With the now-fledging wearables market set to explode thanks to Apple’s upcoming smartwatch, many hardware startups are looking for creative ways own wristband real estate. Taiwan’s JoyRay is hedging its bets youngsters with Jumpy, a smartwatch for kids that’s currently raising funds on Kickstarter.
Jumpy is a palm-sized cube that fits inside a wearable rubber wristband. It comes with several basic features like bluetooth proximity tracking, a step counter, an activity counter, and notifications, along with several educational games. Chang demoed some these features for Tech in Asia at JoyRay’s office space in Taipei, and it checks our box for “Working Prototype Completed.”
Founder Jerry Chang tells Tech in Asia that he hopes to build an open platform around Jumpy, through which developers can create and submit their own apps. In his opinion, developing a strong ecosystem will help maintain high user retention.
“In our side, we’ll try to make usage limitless. We will keep developing applications by ourselves and by our partners,” says Chang. We also don’t want this watch to only be used by kids. We want to have kids interacting with kids, and parents interacting with kids.”
Keeping both children and parents happy is a core part of Chang’s vision for Jumpy. For one thing, parents are the ones with the wallet, Chang believes be more likely to purchase a product for kids that doesn’t come stocked with time-waster games. But if the app doesn’t engage the children who wear it, it could end up in the junk heap alongside last year’s Christmas toys.
“When I studied the market, I realized there were three types of smart wristbands for children,” says Chang. “The first type was like Jawbone but for kids. I don’t think kids really want to calculate the number of steps they take each day. The next type I saw was a tracking device. But if you’re a kid who’s out playing video games when he should be at basketball practice, you won’t wear the watch. The third type is more focused on entertainment – but we want to do entertainment plus education.”
Jumpy’s app suite is sparse at the moment, but impressive when one considers that product has been in development for just eight months. Chang envisions his software team’s “explore the human body” app, in which users place Jumpy on top of a tablet to peek at pictures of hearts and lungs, as the type of apps he hopes to fill the platform with.
Like many of Taiwan’s hardware entrepreneurs, Chang has a good decade (and then some) of industry experience on his resume. He spent the first part of his career building software Alcatel in Taiwan, where he helped create the island’s first ringback tone server (that’s what plays back elevator music or Lady Gaga when you call someone). Sensing he’d hit a glass ceiling at a foreign company, Chang moved over to Foxconn, where he spent time at Mobinnova, the company’s division for in-house branded products. After several shifts between departments, he left in late 2013 to found JoyRay. Chang says he exited the island’s biggest contract manufacturer for the independence.
“Although we’re encouraged to run our own internal startups at Foxconn, if we face competition for resources, then those resources will be given to products [considered more urgent]. We did a smartwatch before at Foxconn, but we didn’t get to mass product it because the project was killed,” says Chang. “I want to do this [on my own volition], without interference from others – that ‘others’ includes clients and upper management.
Even as Chang severed formal ties with Foxconn, his connection to the company remains strong. As is the case for many Taiwanese hardware startups, sourcing components for JoyRay has been a breeze. In addition, Chang says his connections at the company have helped him source talent for completing Jumpy. “You can easily imagine it’s not easy to design this,” Chang says. “You need mechanical engineers, software engineers, testing engineers, and other types of engineers.” The JoyRay team currently consists of four full-timers including Chang, and a small group of contract workers.
Chang is currently he’s looking to raise US$1-2 million in venture capital for JoyRay and Jumpy. In order to familiarize himself with the ins-and-outs of startuphood, he joined the most recent accelerator batch of AppWorks, Taiwan’s homegrown answer to Y Combinator.
“I’m already 43. I thought, if I can join AppWorks… these people are ten or fifteen years younger than me. I can learn from their passion and their mindset,” says Chang. “I’m also looking to hire them,” he jokes.
This post Taiwan’s Jumpy is betting on Foxconn smarts to crack the childrens wearables market appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Taiwan’s Jumpy is betting on Foxconn smarts to crack the childrens wearables market
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