Progress in many shapes and sizes – Kickstarter update
Who is still waiting and why?
92.9% now shipped and fulfilled, 7.1% still waiting as we’re waiting on our next delivery from China. Each backer that is still waiting was given the option to change their ring choice so we could fulfill their order, both ourselves and our backers felt this was the right approach to take. Some orders we just cannot fulfill due to stock shortages (size 8, 8.5, 9, 10.5 and 11.5), we have prioritized the production of these sizes and they should be shipping to us on the 8th of September, the other ring sizes will ship a week later. The outstanding Kickstarter rings will be shipped to backers mid to late September.
Again we apologize profusely for these delays, we did really work hard on quality instead of rushing the rings out and thankfully the feedback we have received is that the rings are worth the wait. Thanks everyone that’s given us feedback and helped us improve the rings so much over the last year, your input has steered this project.
Creativity beyond our wildest imagination
Wow, just wow.. I went on vacation for a few weeks and you guys gift us with this.. Amazing new NFC Ring enabled solutions and products.. *Proud face.
How about a way to Login to your Desktop PC with your NFC Ring?
How about a light switch that is powered by your NFC Ring?
How about a lock box that uses the NFC Ring?
How about a way to ensure only you get to the precious alcohol in your flask at a music festival? Love it! *hiccups
How about a way to start your car with your NFC Ring?!
These are all amazing, great job guys, just so fantastic to see creativity and people using this technology freely and expressing themselves without restraints. We love open source and we will continue to have it at the core of the work we do.
As a community and a company I think our next goal should be to help Kickstart some of these projects, which do you think is the most viable to bring to Kickstarter?
Oooh pretty 3D NFC Ring
Thanks to the amazing Inkscape, ThreeJS and Blender projects we were able to take our engineering models and render them as a 3D object in modern browsers. We’re going to be able to use this to provide future adopters to visualize how their ring will look and also a way for our community to mock up new artwork and custom designs.
Check out the 3D NFC Ring
The source code and models for this is available as always on Github – If you are a bit of a ThreeJS or 3D jedi please feel free to tweak our source code and send through pull requests.. I’m very much learning as I go (I did this on vacation as a bit of a fun project) and I’d love to have some input / guidance.
vCard support
vCard support is now available in a branch of the NFC Ring Control app, we’re a few weeks away from launching this to our beta testers. Here is a sneak preview of how it looks:
Carbon Fiber
We’re still going through the prototyping stages on resolving our issues with the carbon fiber material, things are looking hopeful but it’s taking a long time for us to go from concept through to a working material. Our last material failed because the silver colored material we were using was not silver enough so it was difficult to make out the definition in the material. We believe we have solved this now. The main issue we face is that each time we prototype a new material we have to order 300m2 at quite a high cost. 300m2 is enough material to make 50000 rings so naturally we’re being very careful and taking our time to get it right without producing lots of very expensive waste.
Store Trials
We will be trialling a few new things on the store over the coming weeks in preparation for Christmas (Yes it’s that time already)….
1. NFC Ring Stickers. NFC enabled NTAG216 enabled stickers in two different styles (Our orange(ish) color and monochrome)
2. Fancy Ring Boxes. Buying the NFC Ring as a gift, get it in a fancy box.. Actually these boxes are genuinely sweet looking..
3. Tracked shipping. Want to get the ring to you even quicker and with the confidence you can keep a gaze upon it? Alright Sauron, you got it! Pay extra cheese for tracked and rapido delivery.
Backlog of support tickets
We’re getting through yet another backlog (caused by empowering backers to change their orders), we’re about 200 tickets away from complete closure. Over the last 4 weeks things did get a little dicey where more tickets were landing per day than we were able to process but we’re back on top of it now. Apologies if your ticket got caught up in these delays.
Why no update for 4 weeks?
I took a vacation, was ill, then had some family stuff to do, it was my first vacation in 2 years since I started on this project. I appreciate some people might not see downtime as being important, I’d disagree. It was a good chance for me to reflect on how far we have come and where we should go next. Apologies for the lack of update during this time. During this time we still had team members handling tickets, shipping etc. it’s just communication fell as I tend to be the person who is most comfortable communicating with you guys.