Duncan Bell is always innovating
This is an era of amazing new tech – some from surprising sources
“I am glad Sage has produced this product. It’s genuine out-of-thebox thinking”
We live in exciting times right now. Not always in a good way, I grant you. Everyone is doing all manner of things they wouldn’t have dreamed of a few years ago. Or at any rate, if they had dreamed of them, they probably wouldn’t have talked about it in public.
The good news is that this attitude of ‘to hell with it, let’s do something crazy’ is now permeating the tech world. The even better news is that it’s doing it in a more positive way, that doesn’t involve flirting with extremism, or abusing strangers on the internet. The world of tech, instead, is embracing a new era of innovation.
When I say ‘innovation’ here, I don’t mean squeezing a few more megapixels into a phone camera, or making your TV have even more pixels and even blacker blacks in it. No no. I mean real innovation. Gadgets that are quite unlike any we’ve seen before, with the distinct possibility of there being only a very niche audience for them.
I can safely say that this is a trend because I have seen three of them in the last few months, and if there’s three of something, that is a trend. Everyone knows that.
On page 22 of this very magazine you can read about one of them. The Bosch GoFresh uses the unfathomable power of plasma to destroy odour molecules, so your clothes don’t stink. No really. You run a small, handheld, plasmaspurting device over those jeans you haven’t washed for six months – because that will immediately make them shrink by a factor of 30% and lose 50% of their colour – and hey presto: smells be gone. Who wants to pay £300 for such a device? I don’t know and I suspect Bosch doesn’t either, but I am very glad they have created it.
Last month, we had the Sage FoodCycler. This is nothing short of a food waste recycling plant, reduced to the size of a microwave. Put in your food waste – raw or cooked – press a button, and it turns it into compost-like material, ready to make your roses grow.
For someone like me, who lives in London, where the council does not recycle food waste, in a flat with some window boxes, this is absolutely perfect. For practically anyone else, it seems, shall we say, a tad niche? For a family, it is probably too small. Those who have a house with a garden could just compost it in the normal way. And if your local council collects food waste for recycling – into god-knows-what – then why bother doing it for them in advance?
Again though, I am glad Sage has produced this product. It’s genuine out-of-the-box thinking, and a great departure from what they normally do, which is swanky kitchen appliances. The same could be said about Bosch, come to think of it. When have you ever previously associated the Bosch name – either the power tools brand or the dishwashers and washing machines one – with devices that exude plasma, in order to make you not smell? Exactly.
Granted, I can’t give you a third recent example of an established, staid brand taking off its glasses, letting its hair down and revealing its innovative beauty. However, a crowdfunded startup is now redefining the smartwatch.
YHE Techs’ BP Doctor Pro looks pretty much like any smartwatch but it is also a blood pressure monitor. There have been smartwatches that have claimed to do this in the past, but they have actually just given guesstimates based on your pulse rate. The BP Doctor Pro, when it’s not alerting you to messages, actually inflates around your wrist, to take a blood pressure reading in almost the same way as your doctor would.
Okay, you’d probably be better off using a device that measures BP via your upper arm, like your doctor actually does. So this is, again, not a perfect product that’ll have massive appeal to everyone. Even so, its spirit of innovation and risk-taking is very much to be applauded.