We recently led an investment in Orbotix, a Boulder, Colorado company that graduated from the TechStars Boulder 2010 program, Orbotix is creating a new game platform that combines common physical objects, smart phones, and a software marketplace. Their first product will “reinvent the ball” through the creation of a robotic ball controlled by a smart phone.
As we’ve explored the theme of human computer interaction, we’ve observed the incredible opportunity to integrate ordinary toys with computers. The ball is one such object as it is an extremely versatile and popular toy. However, up to this point, attempts to do clever electronic things with balls have been limited to simple things like incorporating motion-sensing blinking LEDs into the ball.
Orbotix (previously called Gearbox) was one of the teams in this year’s TechStars Boulder program. The co-founders Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson are genius-level hardware and software hackers who have been working on robotic control systems for years. Early in the TechStars program they decided to see if they could create a robotic ball that was controlled remotely by a smart phone. This is an extremely tricky piece of software and hardware engineering. With smart phones, much of the computing power is transferred to the phone. As a result, Ian and Adam were able to take a fresh and unique approach to the mechanical control system in the ball.
The result is magical. Three months ago Ian and Adam put up a simple video on Youtube showing them remotely controlling a ball with a smart phone.
One of Ian and Adam’s TechStars mentors was Paul Berberian, a multiple-time entrepreneur and long term friend of Foundry Group. Brad previously sat on the board of Paul’s second company, Raindance Communications, which went public in 2000 and was ultimately acquired by West Corporation. As Paul got to know Ian and Adam the three of them began discussing teaming up. By the end of the summer, Paul had decided to join the company as CEO.
Orbotix expects to get to a production level unit by the end of the year with product availability in 2011. In addition to the physical hardware, Orbotix is creating an API layer that allows anyone to write software that controls the ball. Furthermore, Orbotix plans to release a series of games for multiple players, including racing and sumo type games.
Foundry Group Invests in Fitbit
We recently led a $9 million investment in Fitbit. Based in San Francisco, Fitbit is creating pioneering consumer products in the field of human instrumentation. Its first product is a $99 device containing a 3D motion sensor that accurately tracks your calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, and sleep. The Fitbit tracker is smaller than a belt buckle and is easily worn on your waist, in your pocket or on undergarments. It includes a wireless base station which, when connected to your PC, uploads your data to the Fitbit web site where a user can track progress and compare results from other users. From the company’s website, users can track their activities, compare them to friends or the general population of Fitbit users and track other activity-related information (including diet).
Over the past few years, there have been a steady stream of new computer-connected products that measure various human activities. Many of these, such as glucose monitors, came from the medical device arena. Others were sports-oriented, such as heart rate and GPS distance monitors. These devices were interesting, but addressed a very specific set of human activities and measurements.
As we studied the area of human computer interaction, we developed a belief that in the future humans will increasingly instrument and measure their activities. Over the past year, we bought numerous products in a search for the best company in a market – human instrumentation – that we believe will explode over the next decade. With Fitbit, we believe we have found it.
Human instrumentation implies that we want to measure and track varies aspects of our body, health, and life. The initial Fitbit device directly measures calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, sleep quantity, and sleep quality. This data is uploaded to the Fitbit web site which also allows the user to enter additional information, including food, activities, weight, heart rate, blood pressure, and glucose levels. All of this information is presented in multiple views – daily, weekly, monthly, average, low, and high. The Fitbit web site also contains all the expected social features such as allowing you to share your data with friends and have competitions around any of the measurements.
Sifteo, one of our portfolio companies located in San Francisco, is seeking a Marketing Lead to help deliver a new interactive play and learning system to consumers. They are looking for someone who can develop and execute a focused messaging and outreach plan, who can build and deliver a quantitative marketing program, who can build the right channel relationships, and who is excited about jumping into a start up environment. You’ll be working with the co-founders and the product team, and you will be responsible for the full marketing program for the product on a start-up budget.
You’ll be coming up with the taglines, building the marketing metrics, devising pricing strategies as well as making CES happen end-to-end and helping out on customer service phone calls.
Siftables are gesture-sensitive video tiles that form a smart, distributed system for games and education. The technology has been spun out of the MIT Media Lab and has been featured on the Science and Discovery channels, presented at the TED conference, and has been written up by Engadget, Gizmodo, New Scientist and Wired.
The following is what they are looking for in an ideal candidate:
– 5+ years of professional experience in marketing consumer electronics and/or interactive games (this isn’t your first rodeo)
– organized: you are thoughtful and meticulous in all you do
– agile: you are willing to dig into (and adapt) our target customer profile as we learn more about product/market fit
– creative: you love to execute low-cost, grassroots outreach events
– writing skills: you can dash out tight copy with your eyes closed
– communication skills: you love talking to engineers and designers (maybe you are or were one), understanding their ideas, and working with them to deliver a great product
– resourceful: you can win big results on tight budgets
– decisive: you can pare away good ideas from the great ones and focus on measurable plans
Please send resumes to [email protected] with subject “Marketing Lead”
Foundry Invests in Triggit
Today we are pleased to announce our investment in Demand Side Platform (DSP) Triggit and welcome Zach and Susan Coelius, Ryan Tecco and the rest of the Triggit team to the Foundry family.
Triggit has developed technology that helps advertisers and agencies buy media across various real-time bidding exchanges. Seth has a longer post up on his blog describing some of the changes in the online ad ecosystem – and specifically the rapid rise of exchange-based buying and selling – that lead us to this investment. Along with Foundry portfolio companies AdMeld and Lijit, we see Triggit standing at the center of this fundamental shift in online advertising and in Triggit’s case bringing unique technology to brands and agencies transacting on the real-time exchanges that will help advertisers more effectively target specific online audiences.
We’re joined in this investment by Santo Politi of Spark Capital and a handful of well known Silicon Valley angel investors.
We recently closed a $4m investment in BigDoor Media. Based in Seattle, BigDoor provides a platform for non-game publishers to integrate game mechanics, such as points, badges, levels, leaderboards, virtual currency and virtual goods, into their web and mobile applications.
The web has become increasingly social. While many simple social features, such as sharing, liking, and favoriting content are appearing on publisher’s sites, users are increasingly engaging with each other in other ways as evidenced by the dramatic success of social games. As a result, many non-game publishers are now exploring ways to incorporate “game mechanics” into their web and mobile applications.
BigDoor provides the underlying infrastructure that enables publishers to quickly, easily, and inexpensively accomplish this. Since BigDoor uses an API approach, their system can be configured to be tightly integrated into any publisher’s site. Due to their cloud-based approach, they can aggressively scale to meet any publisher’s need.
BigDoor is part of a new theme we have been investing in that we call Distribution. It also overlaps nicely with our Glue theme. As a cloud based service with a simple API driven pricing model, its deployment and pricing model is similar to SimpleGeo, another recent investment we have made. Finally, we are very comfortable with its publisher driven adoption model, which is similar to Lijit and modeled after an investment we had previously made in FeedBurner.
Seattle is now home to two Foundry Group investments – BigDoor and Gist. We are also mentors and investors in the Techstars Seattle program, which is led by Andy Sack whom is an investors and board member of BigDoor and introduced the company to us.
