Thinking Outside the Box

Connect the dots

Almost all tech startups I hear about are software based. It makes sense; margins in hardware are brutal and as Marc Andreessen pointed out, in his Wall Street Journal article “Software is eating the world”, most of todays most successful/largest companies have made their success through software. So you would be mad to consider making hardware right?

I say why not? Arduino makes it easy to jump into hardware and prototype some ideas. Arduino is low cost, has a cross platform IDE and the syntax is C/C++. There is a fantastic community and countless cool Arduino hacks out there, some of them are simply amazing. Adding to the appeal of Arduino is the Android@Home framework by Google which aims to automate areas of the household in conjunction with the Android platform.

An excellent example of a hardware based startup was announced last week, Swivl an iPhone motion tracking dock. Or how about the following from Bristol based startup TangibleFX:

When creating concepts for your tech startup why limit yourself to software? Think outside the box and consider what you could do with hardware.