 Hey guys, I'm Adrienne Jeffries. I'm here with Dave Vondel who is the co-founder of Central Standard Timing, the makers of this very cool e-ink watch, the CST-1. Hi Dave, thanks for coming to talk with us today. Yeah, thank you. So tell me, where did the idea for this watch come from? Well I've been working on it for, I'll shut up. I've been working on the CST-01 for about a year now and I worked a lot with e-ink on a lot of the other work that I do. I work at a design consulting firm called IDEO. And so I came across their technology, which is this thin, flexible e-ink display that's segmented. And I was always drawn to it because it's segmented, it's super robust, super low power and it's flexible. And what does that mean, segmented? Segmented instead of pixel based. So we designed a series of segments, so kind of like a seven segment display. If you look at old digital watches, they have the seven segment, it looks like a figure eight. We made our own version of something like that for this, but that allows us to render the numbers a lot better. And so if you design the segments properly, then you can have this really thin, really flexible, super low power display. And I always thought that there could be a really cool product out there that used something like this in kind of a fashion type object. So when was that, when you were first thinking of the idea? Do you remember when you first? That was like January in 2009. We worked on a project with Bug Labs and we came up with a concept to have a thin, flexible display on the side of their Bug base unit. And we designed a segmented font for that and my buddy Nick Zambetti, my partner Jerry O'Leary, the other co-founder, we all worked together and we developed this font for that and I always wanted to use that font. So that kind of was the genesis of this where it was in the back of my mind since 2009. And then when I found this microcontroller from Epson that had everything I needed in it for a watch that also had an E Ink driver, I saw that press release and I kind of thought, all right, well, it's time to start working on this now. And what made you think watch? Watches aren't like, in 2009 especially, people weren't thinking of watches as a cool thing. I think people were kind of thinking that watches were going to kind of fade away. The way that we got to watch was the font needed to be, in order for the font to work, it needed to be fairly large. So the one that we created was alphanumeric and so I wanted to have, so it needed to be about this big in order for the font to work with the display. And I was just thinking through different things that we could use this for and I thought it would be really cool to do a word clock. So when it was off your wrist and on the table, it would say, you know, like 1230 in letters and then when you put it on your wrist, then it would change. So that was where it came from and then as we got into the constraints of the project, we found that it would be better to just focus on the time and just think about the most minimal expression of a watch. I think it works. And so you put it on Kickstarter yesterday? Yesterday. And how much money have you raised on Kickstarter so far? Just over 130,000. In how many hours would that be? We launched at 5 o'clock yesterday. And it's now 1.09. So that's pretty incredible. What made you decide to put the project on Kickstarter? Well we've got minimum manufacturing volumes. I designed it and worked on it because I wanted to see it made. And we've got minimum volumes that we have to hit so the best way that we found to do it with where we're at is to launch it on Kickstarter and get backers. And did you expect it to, what did you expect? Well, I mean I hoped that it would get funded soon but I didn't expect it to be as quick as it is now. So the big innovations here, there's like a micro cell battery that's very thin. Can you talk about that a little? The company is called Thinergy and they make a product called a micro energy cell. And what's really great about it is that a lot of conventional batteries will, after a few years, are not going to be very good anymore and they won't hold a charge. And that would be bad for this because it's not replaceable so your watch would be dead. But Thinergy will last at least 15 years, maybe even more. And it's a much more robust, reliable battery under flexing than thin lithium polymer batteries. So we've actually built a rig where we had this flexing for over a thousand times, more than this, all the way to flat and it was still doing fine. This rig, tell me about this rig. This is back in Chicago where you're based. And what is the, the rig actually just goes like this a thousand times? Well it's not on the watch itself but we glue a battery to a piece of stainless steel, a thinner piece, and it just rolls it and then unrolls it and rolls it and unrolls it. And then I'll do that for a certain amount of time and then I'll test the battery, see if the battery is still performing the way it is. And you actually built that thing, right? Yeah. What does your workshop look like in Chicago? It's a, so I work at IDEO and I work in the Chicago office of IDEO. We've got a nice workshop and a little electronics lab that I just took a servo off the shelf and connected to an Arduino board and built a little rig to, or actually I didn't, sorry. A colleague of mine, Garrett, who's working with us, built the rig for us and did the Arduino thing. So I got to give him credit for that. That's cool. So originally you said this was developed for Bug Labs and you guys are still working at IDEO. Yes. What, are they supportive of you having this side project? Yes. IDEO is very supportive. They want to see people following their passions and they want to keep people happy. And if you're a designer, you're always coming up with ideas and if you weren't able to follow them then it would be frustrating. Yeah. I think we probably all want some of these watches as well. Yeah. There are a lot of backers at IDEO already. And mine turned black, I think. Because I mean it's... Sorry? Mine turned black, I think. Or was that the way it was before? Yeah, it flashes when it updates the time. Right. So when you're looking at it, it looks like it's just static, but, and then you're kind of surprised every time it changes to the next minute. So if you want to demonstrate it to somebody for the first time, you might have to wait 60 seconds. But it's definitely very cool looking. So there's a patent pending on this device? Yes. We've filed a design patent and a provisional patent for a flexible, a watch of this nature. And I've heard a couple of people say it kind of reminds them of a slap bracelet. Yeah. Did you guys hear that before? Yeah. I mean that's something that, it is very, it's a similar thickness as a slap bracelet, but we didn't want to go for something that was kind of novelty like that. It's more of a nicer object than that. Awesome. Well, it looks great and super simple, minimal product that is, it's definitely getting a lot of attention and excitement here at CES. So thanks so much for coming on to talk about it. Okay. And one thing that I wanted, a bunch of people on the Kickstarter said that nobody, nobody actually shows the thinness of it. So I wanted to do that, take this time on the camera. So... That's the thickness of the watch itself. So... All right. Great. Thanks so much. Okay. Thanks for having me.