HidrateMe Connected Water Bottle Saves you from Dehydration
The bottle is also doing exceptionally well on Kickstarter right now. The campaign blew past its original $35,000 goal in just one day and is now just over $45,000, with 41 days to go.
There are quite a few other “smart” water bottles out there – the Trago smart bottle is running a concurrent Kickstarter campaign but hasn’t even topped the $10,000 mark – despite being a staff pick. The BluFit raised almost $75,000 on Indiegogo but didn’t reach even half its goal at the time the campaign ran. The Hug water bottle sensor and appalmost hit its Kickstarter goal of $35,000, topping off at $28,227.
There are many other smart water bottles – both in and out of crowdfunding campaigns. Nearly all of them tout themselves as the “world’s first interactive water bottle” or something close to that language. So why is HidrateMe, among all the bottles out there that seem to offer pretty much the same tracking and app features, doing so well from the start?
It’s all in the preparation the HidrateMe bottle creator Nadya Nguyen told TechCrunch. “We did 80 percent of the work for the campaign before it even started,” she said. “Thanks to that, we rallied a large group of influencers in the fitness world to help us spread the word and had a big sign-up list with potential backers long before our Kickstarter launch.”
Nguyen also said she got a lot of feedback on the right price point, design and how to market the product before putting something up on the crowdfunding site.
It might seem wrong to be urging people to drink more when there’s a serious drought in California, but that’s a whole discussion for another day about water usage and the farming industry. The fact is, water is an essential part of our daily lives, and we need it to maintain health and fitness. More than 750 million people around the world don’t have access to adequate amounts of safe drinking water, according to the World Health Organization. While some of that is related to water-borne disease, it’s also due to lack of water.
Drinking enough water can help prevent cancers in the colon and bladder, helps reduce crankiness and confusion and aids in weight loss. It is also essential for the proper circulation of nutrients in your body.
Not all of us are going to carry a smart bottle everywhere, but for those who want a little extra help, the HidrateMe bottle is something nice-looking to bring with you. It also might be helpful to have something that tracks your drinking and glows to remind you to drink more.
Each 24-ounce, BPA-free HidrateMe bottle goes for $39 on Kickstarter and comes in five colors to choose from – iceberg white, bamboo green, ocean teal, crystal pink, or obsidian black. The HidrateMe app will be available Winter 2015. Bottles should start shipping around that time as well.
You can see the prototyping of HidrateMe in the video below:
It’s called the HidrateMe, and think of it as the water bottle equivalent of the notification light on a Blackberry. The bottle syncs with your phone over Bluetooth to track your water intake thanks to a tiny sensor inside that can tell whenever you drink and how much. A connected app then applies that to your daily water goal, which the app calculates based on your height, weight, and sex.
To be honest, the fact that we, as a species, think we need water bottles that tell us when to drink water is kind of stupid. If it weren’t for the fact that my very smart wife has this exact same problem, I’d dismiss the HidrateMe as the first Kickstarter ever launched by a Darwin Award nominee. As it is, though, I find myself wondering if getting my wife a bottle like this would mean I wouldn’t have to send her the following text message twice a day: “Have you had enough water today?”
It also helps that, for a water bottle, the HidrateMe is very attractive. The 24-ounce bottle itself is made of BPA-free, dishwasher-safe plastic, and features a lidded, fractal design that resembles a phosphorescent icicle. The battery lasts one year, and available colors are iceberg white, bamboo green, ocean teal, crystal pink, and obsidian black.
