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A few months ago we were talking about the winner of startup weekend Manchester, Growot. As we titled, “Growot will let you be a farmer in your living room“. In the last two months, a few things have changed, starting with the name. Growot is now Niwa, with the same mission and a better device that is launching today on Kickstarter.
The team has spent the last three months in Shenzhen with HAXLR8R, a top-focused hardware accelerator program for people who hack hardware and make things. Niwa is “the first connected and responsive growing system, that will water and feed your plants whenever they need it.” Further, the technology is controlled by a smartphone, so for the first time ever, you can take care of your plants wherever you are and whenever you want.
What has impressed me a lot during the transition from Growot to Niwa is the design. Although growing food has always been directly connected with getting dirty, Niwa is not using any kind of soil and it keeps everything in a beautiful designed box; which, from a “style” point of view, will add more value to your living room.
In the past years, I have been sure about two things. The first one is the fact that we are going to live on the internet through the use of smart glasses, watches and even devices such as the Oculus Rift. The second one is that the future is not in transportation systems, the future is about staying in our houses, jobless, and with a lot of free time to spend on “living”.
We won’t use our cars anymore and we’ll move only for travelling and meeting people. We need to think of a self-sustainable future, where we can produce energy from our houses, grow food or buy it from local markets and recycle everything. Niwa fits completely in this picture, the future, that today becomes the present with the campaign launching at 10AM Pacific Time.
We have seen several thousands different projects on Kickstarter, but a few of them had the capacity of changing our lifestyles. It’s going to be interesting to see how people will react to Niwa and what the general perception will be. The world we live in doesn’t have any space for hobbies, but the simple fact that Niwa can be monitored from our smartphones changes everything.
Think about being in elevator heading to your office and checking how your tomatoes are growing or receiving a notification saying that the growing process has completed. There are tons of possible integrations to be added to Niwa and one of them could be a recipe to make a proper sauce for pasta.
That’s why it would be great to see Niwa expanding in something even bigger. The aim here is not to sell a product, but changing the way people have lived in the last years by building something that will bring a paradigm shift in our lives. For this reason, the founder’s personal aim is to move the same technology also to any form factor, with the hope to build smartphone controlled indoor spaces, so we can all enjoy high volumes of fresh produce.
Meet Niwa today on Kickstarter.
