A pair of young Richmond entrepreneurs are pointing the way to a bright, business future — with their fingers.
Tony Yu, 24, and girlfriend Mikaella Go, 23, are the duo behind Nanotips, an innovative, nail polish-like product that when applied to the fingertips of your gloves allows you to operate touchscreens.
And while that may seem like a solution to a simple annoyance, judging by the number of touchscreens used in daily life — from smart phones to bank ATMs — the market is out there, and growing.
According to Statista, an online statistics portal that tracks business organizations, Apple, alone, sold a shade over 26 million iPads in the first quarter of 2014.
Those kinds of numbers are giving Yu and Go optimistic signals after spending the last year getting feedback from distributors across North America and Asia.
It took about six months to come up with the right formula for the product packed with electrically conductive nano particles which, en masse, simulates the contact skin has on a touchscreen.
“It works as a conductive bridge between your finger and the surface of your glove,” Yu said. “And that tricks a touchscreen into thinking it’s your skin.”
Touchscreens are electrically charged, and when your finger makes contact it draws current from that point of contact.
Yu, a UVIC grad in applied science, did not have the technical background at first to produce the formula. But he sought out experts in the industry and came up with a recipe which has a patent pending.
With the novel business developing, the two boosted their profile with an appearance on the CBC reality show Dragon’s Den where one celebrity investor, Jim Treliving of Richmond-headquartered Boston Pizza fame, showed interest in investing $60,000 for 15 per cent of the company. While that deal on the show, which aired in mid-November, did not come to fruition the duo did get some helpful advice to get them going.
Their rising profile also earned them an invitation to the Ted Talks event in Vancouver earlier this year, putting them in front of a host of influential business types.
“We have been completely astounded at the interest because this is a pretty simple product,” Yu said. “You can apply it in less than a minute and have touchscreen gloves for the entire winter.
“The reaction from people is most always, ‘Why didn’t I think of that.’”
Marketing plans are focusing on outdoor enthusiasts — Nanotips retails for $20 and is available online (nanotips.com) and at Mountain Equipment Co-op stores in the Lower Mainland — but is expanding to the industrial sector, and beyond.
But it’s not just gloves Nanotips is being applied to. As part of the company’s growth plans, applications for prosthetics are being explored.
That, and growing orders have had the two shift their operation from a garage to a dedicated local production facility.
Despite hectic schedules, the demands don’t feel like work, Yu and Go said.
“And looking back at what we’ve accomplished so far, it’s been quite a leap.”
