Brewbot, Vaporshot and Other Tech Gadgets at Engadget Austin Live

A big crowd turned out for Engadget Live Austin held last Friday to showcase some of the city’s latest tech products.

A customized beer brewing station controlled with a smartphone, a vaporized alcohol machine and a virtual reality Oculus Rift headset were a few of the devices on display at the Austin Music Hall.

Engadget, an online technology news site, is doing a series of live events around the country to showcase new gadgets, said Jeff Taylor with Engadget. More than 3,000 people got a ticket to attend the Austin event.

Other events will be held in Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles and New York.

Austin-based startups at the event included Atlas, which makes a wearable activity monitor, Chaotic Moon, maker of all kinds of software and hardware inventions, Brewbot, a robot that brews beer, Re3D, a 3D printer, Plum, a smart home lighting control device and Techjango, maker of a laptop Xbox gaming station.

The Brewbot booth attracted a steady crowd. It featured the Brewbot, a customized beer brewing device that can be controlled wirelessly with a smart phone. It’s about the size of a mini-frig and it contains everything necessary to brew homemade beer.
Brewbot moved to Austin from Belfast, Northern Ireland to participate in Techstars Austin, said Chris McClelland, its CEO.

The Brewbot costs $3,000 and they can be customized to meet the needs of the customer, McClelland said.

“It’s a robot that brews beer,” McClelland said.

Brewbot, which raised more than $194,000 from a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, is working on a venture-funding round, which the company will announce shortly.

The year old startup moved all five members of its team to Austin.

The line to sample vaporized alcohol from Vapshot was among the longest at the event.

Victor Wong, co-founder of Vapshot, came up with the idea during a “boring weekend” last February. He got together with his friend and engineer, Larry Cotton, co-founder, and they created the Vapshot. They took the machine to a tradeshow in Las Vegas and sold $70,000 worth of the machines, which cost $4,000 each.

“We started shipping them last week,” Wong said.

The machine vaporizes alcohol into a bottle, which people then inhale with a straw. The Vapshot delivers alcohol into the lungs for an immediate buzz, which Wong estimates lasts only 15 minutes.

Vapshot is selling the machine to bars licensed to sell and distribute alcohol, Wong said. The machine can get 1,500 vaporized shots out of bottle of liquor, compared to about 20 shots in liquid form.

The line for Chaotic Moon’s demonstration stretched to the door. The company had an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset for 3D gaming interacting with an iPad app, which Chaotic Moon created. The person controlling the iPad used it to drop bombs on the person playing the Oculus Rift game.

The mash up isn’t anything Chaotic Moon plans to sell, said Chance Ivey, the company’s lead game designer.

“We look at how we can utilize it with other technologies we’ve been working with,” he said.