A sneak peek!

Sent on Friday, 14 February, 2014.

Hey folks,

For the past four weeks, I’ve been working with Victor on the industrial design of Indie Phone and I’m happy to report that we have a beautiful design that I am very happy with.

And, to whet your appetites, we’ve just released a sneak peek of it on the web site:

Check out the sneak peek of Indie Phone.

An update on the bootstrapping

Today also marks Victor’s last day in the office and our last week at 68 Middle Street with our friends at ClearLeft. Although Victor’s initial contract is over, we look forward to working together again as soon as funds permit.

There is still a lot of work that needs to be done before we can reveal the designs at crowdfunding. This includes further UI design, prototyping, visualisations, creation of the crowdfunding film and related promotional materials, and manufacturing an initial prototype (which we have the CAD files ready for but which will cost about £2K to produce). Unfortunately, that will have to wait until I have a bit more money in the bank.

As you know, I’ve been bootstrapping this stage of the project since August of last year and, having just checked my bank account, I can report that there isn’t much of it left to speak of. I need to concentrate on making a bit of money so that I can continue to pay the bills and fund the project. As such, I am planning a couple of things, including running a workshop to teach iOS 7 development with Objective-C and Cocoa Touch and concentrating a bit more heavily on paid talks on User Experience and privacy.

Support us with Bitcoin

We’ve also set up a Bitcoin address to accept donations for Indie Phone. If you’d like to help support us in this early stage, you can send us Bitcoins at:

17gxeVMbfVnkF1FJsPhAdp65FgiEWRNtpY

Upcoming events

Next week, I will be speaking about Indie Phone and indie technologies at two events:

Do come along if you can and tell your friends.

A reminder on The Net Awards

As I mentioned in the previous newsletter, Indie Phone is nominated for Game Changer of the Year at The Net Awards. I’ve also been personally nominated for Conference Talk of the Year for my keynote at LXJS on Digital Feudalism And How To Avoid It and as Entrepreneur of the Year for my work with Indie Phone.

If you haven’t already voted, I would appreciate it if you could take a moment to do so now. Your votes will help determine whether we make it to the finals and a win in any of those categories will bring greater attention to Indie Phone and to indie technology in general.

As always, thank you for your continued support. I am more excited than ever that we are creating something special here and I can’t wait to share our vision and the Indie Phone experience with you fully at crowdfunding.

All the best,

Aral

Aral Balkan
Founder and lead designer, Indie.

PS. If you ever want to get in touch with me, just email aral@ind.ie or send me a tweet to @aral (and don’t forget to follow @indie_phone for smaller, more frequent updates and related news.) :)