popSLATE 2 E-Ink iPhone Case: One Mobile Phone Case to Rule them All

—MILIND YEDKAR, General Manager, Asia Pacific and Japan, Cloud Client Computing, Dell —GREG MOON CMO, Co-founder, popSLATE

Can you talk about the genesis of popSLATE - from version 1 to 2 and how did you bump on to this idea?

We started shipping our original popSLATE (popSLATE 1), in April of last year. Since that time, we have thousands of enthusiastic users in more than 45 countries. popSLATE 1 also generated a lot of excitement in the press as a new category-defining product in the rapidly expanding smart hardware space.

popSLATE 1 focused primarily on visual selfexpression, by connecting people to multiple sources of vibrant images with which to instantly customize their phones (including the iPhone camera and photo library, Instagram, and other members in the popSLATE user community). Users started hacking around with alwayson productivity uses, too, such as daily schedule screen shots, boarding passes, and grocery lists. These early experiments spurred further brainstorming at popSLATE, which led to the development of our first productivity features, like ‘ popBook’ where you can store your scannable membership cards, and ‘auto-pops,’ which enabled notification-type bits of information (eg, a sports score), to be delivered automatically to the back of the phone. For the latter feature, we created an IFTTT channel to integrate with 100+ popular content sources; IFTTT served as a terrific sandbox to understand which content sources were most popular, and how they could best be leveraged within the always-on experience.

For the uninitiated, IFTTT, if we go by Wiki is a free web based service that allows users to create chains of simple conditional statements called “recipes”, which are triggered based on changes to other web services such as Gmail, FB, Instagram and Pinterest. IFTTT is an abbreviation of “If This Then That”.

After popSLATE 1 - it was time to ask the question, “What should the smart second screen really be?” Driven by this question, we conceived of a slew of new, always-on features, in order to take full advantage of