Brad Feld

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Gearbox’s Smart Ball

Jun 30, 2010
Category Techstars

Gearbox, one of the teams that I’m mentoring in this year’s TechStars Boulder program, is starting to blog about their product.  One of their taglines is “reinventing the ball” and while this potentially generates plenty of 14 year old boy jokes it’s pretty amazing stuff.

The ball, which consists of a custom circuit board inside a 3D printed spherical shell (which is pretty cool all by itself) with lots of fun things on it, is completely controlled by a smartphone (in this case, an Android).

ballproto1.jpg

The software is still evolving rapidly but if you know anything about trying to control a spherical shell remotely, watching this video will make you pretty excited.

They are planning to release at least one Android based game by demo day along with an open API to let anyone write applications that incorporate the ball.  I’m totally psyched to get my hands on one of these.