Wearable tech is emerging as the "next big thing" in consumer technology. And a trio of Cincinnati entrepreneurs are developing
Nugg-it, a wristband that will easily record snippets of everyday conversation, and investors are taking notice.
Nugg-it has raised a total of $250,000 raised from
CincyTech and
Design 2 Matter, a Silicon Valley-based industrial design firm. That's part of an ongoing $600,000 investment seed round. Design 2 Matter is also designing and building the device.
"[Design 2 Matter] has a very successful track record of bringing products from concept to shelf," says Nugg-it's co-founder and social media entrepreneur Matthew Dooley.
Nugg-it is meant to be worn 24 hours a day. It records live conversations on a 60-second loop, continuously saving them in one-minute "nuggets." To save a memorable part of a conversation, the user touches the device to save the last minute of buffered memory. That recording can be sent to a smartphone, and through an app can be edited, saved and shared.
"It's a smaller, lighter weight band," says Dooley. "Right now, we are trying to focus a lot of attention on design. It has to be something that is stylish and comfortable to wear. A lot of the functionality is off the shelf, but we're putting it together in a new way."
Dooley is working with former Procter & Gamble brand marketer and engineer Mike Sarow to develop the device. Plans are to deliver the final concept in March, and introduce it to the market by December, Dooley says.
"It occurred to us that there are a lot of circumstances in life where we want to remember and share something that was just said—a clever phrase in a meeting, something adorable from our 3-year-old, words of wisdom from a mentor—but we can't 'capture' it," Sarow says. "Now you can."
Nugg-it is
CincyTech's first consumer electronics device investment.
"With the rise of the Nike FuelBand and smartwatches such as Pebble, wearable technology is projected to be a $7 billion market by 2017," says CincyTech's Executive-in-Residence Doug Groh. "We expect Nugg-it to help drive that growth and to do for short audio files what Twitter has done for 140-character content."
By Feoshia H. Davis
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