This Tiny Gadget Can Turn Virtually Anything Into a Musical Instrument

It seems like every other day we read about some far-out, new technology that makes us scratch our heads and say, "What the heck?" In this series, we'll take a look at all types of crazy new gadgets, apps and other technologies -- and the entrepreneurs dreaming them up.
Music and technology have been comfortable bedfellows since before someone strummed the first electric guitar. But creating your own instruments -- electronic or otherwise -- can be a difficult proposition, and not one easily undertaken by someone without training.
That is exactly the problem British creative agency Dentaku decided to tackle when it created the Ototo, a pocket-sized circuit board designed to be a "musical invention kit." Translation: this thing can turn virtually any object into a musical instrument.
Simple enough that anyone can use it, the Ototo lets even the most musically or mechanically inept create a musical instrument out of just about anything -- no coding or soldering involved. It consists of a small control board about the size of a cassette tape that has a speaker and 12 triangular touch inputs which come pre-programmed so you can use them like piano keys.
Even more fun can be had when you use the included set of wires with alligator clips on the ends to connect the Ototo to any object that's even slightly conductive, letting you turn pots and pans, aluminum foil, a chocolate bar or even a plant into a musical instrument. Other accessories act like wah-wah pedals, letting you add even more variety to the sounds you can make.
The platform is also fully-hackable and compatible with the Arduino open-source electronic prototyping platform, so if you're more mechanically or electronically inclined, the possibilities are nearly endless. The sounds created by the Ototo are reminiscent of old-school Moog synthesizers, with a fun, futuristic feeling that's only heightened when you realize you can even turn a pencil drawing into something that plays music.

When it was time for the designers at Dentaku to seek funding for the Ototo, they decided to skip the now-ubiquitous Kickstarter crowd-sourcing method in favor of applying for traditional arts grants. A British arts program called Near Now found their idea intriguing enough to work with, and offered to fund it. Near Now focuses on arts and technology in everyday life, and Ototo is an example of interactive art that promotes design and digital literacy. Near Now Director Mat Trivett explains in Wired that they are "excited at the potential of Ototo as both an accessible tool to learn the basics of physical computing and interaction design and as an advanced

How One Startup Plans to Replace Every Card in Your Wallet

Entrepreneur Kanish Parashar has an ambitious goal: He wants to replace every credit card, gift card and loyalty card in your wallet. To do that, Parashar has founded a company called Coin. Unlike other companies like Square and PayPal that are trying to do the same thing with mobile apps and proprietary services, Parashar plans to use something quite different -- something that looks like a credit card. Coin is a Bluetooth card that can be used in the place of the cards in your wallet. Any card with a magnetic strip can be added to Coin, and a button on the front allows you to easily swap between cards. With each button press, the magnetic strip on the card essentially becomes your card of choice, giving you the ability to carry around your whole wallet in just a single piece of plastic. A tiny LED screen displays the last four digits of the card you're using along with its expiration date. The final version on Coin will also allow you to give each card a four-character nickname such as "Bank" or "Work" to keep them straight. Parashar got the idea for Coin after another payment startup of his, Smartmarket, failed. Smartmarket was a mobile payment solution that used "geofencing" to allow customers to pay for goods when they were physically near a store. While Smartmarket got quite a few downloads, it wasn't actually being used for payments. "Turns out we had a chicken and the egg problem," says Parashar. "Customers couldn't find merchants who adopted it, and merchants didn't see customers use the app, so they didn't have a reason to adopt it." With Coin, Parashar hopes the process will be intuitive. "A card is something that we're used to using," he says. "We have a habit [of using a card], and we trust it." Cards are added to Coin using a mobile card reader that plugs into your phone's headphone jack. Once you create an account for the service, Coin verifies that each card you add belongs to you and creates a mobile version of the card within the app. You can carry around literally hundreds of cards at a time in the app, and eight cards can be added to the physical card at any given time. A digital leash on Coin helps keep it safe. If you and your card are separated an alert will show on your phone letting you know you might have left Coin behind. After you're separated for a while -- you can select a time between just a few minutes or several hours -- the card is locked down, preventing any further use until you're reunited. The battery in Coin should last two years, and the card isn't susceptible to issues like scratching and demagnetization that plague traditional credit cards. Coin is launching a crowdfunding campaign today to begin production of the card. Initial backers can purchase the card for $50, a 50 percent discount on its future retail price of $100. Coin is expected to ship in the summer of 2014.

How to Ensure Your Technology is Secure, Stable and Scalable

Your business operates in the digital economy where success is predicated on your ability to compete in a high-velocity environment. Selecting, deploying and maintaining the right technology platforms will determine whether your business will thrive.
There are four primary areas you should focus on to maintain the efficacy of your technology foundation:
1. Security
Data is at the core of every business and your inability to protect it will be the end of your business. Outside of more regulated industries like finance and healthcare, security is unfortunately not one of the top priorities. For a company that operates on tight margins, investing in security is seen as non-revenue generating, serving merely as a risk-mitigating insurance policy.
Would you be able to convince your CEO to invest $100,000 to prevent the 10 percent likelihood of a cyberattack resulting in $1 million in damages? Or, is it easier to make the argument for a $100,000 investment which has a 75 percent chance of generating $150,000 in revenue? Flipped around, the former has a 90 percent chance of throwing $100,000 down the tubes, and the latter has a 25 percent chance.
The problem with applying an expected value analysis to security is that there are too many qualitative variables required in the assessment. What you should acknowledge on is that a security incident is a low-probability, but high-cost event. And it’s possible for that cost to be catastrophically high. Can you really quantify the cost of exposing all of your customer data?
2. Stability
If your technology doesn’t work when you need it most, what good is it? When a new customer tries to buy something from your website and it doesn’t work, it’s very likely that you’ve lost him forever. The most timely and unfortunate example is HealthCare.gov.
The digital centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act is supposed to permit Americans to sign up for health insurance online. The problem with the website is that, since it launched, it has intermittently not worked for users, displaying a multitude of cryptic errors or transferring invalid information to healthcare providers.
The lesson here is that the consumer has very little patience for a lousy online experience. In our digital economy, we have come to expect websites to work with the certainty of flipping a light switch or starting a car. When Gmail goes down for several minutes, there is a collective aneurysm on Twitter. A population that reacts like this is not going to tolerate substandard technology, so you better make sure your digital infrastructure works all the time.

3. Scalability
Your business objective should be growth and the digital infrastructure supporting your operations must be able to scale and accommodate the resulting increase in demand. If you have an infrastructure that is based on physical servers, you’ll need to be extremely accurate with your load estimates. In this situation, it’s better to overestimate the potential impact of increased business, than to underestimate. In the digital world, when you find yourself faced with the latter, you have no recourse in the midst of a traffic surge.
Imagine a three-lane highway that has three cars driving down it. Once you add a fourth vehicle to the mix, you start seeing congestion. At the end of a football game, ten thousand cars get added to the highway, and the result is a major traffic jam. Physical servers are fixed assets like highway lanes, which function perfectly under normal conditions, but are unable to expand and meet high demand.
4. Sustainability
Your ability to ensure security, stability and scalability at a single point in time is critical, but it’s more important to be able to sustain this over the long-term. The apropos and often overused analogy here would be that it’s a marathon, not a sprint, because you need to serve your customers today, tomorrow and in the future.
The digital business environment is fluid and dynamic, with regular traffic peaks and valleys. The nature of viral content is that it is unpredictable. Like a tsunami, it’s difficult to spot until it’s too late to respond -- when it’s about to break on your shores. Handling the scale of a massive traffic spike and sustaining that over a period of time is how you can take your company to the next level. That surge is likely exposing your brand to a massive new consumer base.
Digital infrastructure is the foundation on top of which many of you will build successful businesses. The potential for, and magnitude of your success is contingent upon the quality of this foundation. It has to be secure to protect your critical assets and data. It has to be stable and provide expected functionality for your customers. It has to be scalable to respond to the increasing demands of your success. And, it must sustain these traits over extended periods of time.
As an entrepreneur, your business should succeed or fail based on the merits of your ideas, not the technology used to support your operations. Your digital infrastructure should be secure, stable, scalable and sustainable, allowing you to focus on your core business.

How to Get Your Startup's Technology Up and Running Today

Thanks to a bevy of cloud-based applications, you can be in business faster than it takes for the cable company to install your internet connection. Follow our steps to get the technology side of your venture up and running today.
Step 1: Lock down a URL or domain name for your website through a registrar such as GoDaddy. Pricing and support options vary, but expect to pay roughly $15 per year for your domain name.
Step 2: Set up your website. If you've never built or managed one before, try Squarespace or Wix. They'll host your site (i.e., store your site's information on their servers) and provide easy-to-use templates and tools for you to get started.
If you have more experience online, check out the web-hosting and domain-registration deals from Intuit or Yahoo Small Business
When Brooklyn's Tina Roth Eisenberg launched Tattly to sell designer temporary tattoos, she already had experience buying URLs. "I bought my own domain and set up the site on our servers," she says.
Step 3: Most website building or hosting providers offer one or more e-mail addresses with each domain. An alternative is to use an external service like Google's Gmail or Microsoft's Outlook.
Manny Gonzales, owner of Tiger Lily florists in Charleston, S.C., went with Gmail through Google Apps for Business, so all of his mail stays on Google's servers and is searchable. "We do about 300 weddings a year," he says, "and each wedding has a trail of 10 or 15 e-mails." Previously, those e-mails were scattered among the shop's multiple computers, making them difficult to track down.
Step 4: To sell goods online, Tattly uses Shopify, which handles credit card transactions, basic inventory management and allows Eisenberg to keep visitors on her site instead of directing them to a third party such as eBay or Amazon. There are several e-commerce options for small businesses (and more popping up each year), but Bigcommerce, Intuit and Squarespace are worth investigating for their manageable cost and useful features.
Step 5: E-mail marketing may not get as much attention as social media marketing these days, but it's actually much more effective than Twitter and Facebook postings at developing paying customers. As your database of current and prospective customers grows, you'll want to use an e-mail marketing program from the likes of Constant Contact or MailChimp, both of which offer e-mail templates, mailing-list segmentation and tracking tools that will tell you which offers work better than others
Step 6: Move operations off your spreadsheets and into the cloud. Intuit's QuickBooks Online, FreshBooks and Kashoo are easy-to-use accounting software tools designed specifically for small businesses. Do yourself a favor and start using one from day one; it'll make future growth much easier to manage.
If you're a hair stylist, consultant or mechanic, or run some other appointment-intensive business, use a cloud-based appointment service such as Genbook to manage your time. Motorsport Lab, a Boston-based car service, reduced its staff and saved $50,000 per year after moving booking and scheduling to Genbook.

5 Ways Tech Is Stopping Theft

Even if you have the most brilliant social media strategy and are constantly bringing new faces through the door, it will be hard to stay profitable if unpaid merchandise walks out behind them. New technologies are helping businesses decrease their losses by either preventing crimes before they happen or catching shoplifters in the act. However, it is essential to select the right product for your industry and business model as well as actively use the technology in your day-to-day operations.
Here are five technologies that can help you prevent shoplifters:
1. Video analytics. This software can be paired with security cameras allowing retailers an innovative, real-time way to analyze your surveillance. It identifies and detects when suspicious activity occurs, such as a customer walking out of the store with unpaid merchandise, and concealment of goods on the sales floor, and allows merchants to go directly to the incident on video, saving hours of monitoring and reviewing. “You can also integrate the technology with a point of sale system to catch financial losses at the register, such as an employee making bad choices or a cashier working in cahoots with another thief,” says Garth Gasse, director of assets protection for the Retail Industry Leaders Association.

2. Anti-push out technology. In the “push out” scam, a shopping cart is loaded with goodies and “pushed” right out of the store. Anti-push out technology is a modification of existing technology that prevents shopping cart theft from lots. With this loss prevention technology, underground wires are installed around the perimeter of a store parking lot and a device on the shopping cart locks the wheels when the cart crosses that perimeter. The technology can be redeployed to prevent push-outs by embedding wires at the store's front doors and locking up cart wheels that have not been pushed through checkout, says Bill Alford, president of International Lighthouse Group and member of the ASIS National Loss Prevention committee.


3. Facial recognition software. Stores using video surveillance can benefit from integrating facial recognition software into their video program. When someone enters the store, the software compares the person to known shoplifters in the database. If a known shoplifter enters your store, facial recognition software sends an alert to the smartphone of your manager or your loss prevention agent. “The best part about this technology is that it can prevent shoplifting from actually occurring by allowing a manager to approach the person and ask them to leave,” says Alford. He says that the facial recognition database can be used to track repeated visits to multiple locations and the facial recognition technology can be especially helpful for merchants targeted by organized crime rings. To most effectively use the software, merchants would need to take photos of people caught shoplifting in their store.

4. Mobile point of sale. With a traditional point of sale system, the cashier is stuck behind the cash register, giving potential shoplifters plenty of opportunity to head out the door with a shirt or piece of jewelry. But a mobile point of sale system allows your employees to be on the store floor, which often discourages theft because clerks are mobile and thieves feel they have less opportunity to steal. This system is especially useful for large stores or those that often have one person working alone, who can't monitor all areas. “However, it is essential that all staff using mobile point of sale technology have security training before engaging with perpetrators,” says David Feeney, IT director of integrated solutions AlliedBarton Security Services. For best practice, he suggests having a professional security guard is nearby to limit staff involvement with the shoplifter.

5. Smart display system. A new and emerging technology, these systems allow high-theft merchandise to be openly displayed rather than be locked in a cabinet. “If several items are taken from a cologne display, the smart display system triggers a flag that immediately sends a preventative message via email or text to a loss prevention person in the store who may be able to stop theives before they leave the store,” Alford says. An audible alert can also sound. He recommends this product for stores with a theft problem targeting specific items, especially health and beauty care items, baby formula and perfume.