A Slovak start-up caught attention at the CES fair. (source: SME)
DESPITE being completely unknown a year ago, today Slovaks Viktor Reviliak and Jozef Žemla are fighting giants like Sony and Samsung for customers for their CulCharge, a compact charge and data cable. Since most mobile users need a charging cable, CulCharge may have found a place in the market, the Hospodárske Noviny daily wrote on January 10.
“Nobody wants to carry long cables with him and thus we have an alternative,” Reviliak told the daily when recalling the impetus for developing CulCharge, a very short cable for charging modern smart phones, which people can hang on their key chains.
Reviliak and Žemla introduced their product at the prestigious consumer technology fair CES 2014 between January 6 and 9 in Las Vegas, where they caught the attention of international suppliers.
“The value of our company [has] soared 100-200 times [since then],” said Žemla.
The small start-up’s birth recalls the classic American dream. Reviliak and Žemla asked for funding and support via the crowd-funding indiegogo.com website. They had hoped to raise $15,000, but wound up receiving $94,000. They have developed four different connectors and are able to cover the whole market, including iPhones, Androids and Windows mobiles, and have started production in China.
