Kickstarter

We know, we know: everyone and their mom asks you to vote for them in some online contest every day. Why should you care about this? Well, since this is an open-source project, you guys are really part of our team, aren’t you? So you need Samsung tablets (almost) as much as we do, right? If we win, we’ll be giving away some of our fancy newfangled tablets to you - our backers!

You’re allowed to vote once a day, every day until the end of the contest, and you don’t have to register to vote! All you have to do is go here and click the green “Vote for this Story” button once a day until March 8th. If we win, you win, so vote vote vote!

Setting up shop

You guys have already ordered machines, but we know you’ve been talking to your friends, family and customers non-stop about the project, and they’re dying to get their hands on a machine. Now you can direct them to the brand new ZPM Webstore! But don’t worry - you’ll still get your order before your annoying brother-in-law does. We won’t ship these machines until after we’ve fulfilled all our Kickstarter obligations. You guys will always be our favorites!

And the store can do good things for you, too! A lot of you mentioned wanting to add items to your pledge. We’ll be posting those swag items on the webstore soon, along with some pretty publicity shots, and you’ll be able to add them to your Kickstarter pledge. When we post them, we’ll also give you all a promo code (through a backer-only update) for free shipping, which you can use if you want your additional items to ship in the same package as your machine or other reward items.

New playthings

The progress hasn’t been all digital. Since our last update we’ve gotten a few exciting new parts in, the most exciting being the new 1200W heating element! This guy is bigger and feels nicer than the wimpy 800W element we were using before. Now that we have the 1200W element, we can mill a new thermoblock (the 1200W element is a little bigger and a different shape from our original 800W element), put this bad boy together and get it up and running. This coming prototype will be close to the ultimate machine, and the next step will be programming the GUI.

We also got portafilter, tamper and steam wand samples (pictured). Fun story about the steam wands: they don’t sell steam wands with any specifications, so we just had to order and see. These commercial-sized wands are all too tall for our machine. Total bummer. But, we still might be able to jerry-rig a steam setup so we can do some steam test function. We’ve also ordered more wands that should fit.

Vote on a tamper!

We can’t decide which we like better. Gleb and Rachel like the wood-handled tamper; Igor and Janet like the all-stainless. So, we thought we’d let you vote! Both are 57mm tampers with stainless steel bases. You can vote on the forum or on Facebook, or both if you feel really strongly. Everyone will be getting the same tamper, so if you love one, feel free to argue for it on the forum.

New clothes!

We ordered t-shirts and they look like this:

We think they’re pretty sweet. We hope you do, too!

We’ll be in the Big Apple (full disclosure: we’re staying in New Providence, NJ - the Manhattan of the outer New Jersey suburbs) from March 9th to the 11th for CoffeeFest NYC! We’ll have a real booth and everything. CoffeeFest has a bunch of classes, talks, new coffee products, latte art competitions and all manner of coffee-related fun, and as exhibitors we get discount coupons for our customers (more on that later). So come out and see us!

For those of you who don’t want to shell out the $30 entry fee, we’re also making an appeal to our NYC-area backers. If anyone has a space, or knows someone who has a space, and would be willing to host us, we’d love to have a get-together where backers can meet the machine.

Corrections to your survey

As some of you have already discovered, you can’t make changes to your Kickstarter form once it has been submitted. If at any point (now, or in the distant future) you want to make changes to your survey, you can do so through our ZPM Survey Correction Form. When filling out this form, please make sure that your name/username, email address and mailing address match the information attached to your Kickstarter account and the mailing address you included in your original survey. We’ll use your email and mailing addresses to confirm that you are indeed the account holder, so if they don’t match we won’t be able to make changes to the account.

Anyone who hasn’t received a survey, or doesn’t want to fill out the Kickstarter survey, can go to our ZPM Espresso Customer Information Form (where we were able to make some questions optional, yay!) to provide their order preferences. If you have already submitted a survey, please only make changes through the Survey Correction form. Submitting multiple surveys could cause inaccuracies in (and consequently delays in the delivery of) your reward. No one wants that!

And if you haven’t done your survey yet? Go do it. Do it right now. We’ll wait.

(NOTE: If you’re at the $1 Reward or No Reward level, you don’t need to fill out any survey. If you don’t want to complete the survey, but do want your name/website/something to appear on our ‘Thank You’ page, shoot us a message/email with your preferred moniker.)

Thanks!

Igor, Gleb, Rachel and Janet

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