Water Saving Shower Maker Altered Joins Hands With ‘Kickstarter’ For Second Campaign For the 'Altered'

Altered, partnered with the world’s most successful crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, to go viral with the brand’s second campaign through the platform; a unique initiative that seeks to highlight a novel new product – Altered: Shower.

On December 3rd at 7 PM, Altered launches this one-of-a-kind campaign to crowd fund the Altered: Shower, so you can enjoy a great shower with 75% less water! Altered aims to raise Euro 40,000 through this latest campaign. The brand has developed this exceptional new technology for showers - the Dome®. It creates a rotating water dome, tearing water apart into very large drops at high speed. It gives you the coverage, pressure, and heat that you want for a nice shower. Just with 75% less water. This is great for you – and even better for the planet!

[caption id="attachment_138934" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Altered - Shower[/caption]

The Altered: Shower follows global standards and installs literally in seconds in showers across the globe. It is a way for everyone to be part of the solution. An average household will save 28.168 liters of water, 1407 KwH, 4920 kg of CO2 and, last but not least, €393 every year with this technology.

“We truly believe this is the simplest and best sustainable shower to date. And it is very important because by 2025 WWF has pointed out that 75% of the global population may face water shortage. Also, scientists now agree we have at most 10 years before the effects of climate change are irreversible,” remarks Mr. Mikael Abbhagen, Founding Partner, Altered, Sweden. “By creating very simple solutions, that everyone can use right now, we can have an impact on water stress and climate change – today,” he adds.

Some of the company’s clients include brands of the stature of The Taj group of hotels, Emirates, Unilever and Burger King, to name just a few.

You can follow and take part in the campaign through the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alteredshower/altered-shower-an-exceptional-shower-with-75-less-water

ABOUT ALTERED

Founded in 2016, Altered is a Swedish innovation company using proprietary technologies to develop products that reduces the use of water and energy with 85-98% without sacrificing user experience, functionality or design. Altered was co-founded by Professor Kaj Mickos, innovator of the revolutionary Altered:Nozzle, Johan Nihlén, CEO and Mikael Abbhagen, Head of Design. Thus far, Altered has raised over € 2million in multiple rounds of funding.

Altered presently has four products in the market – Altered:Nozzle Dual Flow Pro, Altered:Nozzle Dome, Altered:Tap and the Altered:Soap. Over the next few years, Altered will be developing its tap range as well as a new shower range for the market and launch five more products by 2020. It is focused on five key market segments – Online and Retail Customers; HoReCa; Offices & Public Areas; Governments; and Utility Companies. Simultaneously, the company will focus on expanding its presence in its key markets – the US, GCC, Scandinavia and India by building awareness and strengthening its distribution network. Altered products are of premium quality that lasts – tested up to 60,000 cycles at KIWA laboratories.

ABOUT KICKSTARTER

Kickstarter is a platform that helps artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality. To date, tens of thousands of creative projects — big and small — have come to life with the support of the Kickstarter community. Kickstarter is an enormous global community built around creativity and creative projects. Over 10 million people, from every continent on earth, have backed a Kickstarter project.

Crowdfunding Platform Kickstarter Launches in India

Kickstarter, one of the largest crowdfunding platform in the world is entering India in association with Amazon Launchpad and HAX. Together, the three global entities will launch Startup C-Cube, a multi-level challenge for Indian start-ups that flags off in Bangalore on the 5th of December 2017.

HAX is a hardware accelerator that invests in select startups in their early stages and provides guidance and resources in exchange for equity. Kickstarter is a platform for entrepreneurs to showcase their products and start a crowdfunding program. Amazon Launchpad is a global program that curates, showcases and delivers all kinds of products from startups to Amazon customers.

The Startup C-Cube challenge will be officially flagged off by Amazon Launchpad, HAX and Kickstarter at an event in Bangalore on the 5th of December. This will also mark Amazon Launchpad’s one year anniversary in the Indian market. The winning start-up will be supported by the three companies through the entire “concept-to-customer” journey and the joint program will also provide resources to the winner for launch, both in India and in Europe/US, depending on the scalability of the idea.

Manish Tiwary, VP of Category Management at Amazon India said, "Business growth of some of the start-ups on Amazon Launchpad has elicited interest in these start-ups from VCs as well as other funding agencies in the last one year.

"We are very happy to bring Kickstarter and HAX to India to give Indian start-ups an opportunity to get their ideas noticed at the global stage and arm them with resources to convert these into real business opportunities", he added.

RePhone kit: World’s First Open Source Modular Phone

What if I tell you that you can now create your own phone? You would consider that I'm crazy but fortunately, this crazy idea could soon become a reality, all thanks to Seeed Studio's RePhone kit.

The RePhone kit helps one to create his/her own phone within a few minutes. The kit provides slim modules, customizable phone enclosures and accessible software to help the users build their dream phones. Open source components like RePhone Core GSM + BLE module or RePhone Core 3G model are also made available, which can even help the user to add cell connection to his/her phone.

To some of you, this modular phone might reminds you of Google’s much-awaited Project Ara modular phone however it is not open source like RePhone.

The kit also comes with 8 more modules, apart from the above stated core modules. – a 5×7 LED board, a NFC board, a GPS board, a 1.54-inch touch screen, an audio board, an Arduino-compatible microcontroller, a GSM breakout board and a basic sensor board.





All these above mentioned modules can be hooked together with a varied choice of connectors like FPC ribbon cable, soldered wires etc.

The kit also offers its customers a rich library for hooking into Arduino IDE, JavaScrip and Lua. It also comes with detailed examples to teach everyone how to develop things in an easy way. They also provide a complete SDK based on Eclipse IDE for C/C++ developers in order to help them work with complex applications.



For those who are not very well versed with programming, the kit comes with an easy drag and drop feature for files for them. One just needs to download them online and put them in their RePhone.

Along with the the RePhone modular smartphone kit, the user also gets a very cool Kraft paper foldable case. The user can make her their own RePhone, call their friends and listen to music. Further, by connecting it to IFTT, one can even setup logic to convert it as an IoT device.

This Indian Gaming Startup Has Reinvented The Jigsaw Puzzle and Now Crowdfunding For Global Expansion

In this digital age, the digital bug bites children at such a young age that children of even 2-4 prefer grabbing the Smartphones of their parents in order to play their favourite games online. The current generation is so hooked up on playing their games on their Smartphones, laptops and gaming consoles etc. that playing an offline games seems highly boring and uninteresting to them. Understanding this situation at hand and working towards bettering of it, is a Bangalore based startup called MadRat Games.

MadRat Games is one of those handful of offline gaming firms in India which builds and retails educational games. The firm is currently in the news for having launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to support the overseas expansion plans of Madzzle, its new series, which is a reinvention of the age old jigsaw puzzles.

The company is currently going great guns as they were successful in raising $1 million earlier this year from investors including Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, the two co-founders of Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart.

Bermuda Triangle, a zero-gap jigsaw puzzle, is among the five Madzzle games that is currently taking the country by storm. Jigsaw puzzles, which were once a hit among children are no longer preferred by them because of their lack of replay factor. Madzzle puzzles fixes this glitch as they lend themselves to further games once the jigsaw has been completed. Each Madzzle puzzle kit comes packed with accessories such as decoders, glow-in-the-dark objects and magnifying glasses.



MadRat Games has been founded by the couple, Rajat Dhariwal and Madhumita Halder. Both are alumni of the same institute, IIT, Mumbai. They both quit their high paying jobs after being intrigued by the purpose-of-life question and started teaching at the well-known Rishi Valley School, outside Bangalore. That's when they decided to bring activity and play into teaching and started MadRat Games.

MadRat began its first official journey in 2010 with a help of 35,00,00 rupees from Dhariwal’s father and since then there has been no looking back. Their first game, Aksharit, which is the world’s first Hindi-language Scrabble was a big hit and was sold by the thousands to government schools and, later, as a mobile game, got bundled with mobile phones from device maker, Nokia. The startup was then funded by Blume Ventures and First Light Ventures and successfully retailed over 3 lakh games.

After much deliberation and thinking, they came upon jigsaws as a category because they thought there was a certain calmness and concentration built into them. All this led to the amazing Madzzle, the zero-gap, roll-up puzzle that converted into a board game with sunken ships underwater scenes and crashed plans that extended into treasure hunts.

MadRat Games is currently working on a project that involves incorporating technology – but without screens – by creating a wearable platform. The platform which is currently at prototype stage will be at the at the Consumer Electronics Show 2016.

Apple CEO & Chairman of Google Funded A Startup Which Makes Bathroom Showers

With an era of water shortage dawning upon the world, this particular invention was much needed. Nebia is one of a kinds shower head that boosts of reducing the amount of water used by up to 70%. Yes, 70 percent.

What has caught more fancy of the world other than the product itself, is the kinds of investors that the startup has been able to attract. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, and Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, are some of the high profile investors of the Silicon Valley based shower heads startup.

An average shower takes around 20 gallons of water, but according to Nebia, showers taken using its shower heads only use about six gallons. Nebia reduces the amount of water used through its nozzles that break water down into droplets. That means even though less water is being used, more water is coming into contact with the body of the person taking the shower.

Essentially, Nebia's trade marked H2MICRO technology atomizes water into millions of droplets to create 10 times more surface area than a regular shower. More water comes in contact with your body leaving your skin feeling clean and hydrated.



In testing of a prototype by NYTimes, the multinozzle shower head produced a misty spray (the word nebbia in Italian means mist) that could easily immerse the one who taking shower me in water, unlike traditional shower heads that shoot pressurized streams of water.

The Silicon Valley based startup has chosen to remain mum on the amount of money it has raised from the top tech executives.

The startup has been testing out its product on the campuses of Google and Apple, as well as in Stanford University and at Equinox gyms.

With the discussions on water rationing getting frequenter day by day, California is currently in the middle of a drought like situation. Hence, tech giants are going out of their way to invest in Nebia.

The startup is currently on Kickstarter trying to raise $100,000 to help it ship its first units. The cost of sinle Nevia shower panel starts from $299 and cab be pre-ordered from Kickstarter.

Meet Mycroft - A First Ever Open Source Artificial Intelligence Platform

Artificial intelligence has now become a part of our day to day lives like never before. Natural language processing, self driving cars are all miracles bestowed upon us by this wonderful creation of the human mind. But this particular wonder has for long been in the possession of big private companies. Well, not anymore.

Introducing Mycroft, a state of the art Artificial intelligence (A.I.) that makes use of natural language processing to respond to your voice.

The world's first open hardware, open source home A.I. platform is based on two of the world's most popular open development platforms- Arduino and Raspberry Pi 2.

With Mycroft, you will be no longer needed to reach out to your smartphone for every small need of yours. The A.I. makes online services like Spotify, Netflix, Pandora, and YouTube etc. available to its users instantly. So, for example, if you want to hear your favourite music, you just have to say the words to Mycroft and it will do it for you. The A.I. has integrated high quality speaker and is capable of playing the music directly.

Not only this, Mycroft also allows one to integrate the A.I. with their smart devices and control the Internet of Things (IoT) for them. From watering your plants to making the coffee, if it is connected to the Internet, Mycroft will do it for you.

Besides all of these, Mycroft can also double up as your Calendar, Reminders reminder, Weather forecaster and Alarm Clock etc.



Mycroft can also prove to be a boon for developers, makers and tinkerers wanting to explore their own ideas.

Joshua Montgomery - CEO, Ryan Sipes - CTO and Kristie Adair - CFO are the wonder brains behind Mycroft who are currently raising funds to make their wonderful invention a reality for the human kind. You can head to their Kickstarter page here and donate if you think Mycroft is the thing that the human kind truly deserves and should see the day of light.

Mycroft is priced at only $129 per unit, which makes it affordable enough to install 100% coverage in your home or office.

Although the company has created an entry-level model that requires no tinkering or hacking to get it started for just $99, most users will likely be interested in the $249 Hardware Development kit that features more flexible options for creating a customized hardware solution.

Currently, the company has raised just over $36K with a goal of $99K and has about three weeks left to go in their Kickstarter campaign.