![]() ![]() ![]() And yet every day, thousands of police officers run towards gunshots to keep communities safe. It’s a terrifying thought, overruling human instinct. They ran towards the noise and shrapnel to help rescue hundreds of people. In the seconds after the attack, with smoke in the air and runners on the ground, Boston police went into crisis mode. When I first saw the photo above, I stared at it for minutes. And yet the Boston community dealt with all of this with valor and poise. It’s hard to imagine a citywide manhunt that ends in a shootout with police on a normally quiet residential street. It’s hard to imagine an entire city on lockdown. On April 15th-exactly three months ago to the day-the city of Boston stood together against one of the most gruesome attacks in the city’s history. This isn’t your average investment announcement in so many ways. We can’t wait to see where the product goes. They have expertise in this space, they had a prototype we loved, and they have their roots in Boston. Jia, Tim, and Jon embody the type of entrepreneurs we look for. After dominating the front page of Hacker News and getting a bunch of inbound interest, their crowdfunding campaign launched today! At the time this post was published, they’ve already raised $41,485 and counting. I couldn’t be more honored to announce Rough Draft Ventures’ investment in the Technical Machine team and their first product, Tessel. You don’t have to plug your device into your computer to get code onto it. You no longer need to program in a low level language. This little device has the potential to transform the Maker community. So when they emailed me a few weeks later with an idea for a wireless-first Arduino with built-in Node.js support, I knew we had something that the hardware community would love. Over time, however, the team realized that the problems they were solving-with embedded controllers and wireless connectivity-applied to so many other startups. We had several phone calls to discuss their vision for the hardware, software, and design. At the time, they were working on a product called Entrance that used RFID readers to control music playlists. When I was first introduced to Jon, Jia, and Tim back in March, we spoke on the phone for an hour about RFID readers. It’s time for the next generation of Arduino, built for the web. Yet the ecosystem wasn’t built for collaboration-for taking modules of code from one developer and using it in another context. The Arduino community is fairly vibrant, and there’s lots of open source code available to build upon. ![]() You can purchase a WiFi add-on for your Arduino, but it costs $85 in addition tothe $30 for the base Arduino board-and then you still have to set the whole thing up. So what’s the problem? For all the talk of the Internet of Things, it’s not particularly easy to make these things talk to the Internet. What can you do with it? Only make a mini Segway, build a Keytar, create your own Daft Punk helmet, and fly your own UAV drone. It’s a powerful little device, a sort of programmable and customizable mini-computer in the palm of your hand. ![]()
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