Tribetan’s Pop-Up Tech Museum is a collection of technologies, gadgets and other favorites of Tribetan’s Founder and CEO, Tiffany Norwood. From her personal collection, curated over the past 40 years the Tech Museum includes both items she help to create, as well as those she has loved-spanning seven start-up and 50 countries.

Tribetan’s Pop-Up Tech Museum can be a stand-alone experience or combined with a presentation, speech or workshop. If you are interested in the Pop-Up Tech Museum please contact collaborate@tribetan.com.

Highlights from the Collection-

The Clocky

Clocky is a brand of alarm clock outfitted with wheels, allowing it to hide itself in order to force the owner awake in an attempt to find it. Invented for an industrial design class by Gauri Nanda, then a graduate student at MIT Media Lab, Clocky won the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize in

Economics. After earning her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and her master’s degree from MIT, Nanda founded a company, Nanda Home, to commercialize Clocky and other home products.

The original prototype, built in three days, was covered with shag carpet to appear like a pet.

Several months after a description was posted on the Media Lab website, pictures of Clocky were picked up on various technology product blogs including Gizmodo, Engadget, and BoingBoing. Within two weeks information about the device became an Internet meme and Nanda, the inventor, had been booked to demonstrate the device on Good Morning America. The development of Clocky and marketing of it has become a Harvard Business School case study: Clocky the Runaway Alarm Clock.

Diamond Rio

The Rio PMP300 was one of the first portable consumer MP3 digital audio players, and the first commercially successful one. Produced by Diamond Multimedia, it was introduced September 15, 1998 as the first in the “Rio” series of digital audio players, and it shipped later that year. Roughly the dimensions of a deck of cards (3.5 inches by 2.5 inches and 0.625 inches thick), the Rio was black and had an LCD screen and a circular pad with control buttons. It had controls for skipping tracks forwards or backwards, repeat, random play and for four preset equalizer settings.

The LCD displayed the filename of the track being played. It could play MP2 and MP3 format audio files, and had support for a variety of bitrates, including MP3 variable-bitrate (VBR) support. It shipped with 32 MB of internal memory and had a SmartMedia slot, allowing users to add additional memory. It was powered by a single AA battery, which provided between 8 and 12 hours of playback time. Connection to a personal computer was through the computer’s parallel port, with a proprietary connector on the Rio’s edge.

Free Play Radio

This compact AM/FM radio, first launched by Freeplay in January 1999, is the S360 model. It features not only the spring wind up mechanism but a solar panel as well as a built-in rechargeable battery which can be charged by sitting in the sun, winding it up or charging from mains electricity. It was presented for display in the EcoLogic exhibition in 2001 by Freeplay’s Australian agent, John Devitt & Associates Pty Ltd of Balgowlah, NSW.

The Freeplay Radio is equipped with three different energy supply facilities, a carbon steel spring, a solar panel (Model FPR3 360) and a NiCd rechargeable battery.Freeplay = reliable wind-up technology 30 sec wind = up to 45 min of play! Affordable Excellent reception Plugs in with AC adapter! Optional headphones for private listening

HP 95LX

The HP 95LX (also known as Project Jaguar) was the first MS-DOS pocket computer or personal digital assistant, introduced by Hewlett-Packard in April 1991 in collaboration with Lotus Development Corporation.

The HP 95LX had an NEC V20 CPU (an Intel 8088 clone running at 5.37 MHz) with an Intel Corporation System on a chip (SoC) device. It cannot be considered completely PC-compatible because of its quarter-CGA resolution LCD screen. It ran Microsoft’s MS-DOS version 3.22 and had Lotus 1-2-3 built in. Other software in read-only memory (ROM) included a calculator, an appointment calendar, a telecommunications program, and a simple text editor. It also included a CR 2032 lithium coin cell for memory backup when the two AA main batteries run out.

For mass storage, the HP 95LX had a single PCMCIA slot which could hold a static RAM card (which had its own CR 2025 back-up coin cell). An RS-232-compatible serial port was provided, as well as an infrared port for printing on compatible models of Hewlett Packard printers. In character mode, the display showed 16 lines of 40 characters and had no back light. Successor models to the HP 95LX include the HP 100LX, HP 200LX, HP 1000CX, and HP OmniGo 700LX.

Kindle (Original)

In 2007, the Internet commerce company Amazon introduced a $399 electronic book (e-book) reader called the Kindle. The Kindle wasn’t the first dedicated e-book reader device, but it didn’t really have much competition — there wasn’t a huge demand in the market for e-book readers before the Kindle’s launch.

The company designed the Kindle to interface seamlessly with Amazon’s online store. Amazon.com hosts more than a million titles in electronic format. Because the Kindle is wireless, you can access the store without connecting the device to a computer. The original Kindle had a port that allowed users to save titles to a memory card, extending the device’s capacity, which appealed to people who like the idea of having an electronic library that takes up very little physical space.

The iPod (Original, Mini, Shuffle, Nano)

October 2001-Apple presents the iPod, offering “1,000 songs in your pocket”

July 2002-Apple introduces the second generation iPod, compatible with Windows and holding up to 4,000 songs Number of iPods sold through 2002: 600,000

January 2004-Apple introduces iPod mini, available in five colors

January 2005-iPod shuffle introduced

September 2005-iPod nano replaces the iPod mini and goes on to become the best selling music player ever

Mura Hi Stepper

Released in 1982. Mura’s initial portable stereo. Very successful, mainly because it provided AM and FM stereo sound at an affordable price. A recessed balance knob was located on the back and easy access volume and tuning knobs were mounted on the top. Yes, they took Sony’s “Mystereo” look and feel and implemented into their own product, but who could blame them. The design was a good one. Those who wanted to go even cheaper could grab the FM-only HI-6.

Pebble SmartWatch

The Pebble Smartwatch is a smartwatch developed by Pebble Technology Corporation and released in 2013 that received the majority of its initial funding via the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. The watch features a black and white Sharp Memory LCD, a programmable CPU, memory, storage, Bluetooth, a vibrating motor, a magnetometer, an ambient light sensor, and an accelerometer; these extend its use beyond just displaying the time and into many roles including interacting with smartphone notifications, activity tracking, gaming, map display, golf tracking, and more. The Pebble is compatible with Android and iOS devices. When connected to one of these devices via Bluetooth, it will vibrate and display text messages, emails, incoming calls, and notifications from social media accounts when they are received on the paired device. It can also act as a remote control for the phone, or for cameras such as the GoPro. As of February 2014, the Pebble app store had over 1,000 applications developed using Pebble’s free software development kit (SDK).

Pebble Technology Corporation raised $10.3 million through a Kickstarter campaign running from April 11, 2012 through May 18, 2012; this was the most money raised for any product on the site at that time. Best Buy, an American consumer electronics corporation, began selling Pebble smart watches in July 2013, and sold out within five days. As of 31 December 2014, Pebble had sold its 1 millionth smartwatch.

Zeos Pocket PC

Manufactured around 1991–92 and selling for $595, this palmtop ran MS-DOS 5.0 and was bundled with Microsoft Works and RacePen. Its dimensions were 4.5″ × 9.7″ × 1.0″ and it weighed approximately 1.3 lb (0.59 kg). The 640×200 monochrome LCD screen was about 2.75″ × 7″ and was not backlit. The keyboard was 9″ wide (compared to 11″ for a standard keyboard), making typing slightly tedious for many people.

The unit featured two PCMCIA card slots, as well as a serial and a parallel port located on the rear which used proprietary mini-connectors and custom cables, which were included with the unit. The unit powered on instantly using two standard AA batteries and one lithium backup battery. It was manufactured in Taiwan and sold by mail-order.

Zip Drive

The Zip drive is a medium-capacity removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Originally, Zip disks launched with capacities of 100 MB, but later versions increased this to first 250 MB and then 750 MB.

The format became the most popular of the superfloppy products which filled a niche in the late 1990s portable storage market. However, it was never popular enough to replace the 3.5-inch floppy disk nor could ever match the storage size available on rewritable CDs and later rewritable DVDs.

USB flash drives ultimately proved to be the better rewritable storage medium among the general public due to the near-ubiquity of USB ports on personal computers and soon after because of the far greater storage sizes offered. Zip drives fell out of favor for mass portable storage during the early 2000s. The Zip brand later covered internal and external CD writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD, which had no relation to the Zip drive.

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About Tribetan

She recognized that most frameworks related to entrepreneurship, like lean canvas and agile development, were for the product or the company. What was missing was something for the person, the entrepreneur themself. Our Tribetan framework; a step-by-step algorithm for turning imagination into reality for any person trying to manifest an idea, was captured and codified based on her 30 year history of startups.

The market realized the framework’s value, and our audiences came to us. We have now reached more than 9,000 people live, 150+ countries  and over one million people through broadcast. All through word of mouth. Venues have included NYU, the Italian Parliament, Global Entrepreneurship Week, Creative Business Cup, USOW, the Mexican Embassy, KMPG UK, Forte, and many others. Organizations working with Tribetan have included accelerators, incubators, universities, companies and others; with an interest in entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, imagination, innovation, startups, the skills of successful entrepreneurs, global entrepreneurship and leadership success.

To learn more about our framework, we have included many resources on this website and will be adding even more in the future. If you are interested in speeches, lectures, workshops or collaborating, please contact collaborate@tribetan.com.

-The Tribetan Team

© 2011-2019 Tiffany Ann Norwood. All Rights Reserved.