INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Learn-to-code startupKano, whose products aim to turn kids into digital makers, has taken the wraps off the latest incarnation of its
build-it-yourself computer kit.
With the new flagship Kano is doubling down on touch interactions — urging kids to &make your own
tablet&.The Computer Kit Touch packsa 10.1″ HD touchscreen, along with Kano now familiar bright orange wireless keyboard which comes with
a built in trackpad.
While touch is becoming increasingly central to its products, Kano says the keyboard remains an important component of
the product — supporting text-based coding apps which its platform also provides access to, as well as themore approachable drag-and-drop
block-based coding systems that do really benefit from having a touchscreen to hand.
The kit, which Kano says is generally (but not
exclusively) aimed at the 6-13 age range, is on sale from today, priced at $279.99 — via its website (Kano.me), as well as from selected
retailers and e-tailers.
The Raspberry Pi powered computer is also getting increased storage capacity in this upgrade — of 16GB
But the main refresh is around updating KanoOS, Kano kid-friendly Pi topper, with expanded support for touch controls, according to founder
Alex Klein .
Last year Kano combined touch and keyboard based interaction into a single product, theComputer Kit Complete— calling that a
DIY laptop.
The 2018 refreshed version looks much the same, with enhancements generally behind the scenes and/or under the hood.
The big
moves this year are advancing the software and content ecosystem,& says Klein
&How it all integrated together.
He points to another coding kit the team has up for pre-order, slated to ship next month — a co-branded
Harry Potter gizmo in which kids get to build a motion-sensitive &coding wand& and use it to cook up their own digital spells, helped along
by Kano software — adding: &With the Potter kit we&re bringing Kano code — to create a system, the ability to blend and change physics
engines and sounds and particle systems — to tablets
So we&ve now got a touch-based interaction model for that e-product, as well as mouse and keyboard, and so we&ve brought that software
system now to the Computer Kit Touch.
You can code by dragging and dropping blocks with your fingers, you can paint and draw
You can change the pitch of a loop or a melody by running your fingers up and down and then using a change of a parameter mess with how
quickly that melody changes, mess with the number of layers, you can make a beat or a loop using a touch-based digital audio workstation
You can go into any one of our creative coding apps and pull in touch-based interactions, so instead of just using a mouse, a click and
point, you can make an app that responds to swipes and taps, and different speeds, and in different locations.
On the touch kit itself there
also a set of new content that demystifies how touchscreens work and peels back the layer of the screen and shows you what behind, and
you&re kind of touching the intersection of the different copper wires and seeing what happening beneath,& he adds.
There obviously a big
hardware upgrade with the new ability to touch it, to take it with you
We&ve refined a lot of the components, we&ve improved the speed, the battery life
But really the core of it is this upgraded software that integrates with all the other kit.
Talking of other kit, the learn-to-code space is
now awash with quasi-educational gizmos, leaving parents in Western markets spoiled for choice of what to buy a budding coder.
Many more of
these gizmos will be unboxed as we head into the holiday season
And while Kano was something of a startup pioneer here — a category creator, as Klein tells it — there now no shortage of tech for kids
promising some kind of STEM-based educational benefit
So it facing an ever-growing gaggle of competition.
Kano strategy to stand out in an increasingly contested space is to fix on familiar
elements, says Stein — flagging for example the popular game Minecraft — which runs on the Kano kit, and for which there a whole
subsection of the Kano World community given over to hacking Minecraft.
And, well, aside from block-headed Minecraft characters it hard to
find a character more familiar to children than the fictional wizard Harry Potter
So you can certainly see where Kano trying to get with the coding wand.
We broke our first month pre-order target in one day,& he says of
that forthcoming e-product (RRP ~$130)
&There was massive coverage, massive traffic on our site, it was picked up all over the place and we&re very happy with the pre-orders so
As are our retail partners.
The Potter co-branding play is certainly Kano trying to make its products cast a wider spell by expanding the
appeal of coding from nerdy makers to more mainstream child consumers
But how successful that will be remains to be seen.Not least because we&ve seen this sort of tactic elsewhere in this space.
Sphero, for
example, is now rolling back the other way — shifting away from Star Wars co-branded bots to a serious education push focused on bringing
(Although Kano would doubtless say a programmable bot that rolls is not the same as a fully fledged kit computer that can run all manner of
apps, including familiar and fashionable stuff like Minecraft and YouTube.)
We&re very pleased to see that this category that we created,
with that Kickstarter campaign in 2013 — it become more than what some people initially feared it would be which was niche, maker
‘arcanery&; and it becoming a major consumer phenomenon,& he says
&This notion that people want to make their own technology, learn how to code and play in that way
And not just kids — people of all ages.
On the hard sales front, Klein isn''t breaking out numbers for Potter kit pre-sales at this stage
But says the various incarnations of its main computer kit have shipped ~360,000 units since September 2014
So it not Lego (which has also moved into programmable kits) — but it not bad either.
In recent years Kano has also branched out into
offering Internet of Things kits, previewing three code-your-own connected devices in 2016— and launching Kickstarter campaigns to get the
products to market.
It since shipped one (the Pixel kit) but the other two (a build-it-yourself camera kit and a DIY speaker) remain delayed
— leaving crowdfunder backers waiting for their hardware.
Why the delay Have Kano priorities shifted — perhaps because it focusing
efforts on cobranded products (like the Potter wand) vs creating more of its own standalone devices
We are still committed to shipping the
speaker kit, the camera kit,& Klein tells TechCrunch
&A big reason for [the delay] is not only the fact that the company is in a position now where we have mass distribution, we have great
partners — perennially testing new product ideas — and we want to make sure that products are going to resonate with, not just a small
group of people but many, many people, of many different age groups and interests before we release them.
He also points out that any
backers of the two devices who want refunds can get them in full.
Though he also says some are choosing to wait — adding that Kano remains
committed to shipping the devices, and saying for those that do wait there will be a few extra bells and whistles than originally specced
out in the crowdfunder campaign.
The delay itself looks like the market (and consumer tastes) moving quicker than Kano predicted — and so
it finds itself wishing its products could deliver more than it originally planned (but without a wand to wave to instantly achieve
that).
This is also a pitfall with previewing anything months or years ahead of time, of course
But the expense and complexity of building hardware makes crowdfunding platforms attractive — even for a relatively established brand like
Kano.
The delay is really unfortunate,& he adds
&We did say they would ship earlier but what we have done is we&ve offered any backer a full refund on the camera and the speaker if they
But if they do wait they will receive incredible camera, incredible speaker
Both of them are going to benefit from the advancements made in low cost computing in the last year.
The speaker as well is going to have
elements that weren''t even part of the original campaign
On our side it critical that we get those products absolutely right and that they feel mass, and that they demystify not only coding and the
Internet of Things, which was part of the original purpose, but in the case of the camera and the speaker there are elements that have come
to the fore in more recent months like voice interaction and image recognition that we feel if our mandate is to demystify technology and
we&re shipping a camera and a speaker… that kind of part of it
Make it perfect, make it of the moment
And for any backer who doesn''t want to wait for that, no problem at all — we&ll refund you 100%.
Beyond reworking its approach with those
perhaps overly ambitious connected devices, Kano has additional release plans in its pipeline — with Klein mentioning that additional
co-branded products will be coming next year.
He says Kano is also eyeing expanding into more markets
&There a significant market for Kano even beyond our traditional leading position amongst 6-13 year olds in the US and the UK
There a really strong market for people who are beyond the US and the UK and we&re now at a scale where we can start really investing in
these distribution and localization relationships that have come our way since year one,& he says.
And he at least entertains the idea of a
future Kano device that does away with a keyboard entirely — and goes all in on touch — when we suggest it.
Would we move to a place
where we have no keyboard in a Kano computer I think it very possible,& he says.&It might be a different form factor, it might be smaller,
it might fit in your pocket, it might have connectivity — that kind of stuff.
Which sort of sounds like Kano thinking about making a DIY
If so, you heard it here first.
The five and a half year old London-based startup is not yet profitable but Klein flags growth he dubs &fast
enough& (noting it doubled sales year-over-year last year, a ''trend& he says continued in the first half of this year), before adding: &It
not impossible for us to get to profitability
We have a lot of optionality
But at the moment we are making investments — in software, in team — we have partner products coming out like Harry, we&ll have more
So in terms of absolute positive EBITDA not yet but we are profitable on a units basis.
Kano closed a $28M Series B last year— and has
raised some $44.5M in all at this stage, according to Crunchbase
Is it raising more funding now &I think any entrepreneur who is looking to do something big is always in some sense keeping an eye out for
sources of capital,& replies Klein
&As well as sources of talent.
He points by way of a connected aside to this study of C-suite execs, carried out by Stripe and Harris poll,
which found that access to software developers is a bigger constraint than access to capital, saying:&I read that and I thought that that
gap — between the 1% of 1% who can develop software or hardware and the rest of us — is exactly the challenge that Kano set out to solve
from a consumer and education perspective.
In terms of fundraising we do get a lot of inbound, we have great investors at the moment,& he
&We do know that the scale of this particular challenge — which is demystify technology, become synonymous with learning to code and
making your own computers — that requires significant support and we&ll be continuing to keep our eyes out as we grow.
