Hovertrax And The Battle Of The Auto-Balancing Skateboards
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A funny thing happened at a CES press event last week. We walked into a crowded ballroom where companies were showing off their products, and saw the IO Hawk being demonstrated. This is an auto-balancing electric skateboard. It’s like a mini-Segway. Except this time it wasn’t the IO Hawk, but what appeared to be an identical product called the Hovertrax. The marketing executive we asked about it grimaced and said that her company, Inventist, owned the patents. Lawyers getting involved, we asked? Yep. Which just shows that no market segment is too tiny to engage in battles over intellectual property rights.
Hovertrax was a Kickstarter project that launched on May 1, 2013, and was fully funded by the end of that June, having raised $85,744. The company founder is Shane Chen, a serial inventor who has built other self-balancing transportation gizmos in the past. According to Chen, after the Kickstarter campaign launched, several other companies rushed to rip off his design and he’s been playing legal whack-a-mole ever since.
We’re not ready to judge who’s in the right. One thing we can say, though, is that these products demonstrate how inventions these days rely on the smart phone industry. Hovertrax employs a set of accelerometer chips to perform its auto-balancing magic, and Chen told us that the chips are the same ones used in many phones. They cost just $3 apiece. The chips sense when the rider’s weight shifts, prompting the device to adjust by activating its electric motors.
The Hovertrax started shipping about a month ago, and according to a company rep there are 900 units in the wild, in countries that include the United States, the U.K., China, Dubai, Iran, and Iraq—go figure. The device weighs 13 pounds. It can go up to 6 mph, and travel 8 miles on a charge. It takes a few minutes to get comfortable using it, but once you master the Hovertrax, it allows you swoop around with an elegance that no Segway rider ever achieved.
