Hello Kickstarters and those that may have missed this project;

Click on over to our website (okay, it's just a splash page at this point) and leave your email if you'd like to get updates or more information on how to order product after we fulfill the Kickstarter units.

www.translusense.com

Also, we will be providing Twitter updates as well. Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/TransluSense

And as for the survey. We have a very simple 8 question survey that we could use your help on. It should only take a few minutes if you're so inclined. You can find the survey by clicking here:

http://freeonlinesurveys.com/s.asp?sid=i7p8otn8h7cxeq526050 

Thank you!

Kickstarters!

Time flies when you’re working your butt off:) and you all deserve an update. Let me warn you upfront… this update is going to be long and I probably still won’t say everything I need to.

First, if you haven’t heard, a company in Switzerland has invested a significant sum of money to help us with the first year of startup. This will insure that you guys get a great product and help us to build a successful company. To be honest, this project would have likely failed if it had not been for the venture capitol we received. Tooling and software costs were far higher than expected. The investors are committed to satisfying the Kickstarters and they are very excited to get you your product as soon as possible!

So far I have hired 4 full time employees and am contracting with several more. Our assembly factory is being set up in a building in Sandpoint Idaho. The city officials in Sandpoint have been extremely helpful. They put us in a 13,000 square foot building and have really helped with grants and tax incentives to help us create jobs and set up assembly lines.

We have run into many challenges and a fair amount of feature creep. The fact is, all the input we got from the Kickstarter community has given us some really wonderful ideas, some we are implementing now and some we will implement in the next generation of product.  The product you will get is going to be glass upper key area and a metal base just as described. We had to compromise on the gorilla glass because Corning’s prices were very high and they are extremely slow to provide quotes and technical info. Big companies are sometimes hard to deal with. We are currently using a molded borosilicate glass which is very strong much like the Pyrex dishes folks use every day. There are some exciting benefits to using this sort of glass…

· Gorilla Glass has a maximum thickness of 2mm. We would have had to laminate 3 pieces together in order to get it to the right thickness. Borosilicate glass can be molded to the right thickness in one part.

·  Gorilla glass blocks most UV, borosilicate can be blended to allow most UV to pass through. In the future this will allow us to add self-cleaning functionality for medical applications where the UV is piped right into the glass!

· Borosilicate glass can be blended any color we like so we eventually can have limited edition colors.

· By incorporating special Fresnel lenses into the glass the plastic light-pipes can be eliminated allowing us to reduce cost and, believe me, cost is a big issue. Let’s just say you guys are getting a good deal!   

· Borosilicate glass is about 1/10th the cost of Gorilla Glass.

· Borosilicate glass can be molded in 3D shapes while Gorilla Glass is just flat.

The key layout will be applied on the top surface with a thin static film. Those of you who ordered a keyboard will get two versions of the film, one with a full keyboard and one with a keyboard/mouse combo where a mouse replaces the number-pad. You can choose which one to apply. Once the film is applied it is nearly invisible and adds durability to the top surface. If you get tired of the one you have you can peel it off and replace it with another.  The coolest thing about the film is that we are building an online tool that will allow you to custom design your own keyboard or mouse films. Just design your layout and add the custom film to your cart we will print it out on a special printer and send it to you right away. This is really exciting because it will allow people with particular needs to customize their keyboard for uses such as gaming, home theater, CAD, video design, web design, music or whatever you spend your time doing. We will store all the designs on the website so, for instance, if you want to share your special EVE INFERNO game keyboard design with a friend just give them the code and they can order one for themselves!

All the hurdles have taken a toll on our schedule. I had hoped to start shipping product to the Kickstarters in May but tooling is still 40 days out and we need to fine tune the tools once they send us the first articles. All that said, it looks like we will be shipping in June at this point. Ill keep you guys updated as we get closer to the ship date.

You may have heard, we had some issues with the name we chose from the kickstarter Name Game, ClearTouch. The owner of the URL wanted way too much money for it. In the end we decided to call the company TransluSense and the product ClearTouch. The website will be www.TransluSense.com and currently just has a splash page. We have a team working on a full blown webpage with special areas for the Kickstarter folks. We have met resistance on the name but when 800+ people are watching a project everyone has a different opinion. It’s nearly impossible to make these choices by consensus. I guess what I am saying is: here is the logo. If you like it great! If not tough:) We will be creating the ClearTouch art as well as the package art very soon.

I thought you all might like to see a rough image of the concept package minus the exterior artwork...

Just a quick note to let all know that I have locked down the design and am now engaging tooling suppliers. It has taken much more than I originally expected to get to this point, but working through the electronics and battery size pushed us to this point. 

We expect T1 samples by the middle of March and production components to build out the kickstarter units by the end of April.

Just to give you a quick update, we have engaged the services of a professional consultant about the final naming of the product. We want to make sure that we are doing the right thing from a branding standpoint. Stay tuned, we should have an update next week.