dTOOR’s 2016 Social Purpose Corporation Annual Report

From the beginning, dTOOR’s mission has been to make mobile devices with women as a forethought, not an afterthought. Current rectangular smartphones are not designed to fit in women’s pockets or be transported when someone has no pockets at all, a situation far more common for women than men. In 2015 dTOOR started operations determined to solve these problems and more, and that mission has been carried through into 2016. This year (2016) we focused on delivering The Cyrcle Phone prototype to our Kickstarter backers, attending multiple mobile trade shows, and expanding our product development team. Through these experiences we have learned that our products appeal not just to women and thus our company slogan has now been updated to “Non-Rectangular Phones for Non-Rectangular People.” We will continue to consider women’s needs first, but are delighted that our products have found favor among people of all genders.

We spent the beginning of the year attending trade shows to promote dTOOR and our phone. In February 2016 we were part of the “Four Years from Now” (4YFN) exhibition at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The 4YFN exhibition featured early-stage technologies from hundreds of startups and was a great place to show off our Cyrcle phone and talk with many interesting people. We also attended the Northwest Women’s Show in March and CTIA Mobility in September.

In between going to trade shows we were busy working The Cyrcle Phone prototype, which we launched on Kickstarter in September 2016. This phone prototype was able to make calls and receive texts and came in a circular, clam-shelled design that made it easy to fit in your pocket or clasp onto your clothes. Our campaign was fully funded and we were able to deliver all rewards to our backers within sixty days. We made a phone four times faster than our competitors - and with less than 10% of the typical capital!

In addition to our Kickstarter campaign, we teamed up with the University of Washington’s Electrical Engineering department so students would have the chance to design and build aspects of our new phone in their Capstone design class. This year-long program began in September and will last through June 2017.

Looking ahead to 2017, we are happy to be working with the University of Washington to be an industry partner as a part of this year’s Capstone program and plan to participate next year. Also, we are looking into working with other departments’ Capstone programs as well. We are also applying to investment summits such as SVP Fast pitch, Pipeline Angels, Belle Capital, the Mobile Venture Summit, and the New York Mobile Summit; as well as various independent investors in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area. Further, we plan to license our new 4G LTE phone maker board to a third party as an extra revenue stream.

We are excited for what 2017 will bring and hope you will join us as we explore the joy in being a non-rectangular company.