the company is benefiting from advances in areas like sensor technology and DC motors.
Momentum Machines hopes to install machines in five hamburger joints in 2013 and 1,500 by 2017. While the device won’t be cheap, it will pay for itself rapidly, Vardakostas says. “We think it would be hard to compete if you don’t have a robot,” he says.
Clement Gires, who co-founded Local Motion two years ago at Stanford University, says “the big problem we are trying to solve is that local mobility is huge, messy, and broken.” One third of all trips in the United States are less than five miles, yet 99 percent of them are made in cars burning gas in internal combustion engines. Local Motion is building “mobility networks” consisting of both fleets of electric vehicles, and the software needed to deploy them intelligently; it’s marketing these networks first on corporate campuses such as the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.
Some 30 million people in the U.S. work on corporate campuses, university campuses, and military bases, Gires observes. The company’s prototype four-seater vehicle is designed to help people get around those campuses, or make short trips to and from campus, for less money than companies would spend on shuttle buses or car sharing. (Local Motion’s vehicles can be operated for 12 cents per mile, which is one-third the cost of renting a Zipcar and one-tenth the cost of operating a campus shuttle service, Gires says.)
The company’s software platform is just as important as its hardware. The system senses where a vehicle is, how many people are on board, and “builds a graph to connect people, places, and events,” Gires says. The goal is to enable users to go online shortly before a trip and locate and reserve the nearest vehicle, while coordinating with others heading the same direction.
“You want a campus to be a vibrant place of communication, exchange, and creativity,” Gires says. To enable that, “people need to feel empowered to move around during the day, not just sit at their desk. Building a real mobility network will change the perspective people have on their local environment. We think that’s the biggest value we can bring to the market.”
The founders of Unplugged Instruments, Andrew Penrose and Ari Atkins, are both graduating from Stanford this week. They’re both longtime guitarists, and Atkins says looking at innovations like the iPhone highlighted just how little the electric guitar has changed in the last 50 years. “You need big amps and bulky effects pedals, so most of the time your instrument is stuck at home,” he says. “Our solution is the unlimited electric guitar. It feels and plays like a classic electric, but it has a built-in amplifier and iPhone app.”
The speaker in the Unplugged Instruments’ prototype is where the sound hole would be in an acoustic guitar. Plug the instrument into our iPhone and download the Unplugged Instruments app, and suddenly you can play along to songs downloaded from iTunes, or turn on effects like delays, or take lessons, or record your own music (which you can then upload to Facebook and other social platforms). “It just expands your experience so much beyond what any other guitar can do,” Atkins says.
Unplugged Instruments, which is currently raising money on Kickstarter, hopes to bring its first guitar to market by March 2013 at a price of around $350. Atkins thinks it will appeal to a “huge number of people,” given that there are 20 million guitarists in the U.S. alone, who buy 2 million guitars every year. “The big manufacturers like Fender and Gibson have been making phenomenal guitars for 60 years, but they haven’t innovated since the 1950s, and nowadays these classic setups can’t keep up,” Atkins says. “People want a more affordable solution.”
