Lost In Translation – How It All Started

The idea started spinning when I was working in Tokyo last winter. I loved Japan - great people, food and nature. Very polite and unassuming, and of course tech savvy. But the language is…. complicated, even after spending 7 years in China. So I found myself admiring a lot of the cool infrastructure they had, without necessarily understanding much of how it actually worked.

The control panels in my apartment were case in point. It had some brilliant features – for instance it would record a video when someone was calling for me at the door when I wasn't at home. So in theory I could see who had been visiting when I got back. If I had understood the menus that is. Most times I ended up receiving a call from the security people and a lot of “sumimasen, daijoubu desu”.

Home control panel

So this thing was obviously connected, but I couldn't access it on my terminals. Why couldn't it just stream to a mobile app? Come to think of it, why couldn't the whole monitoring just be built into the WiFi router? I had been doing work on smart devices in Symbio, so I knew it would be possible.

Anyway, ideas have developed but the key vision remains – get our home devices to wirelessly plug-and-play to a smart device where user experience just makes sense. No hassle, no wires, no protocols, no weird buttons. Just a simpler, better life.

Luckily the toilet panel had pictures

Being creative in the Hub

Ambience matters. We just finished our second f2f workshop, this time in a cool incubator space downtown London. Ian and his team build a new makers movement platform out of here, and the buzz and energy of 200 people of 50 startups in one huge space certainly inspired. Worlds apart from my normal “office” space one could say.

Two intense days, working with David who help us design the device. Two ideas graduated to the final, both very cool. Can’t wait to see them in 3D. Maybe we can mold first batch here instead of china. Also playing around with some ideas for name: Domo and Multo. Domo is inspired from Japanese, Multo from Italian/Roman. Values intended to be open, flexible with endless opportunities… but also just simple, easy names. Need to test it out and let them mature a bit.

Anyway, fired up and ready to go now! Next 6 weeks will be finalising v1 offering – device design, sensor packs and app UX. Build focus groups and prepare late summer launch on Kickstarter + retail in Norway. Now back to fresh snow in Sixt!