grundyoso

Maybe so. We're not building nuclear power plants though, but NFC readers for iOS. We're doing it more to bootstrap an industry than to sell widgets. The mistake was to not consistently reiterate that message throughout the campaign.

Our quality yields from the factory were more like 90%:10% but we did basic testing before shipping to reach the 100% target. First customer defects were covered but we quickly discovered these were user error which led to our current policy.

I feel Kickstarter backers of hardware projects should have a certain sense of tolerance. If they are expecting "commercial grade" products they should stick to buying retail as we're angling to test a concept and knock out the kinks with early backers.

I agree that it's a tough deal, one that's filled with unknowns. If you overestimate, you price things out of the range of what the market will bear and you get no backers. If you underestimate, you get pissed off customers. What motivates us is not the money we raised or the guilt of delivering, but the potential of what we're doing. KS has done a good job of giving us an audience to speak to. An audience to educate on what we can do. Without this connection it's likely R&D projects like ours would take much longer to surface, even though their impact on society is a good one.

That's a good summary. We definitely underestimated the cost of customer service. I'd say that after a year of having our KS campaign, we've spent 40% of our time keeping people informed. The irony is that with that time we could have easily added the quality and polish that most customers are upset about.

Interesting.. how would you have worded it? I mean we charged KS folks $39 per device, which pretty much worked out to our COGS. Covering postage was something we included as a good faith in our early backers and the patience they've had with us.

The FloJack aims to support the NFC ecosystem. It's hw compatible with any device with a 3.5mm audio jack. It's the smallest -and lightest- full fledged NFC reader on the market. And it's available for anyone to buy (unlike enterprise-only icarte, devicefidelity, twinlinx, roamdata, etc with their "ask for quote" bs)

FloJack was conceived as a way of instrumenting spaces. Think point of sale, digital interactive signage, checkin touch-points, etc. So the general public would carry native NFC phones or NFC cards/wristbands that would interact with an iPad -or an old iPhone- to trigger a secure transaction. If that's not convincing enough, hit us up at info@flomio.com.

The FloJack supports all 3 NFC modes: Discovery (R/W), Card Emulation, and Peer to Peer. Payments is messy. There are two types: Closed-loop and Open-loop. The FloJack supports closed-loop via cloud payments, but for open-loop you need a tamper-proof secure module which we couldn't manage to fit in. We are working on new devices that will support open-loop payments, so email info@flomio.com if you want to learn more.

A battery is indeed included with each FloJack. Thanks for the feedback, we'll add that to the KS project page.

The FloJack bill of materials consists of only 54 parts, of which the cr2032 battery tray is the largest by far. We chose this design because these batteries are inexpensive and easy to find. Creating a more streamline form factor with a 3D printer that draws power from the iPhone bottom connector is trivial and something we're exploring. How much would you be willing to pay for it?

Samuel, the power efficiency of the FloJack is first rate. The consumption per polling interval is ~10uAs. On a 250mAh cr2032, this works out to about 90MM polls. At the Android polling rate of 10Hz, the FloJack would last just over 3 months. Since FloJack's sleep mode kicks in when apps stop using it, we estimate typical usage patterns will allow upwards of a year of battery life.

NFC is great precisely because of it's opt-in user experience. in other words, people need to make an effort to get their tags read due to the 1-2in range. this makes for more accurate tracking yet preserves a user-in-control notion different from shopkick. we have an app that let's you checkin to an event that can easily be made to create an email subscription.

yes, you are correct. all of our use-cases currently can be implemented with the short-range nature of NFC (1-2in). however, our platform also supports long-range readers (UHF - 10-15m) as well.