connected-hardware
(9)
When the Picture Frame Became a Service
Nixplay sold families a way to keep photographs moving across the miles. Then the cost of keeping those memories in the cloud forced a harder question: who pays after the frame is unwrapped?
The Pool Boy That Lived in the Cloud
pHin made pool chemistry feel like checking the weather. Then the forecast disappeared - and a useful little machine became a lesson in where connected products really live.
Newmark Security’s next act starts at the timeclock
The AIM-listed group is betting on the software behind clocking in. A £1 agreement to sell its physical security arm shows how much it is willing to change.
Spiffy Spent a Decade Washing Cars. The Real Product Was Hiding in the Van.
The North Carolina company started with blue vans and an app. After four million services, it is selling dealers the software, hardware and hard-won operating manual behind the fleet.
Relay Tried to Replace the Kids’ Phone. Frontline Workers Found the Bigger Job.
A $99 screen-free gadget for children found its real market in hotel corridors, stadium kitchens and factory floors. Relay’s second act is a useful lesson in letting an unexpected customer rewrite the pitch.
Therabody Turned an $84 Crisis Into 6.5 Million Massage Guns - Here’s the Eight-Year Grind You Can Copy
A chiropractor spent eight years turning a jigsaw wrapped in a dish towel into a premium wellness platform. The useful lesson is not the hardware - it is how Therabody earned trust one treatment room at a time, then stretched a product into a habit.
Liang Crow
Liang Crow is listed in business-contact directories as Chief Executive Officer of Juicero, the San Francisco cold-press juice company that became a defining parable of Silicon Valley hardware ambition. Juicero built a Wi-Fi-connected countertop press paired with proprietary single-serving produce packs, raised roughly $120 million from marquee investors, and priced its first machine at $699. In April 2017 Bloomberg reporters showed the packs could be squeezed by hand, the company suspended sales that September, and it was defunct by December. Crow's name is attached to the CEO chair in Apollo and similar records; beyond that role listing, little independent public biography is verifiable.
Juicero
Juicero was a San Francisco hardware startup that built a Wi-Fi-connected, $699 cold-press juicer paired with proprietary single-serving produce packs sold by subscription. Backed by roughly $118.5 million from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and Campbell Soup's venture arm, it became a Silicon Valley cautionary tale in 2017 after Bloomberg showed the packs could be squeezed by hand just as effectively as the machine. The company suspended sales in September 2017. The juicero.com domain now hosts an unrelated sparkling-water brand revived in 2025.
Peter Barrett
Peter Barrett is the Founder and General Partner of Playground Global, a Palo Alto-based deep tech venture firm managing over $1.2 billion across three funds. An Australian-born engineer turned investor, Barrett holds 100+ patents, gave Elon Musk one of his first jobs in the 1990s, and built the world's most popular IPTV platform at Microsoft before pivoting to backing founders working on problems that sit 'somewhere between improbable and impossible.' Playground Global's portfolio spans quantum computing, robotics, synthetic biology, and energy transition — representing Barrett's conviction that the computing and industrial revolutions are still ahead of us.