On May 23rd we spent the day at TechCrunch Disrupt. We had a great time - check out this video of our day at the event!

On Saturday we attended the opening of the Tony Hawk Rad Science Exhibit at UC Berkeley Lawrence Hall of Science where the ZBoard is being featured as part of the evolution of skateboard technology.

The exhibit, which is much bigger than just the pictures below, is set to tour the country over the next 3 years. I highly recommend it for anyone with kids aged 14 and under as there are lots of hands-on exhibits that the attendees really seemed to enjoy. Check out the 2012 schedule here.

To mark the opening, Tony Hawk and his crew set up an awesome half pipe demo to teach the thousands of kids in attendance about the science of skateboarding.

Check out the ZBoard on display:

People are constantly comparing the ZBoard to the Back to the Future II Hoverboard, so its pretty cool that the museum put the boards side by side.

Here is a shot of Tony with the History of Skateboarding Exhibit.

Here are some pictures of the demo which was incredible to watch up close.

Dear ZBoard Community,

Since we received your Kickstarter backing funds a month ago, we’ve been working to ramp up our manufacturing plan. Most of the growing pains involved with increasing capacity so fast (our new volume is 25X our pre-Kickstarter projections) have been finding the correct manufacturer for all our components. Some of our old familiar manufacturers can handle the new capacity and some cannot, meaning for some parts we’ve had to find new sources.

Manufacturing Facility – We’re very excited about how our manufacturing facility in Sacramento, CA is coming together. We’ve been spending some long days building tables, shelves, etc. As you can see in these pictures, we’ve got a lot of space to not only build boards, but also test them. We have  a lot more work to do on this facility, so consider these “Before” pictures.

Decks – All decks have been paid for and production has begun. In order to have enough raw materials to build these, our SoCal deck manufacturer had additional wood shipped from Little Rock, AR. We expect the first 500 decks to be delivered  to our facility in 4 weeks.

Trucks – When we approached our old truck manufacturer with our new quantities we found they were unable to handle them within our timeframes. Thus, we’ve switched to a truck manufacturer that actually has higher quality units. We've tested the new trucks like crazy and we are very pleased with their performance and appearance. Switching to a new factory also meant that we had to do a new audit. We sent our Chinese auditor and their operation received high marks.  We are finalizing the manufacturing agreement now and production and  shipping (by sea) are around the corner. We expect shipping to take 3-4 weeks.

Batteries – We’ve been working closely with our battery manufacturer to make sure we have all of the paperwork and certifications necessary to ship tens of thousands of dollars of batteries from China to Long Beach. This has proven much more difficult than we initially expected. The logistics of this industry are regulated by the UN (lithium ion batteries are considered hazardous materials) so as you can probably imagine, the red tape is thick. Here is some light reading on some of those regulations. After sending our auditor to the factory and working with a battery shipping firm, we believe we have resolved the issue and have obtained the correct documentation. We are hoping to have batteries arrive around the end of June. 

Battery Boxes – We’ve identified a new Sacramento source for battery boxes that can handle our quantities.  Soon we will be anodizing and engraving the boxes. We will let you know when your box is to be engraved and if you’re interested, we can send you a picture of your box when it is done.

Shipping Packaging - We're working with the Bay Cities Company on designing a custom packaging box that will protect the ZBoard in the shipping process.

Overall, this means that we expect to have all parts at our facility at the end of June. We'll be assembling and shipping starting then. 

Next week we are heading to the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in New York. Our next update will include pictures and videos of that trip.

In other news, we ended up in 7th in the MobiPrize Contest that we wrote about previously. The $250 Gift Card Contest was won by Ryan Yust. Congratulations to Ryan and thanks to everyone for voting!

Again, we really appreciate your patience - none of this would be possible without you.

Regards,
Ben and Geoff

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.

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.

What a Launch Week!

We reached our $10k Kickstarter goal in 4 days (and then doubled it in 6, and tripled it in 9)! Today we passed $30k on Kickstarter! 

Thanks to all the help from the ZBoard supporters out there, we've received 110k youtube views, 1200 facebook page likes, and 145 followers on twitter.

We were also featured on the Yahoo web show "The Future is Now." Big thanks to Jennie, Will, Mark and the rest of the Yahoo crew.

Next on the schedule for the ZBoard Team is the SXSW festival in Austin, TX. If you'll be there, you'll find us buzzing around the Start-Up America Booth.

THANK YOU to everyone who's pre-ordered and/or gotten the word out about the ZBoard!