I love building and designing things.
In college, my design team came up with a mechanical
boot that generates power while you're walking.
Every step spins a small generator.
And that electricity can be used to charge a battery.
Fast-forward to many design iterations later,
actually founding a company, a lot of coffee
and a lot of long walks on a treadmill and
we had a design that worked pretty well … so
we tested it with real users.
Everyone liked the idea of generating power while
walking -- they thought it was really cool --
but the reality is that we found
carrying a simple battery pack would be a
lot easier than using a self-charging shoe.
And that was pretty disappointing.
We'd spent years developing this device, and
no one really wanted to use it.
We kind of took it as a challenge.
The failure taught us an important lesson …
you have to make something that people can't do without.
So now we're making a "smart shoe."
Every step creates enough power to charge
sensors like GPS, temperature, motion and step count.
The shoe sends all of this data to the Internet.
For example, say there was an emergency;
it could tell rescuers where workers wearing
the boots were stranded after an accident.
Our shoe became more than just a battery charger.
It became a potentially lifesaving device
you never have to charge.
