In a pleasant Friday surprise, Roku dropped its S-1 document today, detailing its financial performance and corporate strategy. The filing indicates that the company intends to raise $100 million in its debut. The figure is a widely-recognized placeholder number. The company could raise more or less in its IPO. Follow Crunchbase News on Twitter & Facebook As a private company,… Read More
Ever wanted to build an R2-D2 to call your own? You could drop a few million dollars to get all the screen-used parts/props… Or you could spend a few weeks in the shop bangin’ on scrap metal to build one from scratch. Or you could grab littleBit’s new Droid Inventor Kit and call it a day. It’s pint-sized and not quite as intense as the aforementioned options, but hey… Read More
Essential has a unique port around back on its debut Phone, which can handle data and power transfer, and which attaches to accessories via magnets. The first such accessory is Essential’s own 360 camera, which offers you an easy way to capture immersive images and video in a very small package. The Essential 360 camera is much smaller than most other consumer 360 cameras out there, and… Read More
Have you ever wanted to print an animated image? Well now you (almost) can. A maker named Abhishek Singh has created an instant camera that outputs a little box that contains a Raspberry Pi connected to a PiTFT screen. When you take a picture the camera transmits a short video to the screen which then plays it over and over again until you take another picture. The entire project is… Read More
Launching a product and company from scratch is hard, as fresh-faced entrepreneurs and Kickstarter successes often learn to their chagrin. And it turns out even heavy hitters like Andy Rubin and his mobile startup Essential have unpleasant lessons to learn — in this case, about how even a small detail like a mailing list configuration can put your entire company at risk. Read More
A handful of tech companies have just been given Emmy awards for a variety of behind-the-scenes accomplishments. Yeah, I didn’t know it was a thing either! Well, I kind of knew. They just don’t play it up a lot. But it’s still a little weird to see Apple win one for Siri, Microsoft win one for Skype and… Comcast win one for its X1 remote. Really?! Read More
We don’t do a lot of Kickstarter posts because the outcomes of crowdfunding campaigns, especially hardware ones, are notoriously unpredictable. But it’s with an easy conscience that I recommend Lomography’s new instant film camera; I backed the company’s last one, the Automat, and it’s been fantastic. This one looks similarly fun, and shoots in a larger format. Read More
We’ve mostly moved past the point where our Internet of Things devices leak private information to anyone watching via unsecured connections, but that doesn’t mean you can stop being afraid. Never, ever stop being afraid. To top up your paranoia reserves, a new study finds that internet providers can, if they so choose, monitor all kinds of things from your smart home’s… Read More
Uber’s engineering blog has just posted an interesting piece on the company’s web-based tool for exploring and visualizing data from self-driving car research. It’s a smart look at an impressive platform, and definitely has nothing to do with a long piece published last week lauding a similar platform in use by one of Uber’s most serious rivals, Waymo. Read More
Keep your dogs close but your kitties closer, is I think the expression. Maybe. Whatever it is, pets are important to people. And keeping a close watch on them even when you’re not located in the same place has become increasingly possible thanks to the broad proliferation of tech like Wi-Fi connected cameras. Petcube Bites is one of those cameras, but it’s also a treat… Read More
