Happy New Year

Hello backers,

November and December have been quite busy for the Team. Before we dive in, we want to thank you again for your support. You guys changed our lives. And we’re grateful for that.

This update summarizes what we’ve done since our last post.

EMBEDDED SYSTEM DESIGN

To ensure quality and reliability, we’ve partnered with our friends at Davidson here in Paris, to work on the final design of the PCB of Qleek and its firmware. Pierre (our CTO) has been working with Davidson’s best engineers to make sure the PCB design is :

• Energy efficient, so you can run Qleek for months,
• Fast, for Qleek to be as responsive as you’d expect,
• Robust, so it runs and runs for ages without failing.

At the time of writing we are expecting the printed circuits to come from our manufacturer in a few days to test how our firmware behaves. Pierre is excited :)

WOOD MANUFACTURING

In the meantime, Johanna has been taking care of sourcing the best possible manufacturer who would fulfil Qleek’s quality requirements.

This phase is taking longer than what we’ve expected. Because we’ve came to learn that chosing the right manufacturer is a lot like chosing a partner in your personal life. You can’t just pick the first one who does the job. You’ve got to build a strong relationship based on business, quality and trust.

So in addition to the several technical properties required for the wooden pieces, Johanna has to make sure the preferred manufacturer:

• has well managed production processes,
• can scale up with the production ramp up,
• has knowledge and experience in his craftsmanship to help us spot the wrongs in our own processes,
• is highly motivated and personnaly involved in Qleek,
• shares our values and the production ethics we want to distill in our product.

QLEEK STORE

To make sure you guys have amazing content and a wide variety of Tapps to make, Ismail traveled to big apple to meet music labels, Artists and content providers. The idea is to get them on the bandwagon and make Qleek a great place to find great music, films and photography.

We cannot announce anything official right now, but we can tell you that people we’ve met are excited to be part of the adventure. More soon.

Oh, and by the way. Here’s Ismail presenting Qleek to the French Prime Minister. It was fun !

WHAT’S NEXT

As we go further in the manufacturing process, we realize the amount of work that is still ahead of us. The 3 of us alone cannot possibly get it done in a reasonable time. So we decided to start looking for investors to help us grow the team and get additional help and go faster.

Of course, before we say goodbye, we want to wish you all a Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year.

You guys gave us the best possible gift this year, we’ll keep working hard to to give YOU the best one in 2015.

Cheers,

Ismail, Johanna & Pierre