google may not want to spend above the price of a Motorola on acquiring it at this point. What’s your experience with Airbnb? I’m posting this video from an Airbnb apartment, after having just spent about a month in several different Airbnb apartments on different continents and I know people who quit their jobs after becoming Airbnb hosts, it really is amazing.

Here are some feature requests that I have (and just made up) for Airbnb:

– $100 or $200 per year, heavy users of Airbnb should become Airbnb Gold Members, and should be able to do unlimited bookings with $0 or a much lower Service Fee than 12%.
– Airbnb Gold Members can get prioritized service, access to special deals on new listings automatically.
– Airbnb Gold Members should get access to “Sort by price” especially showing new listings exclusively.
– Sale of Bluetooth 4.0 Automatic Door Locks, Airbnb should even provide installation services for these types of locks and fully integrate it with Airbnb. New guest just clicks on Airbnb App to open the door using the web/BT4.
– Somehow rental of Smartphones or SIM Cards in every country. Perhaps Airbnb needs to buy an automatic vending machine for those in every airport. When guests arrive, they need to get connected to the web on their smartphone easily.
– Cleaning, key swap services provided and organized by Airbnb.
– Of course Political clarification legalizing the use of Airbnb for owners and renters alike throughout the world. Airbnb needs to campaign with politicians to make this legally clear worldwide.
– Combine with social network of cooks and high quality food delivery into each Airbnb accomodation. You click a button and you can get delicious healthy food delivered for cheap from local talented cooks. For example $8 and you get a delicious meal delivered to your Airbnb door in 30 minutes somehow.
– Organize sport activities around each Airbnb listing. Integrate the booking of Badminton, Tennis, Squash courts, compete with other Airbnb guests or locals automatically. Thus integration with bookings for sports, theatre, cinema, everything can get integrated into one seamless travel experience. This is kind of why I expect Google is thinking to acquire Airbnb regardless of how expensive it may be.

Interview from Gigaom Roadmap (about 10 minutes before I filmed this short Interview):

Solana Crawford of Goodsearch.com at Gigaom Roadmap #roadmapconf

Posted by – November 13, 2012

Goodsearch.com donates 50% of all their Yahoo powered search and e-commerce revenue to charities. They have 200 thousand members, and 1.5 million monthly users. Thus far, Goodsearch has donated $9.3 Million to charities this way.

Katia Beauchamp of Birchbox.com, Dave Gilboa of WarbyParker.com at Gigaom Roadmap #roadmapconf

Posted by – November 13, 2012

Birchbox delivers beauty products randomly in a box for a $20/month subscription. WarbyParker delivers boutique-quality, classically crafted eyewear at cheap price points.

Windows Phone 8 Review: HTC Windows Phone 8X

Posted by – November 13, 2012

My initial look at Windows Phone 8, asking what is new about it to Harry McCracken Technology Editor at Time.com (he wrote an article about one of the tablets I showed him the Eken VIA8850 based A70 tablet at http://techland.time.com/2012/11/07/a-50-not-really-windows-tablet/).

Kevin Krejci of Fujitsu Laboratories of America at Gigaom Roadmap #roadmapconf

Posted by – November 13, 2012

Kevin Krejci of Fujitsu Laboratories of America talks about the latest developments in Mobile technologies out of Silicon Valley and how that is being used by Japanese technology giants like Fujitsu.

Dr. Joseph Turian, How to do AI, crowdsourcing information work for pay

Posted by – November 13, 2012

Dr. Joseph Turian, President, Metaoptimize and Analyst, GigaOM Pro talks about using Crowd-Labor, getting machine applications that build on Human Intelligence.

You can watch his keynote presentation here:

LitMotors C-1, fully-electric, self-balancing, two-wheeled vehicle at Gigaom Roadmap #roadmapconf

Posted by – November 13, 2012

LitMotors shows their new C-1, self-balancing two wheeled futuristic looking electric bike.

David Prager at Gigaom Roadmap #roadmapconf

Posted by – November 13, 2012

David Prager, co-founder of Revision3 (recently sold to the Discovery Channel) is working on some new startup ideas.

Livefyre at Gigaom Roadmap #roadmapconf

Posted by – November 13, 2012

Livefyre is an alternative to Disqus providing live blog, chat and comments for blogs and for use on the social web. This is the comment system recently used on Engadget for comments, by Techcrunch for their live blogging and they are talking to more blogs to integrate them.

The Open Company Map and T-Shirt at Gigaom Roadmap #roadmapconf

Posted by – November 13, 2012

The Open Company is a startup about being transparent about the price of products, showing the conditions under which the products are made, how much the workers are getting paid, how many hours the workers work per week, how much it cost to make each product, how much for components, shipping etc. They are just a startup and consider expanding to add more products to their store.