Tecbak's Foosball Society table football is making waves again! Presented at CES 2018, this reinvented and ultra-connected table football continues its ascent with the ultimate goal of breaking into the United States. A quick refresher.
Foosball Society: a concentration of technology in a table football
What the Parisian startup Tecbak has imagined with Foosball is much more than a game table packed with high-tech gadgets: it's a new way to approach table football. By partnering with the manufacturer of Bonzini table football, the company has succeeded in transforming the most "basic" of playing fields into a high-end, ultra-connected version in order to "combine the best of both worlds, physical and digital," explains Jérôme Boyé, CEO of Tecbak. Developed in 2015, the Foosball incorporates a camera that films the game, a screen that displays match statistics in real time, and a series of infrared sensors that act as referees. "The table football appeals to memory, to recollections: everyone has played it at least once. We want to show that it's possible to enrich this type of experience through digital technology," recalls Jérôme Boyé. Bad news, however: this new kind of table football is not intended for the general public...
A B2B2C Foosball Table
While you won't be able to install a Foosball Society in your living room, you'll soon be able to test its playability in a hotel lobby or bar. Tecbak intends to market its creation exclusively to a professional clientele. As the Tecbak boss explains, the goal of this foosball 2.0 goes beyond entertainment or competition:
- to create a shared experience, internally or externally
- to generate traffic to a location and data
- to enable a brand to communicate
Integrating a foosball table into a company's sales or HR strategy? Why not! The CEO goes even further, envisioning the foosball table as "an example of positive digital transformation, of reinventing the experience through digital technology: it can help raise awareness about change management."
CES 2018 was a fantastic opportunity for the startup to present its concept and make contacts. His goal now is to continue selling and renting table football while expanding outside France. So, is the future of table football in high tech?
