Alright Guys and Gals.  Big news.  

Apple has officially approved the hardware, and as of today our factory in China is starting production.  This is a huge milestone for us, and it is a huge relief to be able to announce it.  Based on this, we will ship the $39 units by June 1st.  We will use testflight to distribute apps to the backers who paid $49 and $249, and ship those units by May 1st.  

Thanks so much for your patience.  Things are coming together really well, and we could not have made it to this point without you.  I understand the concern expressed by some of you; I too have backed projects that have had delays.

I can, however, tell you that Ronald and I wake up every day with one goal- get this product to market and build a business of innovative and fun iOS experiences.  We are constantly pushing the product, and showing demos.  You'll never find me without an Air Guitar in my pocket, assuming I'm wearing pants.  

In addition to our kickstarter goals, the product will launch in retail this summer, in the US and abroad.  The retailer cannot yet be disclosed, but you'll find them in every major city.  

Colin

Happy holidays! This is a quick update to thank you for your support this year and a brief project update.

- It took us quite some effort to ready the prototype we showed in the original Kickstarter video for mass manufacturing. We're glad to announce that the Air Guitar Move is now in production. We just returned from a trip to our factory in China and we're glad to announce that we solved the last issues. We received the very first batch of Air Guitar Moves and they work and look very, very good. 

- The Air Guitar Move is now being certified for FCC, CE and a bunch of other institutions. 

- We demonstrated the Air Guitar Move at SF Beta in November and won the People's Choice Award. 

What's next?

- We don't have a final shipping date yet, but we want you to have the product as soon as possible once the product is certified.

- We focussed on making the hardware reliable and the game still need work. Fortunately, software is easier to upgrade than hardware. We will focus on the software the next few months and would like to use your feedback to improve the software.

- The Air Guitar Move will be sold in retail (in the USA and Canada for certain and we're working on getting the product in Europe, Asia and Australia) in the summer of 2012. That means that you, Kickstarter backers, will have a unique product for the next few months.

Pictures:

- Sealing the guitar pick.

- Colin pretending to build an air guitar. He's not fooling anyone though.

- The finished product

Good ideas come out of thin air. Last week we were wondered if it would be possible to make a music game just 100% based on motion. No touch required, just motion of the iPhone and motion of our guitar pick. It's quite a radical departure from what we've been working on so far and probably quite different than existing mobile music games. 

One of the cool things in Silicon Valley is, is that there's always a cool geek event just around the corner and lucky for us, a great event ('The Muther of all Hackathons') was just days away. If you're not familiar with the term hackathon. Imagine hundreds of nerds gathering and hacking on crazy apps for a full day. And night. A hackathon is a great environment to try out crazy ideas and to get inspired by other people with ideas possibly even crazier than yours. The Muther of all Hackathons was specifically targeted at mobile app developers and we spend over 24 hours at the Computer History Museum (go see it, it has been recently remodeled and it's the ultimate geek paradise!) in Mountain View hacking on our 'no-touch music game' idea. We briefly considered sneaking into the museum exhibit area at night and see if we could use a Cray supercomputer to speed up compile time but eventually decided it wasn't such a good idea (Cray has a different computer architecture than the iPhone, you know). 

The end result after 24h+ of hacking? A working (!) demo of a game that can best be described as "Guitar Hero meets Dance Central, but mobile. And with badges" (actually, there are no badges in the game, but since every startup nowadays thinks it cool to have badges, I thought it would be cool to claim we have badges too, even though we don't. Yet) 

The game play is easy to understand and quite addictive: To start the game, hold a "Bruce Springsteen pose" (this sentence might make better sense after watching the video below) for a couple of seconds (and don't move!). Next the game will ask the user to perform certain motion in the rhythm of the song. For example: strum quickly, strum slowly, hold still (I didn't hold still and that's the scratching record sound you hear in the video), etc.

Our app was voted by a jury of VC's and mobile entrepreneurs "Best new app" at the Hackathon, a $25,000 prize (in publicity, booth at a CTIA Wireless Conference and a lot more). Wow :)

I hope the video gives a brief overview of how fun the game is. Personally, I think this concept has a lot of potential and I would like to hear from you, dear backers, what you think. Should we continue this path or should we go back to a more traditional Guitar Hero 'press the button' type of game play?