As of May 31, three new companies have officially been spun off from Samsung Electronics’ Creative Lab (C-Lab) project to join the technology industry as new startups. The companies – AGWART, CATCH FLOW and FOR MAKERS – span the breadth of the technology spectrum from intelligently designed speakers to connective services and high-tech agriculture. It goes without saying that since C-Lab is an internal effort to encourage innovation from Samsung’s own employees, those companies won’t necessarily be on their own. In fact, Samsung has provided those employees with a full three months’ worth of business consulting and mentoring and is committed to seeing them succeed, just as with past C-Lab “alumni.”
Breaking down what type of projects those companies have created, AGWART fills in the above-mentioned agriculture category with a smart greenhouse called PLANTBOX. That’s a dorm refrigerator-sized device which helps automate the process of growing food or herbs. The device itself is rounded out with preset seed “capsules” and an application for more fine-tuned control. However, the box will, once a seed capsule is placed inside, automatically detect the plant species or species’ used and set environmental conditions on its own. That includes light, temperature, humidity, nutrients, and even air quality. Moving past PLANTBOX, CATCH FLOW is responsible for a portable directional speaker called S-Ray. The speaker is designed to direct sound in a single direction efficiently, with low-power and high quality, while preventing sound from playing in the wrong direction. It’s small enough to be placed in a smartphone case, clip-on laptop speaker, or neckband and helps eliminate noise bleed or the chances that others in the user’s immediate vicinity will be bothered by whatever’s being played. Finally, FOR MAKERS is responsible for an A.I.-driven research platform called AppBee. The platform utilizes mobile use patterns to predictively match up users to suitable clients with the hope of attaining a higher accuracy at cost, compared to larger targeted surveys. Ultimately, the company hopes to use the platform as a means to garner more useful feedback for creators.
With any luck, it shouldn’t be too long before the products created by the new companies end up on the market. So anybody interested in those listed above is going to want to watch for their arrival over the coming months and years. In the meantime, the new startups bring the total launched form C-Lab to 34 and the number of employees included in that figure up to 130 since the program started in 2015. That’s also resulted in a further 170 jobs being created which were not originally working for the Korean technology giant.
