Description
About the Startup Jack Yao Co-Founder (Ops) Steohen Ng Co- Founder (Tech) Shruti Banda Co-Founder (Mkt) Describe your products in 3 words. Portable, Lightweight, Efficient How did you come up with the idea for this product? My name is Jack Yao, our company is Mobile Pixels Inc. We started the company when I was a graduate student at MIT. During an internship at Amazon, I urgently felt the need of using a portable monitor as I was working in a co-working space. The idea came to when I was doing some programming work, I wished that I could have had a monitor that can be expanded from the back of the main laptop display. When I return to school the following semester, my roommate Stephen and I started to prototype this idea. With funding from Northeastern University and MIT, we launched a Kickstarter/IndieGoGo campaign which raised 1.5MM in pre-sales. What makes your product special? Our product is the first monitor that integrates into one's laptop as a one-piece solution to hit the market. It simply magnetizes to the back of a laptop, the user just has to connect a single USB cable, slide out the screen, and the Duex Pro is on. It is as simple as that. What has been the best part of your experience? The best part has been about developing our Duex Pro from scratch with Stephen. I made the first prototype by using an LCD screen from my mom's broken laptop. I build the housing at MIT's hobby shop using acrylic and an off the shelf driver board. That allowed me to gather people's interest around whether or not a portable display will prove to be useful. Then with the help of Stephen, we started producing the prototype using CAD and 3D printing the components to build a functional prototype. We also hired a solutions provider to design and produce a sample run of 10 custom video driver boards. From there, we did more market research/consumer interviews and refined our prototype more to the point that we can use it to shoot a commercial for our Kickstarter.