Envision a world in which coffee mugs talk to bottle warmers that then talk to baby monitors. That world isn’t that far away. In fact, it could be in your home within a few months. And Mimo is one of the faces leading the charge into that future! But instead of talking to a coffee mug, the Mimo Baby Monitor and Mimo Bottle Warmer talk to your smartphone.

January 6th was the start of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, the world’s largest annual technology conference. The conference opened with a keynote speech by Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich that brought the Mimo Baby Monitor and the Mimo Bottle Warmer to the attention of millions of people overnight! In his presentation, Mr. Krzanich discussed the Internet of Things, a network of technologies that will enable anything to have a place on the Internet creating millions of remotely accessible and integrated systems, heralding in a new era of wearables like Mimo.

Krzanich’s talk focused on the introduction of Edison, a Linux computer the size of an SD card. After introducing Edison, Krzanich brought Mimo, and other wearables on stage with him. The next few minutes were unbelievable for

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As in, training startup guys on and about the world of babies.

No, this is not a blog post on how to convince your boyfriend (or brother or son) to start a family. This is a post about how three young MIT engineering grads got uber-comfortable in the baby sphere. Initially, Rest was focused on becoming a medical device development company, and the team's biggest problem was establishing scientific credibility and validity. But, like most ideas and start-ups, things change (we think the change was definitely for the better, though). Parents started coming out of the woodwork, asking if we could use our sensors to monitor their baby's respiration. Initially the team shrugged off these requests, but eventually there were too many to ignore. It was a pretty ideal situation for a startup: the market was actually coming to us with their demand, and we were miraculously able to respond to it. Perfect, right? In addition, the baby market is large and recurring, working with families is incredibly fun, and we knew we'd be able to provide some value for tired, anxious parents.

But the world of babies is not for the lighthearted; on any given day, you can be

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Initially, Rest Devices focused solely on medical devices. We had some great technology, solid engineering know-how, and some rough prototypes, but to iterate on our design, we needed data, and medical devices need…medical data. From the start, Dr. Matt Bianchi provided excellent guidance to help us navigate the IRB and BME processes, and we knew our prototypes had to look and feel complete—like an actual medical device.

Then, last summer, we switched over to the consumer space with the Mimo monitor. We wholly expected that our prior requirements for polished prototypes would relax, as we were moving from the FDA to parents as our “regulatory bodies.” However, we quickly found that parents are far more demanding. For a parent to be comfortable testing a new device it needs to be approachable, friendly, and, most importantly, not look like a device! In short, it needs to be polished. (It’s worth noting that, early on, Dulcie demanded that I never say the word device while talking about Mimo.)

This principle of polished prototypes seemingly flew in the face of our entire rapid prototyping philosophy. When we were first developing the Mimo, we probably went through 5-10 different versions of

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I am the fifth of six kids, which meant that the mentality of “helicopter parenting” or “ever-present parental fear and anxiety” wasn’t part of my own upbringing. However, I started babysitting when I was 12, have nannied, and also have 7 nieces and nephews, so I’ve seen a pretty decent spectrum of parenting styles and mentalities. While I’m not a parent, I have definitely crept into a baby’s room countless times to make sure they’re still breathing, and I’ve nearly had a heart attack when I thought they weren’t (I cannot even imagine what happens when you’re a mother). Though I like to think that I’ll be as naturally cool and collected as my mom, I seriously doubt that’s going to be the case, and I know I’ll be using Mimo whenever it is that I do become a mom.

As we’ve developed Mimo, we’ve worked to be as user-centered as possible; we’ve talked to hundreds of parents about their families, their demands, their monitors, their painpoints, and their likes/dislikes. As we’ve done this, our goal has been to create a product that is

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Mimo at to ABC Kids

After making our pivot to a baby monitor in mid-August, we focused with laser-like intensity on one deadline: the ABC Kids trade show in October. ABC Kids is the US’s largest juvenile products trade show, and it was held this year from October 14-17 in Louisville, Kentucky.
We had some clear goals for the tradeshow:

• Have a working product kit that had been through at least one round of testing with families in the field

• Meet our targeted list of retailers, which included both specialty brick and mortar stores as well as the national chains

• Develop press contacts and relationships with as many people and outlets as possible

• Gauge overall reception of the product and get feedback

• Meet as many potential partners as we can

• Finally, given that we were all so new to the baby/infant space, we went there to learn as much as we possibly could

Overall, it was a great success, and it was essentially like retail bootcamp: we learned a ton about retail timelines, about the juvenile products community, and about how to position ourselves for next year. We met just about everyone we wanted to, generated great buzz

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