From Product Club to Thington Inc.

When Matt Biddulph and I started Product Club, we already knew we wanted to work together, but we didn’t know precisely what we wanted to work on. So we created in Product Club a structure that would allow us to experiment and prototype while doing odds and ends of consultancy work to pay the bills. We did a cool project with Jawbone and another with Nokia, but primarily we followed our passions to try and find a product that we could commit the next few years of our life to.

Over the last two years we’ve explored mobile Q&A, ambient displays in the home, and gone deep on an awesome project focused on using machine vision and video compositing to build new interfaces and experiences for television sets.

In the end though, we kept coming came back to two of our main loves — hacking in hardware and the power of the network, and they way they worked together in The Internet of Things. We did a wide range of experiments here — playing with connection technologies and protocols (BLE, Wifi, Zigbee — Matt even made a mobile phone) and generated a few hardware projects and ideas sketched out to a greater or lesser extent…

The more we explored the space, the more we found that however good and interesting the hardware was in the Internet of Things, the software and service layers were generally awful. Gradually, we came to believe that huge problems in these layers were hiding all of the value and the potential of the technology.

Which brings us to Thington! We decided that we wanted to build a new user interface and service layer that would push past all these problems and in the process bring in our experience working on social systems, location sharing, privacy, hardware and the web of data. And we’re super excited by what we’ve come up with. So excited in fact that we’ve put our money where our mouths are and have formally changed the name of the company from Product Club to Thington Inc.

We’ve managed to get some other people excited about it too… We’ve taken some angel funding from some pretty amazing people — including Ray Ozzie, Stewart Butterfield, Eric Wahlforss, Joi Ito, Marko Ahtisaari, Saul Klein, Loic Le Meur, Matt Rolandson and Samantha Tripodi. They’re all people we respect enormously and it makes us almost intolerably happy that they have this much faith in us.

That’s all for now, except to say if you want to be among the first people to play with our beta later in the year, then go to thington.com and sign up! And feel free to spread the word!

Press release: Thington Inc. announces funding to build a new way to interact with a world of connected objects