Lemnos Labs’ Eric Klein is chattering away about the brewing hardware revolution. He says that technology innovations in the last 10 years have made it possible for people to actually accomplish more with hardware for less. That lower barrier to entry will draw more and more people to building hardware.

“This thing is going to be huge…

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For years, Peter Platzer was pretty close to a stereotypical rocket scientist on Wall Street — he was trained as a high-energy physicist, but he spent most of his professional career in finance. But he told me he’s always had an interest in space exploration, and now he’s working on an aerospace startup called NanoSatisfi, which just raised $1.2 million in seed funding…

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I always find it entertaining when I watch one of my friends writing code in Emacs because by and large it’s the exact same interaction that their fellow coders would have had in the early 80′s. Yes, the laptop they type on is infinitely lighter and more capable, but there is still a screen with a keyboard, and mouse as the input being used to write code in the same program. Not to mention the fact the keyboard layout most people use was invented in the late 1800′s.

Over the past decade there have been endless new technologies that have come out that have promised to change human computer interaction. These range from voice control to augmented reality but outside of one exception we still use computers the same way we used to.

The only game changing technology that has achieved large market adoption is the touch screen. Part of the reason of their success was the incredible investment in the space by the giants like Samsung, Apple and Corning. Today touch screens are ubiquitous and some people are starting to use them as their sole input device.

The new frontier is now gesture control. The first inkling of how big this type of technology could be was the introduction of the Nintendo Wii in November of 2006. This blew the gaming community away for a number of reasons. Not only did the technology work and was enjoyable, it opened a large community of people who had never considered a console game before. Four years later, the Microsoft Kinect went a step further and eliminated the controller in your hand completely.

Since then all bets were off. A number of apps for the Xbox have tried to integrate the gesture control, with limited success. To date the biggest problem has been wide spread adoption of the technology by the OEM’s who make the computers and TV’s we use. From our view we have seen more and more applications to Lemnos in this space, but the path to market is always uncertain.

For me, the company to watch in 2013 is Leap Motion. They have managed to crack the nut of getting into the major companies. Just like Gorilla Glass was just a research project without Apple’s pull, many gesture control devices lacked the scale of a major corp. Leap is not only selling their units through Best Buy but have also partnered with ASUS who is going to be integrating them into their laptops this year.

Part of me is still skeptical of gesture control. I remember using some of the early Kinect apps and my arms would get tired just trying to watch TV. Part of that may have been the implementation or the technology. I’m pumped to see what this year will bring in this area.

After taking the last week to reflect…2012 was a wild ride. We raised our first fund. We made nine investments. We saw two other incubators pop up in our space and a new fund dedicated to robotics. In March, Kiva Systems was acquired by Amazon for $775M and in November, Cisco acquired Meraki for $1.2B. In year one of our existence, we’ve seen two major myths about hardware debunked:

Hardware companies can’t raise money

Hardware doesn’t have big exists

What’s changed? Everything really, but we’ll delve into the details with a series of subsequent posts: changes in how we interact with physical & digital world, advances in rapid prototyping, and disruptive new e-commerce platforms.

What can you expect from Lemnos Labs in 2013?

• We’re now accepting startups into our incubator program year-round. Feel free to reach out even if it’s before you’re ready to submit a full application.
• We’ll be hosting a variety of events from happy hours to panels to conferences. Join our events list so that you don’t miss out.
• We’re going to keep you up to date on the latest happenings in the hardware startup world. We’ll try to blog a couple times a month ourselves and we’ll ask our mentors and portfolio CEO’s to share a few of their experiences as well. We’ll also aggregate our favorite articles from around the web on twitter and facebook.

“The old saw in Silicon Valley is that venture capitalists won’t touch hardware investments. It’s not because they hate gadgets and machines, it’s that the cost to launch a hardware startup is much higher compared to the price to code a new piece of software. Not only do you have to build it, you’ve got to find the shelf space (virtual or otherwise) to sell it. All that adds up to a risk most investors don’t want to touch.

If you ask Jeremy Conrad, co-founder of hardware incubator Lemnos Labs, he’ll tell you that those notions are outdated. “Venture capitalists are starting to look at radically different companies than they used to because the cost to launch a hardware startup has gone down,” he says. Conrad hosted the Hardware 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where investors, startup founders, and others in the hardware space challenged the notion that hardware startups are impossible to fund.”

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“When you can’t be somewhere in person, you can check things out virtually through the concept of telepresence. But not all solutions are created equal, which is where Revolve Robotics’ new product Kubi comes in. It’s smarter than a stand but cheaper than a robot.

Kubi is a motorized tablet stand that lets you look around the room during video-conferencing sessions. It can pan up to 300 degrees and has a tilt range of 90 degrees. The device’s spring-loaded “arms” pinch together to hold a tablet — just about any tablet — in portrait or landscape mode.”

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“Silicon Valley is gearing up for a new type of space race: the quest to launch relatively inexpensive satellites to open up space exploration to the masses.

Two San Francisco startups are preparing to launch their first satellites next year. NanoSatisfi Inc. plans to provide data such as weather and shipping information to businesses through imagery gleaned from a constellation of small satellites. It has raised nearly $1.5 million from Bay Area, New York and European angel investors and $106,330 through Kickstarter for a venture designed to let students conduct their own experiments from satellites, such as examining high-atmosphere radiation.”

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“Hardware has long been the outcast of startup society, pushed to the fringes by popular social networks, e-commerce platforms, and enterprise jocks. But now the nerdy kids spending their free time in science club, tinkering with robots and playing with math, are making a comeback.

Today, Lemnos Labs held an event called Hardware 2.0 at its SoMA warehouse to bring entrepreneurs, investors, experts, and innovators together to stimulate discussion about the state of hardware.”

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“Crowdfunding pioneers Indiegogo and Kickstarter opened up their fundraising platforms in 2008 and 2009 respectively, but 2012 may be the first year that tech investors and entrepreneurs took crowdfunding very seriously. Hardware projects especially grew into full-fledged businesses after humble beginnings.

A San Francisco-based incubator for early-stage hardware startups, Lemnos Labs, reports that today a majority of its portfolio companies use crowdfunding to make money. More importantly, they use crowdfunding to see if there’s real demand for the products they’ve imagined and prototyped, says Lemnos founding partner Jeremy Conrad.”

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Lemnos Labs was founded by Zelman and Jeremy Conrad, both 28, last November in San Francisco, and has raised $1.85 million from angel investors including former Yahoo! (YHOO) executive Ash Patel and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg. Lemnos is backing about 10 hardware startups, including a maker of autopilot systems for unmanned drones and a company that built a device that attaches to corporate campus vehicles and connects with a smartphone to coordinate employee pickups.

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