Turning your desk or that restaurant booth into a tech tool
Touchwood Labs wants consum-ersto break from screens.
The company, which officially launched in September and is part of the East Liberty-based startup accelerator AlphaLab Gear, has developed technology that could turn ordinary surfaces into high-tech access pointsto the digital world.
With Touchwood’s technology tucked below the surface, a restaurant booth could display menus, take orders and collect payment or a desk that could display notifications and calendar events.
“Technology is mostly delivered right now through screens,” said cofounder and CEO Matthew Dworman. “We carry them in our pockets; they’re on our desks. It’s the same formfactor, just in different sizes.”
When we are not limited to “this black glass slab form factor, we can incorporate technology more naturally into our lives,” he said.
The company wants to declutter our digital lives while tackling screen fatigue and information overload, Mr. Dworman said in a pitch to investors last month at TechCrunch Disrupt, an annual event for startups and investors that has been held in U.S. cities, including San Francisco and New York, and internationally.
Individuals reach into their pockets to check their devices hundreds of times a day and spend half of their waking hours staring at screens, he said. There is too much competition for users’ attention on one platform or device.
Touchwood’s technology is meant to “give people information and controls that are context-appropriate, give someone information when they need it and where they need it,” co-founder and chief operating officer Gaurav Asthana said in an interview.
For example, instead of push notifications that ping to your cellphone, Touchwood’s technology would
incorporate a colorful light on your desk. That area will light up when a notification comes in but won’t try to pull you away from the task you are working on, Mr. Asthana said.
The technology could also enable users to move buttons and tools around the physical desk space so they don’t have to switch between tabs or browsers while they are working.
It shouldn’t feel “like transferring yourself from the physical to the digital world every time you pick up a device,” Mr. Asthana said. “You’re able to get what you need from both at the same time.”
The startup decided to apply to pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt after a member of their eightperson staff brought it up during a team Zoom call — on the same day the application was due. Four weeks before the event in September, the founders heard they had been accepted. The company was one of 20 selected to pitch at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield.
Preparing for the pitch pushed the company to build out its product and define a business model in weeks rather than months, Mr. Asthana said.
The idea for the company was born out of a class at Carnegie Mellon University in March 2019. After that, the two co-founders said Touchwood Labs began to form this June and officially launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September.
Now, the founders are looking to raise $2 million for Touchwood’s seed round this year and another $3 million the following year.
In the meantime, they are working through AlphaLab Gear, a startup incubator in East Liberty that helps early-stage hardware companies. Innovation Works, which runs AlphaLab Gear, fundeda $10,000 grant for the company.
To design their products, the startup plans to partner with companies already working in those industries, like a furniture manufacturer to develop an interactive desk or early childhood development experts to design tables for kids to learn and play digitally.
Think of Touchwood’s technology like a sandwich, Mr. Asthana said.
The ingredients make up several layers underneath the natural material, like woodor another opaque surface. Inside the sandwich, there are layers of high-intensity LED lights, capacitive touch sensors and lots of proprietary material.
On the outside, the tech shouldn’ tbe noticeable.
“What we want it to look like is nothing,” Mr. Dworman said. “We want it to be invisible and just blend seamlessly into our environment, the objects we already have in our lives.”
For consumers, the technology would likely cost about $750, plus the expense for the furniture or other surface.
Touchwood hopes to start rolling out products in the next four to six months. Already, the startup has presold50 end table prototypes.
When thinking of how to integrate the technology into different products, the co-founders come back to the same questions: How is this different — and better — thana screen?
“We hope to see new ways of interacting with the types of tools that we’re using,” Mr. Dworman said. “We see this as being an integral part of the kitchen of the future, restaurants of the future, education of the future.”