If you’ve been following our Twitter feed, you may have noticed that we were at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco on September 8-10, a massive tech conference held in San Francisco, New York, and Beijing each year. The conference was a busy and invaluable time for us to meet some of the most prominent venture capitalists, journalists and entrepreneurs in the industry. This year, Ambi Climate exhibited at Hardware Alley on the third day of the SF conference, where we announced our upcoming launch on Kickstarter!
Here’s a quick recap of our experience at TCDisrupt:
Hardware Renaissance
We were incredibly excited to see the growing maker movement in the US as well as have the opportunity to share Ambi Climate with TCDisrupt’s SF attendees. As witnessed by the number of hardware startups, accelerators and prolific hardware speakers in San Francisco, it’s an important and exciting time to be a hardware startup! With Ambi Climate’s roots in Arduino and 3D printing, we’re no stranger to the fact that prototyping has become easier than ever before. More and more hardware startups are now able to quickly develop and test a product without having to wait years and years to create a prototype. Liam Casey, CEO and Founder of PCH and speaker at TCDisrupt, aptly called this emerging trend, the “renaissance in prototyping.” In San Francisco, Julian and Martin were psyched to see this trend reflected by the multitude of great hardware startups at Disrupt.
Here are some of the startups we were particularly excited about:
Vinli - We stopped by the Startup Battlefield to see Vinli, a team working on making “dumb” cars smart with their device, letting developers create their own apps for their platform - Vinli even has a Google Glass app! Since we’ve designed Ambi Climate as a way to retrofit existing technology (air conditioners) with a more intelligent and energy efficient solution, we were happy to see other startups doing the same!
Movpack - We also got to meet Movpak, a funky new startup that’s made a backpack-skateboard combo that folds into itself. They’re currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter. Movpak lets you take your transportation with you while giving you a break from carrying a heavy load. Do you think these will catch on on university campuses?
BloomSky - We also met the team behind BloomSky, a device that effectively crowdsources local weather from wherever it’s placed. BloomSky’s Kickstarter was successfully funded at the end of July for 170% of their original goal. We’re keen to explore whether Ambi Climate can work with BloomSky’s crowdsourced weather in the future so our users can get even more accurate, super localized weather for our algorithms!
These were only a few of the amazing startups at TCDisrupt - to see the multitude of startup attendees, watch John Bigg’s walk down Hardware Alley. (BTW, you can catch Martin sharing Ambi Climate 6 minutes into Part 2.
What’s Next?
We shared Ambi Climate with hundreds of TCDisrupt attendees and found that most people were excited about the smart technology and multi-sensor machine learning that’s built into our devices. While window and wall unit AC users are most prevalent in the northeast region of the United States, we were excited to be a part of such an iconic conference and found the opportunity to witness the growing maker movement in the US invaluable. Perhaps a trip to TC Disrupt New York is in store for us next….
Singapore. Beijing. Tokyo. And now San Francisco. Where is Ambi Climate headed next? Kickstarter! We’re preparing to go live on Kickstarter this Wednesday 8 am HKT. Sign up for our newsletter here to get all the details. (We’re offering a Super Early Bird Ambi Climate for $49 USD, but we’re only offering 50 units, so pledge early to secure yours!)
Follow us on Twitter (@ambiclimate) and like us on Facebook to get more updates from us while we’re live on Kickstarter.
