How many times have you looked at that piece of double strawberry sponge or slice of pizza and thought: it looks like food, it probably tastes amazing, is it really that calorie-laden? Is what’s in it even fit for human consumption?
What if you could buy a device that you pointed at the food, and it would tell you exactly how many calories were in it, what chemicals lurk within, what all its ingredients are and even whether it contains allergens that you are sensitive to – even if the food is still behind the glass in the shop.
Pipe dream right? Well not exactly. It’s reality. Almost.
Meet TellSpec. Using a zippy keyfob-sized device called a spectrometer which measures photons (a type of energy that is specific to each ingredient), it sorts them by wavelength, counts them, and sends the results to an ‘analysis engine’ – basically an app on your phone – in the cloud via your smartphone.
The results come back to the phone with all the nutritional info you need. This could literally save your life with hidden and undisclosed ingredients in café food.
Although the project is still in development, you can invest in the Indiegogo (a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter) project that is developing it.
Getting in this early means that you get to back the project and get a substantial discount off the device when it is launched – they have already sold out of the US $150 earlybird offer, and exceeded their US $ 100,000 goal. Even so the delivery date is expected to be August 2014.
Investing in these startups is only a little risky – you get to choose the level you invest at for set rewards – and now that the goal has been raised all pledges actually go through on the funding date November 30, 2013 in this case.
The company will send you updates that keep you in the loop with the progress of the device along with invitations to live events (although these will probably be in the states).
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