Earlier this week, Harman Kardon announced the Invoke, its Cortana-enabled Amazon Echo competitor. While Harman Kardon was the first company to integrate Cortana into this kind of device, it’s not going to be the only one for long. As Microsoft announced today, HP has also signed on to build similar devices. Intel, too, is getting into this game. Read More
Amazon’s Echo Show killer feature is video calls. If you buy a couple of devices, you can call each other using the device. And it should be so easy that young kids and grandparents will be able to use it in no time. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Amazon invested in a startup called Nucleus then built a copycat. And today is a rough day for the young startup. Nucleus spent… Read More
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a new way to turn almost any surface into a touchpad with just a little conductive spray paint. The system, called Electrick, uses a technique called “electric field tomography.”
Created by CMU Ph.D. student Yang Zhang, Electrick uses small electrodes attached to the edges of a painted surface and it can turn wood, plastic… Read More
Nixie (“Numeric Indicator eXperimental No. 1”) tubes were displays used for digital readouts before the advent of the LED. Popular with James Bond villains who wanted to rule the world yet whose bomb timers stopped at exactly 007 when Bond figured out what wire to cut (and with scientists), the tubes once graced the highest of the high tech circa 1950. Now, however, they’re… Read More
The Urban-X investors showcase is a closed-door event that shows off eight different incubated startups to potential investors and press. I stopped by earlier this week to see what the fuss was about. Of the eight companies in Urban-X’s 02 cohort, I picked four that tackled problems relating to pollution, the visually impaired, urban deliveries and maintaining public cleanliness:… Read More
Becoming a parent brings drastic change in the household budget. As such, new and expectant parents are a favored demographic among marketers. Startup founders and their backers have also taken an interest, applying technology and business model innovation to the increasingly tech-intensive art of watching, feeding, entertaining and transporting tiny humans. Read More
With titanium 3D printers, electrostatic charge tables, and a giant slide, Playground Global lives up to it’s a name. Here we take you on a tour of Android operating system inventor Andy Rubin’s hardware startup incubator that’s backed by a $300 million fund. Check out how the whimsical space lets scrappy hackers compete with Facebook and Google to recruit top talent. If… Read More
If the Surface Laptop wasn’t enough, Microsoft is going to announce new devices once again at an event later this month. The company’s vice president of devices Panos Panay teased the event in a tweet and Instagram photo. Besides the city and date, the only hint we have is the use of the hashtag “#Surface.” Given that the Surface Laptop is brand new, the Surface Studio… Read More
Rumor has it that Amazon has been working on an Echo device with a touchscreen for a while. AFTVnews spotted an image on Amazon’s own servers. And it looks like a device we’ve never seen before. As you can see, this isn’t exactly the best image of the device. It’s extremely pixelated because it’s a tiny thumbnail. I believe it’s going to appear at the top of… Read More
British chipset firm Imagination Technologies is having a tough quarter. After announcing that Apple is about to end its relationship with its supplier, the company is now starting the dispute process according to a statement sent to Reuters.
Imagination Technologies has worked for many years with Apple on graphics chipsets. Its designs have been essential to the iPhone and iPad graphical… Read More
