The folks over on Android Police must have spent some of their time rewatching I/O videos. While they were doing that, they spotted a potential leak during the “Structure in Android App Design” session. In it, it seems, Google quietly leaked screenshots of what looks to be a revamped interface for the Gmail app.

If this turns out to be a real product, and the presentation sure made it look like that, the app could soon get a new navigation drawer that should make using it quite a bit easier – especially for those of us who like to use lots of labels in Gmail.

Currently, Google uses what it calls a “spinner,” the drop-down menu at the top of the screen you’ve probably seen in numerous Android apps. Instead, as Google’s Jens Nagel showed during his presentation, the new design would use a navigation drawer that users can pop out from the left side of the screen.

Here is what this would look like:

It’s worth noting that Google showed a lot of mock-ups during this presentation. The Gmail screenshot looks pretty real, however. Google does typically vet these presentations ahead of time, so we will just have to wait and see if this is really a leak or just an example of what the Android team could do with navigation drawers in Gmail.

During the presentation, Google also showed a mock-up of what the Calendar app would look like with the new navigation drawer, but Jens Nagel explicitly noted that while they could use this as the main interface for Calendar, the sidebar does “look a bit underpopulated,” especially on a tablet. It would be odd for Google to use one interface paradigm for one of its main native Android apps and go with another one in the rest of its apps.

Here is the full presentation. The discussion about the new Gmail interface starts about 23 minutes into the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XpqyiBR0lJ4

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Paper by FiftyThree is one of the most beautiful digital products on the market today.

The immersive drawing app for tablets has won Apple’s Design Award, a Crunchie, and was most recently honored at Time Inc.’s 10 NYC Startups To Watch party. So how do you build on that kind of success?

Well, according to the founders, Paper is but the first product in a series of creative tools. The team is thinking pretty seriously about what comes next, and it seems as though a stylus is where things are headed.

“The human hand has evolved to use tools,” said co-founder Georg Petchnigg. “You have wrists to do fine-detailed work, so the idea of a stylus is really interesting to us. It’s something that we’re thinking about because we want to deliver the best creation experience on tablets, so a stylus is right at the forefront of that.”

Currently, FiftyThree recommends customers on its website buy a stylus, linking to an Amazon stylus page as well as promoting the Pogo Connect.

But new products aren’t the only concern at FiftyThree. The team is also constantly thinking about how to reach a broader audience. As co-founder Julian Walker put it, “everyone out there is creative.”

That said, the company recently launched a new stream of content called Made With Paper, to help users get inspiration from other works created in the app. This is just a first step in building out more social, community-based features that will not only attract new users but keep loyal ones engaged.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Jolla, the Finnish MeeGo startup composed of ex-Nokians building their own mobile hardware and Sailfish OS, has finally taken the wraps off its first handset, revealing what the hardware will look like on its website. The design is a clean-looking, elegant slab, with the most stand-out feature being the coloured shell on the back that wraps around half the sides of the phone to create a dual-tone sandwich effect.

The shell colours, which appear to be user-customisable, can also influence the theme colours of the Sailfish UI. This is a feature Jolla is calling “the Other Half”. “Attach the Other Half and your Jolla becomes alive and unique,” the text notes. “Magically, the software changes to match your selected colour and design. Your Ambience. Your Jolla.” It’s unclear exactly what technology is linking hardware and software but it sounds like it could be NFC.

The removable, customisable shells bring to mind Nokia’s Lumia 820 — a device for which Nokia has released the 3D print files so owners of 3D printers can  design and print their own custom shell. The Lumia 820 shells, however, do not have any link to the Windows Phone software.

Jolla’s handset will cost €399 ($513) and is slated to ship at the end of the year. Jolla notes:

Expected availability by end of 2013 subject to demand in your local market. Sales will start in European countries with more countries to follow. If you join the Movement and get the pre-order number to buy the phone when available, you’ll pay no more than 399€; including applicable VAT in Europe, but excluding shipping costs, duties and any local taxes.

Specs wise, the device has a 4.5″ Estrade display, a dual-core chip, 4G, 16GB internal memory plus a microSD card slot, an 8MP auto focus camera, a user-replaceable battery. The device is powered by Jolla’s Sailfish OS but can also run Android apps, giving it something of a leg up. Jolla is also encouraging developers to build native Sailfish apps too.

The hardware reveal is also the start of Jolla’s pre-order sales campaign, announced last month. Jolla confirmed it is taking pre-orders from today, with the first shipments due at the start of Q4 2013. It is accepting pre-orders of either €100 or €40 for a limited edition Jolla (plus exclusive Other Half for those making the higher payment). It is also accepting pre-orders without any down payment to be among the first to get a Jolla handset.

The big question for Jolla is has it done enough to sustain people’s interest in a device that won’t ship for at least half a year — during which time scores more Android-powered handsets will arrive, and companies like Samsung will continue to push the limits of flagship phone hardware.

Jolla is holding an event in Helsinki today — dubbed the Jolla LoveDay — to promote the handset and encourage fans to pre-order the device, having kept the design tightly under wraps up to now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Android UX and interaction design leads Helena Roeber and Rachel Garb gave a talk at Google I/O this year about the Android Design Principles (ADP) they helped create and introduced back in 2012 with the launch of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The ADP foll three simple principles, essentially “enchat, simplify and amaze,” but there’s much more to those principles that that relatively slippery and non-scientific language might lead you to believe.

In fact, Garb and Roeber have based the ADP on compelling recent research that suggests eliciting negative emotional responses have an outsized effect on user experience, and require lots more counterbalance in terms of positive experiences to achieve a net positive, or even net zero lasting impression.

The Math Of Joy

They cited a John Gottman study that found successful marriages maintain around a 5:1 ration of pleasant feelings to bad, whereas those with more like a 1:1 ration have a far greater chance of ending in divorce. Another study they cited offers insight into team productivity, which suggests that positive-to-negative interactions in a work group setting operating in at least a 3:1 ratio result in much more productive teams than those with more negative experiences. Finally, they suggested that humans need three positive experiences to compensate for every bad one.

A lot of that may sound obvious when simplified; it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that designers and app builders should strive to please their audiences. But the execution of enacting that pleasure is where things get interesting, and where Roeber and Garb’s insight really shone through. It’s one thing to say “okay, we won’t anger a user here, and we’ll make them happy instead,” and quite another to actually do it.

Putting Theory Into Action

Hearing them describe it, the ADP almost came about under a sort of moral obligation. Roeber described how the teams in charge of Android UX and interaction found that tech now has “a profound impact” on all of our lives, and as such, when things go wrong, we have a tendency to blame ourselves, and that can have a subtle but ultimately strong impact on people’s wellbeing.

“All those non-ideal implementations eroded people’s confidence in their own abilities and caused frustration,” she said, describing how even small things that you might not think that much about ultimately leave you with a tick in the negative column if left unresolved. So if you can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong in setting up Gmail on your phone, for instance, that’s something you’ll carry, and something that requires that much more to negate in terms of the overall karmic balancing act.

The example offered by the presenters of how exactly this works in action in Android right now is the visual signal given for when you’ve hit the last of your home screens. Android users will know that you’re greated with a blue glow animation and a visual representation of a page turning up to suggested nothing underneath. It’s clear in what it indicates, but it’s less accusatory or finger-pointing than a text alert, Roeber explained, which can still make users feel admonished and leave them internalizing some blame.

Another example meant to explain how interface elements can not only minimize or eliminate bad feelings, but actually generate good ones was the Google Now art which occupies the search box when you call up Android’s digital personal assistant. It changes based on both location and time of day, and Roeber and Garb explained that in testing, the produced a reaction of wonder and enjoyment not just the first time it was encountered by users in testing, but every time after that as well, thanks to its dynamic nature. Experiences like this rack up positive emotions on the part of the user.

The Interface As The Ultimate Customer Service Rep

Essentially, what Roeber and Garb described in their chat is a means of combining the best possible way of tiptoeing around a potentially negative interaction with positive ones that excite and delight. It’s a simple calculus designed to result in an overwhelmingly net positive experience, the ultimate aim of which isn’t just to minimize the negative impact of the tech we now use constantly, but also to add points in the wins column that can be used to offset negative interactions that happen anywhere in our lives. The ADP isn’t conceived as a way to make using apps not suck, in other words; it’s actually designed to turn Android into a means of spreading happiness.

That’s an ambitious goal, but it’s impossible to deny that the experience of using Android on a daily basis has improved dramatically since the introduction of the ADP. And all of these improvements serve to illustrate how mobile software is perhaps at its best when it’s acting as the idealized customer service representative: friendly and informal, but not overly familiar; attentive to and anticipatory of your needs; gentle and kind when you’re barking up the wrong tree. A truly great customer service experience leaves you feeling lifted, capable, intelligent and happy. It’s more than fair to expect the same out of our device interactions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The idea of a VC having its own news aggregator was a bit outlandish in 2007. But Y Combinator was in an unusual position in those days anyway. Startup incubators had been a highly visible part of the dot-com crash, and Silicon Valley was still skeptical of the concept nearly a decade later. So YC set out to be something different — a community of hackers building companies on their own terms.

Hacker News was initially built by YC co-founder Paul Graham as a demonstration of Arc, a new programming language he’d been working on. He quickly realized that it could help bring together the companies he was supporting and the rest of the folks who wanted in. With 1.6 million page views and 200,000 unique visitors on a given weekday, it’s now a key part of the venture firm’s success.

But the site quickly took off, as former Redditors flocked to it to talk about tech and startups (the site was then known as Startup News).

Having a big audience isn’t really the goal. In comparison, Hacker News’ inspiration and the first big YC exit, Reddit has seen as much as 4.4 million page views in a given day.

A Community For Ex-Redditors

As Graham explains, as the site started seeing traction immediately, he realized this wasn’t just a way to test Arc. He wanted to make Hacker News a place to recreate the way Reddit felt in the good old days, when most of its community was made up of hackers. As Reddit drew more traffic, the hacker focus of the site evolved. The community’s user base became diluted as it grew, and Hacker News was a new home for some of the early Reddit hackers.

Graham writes in February of 2007:

Reddit used to have a good concentration of startup-related links, but that was because so many of Reddit’s initial users were connected in some way to Y Combinator. Now that Reddit is so much more popular, the top links tend to be images, or videos, or political news.

Another goal of Hacker News, says Graham, was to be a place where founders could share ideas and communicate. In the spirit of Y Combinator’s own incubator, Hacker News was focused on being a community for entrepreneurs and founders in the tech community: a place where they could freely post and where Y Combinator could also get to know potential founders and leaders in the tech world.

“From the beginning we had a real community, and some of the core group of refugees from Reddit are still prominent on Hacker News today,” Graham explains. Part of what attracted many to Hacker News was its simplicity and voting system. The product’s UI, design and color scheme have remained relatively constant over the past six years.

Thomas Ptacek, one of the site’s first users, explains that he was a Slashdot user and then a Reddit user, and flocked to Hacker News (at the time Startup News) because it was more relevant to the technology and startup community. He found Hacker News to be a refreshing change from past forums where the quality of commenting was declining.

Here’s how Hacker News works: Users submit links to stories, and stories are ranked according to a voting system, similar to Reddit. The difference between Hacker News and Reddit, however, is the voting system. While you can vote stories up, you cannot vote stories down (but you can flag stories). According to Graham, 100 upvotes will get a story to the top of the front page of the site. You can only downvote a comment if you have enough “karma” on the site, which is another compelling element of Hacker News. The Karma factor is determined by the number of upvotes on a user’s submission and comments minus the number of downvotes.

In terms of the design, Graham says he wanted Hacker News to look like your list of processes in a terminal window. The look and feel of the site was aimed at hackers themselves who are familiar with tabular data.

Graham will occasionally add new features, some of which are on the backend of the site. For example, as comments get more deeply nested and heated in terms of exchange, the reply link takes longer to appear. There is a purposeful drag implemented on this, says Graham, because deeply nested discussions are rarely interesting.

Another subtle feature addition: a flame-war detector. Graham has been consistently deploying and updating proprietary software that determines whether there is a flame war, where people argue heatedly. When these flame wars take place (which Graham says can often get ugly and personal), the story in which the commenting is taking place is moved further down the page.

Graham has also created sophisticated spam-detection software, which was just updated with new code six months ago. With the update, Graham says that it’s rare for spam to last on the site for more than 10 minutes. If a user does spam the site or engages in personally vicious behaviors, they run the risk of being banned. But in an interesting twist, called “hellbanning,” the user may not actually know they are banned.

On the backend, Hacker News runs on one core, and Graham calls this a “remarkable feat of scaling.”

In terms of human moderation, Graham himself had been spending three to four hours per day simply moderating the site. And that’s in addition to all of his duties running Y Combinator. While a number of other YC alums have moderating abilities, Graham has been the main human element of the site. “It was becoming my life,” he says. Around six months ago, Graham brought on someone else, who he chose not to name, to moderate the site. He says the individual is affiliated with Y Combinator and is a “prudent and thoughtful guy,” and has been doing a great job ever since.

Hacker News has a strong affiliation with Y Combinator, as well. Graham explains that founders usually all create a Hacker News account when they apply, and that user name is the founder’s identity at Y Combinator. Hacker News also features a jobs page that shows any jobs available at Y Combinator companies. He adds that this jobs portal is very useful for Y Combinator, as the majority of the site’s audience is made up of programmers and engineers.

If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC founders to enable these entrepreneurs to recognize and meet each other.

Graham says that Hacker News gets a lot of complaints that it has a bias toward featuring stories about Y Combinator startups, but he says there is no such bias. Instead, the culture at the incubator is to use Hacker News, and with more than 1,000 YC alumni who have graduated from the incubator, many of these founders are still active on the news site and post links to their fellow founders’ launches and news.

“It was a small intellectual village and now it is a giant city.”

Growth has its downside. What keeps Graham up at night is worrying about the dilution of quality of the Hacker News. He explains that the site was community of insiders in the hacker world, and it has gradually been getting diluted. “That is what I spend all my time thinking about,” he says.

He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling building.”

“The community has been in a perpetual but slow decline because the site is growing,” he says.

Ptacek agrees that the value of Hacker News has changed a bit. “I don’t get a community feel as much, whereas in the beginning it was a small group of people who all know each other,” he says. “It’s less likely now to see the same people from thread to thread.”

One of Graham’s biggest pain points is the “schoolyard quarrels” he finds on the site on a daily basis, and wishes “users would stop misbehaving.” He cites the example of users organizing voting rings to purposefully vote up stories, which caused Graham to develop additional software to detect this. He adds that more users are trolling under newly created accounts, and are deliberately starting flame wars on the site.

“I wish I could get people to stop posting comments that are stupid or mean,” he says. “It takes only one or two negative comments and a discussion turns into a flame war.”

Graham adds that he gets a lot of vitriol from users personally with accusations of bias or censoring. He clarifies that he, and the other human editor, rarely take links down unless they are dupes. Even with tabloid or gossip stories that surface, Graham will not take them down. Users with high karma points tend to flag these stories, he adds, and they can then be taken down.

“Hacker News makes me sad a lot,” says Graham. “I wish the community would behave the way they did when it was a little village.”

Users are noticing Graham’s frustrations. Ptacek says that he observes that Graham is careful not to tell people what to say or think, but it’s clear that he wants people to treat each other better and he gets more sad over time.

Could This Be A Business?

While Graham is open about not wanting to be the next Reddit, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Hacker News could be a business. Reddit is reportedly raising cash at a $400 million valuation. While Hacker News has a fraction of the traffic that Reddit does, the smaller site could actually have an impressive valuation as a business without any funding or employees.

Graham himself uses the site as his primary source of news. He’s even found Y Combinator companies through Hacker News. A user in the community posted a link to Watsi, a non-profit that allows people in dire need of medical care to raise money for procedures and health care. He noticed Watsi the second time it was posted on Hacker News and thought it was an amazing idea. He cold-called the founders and convinced them to be the first ever YC-backed nonprofit. And Graham recently took a first board seat at Watsi, his first board position ever.

But Graham is adamant that Hacker News is not a business and would not become a business. There are no ads on the site, and he has no interest in making money from ads. He admits that through the jobs page he indirectly makes money, as he is an investor in Y Combinator companies and will inevitably profit if the company’s hires help the business. Nor would he be interested in selling the site.

While it’s clear that Graham has his frustrations with the community, when he talks about the site’s defining moments, he sounds like he is speaking about his own child. One of his most distinct memories about the site is the day following Steve Jobs’ death, when every story on the front page was about the Apple founder.

“Users did it collectively as a tribute, and I found this a really remarkable way to show the power of a community. I thought this is really a living, breathing thing. It was like a bunch of birds flying through the sky forming themselves as an S.”

“There are really good reasons to engage with Hacker News,” says Ptacek. “There is no better place to stay engaged with the hacker community…At the end of day it is a message board. Having a place where you can reach and talk to groups of people is an important concept.”

As for the future of Hacker News, it’s clear that Graham is focused on maintaining quality and making sure that the community treats each other with respect and kindness. “I hope that most Hacker News readers know that I am doing this for their sake,” he says.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has begun to roll out its new mobile page layout to Android, a spokesperson from the company tells us.

Two weeks ago the social network debuted a redesign for business and fan pages on iOS, putting more actionable information about a business, brand or personality near the top of the screen. Now the design in reflected in the mobile web version of Facebook and eventually the Android app.

The redesign, with a top row of buttons and a prominent map and recommendations module, better optimizes pages for the mobile use case, for instance, looking up a store’s location or hours, viewing a restaurant’s photos or checking reviews. Options to Like, call, share or check into a place are easy to access. Instead of having to click to view a map, users can see the map, address and hours immediately. Place ratings are now visible on mobile location pages and a few recommendations can be read without having to click and load a new screen. A photos section allows users to quickly swipe through images, as they can in the mobile News Feed.

Page owners can now easily switch between the admin view and public view, which is a useful new feature. They can also pin one post to appear near the top of the screen, but they have to take this action from desktop. Facebook has eliminated the standalone sections for events, videos and photo albums. However, these will continue to show in the Timeline stream when they are posted, and one can be pinned to the top if desired.

Page owners should also keep in mind how the new design affects their cover photo since it will be darkened and the page name, description and profile photo will appear on top of it.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook has hired Nicola Mendelsohn as VP, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, filling a void being temporarily filled by VP of Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson after Johanna Shields left in October 2012.

Mendelsohn was most recently partner and executive chairman at Karmarama agency in London. She was formerly board director at BBH and deputy chairman at Grey London. She was also the first female president of the Institute of Practitioners of Advertising.

In notable departures news, Facebook’s head of Android product Bubba Murarka has joined VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson as General Partner and Managing Director. He had been at Facebook since 2008, and was most recently involved in the launch of Facebook Home.

As for other hires, Facebook removed 23 positions from its careers page this week, including a Head of Global Marketing Design and a few jobs in user operations, infrastructure, corporate development and other areas.

Prior listings removed from Facebook’s careers page:

• Head of Global Marketing Design (Menlo Park)
• Marketing Manager ( Contract) (Singapore)
• Food & Beverage Manager (Dublin)
• Finance Manager – Data Center Infrastructure (Menlo Park)
• Financial Analyst, Network Infrastructure (Menlo Park)
• Fixed Assets Accountant – Systems and Controls (Menlo Park)
• Administrative Assistant – Corporate Development (Menlo Park)
• Administrative Assistant, Engineering (Menlo Park)
• Administrative Assistant, Sales Planning & Operations (Menlo Park)
• Systems Engineer, Citrix (Menlo Park)
• Commissioning and Deployment Manager (Menlo Park)
• Manager, Marketing Communications APAC (Singapore)
• Product Marketing Manager, Developer Monetization (Menlo Park)
• Data Analytics Lead, User Operations (Dublin)
• Team Lead, User Operations (Menlo Park)
• Integration Manager, Corporate Development (Menlo Park)
• Manager, Corporate Development (Menlo Park)
• Merchant Operations Analyst (Menlo Park)
• Mobile Partnerships Strategist (Menlo Park)
• Account Manager, Czech (Dublin)
• Ad Operations Specialist (Dublin)
• Client Partner – Financial Services & Travel, Global Marketing Solutions (Sydney)
• Client Partner, Politics (Washington)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference is only around a month away, and while we’re already expecting to see iOS 7 at least previewed at the event, now we have some actual data to back up that supposition. Onswipe, the mobile site conversion company that leverages HTML5 to deliver tablet-optimized websites, has seen a big spike in traffic to its partner sites from devices running iOS 7 in recent days.

Over the past week, Onswipe found a significant bump in the number of visits from iOS 7 iPhones and iPads, specifically located in both Cupertino and San Francisco. SF had the most iOS 7 visits, with 18.75 percent, and Cupertino accounted for 17.9 percent of the total. May 2 saw the highest iOS 7 traffic to date, representing 23 percent, or nearly a quarter, of all unique iOS visitors to Onswipe-enabled sites. Most were visiting from iPhones (75 percent), but iPads also represented a full quarter of visits.

Apple typically tests new versions of iOS internally, before then releasing them as a developer preview to anyone registered with the iOS developer program, and then finally releasing it to the public after another few months of testing. An increase in the number of users on iOS 7 is a likely sign that Apple is advancing the testing more aggressively ahead of a wider launch at WWDC, which is in keeping with other reports we’ve seen that say Apple is indeed redirecting resources to iOS 7 to make sure it arrives on schedule.

Onswipe didn’t just note how much use iOS 7 was getting, it also identified what people on the yet-to-be-released OS were looking at. Specifically, Onswipe found that iOS 7′s pioneer users were interested in finding out about which turntable to buy, Vine’s recent update that allows for selfie vids, Apple’s stock price drama and Kid Cudi. Maybe those Onswipe-enabled sites are particularly well-tuned for stress testing the next version of Safari, or maybe that’s just the kind of stuff Apple engineers are into.

As for what iOS 7 will bring, there’s precious little information so far, besides rumors that the design will embrace a more flat visual style, and that core apps like calendar and email will get significant functionality updates. At least we don’t have long to wait to find out what’s next for Apple’s mobile OS.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook released a new version of Messenger for iOS on Monday, bringing its latest stickers feature from the main app to the standalone chat application.

Stickers are now available in Facebook for iOS, Messenger for iOS and Messenger for Android. Facebook also released a new set of stickers available for free in the “sticker store” within Messenger and the main Facebook app. Some chat apps sell stickers, but so far Facebook has made all eight of its sticker sets free. The newest set is called “Skullington.”

Another change that brings parity between Messenger and the main app are photo filters for images users share in private and group messages, as well as the redesigned contact info page in the latest version of Messenger. This design was introduced in a Facebook for iOS update last month. It includes a “shared photos” album that lets users quickly access images that they exchanged with a friend through private messages, similar to what email clients often include.

A feature exclusive to Messenger is the swipe-to-delete feature, similar to other email and chat apps. Before Monday, users could swipe to archive messages, but couldn’t completely delete from the app. Facebook’s main iOS app doesn’t have this feature because swiping right opens the bookmarks menu and swiping left opens the chat menu.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Chef Sleeve has been selling its iPad-protecting plastic sleeves since 2011 to keep kitchen gunk off the iPad you’re using while you cook. They also make a dishwasher-safe, non-porous chopping board with a built in iPad stand (below right), and a smaller stand in the same recycled paper composite finish. But Chef Sleeve’s grand plan is to create a range of connected devices for the kitchen that link up with an iPad app to let people track their nutrition in a highly granular, yet low hassle, way.

To that end it’s just kicked off a Kickstarter campaign for its next product: a smart Bluetooth scale, which it’s calling Smart Food Scales, that will enable people to weigh ingredients and snacks and then determine the exact amount of fat, salt, sugar, vitamins and so on in the ingredients they’re using in recipes or the snacks they’re eating at home.

“This is our first smart product. We now want to activate these pieces of hardware and take the iPad even further and enhance the experience in the kitchen,” says Chef Sleeve’s Michael Tankenoff. “The Bluetooth scale will sync up with our iOS app on iPad or iPhone. Say you’re weighing strawberries. We house the USDA database of food information, so you select strawberries. Not only will it tell you the weight, but it tells you all the nutritional information.

“For example, you’re preparing a salad — you put your bowl on the scale, add your lettuce, select lettuce, reset to zero, add your tomatoes, select tomatoes, reset to zero, keep going, build this recipe and when you’re done, now you know exactly the nutritional value of that salad that you have every day.”

As well as the health conscious and people watching their weight, Chef Sleeve envisages the scales being useful for individuals with conditions such as diabetes to help them track their sugar intake, or people with specific nutritional deficiencies who need to make sure they’re getting enough of certain vitamins in their diet.

The company is looking to raise $30,000 via its Kickstarter campaign, which runs until the end of the month. It’s showing the following prototype screenshots (below) of the planned iPad software. It also intends to open up its API at some point in the future, so that third-party developers can build apps for the smart scales — although it’s going to be careful about how it does this, as it wants to keep any other apps wholesome (scales can, after all, be used to weigh non-foodstuffs too).

After the scales, Chef Sleeve says it will look to launch other connected devices that tie back in to its iOS app to keep adding to a range of smart kitchen devices. A thermometer could be next, says CEO Santiago Merea. A chopping board with an integrated scale could also be on the cards “at some point” — but he says the company is being mindful about its mainstream consumer buyer. “We need to be careful about our demographic. We’re not going to throw rockets at them,” he told TechCrunch. “We want the design to be very homey, very crafty.”

If the uptake of the scales is strong, it could end up generating some fascinating data for Chef Sleeve — such as what, when and how people eat — which it said it will look to feed back into its product development.

“Our pledge is going to be to not store any personal information at all — because we don’t need to but we also don’t want the risk of being hacked,” said Merea. ”Food is personal… So we’re not storing any personal information but we don’t need to. With that data we can also even help our customers. It’s going to be really cool what we can do with this.”

Chef Sleeve already has stores interested in carrying the smart scales, according to Merea. It’s hoping to get into speciality kitchenware stores with the smart scales, a shift of its retail strategy which, to date, has been mostly focused on selling via Amazon (and its own website).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch