The MindStream KickStarter may have failed to reach its lofty goal of $300,000 but that doesn’t mean that parent company Step Ahead Innovations is dead in the water. Far from it, while the successful funding campaign would have brought the MindStream to our reef tanks sooner, SAI is still moving ahead with building their infrastructure and laying the groundwork for moving forward in the delivery of their revolutionary new device.
The building and assembly of the MindStream unit itself is quite straightforward, it’s really the MindStream discs that are a bit of trouble. With every MindStream sold, an order of magnitude of discs will be required to run each MindStream with monthly replacements. Therefore SAI needs some fairly sophisticated equipment to assemble and calibrate each disc and all of their sensor pads to the level of accuracy and dependability which will make the entire machine live up to its full potential.
MindStream plans to open up a webstore in the future to sell their early production batches direct to consumers, beginning with honoring the price point offered to the first KickStarter backers. Interestingly enough, when being crowdfunded through KickStarter, FCC approval is not required for the wireless functions of a device since backing through a crowdfunding platform is seen as a pledge or donation which is exempt from FCC rule.
However when MindStreams are sold more directly to consumers via a webstore, FCC regulations is required. To meet these criteria Step Ahead Innovations is about a month out from submitting for FCC approval, and it’ll be roughly another three weeks after that when they could be awarded an approval certificate. Assuming FCC approval is granted for the MindStream, which there is no reason to believe that it won’t, Step Ahead Innovations will be free to really begin offering the MindStream for sale.
So there are a lot of details up in the air for the MindStream and Step Ahead Innovations, but don’t think that this product won’t see the light of day just because KickStarter didn’t pan out. Again, so much work has been done to make the MindStream the most revolutionary water testing and monitoring device that it’s no longer a question of if the MindStream will come to market, but when.
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