Making friendship bracelets will suck way less with this new gadget
Aren't friendship bracelet's awesome? Handcrafted by your bestie to prove that you'll be BFFs forever.
Of course laced in among the multi-colored threads are all the tears shed while trying to make the thing. Consider it binding material.
Being friends and making these bracelets should be easier. WowWee, a company best know for creating balancing and farting robots, agrees and has unveiled on Saturday at New York Toy Fair what may be the first app-connected friendship bracelet machine: The Digiloom.
It is, as the name suggests, a real loom that handles the messy job of keeping all those threads straight, organized and separated at the right times to accept the perpendicular threads. Though, you still have to feed them through.
The battery-powered Digiloom starts with custom, pre-threaded bracelets, with a flexible, plastic backing and pre-attached clasps that you feed into the machine. On the Bluetooth connected app, users can choose from among pre-made patterns or create their own by typing in a message.
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Once the pattern is selected, you hit one of the buttons on the Digiloom and it separates the threads so that they are perfectly positioned for you to feed through the opposing, usually reverse-colored thread.
Essentially, you keep hitting the button, waiting for the loom and its tiny plastic, blue fingers...er...hooks... to quickly separate the threads and then you feed your thread through the opening, creating a friendship pattern bracelet, complete with a custom message, one thread-line at a time. We put in "Mashable," but only had time to create an "M."
So it's not fully automated, but it is easier than, say, taping threads to a table or trying to keep them organized in your hands.
Making one friendship bracelet with the loom can take roughly 25 minutes.
WowWee plans to ship Digiloom in August for $49.99.
Lance Ulanoff was Chief Correspondent and Editor-at-Large of Mashable. Lance acted as a senior member of the editing team, with a focus on defining internal and curated opinion content. He also helped develop staff-wide alternative story-telling skills and implementation of social media tools during live events. Prior to joining Mashable in September 2011 Lance Ulanoff served as Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for the Ziff Davis, Inc. While there, he guided the brand to a 100% digital existence and oversaw content strategy for all of Ziff Davis’ Web sites. His long-running column on PCMag.com earned him a Bronze award from the ASBPE. Winmag.com, HomePC.com and PCMag.com were all been honored under Lance’s guidance.He makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Fox News, the Today Show, Good Morning America, Kelly and Michael, CNBC, CNN and the BBC.He has also offered commentary on National Public Radio and been interviewed by newspapers and radio stations around the country. Lance has been an invited guest speaker at numerous technology conferences including SXSW, Think Mobile, CEA Line Shows, Digital Life, RoboBusiness, RoboNexus, Business Foresight and Digital Media Wire’s Games and Mobile Forum.
