Pre-Order

I got an Apple ][ computer forty years ago. It cost $3,000 and changed the trajectory of my life. Today, you can pre-order a Misty II for $1,599 , which is 50% off MSRP. From my perspective, Misty is today’s home robot analogy to the personal computer from 40 years ago. A video description is much better than a few paragraphs, so sit back and enjoy. Misty spun off from Sphero a little under a year ago and started shipping Misty 1 four months ago. The company is making progress at a relentless pace and have been shipping a small number of Misty I’s to very early developers in controlled environments. ...

Less than a year after releasing its first product, Nima announced its highly anticipated peanut sensor is now available for pre-order, adding an allergen to its connected food sensor platform. If you have a peanut allergy, Nima is a must have. Pre-order before March 8 to get the product for $229 ($60 off the retail price). More here about the science behind the peanut sensor. Nima launched on the market a year ago with the Nima gluten sensor, the first company on the market to create a connected food sensor for consumers. Nima has enabled thousands of gluten-avoiding folks to test food for gluten at restaurants and packaged foods. The device takes an eight-step lab process and shrinks it to a little device that fits in your pocket. ...

If you’ve been following our Glowforge investment you will be familiar with the pre-order campaign they are currently running . Halfway through (with 15 days to go) they are now at $7.8 million. Yesterday, Dan Shapiro and I did a video of me creating a Foundry Group coaster out of a piece of wood. It was done remotely – I did all the design work on my computer in Boulder, uploaded it to the Glowforge cloud, and printed it on a Glowforge in Seattle. As a bonus, you get to see a VC (me) struggle with Adobe Illustrator, which – while being ubiquitous – is one of those pieces of software that can only be described as “a beast.” ...

Glowforge has started taking pre-orders with an expected ship date of the pre-orders of before the end of the year. It’s one of the most magical products I’ve ever been involved with. It’s in the “show, don’t tell” category, so spend three minutes of your life and see what you can do with it. For the next 29 days, Glowforge 3D laser printers are available for 50% off the retail price. In addition, if you buy using my referral code, you get another $100 of the price . ...

Pre-orders for the new book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business by Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, are available now on Amazon. Matt, who writes the awesome blog Only Once (which stands for “you can only be a first time CEO once”) has put a herculean effort into writing an amazing book while running a very large company. This is the latest book in the Startup Revolution series of books that include Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur, and Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. ...