In the throes of creation. (Photo: Courtesy of Quirky)

Late Friday afternoon, the Chelsea offices of Quirky--past the High Line and across from the Porsche dealership--looked like they'd been abandoned in a hurry.

The front desk: unmanned. Tables in the spacious central meeting area: covered in papers but utterly empty. In search of our assigned guide, Betabeat wandered inside the startup, which marries the wisdom of the crowd with the technical expertise of a team of in-house engineers to create products sold in stores like Bed Bath and Beyond and Lowe's. We made our way past a glass-enclosed workshop and conference rooms with brick artfully exposed, before finally stumbling upon signs of exhausted life among the open floor plan of the back office.

This wasn't mere Friday flakiness. Most of Quirky's 70-plus employees had been up all night, hacking away on an insane attempt to develop a line of accessories for the new iPhone 5 in the course of just 24 hours. Typically, would-be inventors must pay a small fee to have their ideas evaluated by Quirky's community of creative and experts. However, as a special event to get the new vertical off the ground, submissions were temporarily free of charge and thrown into a special high-speed development process.

Community members submitted 1700 ideas all told, and the Quirky team had narrowed them down to just 15 ideas for development. Everything had to be done by Friday night, when CEO Ben Kaufman was scheduled to fly the prototypes to their manufacturers, so that the final products could go up for sale on Fab.com by Wednesday morning.

The number of visible coffee cups suggested it had been a long night.

Typically, Quirky releases two new products per week. Until very recently, those could've been almost anything from shower caddies to spatulas. But the rush to develop new iPhone accessories is part of Quirky's new mission: to launch a series of new verticals on the site and for the company's product line, starting with Apple accessories.

Ultimately, Quirky will roll out a new product each week in each of its new verticals, as well as the two "general" releases. The company just raised a $68 million Series C to help them along.

The aftermath.

The entire office wraps around one glass-enclosed workshop composed of two connected spaces. The dirty room contains the power tools, and is typically covered in sawdust. Goggles and WPA posters urging workplace safety hung side by side on the way. Then, down a pair of stairs, is the clean room, which holds the 3D printers, sewing machines, and the like. As we descended, PR honcho Jaime Yandolino paused and, surveying the paper-littered tables, admitted, "The view from here just shows the aftermath."

The larger of Quirky's 3D printers--nicknamed "Bertha"--was originally installed when the company was based on Bleecker and Broadway. She got her name because she didn't fit up the stairs, requiring Quirky to close down Broadway and "haul this big girl up the side of the building," said Ms. Yandolino, like a piano in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

The night before, there'd been 200 people bustling about the office, for a special edition of Quirky's standard Thursday night evaluation meetings. "Invention ambassador" Andrew Erlick--who, prior to Quirky, developed and sold a device for laser light shows to haunted houses--explained that each of the chosen ideas for Apple accessories had progressed through its own development process. Features and characteristics were hashed out. Then, once refined, concepts were handed over to a designer to execute.

Quirky's standard development process is a little less hell-for-leather. Normally the rate of submissions is more like 1,500 per week. The most promising are upvoted and evaluated by members of the Quirky online community, then evaluated by the company's in-house experts.

Mr. Erlick walked Betabeat through a massive wall of products, separated out by their various stages of development, from exploration (the very earliest stages of tire-kicking) to pricing (where the product is fleshed out and its marketability is evaluated) to production (where Quirky starts really investing resources). The production phase is when engineers “come together and start talking about what we could do with them, to the minute details, every little inch,” he explained. From those discussion, the team at Quirky builds a prototype  in-house, which might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Once the prototype gets the sign off, it's onto one of Quirky's manufacturing partners and, ultimately, onto store shelves.

The bottleneck, it looked like, lay in the pricing section. "As we grow bigger and bigger and we sign on more retailers, those products will hopefully find a home," Mr. Erlick noted.

Quirky is hoping that its new verticals-based approach will be a better way to connect experts with producs they actually give a crap about. "We'll have professionals that have worked in that field before, you know--if you have a person who's working in kitchen products, engineering and designing, you want that person to give their opinion and surface his best ideas."

And, of course, the contest leaves Quirky with quite a backlog of invention ideas to feed the beast that is that new line of Apple accessories--especially considering that charger connector is now completely different, rendering many older items so much garbage. "All of those ideas and every idea that ever gets submitted to Quirky, we have in our 'vault,' our archive," explained Mr. Erlick. "If a retailer comes to us and says, 'Hey I really want this,' we could look at our archive and see what's out there."

United at last. (Photo: Quirky Blog)

Quirky isn't resting on the laurels of that recently announced $68 million series C. Apparently hellbent on setting a new land-speed record for collaborative product development, the company is partnering with Fab.com to bring a brand-new line of Apple accessories to market by roughly the time the latest devices ship later this month.

Hold on to your hats and synchronize your watches, tinkerers, because it's going to be a crazy 48 hours.

Anyone interested in participating has until tomorrow afternoon to submit ideas (for free) to a new Apple Accessories section of Quirky's site. Submissions will be evaluated at 7p.m. EST to determine which inventors proceed to the next stage, a design workshop with "Quirky designers and members collaborating round-the-clock to design and refine each invention pick into a final Quirky product."

So a hackathon, basically.

On Saturday, CEO (and onetime Apple accessories entrepreneur) Ben Kaufman will take whatever's developed to Quirky's factories, which'll churn out a final product for sale on Fab.

We assume that, on Sunday, Quirky's community of creators will rest.

Mr. Kaufman (Photo: Twitter)

There must be a whole lot of you noodling around with an inventive notion in the back of your noggin. Two major VC firms have just made a bet to that effect, investing a whopping $68 million in social product development startup Quirky. Andreessen Horowitz led the series C, with Kleiner Perkins participating. Mary Meeker will join the company's board, as will Andreessen GP Scott Weiss.

The company aims to make the process of invention more accessible to those with bright ideas--but without the requisite technical or legal know-how to get all the way to the finish line. That's achieved by building an online community where creative types can work with experts, collaborating on a final product.

That big, fat check brings the company's total raised to $97 million.

Over at Quirky's blog (in a quirkily formatted post), the delightfully unfiltered CEO Ben Kaufman outlines a few things the company hopes to achieve with the money, like getting products to market faster, investing in U.S. manufacturing and, perhaps most interestingly, "experimenting with our own space at retail." But that's a mere slice of the lengthy piece, most of which is dedicated to his ambivalence about the whole notion of raising venture capital.

Short version: Money ain't shit unless you use it to execute. A representative sample:

This experience, coupled with another 6 years of institutional financing experience after, has lead me to accumulate a comprehensive array of reasons why I hate glorifying startup financing, and why it disgusts me when fellow entrepreneurs gloat about how much money they’ve raised as part of their 60 second elevator pitch.

In the eye of the public, and specifically the tech community, funding is thought to mean much more that it actually does. The world views funding as a badge of honor. I view it as a scarlet letter.

He concludes that they'll "shut the fuck up and get to work, because none of the above matters unless we execute."

Somewhere, an office manager is wondering whether she should put this bottle of champagne back in the refrigerator.

The eyes have it.

Master merchandiser Rachel Shechtman is treating the launch of her new store not unlike the launch of a startup. To that end, the stealth shop, which was hidden behind an installation by the artist JR, launches today at 144 Tenth Avenue at 19th Street, "in beta" with the e-commerce component to follow in February.

"I kind of geek out around new business models and I think the future of the physical retail environment are gonna become less about consumption and more about content and community, so that’s what we’re doing." said Ms. Shechtman, who founded her own retail consulting group Cube Ventures in 2003, and has offered an amalgam of marketing, merchandizing, and business development to clients like Gilt Groupe, Tom's Shoes, Bliss Spa, and AOL.

"The concept," she explained, "Is a space that has a point of view like a magazine, but it changes like a gallery and it sells things like a store."

"In the same way you go to MoMA and there’s an exhibition by Andy Warhol made possible by Proctor & Gamble, the idea is in February, you might walk into the store and it's our 'Love Issue' and it’s a made possible by Match.com," said Ms. Shechtman. "You would not only be able to buy wonderful, cool curated merchandise, but maybe we’ll have a whiskey tasting with Doctor Ruth or we’ll show Love Story on a movie screen."

For her first "shopping exhibition" in the 2,000 sq. ft. space, Ms. Shechtman, who sits on the board of startups like Birchbox, Fashism, and Smartypants, went with a world she knew well. "A Startup Store," as the six week exhibition ending January 12th is called, will feature beauty items from Birchbox, jewelry from BaubleBar, gadgets and gifts from Quirky, accessories from Joor, and art from Artspace. "It was very deliberate choosing a startup store as our version of beta so I can get practice and comfortable in the space before our launch in February," she said. "I consider us as much of a startup as Bonobos when Andy [Dunn] launched it. We’re just launching with our physical space and our e-commerce is coming second."

Rendering of the space.

In the case of the "A Startup Store" the Doctor Ruth equivalent would be classes from SkillShare, Ms. Shechtman said she was working with co-founder Mike Karnjanaprakorn on hosting classes that match the startup theme.

As for the name of the actual store, Mr. Shechtman declined to share that at the moment. "I am not talking about that just yet," she demurred. "We’re just waiting on some final legal stuff from the Patent and Trademark office." See? Talking like a startup already!

360 degrees of Times Square

In front of a packed house, Jeff Glasse grasped a mike at the Village Lantern down on Bleecker. “My brother’s in the army and he’s always sending me pictures of himself—pictures of him and his cub pack, whatever you call the other guys he’s with,” the standup comedian said. “In every picture he sends me he’s wearing camouflage. I don’t really have the heart to tell him that I can see him, in these pictures.”

There was peal of laughter from a woman in the crowd.

Stand-up is a sideline for Mr. Glasse, whose website home page features two portraits of him. On the left Mr. Glasse is dressed in all black, a microphone in one hand, his other hand out in a “What’s the deal with...” shrug reminiscent of Jerry Seinfeld. On the right Mr. Glasse is standing in front of a white board, wearing glasses, holding an iPhone with a strange looking video camera attached. “I’m a comedian. I’m also the CEO of a tiny new company,” reads the website’s banner. “Which one makes me more pathetic?”

That self-deprecation is Mr. Glasse’s own form of camouflage. A student of 17th-century literature at Princeton, he worked in video production for ESPN and the United Nations before founding, DIGIT, a company that helped pioneer the field of interactive exhibits for museums. These days Mr. Glasse is is the co-founder and CEO of Kogeto, a small New York startup trying to revolutionize the way people shoot and watch video by producing the world’s first affordable, handheld, panoramic video camera.

“Jeff has an overactive brain,” says Mark Atkinson, founder of TeachScape, an enterprise software company focused on the educational market, where Mr. Glasse worked for a decade before founding Kogeto. “It’s like the stand-up comedy, he does that because he likes the challenge. It exercises a certain part of his mind.”

In 2009 TeachScape saw the opportunity to win a massive research project being funded by the Gates Foundation. It required the winning bidder to shoot 25,000 hours of classroom video over two years for a longitudinal study. “We needed our best problem solver, so I put Jeff on the job,” Mr. Atkinson said.

Having shot a lot of video in his day, Mr. Glasse knew that a standard setup, with multiple people shooting footage from different angles, would never work. “You would spook the kids, and even with a couple guys, you wouldn’t catch every detail.”

He looked into panoramic cameras, like the ones mounted on Google’s street view cars, but found they were expensive and bulky. So, despite having no experience in engineering, manufacturing or optics, he decided to just build his own.

The result, dubbed Lucy, cut the price of the cheapest, non-professional panoramic camera from about $150,000 to $1,500. On the software side, it had once taken 40 hours to process a single hour of panoramic video. With Lucy the ratio was one-to- one. Teachers loved the small, unobtrusive unit, which could capture 360 degrees of activity without needing to be monitored or adjusted. “It was like we gave them a mirror they could turn on their own teaching, to understand what the students were responding to and when they were losing their attention,” Mr. Atkinson said. The Gates Foundation chose Lucy for its study.

- -
“I come back to New York and I see people, just regular people wearing camouflage. I fucking hate that,” Mr. Glasse told the crowd at Village Vines, his face twisting into a snarl. “I will get in my car and I will drive around Manhattan looking for people in camouflage. When I see someone I HIT THEM.” He shifts moods from anger to innocence.“When the police show I say, oh I didn’t see them. Must have been the camouflage. I thought it was a fern, officer.”
- -

People often ask Mr. Glasse how he finds time to run a new company and be a stand-up comedian. “The truth is, I don’t have kids. Most people get off work, they have to go home and spend time with their family. I work on my comedy. It’s my passion.”

After the success of Lucy, Mr. Glasse realized he had found another passion. In April of 2010, he left Teachscape and founded Kogeto with David Sosnow, a film producer and cinematographer who helped build the Lucy project.

“It was the two of us sitting in an office at WeWork labs in Soho,” said Mr. Sosnow. speaking with Betabeat by phone. “We faced in opposite directions, but the space was so small the backs of our chairs touched one another. We just had our cell phones, so we would go into the bathroom when we were on a conference call, because that’s where we got the best reception.”

Dot as it appears on the iPhone

Over the next year the team at Kogeto designed Dot, the world’s first panoramic camera small enough and cheap enough for the mass market. They raised a small amount of venture capital funding, $720,000, and put together a Kickstarter project. “The idea was to sell a few units and kind of test the market out,” Mr. Sosnow said.

The Lucy had been a revolution at $1,500, but on Kickstarter, backers who gave $99 would get their own Dot camera. The goal was to raise $20,000. More than 1,000 backers ended up pledging over $120,000 into Dot before Kogeto shut the Kickstarter down, and pre-orders kept pouring in to the company’s website.

For a young company without a track record in the consumer electronics space, this was an overwhelming success. Instead of shooting for 2,000 units on their first production run, Kogeto made plans to sell and ship 120,000 units before Christmas.

The popularity of the iPhone is the secret to making the Dot cheap and accessible to such a large market. Instead of building an independent camera unit, the team at Kogeto has designed a small, sleek attachment that fits over the lens of the iPhone’s built-in camera. Go ahead, say it. An iPhone accessory.

Viewed normally through the iPhone, the video appears like a small, 360-degree doughnut. But after filtering it through Kogeto’s software, which users can download as an iPhone app, the viewers sees something resembling a wide-screen movie. Users can swipe around the scene, all 360 degrees, with the touch of their fingers, a cinematic experience unlike anything most of us have ever known.

The Dot represents a new kind of cheap, modular hardware, which relies on a smartphone but adds significant value, a hybrid product some think may represent the next phase of New York’s tech renaissance. “I’ll use Apple because it’s the most famous” Peter Semmelhack, founder of the Chelsea based hardware firm, Bug Labs, told Betabeat. “Today you can avail yourself of over 250,000 applications in the App Store, but do a quick inventory of the interesting hardware you can buy for your iPhone, it’s maybe a couple dozen attachments at best.”

Mr. Semmelhack said that New York has hardware in its DNA. “Look at the history of New York, with AT&T’s Bell Labs and IBM’s research park. We invented things like the transistor, the laser, the radio. We were once a center for innovation in hardware, and the explosion of mobile devices is an opportunity for us to rekindle that industry.”

For Kogeto, the biggest discovery has been the collection of raw, under-valued talent in Rochester, NY, a five hour drive north-west of the city along the border of Lake Ontario. As the headquarters of Kodak and the Rochester Institute of Technology, the city was long a mecca for hardware engineers, optical experts and manufacturing plants. But over the last decade, Kodak cut its work force in the city from roughly 60,000 to 6,000. What little is left may soon be chopped up, as the once-mighty camera maker is sold off in pieces for its valuable patent portfolio.

“There is this incredible community up there, and a lot of start-ups are popping up,” said Mr. Glasse, who cracked no jokes during two long phone conversations with Betabeat. He travels frequently to Rochester to work on everything from the custom tools that will make the Dot to the plastic that goes into the attachment to the packaging in which the product ships. “We’re big fans of Apple, the simplicity and elegance they bring to their products. But we didn’t want to imitate their secrecy or their reliance on questionable overseas labor.”

He added, “Maybe the profit margins will take a hit, but we don’t to make money on the back of some kid getting $2 a day.”

Mr. Glasse is similarly relying on a homegrown marketing plan. “With Kickstarter we were able to essentially find our 1,000 true fans,” he pointed out, “and they are going to help us find the next 10,000.”

--

“I hate the fucking newspaper. Who told them to make it three feet tall with no staples? You get on the subway and it’s like you’re trying to do this crazy oragami. You end up punching the homeless guy next to you in the face. Who you didn’t even see there. Because he’s wearing camouflage.”

--

In Rochester, there is little word of the boom going on in the New York tech scene, where 19-year-old CEOs are a normal occurrence. “The real danger is that our young people are leaving because they don’t see opportunity,” noted Jim Murphy, Vice-President of Advent Tool, a custom molder that is making the plastic attachment and packaging for Dot. “It’s more than just Kodak up here. We have a history with Xerox, with the optical engineers at Bausch and Lomb, just an immense amount of talent here that spans back for generations. But as more and more of that work has dried up and gone overseas, our new generation are moving elsewhere, not staying Rochester and learning these crafts.”

If start-ups like Kogeto can tap the exploding smartphone market, marrying New York’s venture capital, software savvy and marketing muscle with Rochester’s labor force and hardware expertise, a corridor of innovation could open up similar to the one that gave Silicon Valley its name during the boom of computer chip makers like Fairchild and Intel. Gotham-based funding platforms like Kickstarter and Quirky are allowing start-ups and solo entrepreneurs to find the seed capital and target market for their products at little to no cost.

The future already looks bright for Bre Pettis, a pioneering member of the hacker collective, NYC Resistor. His company Makerbot just raised $10 million to make 3-D printers available in every home. From his office in Gowanus, Brooklyn, Mr. Pettis declared we are on the verge of something big. “It is a great time to have a hardware startup. The infrastructure for raising capital toward early stage hardware start-ups is there with Kickstarter and angel investors. The software and hardware is also at a point where it is modular and quick to prototype and get into production. Build it and they will come.”

“I don’t think we really know where this will all go,” Mr. Glasse said, when reached late on a Sunday night, having spent the better part of his day at the office. “I’m making exquisitely detailed decisions about plastics and supply chains and packaging that I’ve never thought about before, and I’ll probably have to live with those choices for the next year. What I do know is that me and the team I have put together are crazy about panoramic video. We’re passionate about the product and we believe once people get it in their hands, it will change the way they see the world.”

Wooster Street Panorama

Bits byte, let's make something.

Quirky, a crowdsourced creation platform,  just raised $16 million. What numbers were those venture heads looking at when they opened their wallets? Well Quirky recently partnered with Bed, Bath & Beyond, and company says this has spurred big growth.

Since the start of 2011 it has expanded its user base by more than 40 percent to over 78,000.

The average number of ideas submitted in each weekly round has doubled from 114 to 227. A show about the company is about to air on the Sundance channel, so expect that growth to increase. 

Recently Kickstarter released some of its metrics, which showed a rapid acceleration in the amount of funding secured for projects on the site. Kickstarter raised $50 million in its first two years of existence and $10 million in just the last ten weeks.

Wired, which gave the Maker movement the cover treatment a few months back, recently declared on Epicenter that 2011 was the year the DIY movement broke out. With companies like Kickstarter, Quirky, Makerbot, Shapeways and Etsy all scaling fast, it seems like New York is poised to capture this booming market.

Quriky is part of a cadre of New York start-ups taking advantage of advances in 3D printing and the power of social networks to fuel crowdsourced funding. 

Founder Ben Kaufman calls there approach social product development. Users pay $10 to submit ideas and awards influence points for contributing ideas and opinion on everything from engineering to branding.

User Matthew Flemming, for example, has earned $9,730 based on his contributions to 52 different products, including one idea he submitted that was selected for production.

Quirky gives back 30% of what each product's sale to the community based on the percentage of influence they earn.