We've been nominated for an award!

Vote for us here and be entered* into a drawing to win a $250 coupon to our store!

The ZBoard was recently named one of the 15 finalists for the SMART Mobility EnterPrize Award. SMART is a University of Michigan initiative aimed at promoting innovative and sustainable transportation options in our growing cities. Read more here.

Of the 15 finalists, 3 will be selected to attend the Rio +20 Sustainability Conference in Rio de Janiero, Brazil in June. 2 finalists will be selected by judges and 1 will be selected for the “People’s Choice” award through this poll – that’s where we need you!

As of writing this, we are in 14^th place out of 15 projects – not so good. How do we fix this? Offer bribes, err I mean a contest to encourage our community to vote.

So, let us know you’ve voted for the ZBoard* and we’ll enter you in a drawing to win a $250 credit to our store. Depending on whether you have purchased a ZBoard or not, this could mean half off  a ZBoard Classic Pre-Order, an upgrade from a Classic to a Pro, or a huge discount on your future Special Edition Upgrade!!!

*To enter the drawing, send us a Facebook message and state the percentage that the ZBoard is at after your vote. This percentage will be shown after you vote. If it isn't, click "View Results."

Get more entries!: If you share our Facebook status, you'll get an additional 2 entries in the drawing. If you retweet this out to your twitter followers, you'll also get an additional 2 entries in the drawing (meaning you can get a total of 5 entries).

Mention @ZBoard in your tweet so we can track it. Or just click the widget below. If you do tweet it out, send us your twitter handle in your Facebook message.

Last week at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, CA, we announced 3 new ZBoard Special Editions (See below in RED for upgrade information).

Santa Monica Special - Larger Battery Capacity, Longer Range, Smooth Wheels, Surf-Inspired Design

San Francisco Special - High Torque Motor, Increased Hill Climbing Capability, Black/Orange Design

Stereo Special - 4 Speakers Embedded into Battery Box, Bluetooth Connectivity, Plays Music

We haven't shot a video for the Stereo Special yet but we have some pretty cool ideas (you can see the basic functionality in the second half of this video)

We are hoping to have the City-based Special Editions available in December (expected price: $1099). We have not yet determined a price or timeline for the Stereo Special. We also have not yet finalized their designs, so we do not have final specs.

Anyone with a ZBoard Pro will be able to purchase an upgrade if they want any of the 3 Special Editions' hardware. Owners will send their entire board back in to us to be adjusted and costs/dates are to be determined. Owners of ZBoard Classics will have to upgrade to Pro before they can upgrade to a Special Edition.

We’re currently not taking orders for these Special Editions (or upgrades) but you can sign up for the waiting list at http://www.zboardshop.com/pages/special.

Ben

benf@intuitivemotion.com

(Scroll to the bottom for the video)

What a week! The week’s highlights included receiving your Kickstarter payments (finally!) and the bulk purchase orders of several key parts.

First things first – if you ordered on Kickstarter, we’ve finally received your payments from Amazon Payments. If for some reason your card hasn’t’ been charged, or you received a message saying your payment failed, email me at benf@intuitivemotion.com and we’ll set up a way that you can purchase the Kickstarter Deal through our website.

Note: Thanks for filling out those surveys* – some very entertaining responses that we’ll be publishing soon.

*Not all surveys have gone out

Please remember that even though you may have backed the project at the beginning of March, we didn’t receive your funds until mid-April, and thus could we not begin purchasing the components for your ZBoard until now.

We’ve put in purchase orders for all your ZBoard components. The construction of these parts (batteries, decks, trucks, etc which get built in San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Asia) has started and once and they are completed, they will be shipped to our assembly facility. As you can imagine, the logistics of shipping 1000 trucks, 500 decks, and more will be a learning experience for us – we appreciate your patience.

We've got a few of the parts in-house now and by "a few" I mean thousands of lbs of components:

$10,000 worth of sensors. We use 2 per ZBoard.	2,000 lbs of plastic raw material. We mill our footpads out of these 5''x1''x1'' plastic pieces.

Hundreds of yards of wires and thousands of connectors. Each ZBoard will be wired by hand, by us.

We’re hoping to have all pre-orders orders fulfilled by the end of June. They will be delivered in order of purchase. More concrete delivery schedules are coming soon. We apologize that it still isn't as nailed down as you or we would like (we will contact you before your board gets shipped out to verify your address).

Switching gears - in this video, we discuss the implementation of our new deck which we mentioned previously in this blog, and two of our three new Special Edition ZBoards, which we'll talk about more in our next blog post.

Read more about Special Editions (which will be available for purchase as upgrades as well) on this page.

Thanks again for your patience and support.

Regards,

Ben

benf@intuitivemotion.com  

NOTE: We’ve received several requests to upgrade from a ZBoard Classic to a ZBoard Pro. Here is the link to purchase that $250 upgrade.

FUNDED! Our Kickstarter Project ended on Monday,  April 4^th at 7:23 PM PST and we couldn’t be more excited! The project ended with 425 backers and $287,767 – making it the 16^th most funded Kickstarter project of all time!

 Behind The Scenes:

Several people have asked us to show how we build ZBoards and this video is the first in that series. Check it out to learn how we make our decks, battery boxes, and footpads!

Arrival Time: 

Since we build ZBoards by hand, the surprising amount of orders means we will be hard at work for the next few months. Initially, we set our goal at $10,000 and projected selling ~20 ZBoards. We told people they’d receive their ZBoards at the end of April / early May. But since our volume projections were off by ~2,000%, not everyone will receive their boards that fast.

ZBoards outside our initial projections will take longer.

What a month! Since our last update we’ve passed $250,000 on Kickstarter and had a memorable trip to SXSW.

It has been an incredible ride and all the credit goes out to you fine folks.

The below video chronicles the highlights of our trip to SXSW - a week full of Segway races and laps around the Expo.

Recent Media:

Check out some of the recent ZBoard media - the rest can be found on our Media Page.

"A Wild Ride"	"I was rolling through the newsroom with no problem"	"a great option for people who want to avoid driving"

SXSW has been crazy as $#%$. 

We're here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX and we've been doing interviews, demos, and pitches left and right. All this attention were getting is directly related to YOU folks, so thanks again for your support!

Some highlights:

We won (!) Startup America's Video Pitch Contest! This granted us the opportunity to pitch at their kick-off event. Here is the winning pitch (kinda a silly video but hey, it worked) and here is a picture of us pitching on stage:

CNN: Yesterday, we shot CNN bits with Ali Velshi and Mario Armstrong. Both guys were super chill and we even got Mario ZBoarding around.

At the end of the day, the CNN crew filmed us cruising around their tour bus.

We were told the interviews and riding footage will air on Saturday (3/17). We'll update you folks with the exact time and date when we find out.

Overall the last few days have been nuts and the next three are sure to be similar.

Thanks again so much for everyone's support and check back in for more updates.

CONTEST

If you're on twitter, and you follow folks who are at SXSW (friends, media peeps, celebs, etc), tell em to find us and ride the ZBoard! Tweet 'em something like:

Hey @aplusk you should find those @ZBoard guys from @Kickstarter at #SXSWi and go for a ride! http://youtu.be/j6HAYuNAGzs

Whoever gets the coolest person to tweet about us or meet up with us for a ride will win a t-shirt and decal! Actually, scratch that. EVERYONE who gets influential twitter peeps to tweet about us or meet up with us will get a t-shirt and decal!

Contest ends 3/13. We'll contact the winners through twitter.