Last Thursday I attended Stanford Design EXPE, where a dozen teams of students present the result of their 9 months of innovative work in relation with a corporate sponsor.
The twist is that all projects must build a hardware prototype (I guess because it’s linked to the Mechanical Engineering department). For me, it was a welcome change to hearing pitch after pitch of web and software startups. When you actually build hardware, your horizons expand.
There were good projects.
A dual-screen tablet to communicate with your grandma (there is a definite need here, I just think having two screens doubles the cost of the tablet beyond what people can afford, without adding enough value).
A very impressive demo of a telepresence table that goes beyond video to provide real document interactivity using gestures.
But my favorite one was TRUSTcard. It looks like a credit card (but a little bit thicker) with a tiny keyboard and LCD screen. It’s meant to make casual borrowing mainstream. Can I borrow your $100 textbook for the weekend? Although you don’t really know me, you hand me the textbook, because I hand you this card where I just punched the borrowing information. The card will serve as a reminder that the item is out there, and in the worst case, it can be used through insurance to get your money back.
Their vision is that will save the world because objects will now be reused much more, so we’ll have less junk being manufactured.
I like it.
Of course, it reminds me of crowdfunding and topics close to my startup (for instance, creating an instantaneous contract on the fly is quite similar to the vision behind FairSoftware, except one is for IP, the other for physical goods).
While there are iPhone apps that pretty much do the same thing today (minus the insurance bit, which I think is critical), the students were adamant that the physical trade, the fact of exchanging the card for the object, was hugely important.
How would I fund such a company? I would pitch it to an insurance company that wants to break into the student market. By selling those cards, they would instantly acquire a huge number of customers, that they could upsell eventually when they need car insurance of whatever else college students need nowdays. Kind of like freemium for insurance.
It’s a great idea. Unfortunately, it was designed by students for a class. So it remains to be seen whether someone will actually push this further.
UPDATED: I just had coffee with a member of the TRUSTcard team to discuss the concept further, and try to understand what features are core, and which ones are not necessary. By removing all the fluff, you can typically launch a product in weeks rather than in months, and find out quickly what works and what doesn’t. Stay tuned…
