Bikes are fitted with a front and rear braking system controlled by your right and left hand.įirst Look: If you've ever gone over the handlebars of your bike (or known someone that has) then you will immediately get this product. number equates to more slide and the lower number equates to more brake. But if you need to stop suddenly and you panic, braking with the wrong hand can send you flying over the handlebars into traffic or worse: public embarrassment. The Strikeforce High Performance Slide Pad and Heel System gives bowlers options. Slidepad Technologies based in Palo Alto has spent the past four years refining a patented system to solve this problem and require only one hand brake for a bike. Co-founder Andrew Ouellet came up with the idea while mountain biking as a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2008. This humble and soft-spoken mechanical engineer, built a heavy and bulky prototype that won Design and Business Plan competitions, but lacked market viability due to the cost and size. It was during one of these product competitions that co-founder Brian Riley saw the product for the first time and wanted to join the team. In fact Jamis just announced they’d be including Slidepad brakes on some of their 2012 models (though probably not mountain bikes yet). One great story about the company's founding is that Andrew learned to machine parts in the student shops at Cal Poly. So the idea of a single-lever bike braking system isn’t new handicapped riders have been using them for a while now but the Slidepad is an interesting new approach. This led to summer jobs in machine shops which led to requests for machine work while back at school. With orders in hand, he convinced his parents to front him 21 of the $38k needed to buy a machine himself, stuck it in his garage in SLO, and got to work in between classes, nights, and weekends.
After cranking for a few months with his machine in the garage at college, he was able to pay his parents back.
That's the machine they use today to prototype new designs molds quickly. With Kid Icarus using L to fire, the slide pad for moving Pit and the touchscreen to control the camera and aiming, it sounds like this could be one smooth. See the head of sales Kyle Jansen describe their four year iteration cycle in the video below: Iteration after iteration got them to the slickly designed and lightweight offering they have today. Last year they really had a breakthrough scoring a contract with Jamis Bicycles to have their brakes featured on several 2013 models releasing in late 2012.
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