EC Hardware

How the FirstBuild product co-creation studio is changing how new things are made • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 13, 2022Posted in consumer electronics, EC Hardware, EC venture capital, firstbuild, Gadgets, HardwareNo Comments

Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and small-batch production for the win If you are running R&D at a large appliance manufacturer, you have a challenge. You typically make products in enormous quantities at pretty slim margins. In order to recoup your development, tooling and launch marketing costs, you need to create and sell a huge number of products. To ensure that that’s possible, you’d probably end up doing a bunch of user and market research to ascertain that you have the highest chance of success with your products. That makes sense, but the very business model itself means that it’s hard to do something truly risky, which in turn means that mainstream manufacturers rarely come up with anything genuinely innovative. If there was a mushroom fruiting appliance, would a lot more people regularly be growing mushrooms at home? There was only one way to find out: to build one and to try and sell it. That’s where FirstBuild comes in. If you’re a small appliances nerd, you may have seen its Opal nugget ice maker, the studio’s first big breakthrough; the Mella mushroom fruiting chamber; its indoor pizza oven; or the Arden indoor smoker. I spoke with André Zdanow, president at FirstBuild, to figure out where these ideas came from and how the studio is working to try to replicate those successes. “The most famous example is probably the Opal nugget ice maker. At first, it wasn’t actually a product at all — it was a technology being worked on in the refrigeration division of GE Appliances,” Zdanow said, explaining that it turned out to be a head-scratcher. They wanted to put the “nugget ice” into a fridge but weren’t able to figure out exactly what the market size would be for such a thing. “It’s actually really complicated to put the technology into a refrigerator. In other words, it was really a great idea that engineers had been toying around with for years, but in the context of the focus and economics of a multibillion-dollar company, it wasn’t something that they could focus on.” The Opal nugget ice maker was FirstBuild’s first commercial success. Image Credits: FirstBuild In a parallel universe, that tech would never have seen the light of day, but instead, the engineers came to FirstBuild and wondered what would happen if they put the tech in a separate appliance, rather than into a full-size refrigerator. “We see lots of people go to the store and buy this type of ice. They call it Sonic ice or hospital ice. We decided to develop a prototype and see if people want it to be just an ice maker,” Zdanow explained. That was the genesis of the FirstBuild lab’s success. “It started with crude concepts that looked like an ice maker but had nugget ice in it. From there, it progressed through industrial design and ultimately to a $2.7 million crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter back in 2015.”

How to land investors who fund game-changing companies • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in Climate, climate tech, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, EC Hardware, EC TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Sila, startup fundraising, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

A lot of problems worth solving aren’t ones that you can solve in a year or two or even 10. For founders and investors alike, such long timelines can seem daunting. But for Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO of battery tech startup Sila, hard tech problems are also some of the most tantalizing. “It’s always a good time to be a hard tech startup,” Berdichevsky said at ZebethMedia Disrupt. “One of the reasons is that the world doesn’t change just because it should. It changes because someone goes after something insanely hard and actually succeeds at it.” Such hard.tech startups run the gamut from advanced batteries like those made by Sila to nuclear fusion, quantum computing, automation and robotics. Any tech that has the potential for such broad impact also has a massive potential market, and that means a certain class of investors are willing to be in it for the long haul. “Hire people to do the technical stuff. Keep an eye on it, but then go learn the other pieces.” Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO, Sila “We look for real step-change, game-changing technologies that are going to benefit everyone and we think that will drive a huge [total addressable market],” said Milo Werner, a general partner at The Engine. When Berdichevsky founded Sila, he believed his company’s technology, a silicon-based anode that promises to improve lithium-ion battery energy density by 20%–40%, would be a significant enough advance that it would have no problem finding a market. What he didn’t expect was how long it would take. When Sila’s first product debuted inside the Whoop 4.0 wearable last year, the path to market had been twice as long as Berdichevsky had expected.

Biden’s new restrictions on exporting semiconductor tools hit China where it hurts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in China, EC Hardware, export laws, Government & Policy, Hardware, semiconductorsNo Comments

Chinese semiconductor manufacturers and their U.S. suppliers should have seen the Biden administration’s latest export restrictions coming. It’s possible they did. The question is whether they’re prepared. Years ago, the Trump administration sent the first shot across the bow, first cutting off Huawei from advanced chips and later successfully pressing the Dutch government to bar the sale of EUV lithography machines made by Netherlands-based ASML to leading Chinese semiconductor firm SMIC. The EUV ban kept SMIC and, by association, China, from getting a chance at producing leading-edge chips with smaller transistors. Smaller transistors make for faster, more energy-efficient chips, and there were concerns that EUV-made Chinese chips would have facilitated myriad military and surveillance applications, including hypersonic missiles and AI-powered video and cyber monitoring tools. Though SMIC said it could produce chips that were similar to some of its competitors’ second-best designs, the yields were reportedly atrocious. Without EUV, the process was unlikely to be profitable anytime soon. China is likely trying to develop its own version, but it’ll be a long road. Even if Chinese companies could get their hands on EUV and related technologies, whether through espionage or some other means, they still would have to duplicate ASML’s global supply chain of more than 5,000 suppliers, some of which are the only ones that have the expertise to make those specific parts.

5 ways disruptive component startups can win over OEMs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 14, 2022Posted in Column, components, EC Column, EC Hardware, EC How To, Hardware, hardware startups, StartupsNo Comments

Ori Mor is chief business officer and co-founder of Wi-Charge. Creating a disruptive hardware components startup can be quite exciting. Few things can compare to the joy of physically interacting with your creation as you design and build it from scratch. But hardware startups are challenging. Think of it as the business version of the age-old question: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” You have to figure out which comes first: The components you’re creating or the devices that are designed to use those components. This may sound like an easy question to answer, but it isn’t. For example, our company built a new way of delivering long-range wireless electricity using infrared light. In order to “catch” those beams of electricity, though, devices would need to have the receiver chips built in, and product designers would need to substantially change their devices to power them wirelessly. We hoped that manufacturers would be excited for our system and move quickly to update their products. We got positive feedback, too, but most simply had no bandwidth for disruption as they grappled with their burdens of running a business and worrying about earning calls. They liked the idea, but they put it on the back burner. So we began to build devices with the necessary receivers built-in to showcase how they work. Here are five things you should do if you’re on a similar path: Creating your own devices does not mean giving up on your original goal of providing components for other manufacturers to use. Start with just one Let’s be honest. The chances are quite low that you’ll have the world-changing success of cargo containers or Qualcomm SoCs. So there’s no point rushing when building a hardware startup. Instead, start by making just a single prototype that you can use to show OEMs. Don’t worry about making this first version of your device perfect or packing in all the features you’ve thought up. Think of it as a relatively crude demonstration that can give people a glimpse of what’s possible. For example, we made a small digital display device for a supermarket shelf that could be powered wirelessly. We 3D printed it and actually used some tape on the inside to keep things in place. The only goal was to show potential buyers a proof of concept that validated our idea. While you’re showing off your first device, gauge people’s responses and ask for both initial impressions and constructive feedback. Would they use it? Would they want more? What might make it work better?