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#475 – An Interview with Christina Cyr
Welcome Christina Cyr, CEO of dToor and the Cyrcle Phone
- This was their 5th year at CES. Mostly hanging out at Eureka Park, which is the startup area
- 2 years ago saw companies doing encryption for voice data because of creepy speakers, now they have gone mainstream.
- Startups are only allowed to be there for 2 years.
- This year dToor got coverage on BBC, CNET, The Daily Mail
- Enclosure company didn’t finish, so Christina 3D printed
- CTA is Consumer Technology Association. $97 to join and worth it.
- Wyze cameras, selling for $19.99
- Random connections from having a booth
- Christina works out of WeWork. Previously she was at Extra Slice in Bellevue, wanted a landline (LAN connection) for older builds of linux
- Metrix Create, Sodo also shut down
- Volunteers at their booth:
- Aileen McGraw, WeWork Labs Manager
- Xuny Haley, CoMotion Labs Manager
- Nalin Chuapetcharasopon, Crowdfunding Expert
- Anna Chuapetcharasopon, EdTech Consultant
- Former guest Scotty Allen dropped by.
- How did this phone get started?
- Phone wasn’t fitting in a pocket in 2014
- People wouldn’t take cardboard prototypes seriously
- Decided to use Seeed Studio’s phone kit with a different “skin”
- Presented as a phone for women, that was a mistake
- Featured in the telegraph out of context
- Demographics were 50/50
- Marketing tech products to women
- Apple Watch is taking the place of similar kind of role
- Joel Telling (3D printing nerd) goes to the hospital, after his watch alerted him to tachycardia
- Unity (software)
- The 4G version of the phone has
- Dual SIM
- Two headphone jacks
- Qualcomm Snapdragon
- Transitioning from micro-b to USB-C
- Working with vendors
- 4 vendors that have the snapdragon
- Tier 1 and Tier 2 companies
- Vendors want to hear 100K units
- Navigating working with vendors
- Looking at doing testing in China for FCC
- Dealing with Tariffs, as batteries and LCDs are coming directly from suppliers
- CES Tech Talk – Caught in the Crossfire: How Tariffs Impact Tech with Austere Sage Chandler, Vice President—International Trade, Consumer Technology Association (CTA)
- Harmonized Tariff Code
- Different goods have different Tariffs
- Should have been an LLC instead of an S Corp or C Corp
- NRE for a completely custom display is $6M!
- Circular display is off the shelf, with 800×800 outer dimensions
- The 4G LTE phone will have a “tangential foot” (see image below)
- Module comes with Android 9
- Christina put together a document for hardware startups in Seattle, might be useful to listeners even if not in Seattle
- Cyrclephone.com
- @CyrChristina