A f***cking great video that was bound to go viral. A project hatched at Science, a recently launched business incubator / accelerator run by well-known American entrepreneurs such as Mike Jones and Peter Pham. A million dollars in seed funding from top investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Andreesen Horowitz and Felicis Ventures. A lot of attention from the tech press (“real innovation” ftw).

And, in my humble opinion, an excellent idea for a business (pay a low, nominal monthly subscription fee and receive fresh razor blades every month).

Here’s the one thing that’s missing in my view (and yes, it bugs me): some acknowledgment for Belgian startup RazWar, which I believe essentially pioneered this very business idea back in 2009 (they were one of the startup finalists at my – now defunct – conference Plugg in March 2010 and even took home an award).

Shaving as a service, they called it. Their whole concept of branding was novel, and funny (even the product names). RazWar’s David Hachez shaved himself after the first sale on the website in July 2009, and put the video up on YouTube). They loudly called out the razor business giants and their ridiculous pricing model.

And yet, not a peep about them this week when Dollar Shave Club decided to, well, join the club. A damn shave shame, in my opinion.

To be fair, RazWar has purposefully kept a relatively low profile and as far as I know has never even considered raising funding or ‘going big’. They like the business growing slowly as it is now.

And, more to the point, they’ve sort of moved away from the subscription model in recent times, to some people’s dismay.

Still, I’d like to see some perspective before we start calling Dollar Shave Club ‘real innovation’. Although this video is extremely funny and shareable indeed.

There are new trends in technology seemingly popping up every few weeks and one that has caught our attention are super-focused subscription shopping sites that fit a very narrow niche. We told you about one such company a few weeks ago called Love With Food that sends you a basket of snacks every month. Another service called GuyHaus lets men set up a simple shopping list to ship directly to their doorstep.

But what happens when tech entrepreneurs “grow up” and have families? They start sites like Wittlebee, which comes to you via former MySpace employee and current CEO and Founder of Fine Folks, Inc, Sean Percival.

Percival’s company is funded by the red-hot Science, Inc., a technology “studio” with former MySpace CEO Mike Jones at the helm.

Wittlebee is a subscription service for kid’s clothes, and as Pervical can attest to, kids grow fast thus needing new clothes almost monthly. Here’s what the CEO had to say about the Wittlee launch:

As a parent and a technology entrepreneur, I appreciate any product or service that makes my life easier and gives me more time to focus on my family. Parents today are already pulled in a million different directions, I saw an opportunity to automate shopping for basics by giving families access to our personal shopper mom squad who put together the ideal package of clothing for each child.

Automation Station

Automating purchases that we tend to make on a bi-monthly or monthly basis is all the rage and there’s no sign of slowing down. It’s a trend that Percival has been watching closely, so I asked him what caught his eye:

I have been tracking the subscription commerce trend for several months. I knew I wanted to make an entry into it with something for parents. I like these properties that have a narrow focus because it allows them to really super serve their audience. In most cases the result is a very compelling offering, something you won’t find in retail or on Amazon.com.

By paying $40 a month, you can fill out a simple questionare about the type of style that suits your little one, including their favorite colors and personality. Based on this “profile” of your child, the Wittlebee shoppers will curate a box of clothing for you and ship it right to your door every month. This style of site takes the browsing completely out of shopping and the trend is on fire.

Another trend that Wittlebee is capitalizing on is the rise of Pinterest, which we’ve noted has a huge female audience. Pervical told us that just by adding “pin-it” buttons to the site, the traffic coming back to Wittlebee has been immense. The site also offers a 50% off promo code for first time customers. The code is PINTEREST, of course.

By honing in on a niche audience of shoppers who would rather not have to hit the mall to do their very specific shopping, anyone with passion and vision can set up a site like Wittlebee. While curating these boxes isn’t easy work, it is a sign of the times that big e-commerce sites like Amazon might start losing their luster. Forget searching and long live curation!

➤ Wittlebee

What if you could control your phone just by thinking?  The Siri hoax we reported on a few weeks back got our science team thinking about how viable brain-computer interfaces (BCI) really are. We selected a few consumer-ready applications that allow mind control of your phone, computer and, er, your fuzzy new animal ears, using inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware. We also included two recent breakthroughs from neuroscience labs that highlight where this technology is going.

Are you ready to fly through virtual worlds by thinking or to watch the orgasmic brain in three dimensions? A mind controlled Siri may have been a hoax but all of the examples below are as real as cat ears are fuzzy.

Off-the-Shelf and Into Your Mind

The Neurosky Mindwave and Emotiv EPOC headsets are available now for $99 and $299 respectively and developers are using them to get creative, and kooky. Before we get into the applications, though, lets take a quick look at how this hardware works:

The Electric Brain

The Emotiv EPOC tracks electricity at the brain's surface

The brain is made up of billions of neurons that communicate with each other to create thoughts and moods. When these neurons interact, or “fire”, they create a tiny electrical discharge. Each firing produces a minute amount of electricity, but when millions fire at once, the electrical activity can be measured at the scalp. Neuroscientists have discovered that certain basic states of mind, like focused concentration, actually create waves of neural discharges in consistent areas of your brain!

This regional specificity is known as neuroplasticity, and is often pithily summarized as “neurons that fire together wire together”. The most distinct of these states, like relaxation and surprise, can be measured reliably from electrical activity on the scalp via a process known as electroencephalography, or EEG.  Recently, companies like Neurosky and Emotiv have created consumer-grade hardware that reads EEG without the usually needed conductive gel – allowing for EEG on the road. So, what can you do with cheap, portable EEG?

1: Necomimi – Express your inner self, in real time, with your own fluffy telepathic cat ears
If you’ve been jealous of your cat’s ability to express nonchalance, surprise and interest with a subtle twitch of the ears, Japan’s “Neurowear” has just the thing for you – behold the Necomimi!

These fluffy ears are hooked up to a modified NeuroSky Mindwave and respond to changes in attention and mood. Time Magazine picked the ears as one of its fifty best inventions of 2011 alongside powerhouses like Siri and Lytro. Before you question their value, keep in mind Neurowear’s assessment of the public’s reaction to the ears at the latest Paris Tech Expo: “Many people tried necomimi and necomimi made them happy!”

2: Tug of Mind – Mental toughness training on your iPhone
Iceland-based MindGames’ “Tug of Mind” uses a Bluetooth Mindwave variant called X-Wave, to take mental control to the iPhone. Tug of Mind has you testing your control of relaxation and attention against a virtual opponent. Your ability to control your mind changes the expression on the opponent’s face – which you can upload yourself.  Mindwave developer Deepa Iyengar explained that children at demos “wait a half hour to get a chance to try the games [and then show] intense concentration and relaxation in the midst of a noisy event”.  Iyengar, like many of the early developers of consumer brain computer interaction, is especially excited about the potential of the apps for reversing attention-deficit trends: “What might it be like to have a generation of kids grow up having this kind of practice at concentrating?” she asked.

 3: Neurophone – No more fingers
Dartmouth scientists Andrew Campbell and Tanzeem Choudhury used their grant from the National Science Foundation to create the NeuroPhone. Hook your iPhone up to a standard Emotiv EPOC headset and you can use their application to choose a caller from a list by thinking alone – no hands.  The app uses a powerful recognition signal called “P300” – it occurs about 300 milliseconds after viewing an image – to identify when the contact shown is the one you want to call.

In the Lab: Helicopters and Orgasms

4: Be the Helicopter: Mind Control Technology Goes 3D
Biomedical engineering professor Bin He and his lab have created the first EEG interface that allows users to control virtual objects in three dimensions.

This video from the University of Minnesota shows a grad student wearing the swim-cap-style EEG reader flying the virtual helicopter through obstacles. According to New York State’s BCI expert Gerwin Schalk, He’s application, published in PloS in October, adds a whole new level to the one or two dimensional capabilities of the non-invasive hardware:

“Traditional approaches [similar to the NeuroPhone] have used a structured environment where characters flash and you determine the preferences of the user from the brain signal.  This is a binary approach. The approach of He uses proportional signals, allowing for multiple dimensions of control”

5: The orgasm brings brain scientists a “fantastic opportunity”
Non-invasive brain-computer hardware, while wearable, can’t hold a scented candle to the enormously powerful (and expensive) technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging.  Arguably the most exciting recent development in this field is this animated look inside a woman’s brain during orgasm.

The study by Rutgers scientists was presented at the annual “Society for Neuroscience” meeting in November. One of the researchers, Nan Wise, described the orgasm to UPI as “a fantastic opportunity to examine the connectivity of the brain” because so many different regions are involved. Some preliminary 3D brain imaging has indeed been done with the portable EPOC and a Nokia N900, so your perhaps your mobile 3D mind imager isn’t so far off in the future.

Moore’s Law + The Human Brain = ???
There are thousands of other BCI applications, from mind controlled bicycles to the inevitable brain activated angry birds, that are available and working today. As the technology gets cheaper and more powerful, we can expect the applications to get increasingly useful and probably even weirder. We’ll leave you with one of our favorites for 2011: here’s an RPI MFA student floating around the studio via telepathic control.

Are your fuzzy ears twitching?

We all know what time we have to get up in the morning, but what time should we go to sleep? I personally tend to go to bed later, the earlier I have to get up.

A small web app called sleepyti.me, is a “bedtime calculator”, which tells you when it’s a good time to fall asleep, based on when you have to wake up. We’re not sure how scientific this is, but the app says:

sleepyti.me works by counting backwards in sleep cycles. Sleep cycles typically last 90 minutes.

We’re sure there is some reasoning behind this.

There are similar apps out there like Sleeptiming, and Lunesta’s own Sleep calculator, but sleepyti.me doesn’t hit you with ads and intrusive banners.

Zee, who is our new CEO at The Next Web, won’t need this app as he will never get a chance to sleep.

It’s similar to Google Earth in the way it enables you to jump to various locations like stars, planets, comets and constellations. This app holds thousands of elements in its collection, bringing space geeks a wide variety of things to discover.

Cosmic Crawler, your tour guide to the stars, seamlessly travels through space displaying the distance and time traveled along with providing overlaid text identifying each object. Users can pause the tour or alternatively right-click on the object to view more information on the web. Quick access to space related data is a nice feature to have although ideally, having the information within the user interface would better serve the end-user.

There are several things users can do with objects. An individual object like your favourite planet perhaps can be viewed simultaneously within the split screen feature. Objects can additionally be added to favourites which will save the location of the item within an accessible folder.

Why it’s cool: If you’re fascinated by space, the guided tours are cool, educational and it’s definitely a neat tool for learning, specifically for children. I’m admittedly a bit of a geek and I was one of those kids that truly enjoyed trips to planetariums and science centers so I was easily immersed.

What we don’t like: It’s not as user-friendly as we’d like and in order to master it, the app seems like a bit of a commitment. There are a series of hot keys for controlling the journey but learning its control scheme is a lot to take in.  Another thing we didn’t like was the fact that not every item labeled within the app connects to “more information” on the web.

The Bottom Line:
While this app is useful, you’d have to be a serious space enthusiast to enjoy it. On the other hand, those with children studying planets and space, may want to consider grabbing this app for its educational value. Cosmic Crawler is available for $2.99 in the Mac store.

On a side note, after reviewing this app we realized that the developers of Cosmic Crawler were same folks involved in some controversy last month over a Mac app called Lagaru HD. It’s an interesting debate over GPL licenses. And, iCoder’s version of Lagaru HD has been removed from the Mac store as a result of the argument.

Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century. –Spock.