Poppy - Turn your iPhone into a 3D Camera

It’s one sign of the headway that the 2 metropolis entrepreneurs have created with flower, a 3D imaging device for iPhone. They got the project off the bottom with a robust crowdfunding campaign last summer — raising over $190,000, well past the first goal of simply $40,000.

Poppy is one amongst the a lot of inspiring  and fun entrepreneurial stories at CES this week: 2 aggressive startup veterans, staying in an exceedingly cheap  building, winning attention and national press coverage amidst a ocean of technical school giants and their multi-million greenback promoting budgets.

“At this stage it’s not very concerning creating cash the maximum amount as building an addict base — the first seed of a community — and so attempting to not lose cash,” explains Heitzeberg.

The $59.95 device permits the iPhone to be used for capturing and viewing 3D pictures and video  — a View-Master two.0, as we’ve known as it. i used to be ready to attempt the assembly version of flower whereas catching up with Heitzeberg and Lowry at CES on, and it’s even higher than the example, thanks partially to a bigger field of read. The 3D result remains spectacular — sanctioning deep and immersive pictures and videos that come out from the screen.

Poppy nearly sells itself, ordinarily generating crowds as those who attempt it decision over their friends and colleagues to examine it out.

But Heitzeberg and Lowry apprehend there’s still a protracted thanks to go. They’re currently turning their attention to their retail strategy, launching on-line sales on and talking with retailers concerning potential deals to distribute flower to a way wider audience.

“It’s still considerably within the thesis stage,” says Lowry, stating that the three,000 devices sold  through Kickstarter aren’t a lot of within the theme of things.

Poppy“Most individuals haven’t even heard of it,” Heitzeberg explains.

But they're, in some ways, an ideal example of Kickstarter success. They were ready to use the web campaign to fund the prototyping, design, hardware development, and initial production of flower — whereas delivering a product to thousands of consumers. They’ve basically broken-even on the business to date, and currently they’ve got all of that initial work behind them, with the infrastructure in situ to require flower to consecutive level.

Future plans embrace AN update to the iPhone app to alter social sharing and browsing of flower pictures. the foremost common request they get is to form the flower compatible with mechanical man devices, and that’s one thing that would be accomplished with some comparatively minor tweaks to the hardware.

Lowry is best called one amongst the co-creators of Urbanspoon, the favored building recommendation app, whereas Heitzeberg worked at corporations like SnapVine, MediaPiston and Whitepages.

It’s the primary hardware startup for them each. They laugh as they talked concerning the challenges of prototyping and developing hardware, and the way nice it had been to be ready to work on the flower app, due to the a lot of easier (or a minimum of a lot of familiar) method of change computer code.

“We each have enough expertise doing computer code startups,” Lowry says. “This is like going back to high school. I want we tend to got a master’s degree in producing.”