With the help of fundraising campaigns, over the years, several small businesses and startups have proven that they have what it takes to compete even with the most resourceful companies in the world, so long as they have an idea that is good enough to sell. In response to this market shift, in 2012 Samsung Electronics’ Creative Lab division was formed as a way for the Korean tech giant to promote creativity in the company’s culture, and to act as a launchpad for new startup companies. Today, Samsung has announced that 18 employees of five C-Lab startups have resigned from Samsung Electronics in order to officially establish five new companies under Samsung’s umbrella, and “engage in full-scale business”.
Last year Samsung chose nine C-Lab projects to become full-fledged startups, and today five new companies have been confirmed to join the market as independent entities aiming to release their first products sometime in the second half of the year. Among the products that have been chosen to become commercially available counts “WELT”, a smart belt that can measure the wearer’s waistline, track whenever the wearer is sitting down eating, and count steps along with the number of calories burned. Another Samsung C-Lab product which will become a reality is called the “Idea Printer”. As the moniker suggests, the product comes in the form of a small printer which can “print ideas” onto sticky notes. In addition, a third C-Lab company was chosen to manufacture “Samsung Insulation”, described by Samsung as “a vacuous insulator with the highest insulation efficiency in the world”. The other two C-Lab startups will apparently focus on software rather than hardware. One of the newly founded companies will release “Locksa”: an application for smartphones designed to “manage photographs with your smartphone unlock function”, and a “Save Energy Cost” application described as “an intelligent software” able to recommend “optimal electricity pricing systems”.
The official press release states that, as yet, Samsung Electronics has 130 projects in development under the Creative Lab division (5 of which have been demoed at SDC 2016), with 480 employees working on making these projects viable for the consumer market. According to Samsung, since the year 2012, 40 C-Lab projects have been transformed to become commercial products.