Admirer of Truth

The iPad would make the ideal kitchen computer. Mounted on the fridge, away from all the grime of the countertop, it would be an outstanding central hub for recipes, music, family photos, calendars, and weather/news alerts.

Inspired by a project I completed earlier this year, where I mounted an old laptop to my fridge, I came up with an idea: Why not create a dock that clips to the iPad and magnetically mounts it to a fridge? It would be a true iFridge!

Design Principles

I was excited enough by this idea to enlist the help of my friend Dan Lockton. Dan was a classmate of mine at Cambridge and he is a brilliant and thoughtful designer. With his help, we came up with the following criteria to inform the design:

* Low cost. As this is merely a plastic accessory for the iPad, we wanted to keep costs as low as possible so as many people as possible could enjoy the benefits.

* Heavy duty. People will be spending hundreds of dollars on an iPad. We figured they wouldn’t trust their device to a clip that felt very flimsy. It had to be secure.

* Versatile. Fridge doors are of varying curvature and profile, so we opted to make it a 2-layer design. The rear layer allows for curvature flexibility and vibration insulation.

Conceptual Drawings

Dan took these principles and put together a preliminary design. Though there is a lot of room for improvement of the design, we think it is an excellent starting point! Here are the rough CAD renderings illustrating the concept:

Making it (for) Real

Initially, I thought we might be able to finance this project ourselves and do the first manufacturing run based upon pre-orders. Silly me. Turns out that manufacturing is more expensive than I thought. Using a custom part estimator tool, we priced out what our preliminary design would cost. For a production run of 10,000 units, it turns out that it would cost around $10 per unit. To put it mildly, that is more pocket change than we can spare.

Rather than letting this idea die, I’ve decided to make it part of my iWant series, which are ideas that I am sharing with the world in the hopes that someone will make them real.

I believe the most promising possibility for carrying forward this project is to submit it as an idea to the Quirky community. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Quirky is a community of designers that collaboratively create physical products. Once the community finishes the design, Quirky manufactures and sells the most promising items. Revenues are shared with all the people who contributed to the design. I think the iFridge would be a perfect project for Quirky. Submitting an idea to Quirky costs $100. Perhaps there is someone out there willing to donate that sum so that we can submit this project to Quirky? Anybody? Anybody?

Market Opportunity

One final word before putting a bow on this idea. I predict that the market opportunity for an iFridge dock is immense. While you could make a little bit of money just selling the accessory itself, I think there is a more interesting business model out there:

Consider the fact that the kitchen (and the fridge in particular) is the most valuable piece of advertising real estate in the entire house. If you can get an iPad on the fridge, and provide an iPad app with live content from the web that people find valuable, you will have just created an ideal network of domestic billboards.

So rather than sell the iFridge dock for money, it might be smarter to give them away at substantial discounts (perhaps even free), and instead build your revenues based upon usage of your iPad app. To encourage downloads of the app, include the app’s logo on the iFridge dock as well as on the iFridge’s packaging. If you must charge for your app, perhaps include a coupon/discount with the iFridge, or vice-versa. Either way the goal should be the same: use the iFridge as the hook, and monetize instead based upon app usage.

This should be a no-brainer for cooking websites like Epicurious. Epi, if you are out there, get in touch and we’ll talk! Beyond the cooking sites, there are bound to be other enterprising developers who have ideas for useful kitchen computing apps. For those folks, consider supporting the iFridge; it could help you unleash a wave of kitchen innovation.

Update: We’re now collecting donations for this project! Please donate to help us cover Quirky’s submission fees.

Update 2: We succeeded in raising enough donations to submit this concept to Quirky! Given that 7 different people contributed, clearly there is market demand for this product. Keep your fingers crossed that the community chooses to make this product a reality….