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Nils Mattisson Contributor Share on Twitter Formerly at Apple, Nils Mattisson is now CEO and co-founder of smart home tech company Minut . If you look at the most successful startups today, you’ll find plenty of proof that the  hardware-enabled service (Haas) model works: Peloton, Particle, Latch and Igloohome all rely on subscriptions along with product sales. Even tech giants like Apple are rapidly reinventing themselves as service companies. Yet, if you currently rely on device sales, the prospect of changing your entire business model might seem daunting. At  Minut , we are building smart home monitors (privacy-safe noise, motion and temperature monitoring) and recently made the transition despite the lack of resources on the process. Here are the seven lessons we learned: It is a question of when  —  not if. The transition will have company-wide impact. Your current and future target audience may differ. Price should reflect the value for the customer. Your r

Richard Dal Porto Contributor 2020 has been all but normal. For businesses and brands. For innovation. For people. The trajectory of business growth strategies, travel plans and lives have been drastically altered due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a global economic downturn with supply chain and market issues, and a fight for equality in the Black Lives Matter movement — amongst all that complicated lives and businesses already. One of the biggest stories in emerging technology is the growth of different types of voice assistants: Niche assistants such as Aider that provide back-office support. Branded in-house assistants such as those offered by BBC and Snapchat. White-label solutions such as Houndify that provide lots of capabilities and configurable tool sets. With so many assistants proliferating globally, voice will become a commodity like a website or an app. And that’s not a bad thing — at least in the name of progress. It will soon (read: over the next couple year

Smart assistants are sensitive to their wake words but who among us doesn’t trigger the smart speakers in their house with alarming frequency? Add in some heavily detailed privacy mishaps and a general feeling of distrust and there’s plenty of reason you might want to silence your smart speaker, occasionally. A new device promises to do just that, placing a check on your Amazon Echo’s always-on microphones through ultrasonic jamming. The gadget, dubbed Alexagate , is the latest drop from hype-as-a-service startup MSCHF. Last month, the startup announced a partnership with YouTuber MrBeast and an app where users could win bug bucks as long as they kept their finger on their phone. The contest ended with multiple winners as the competition stretched from hours into days. Image Credits: Lucas Matney Alexagate is a product for the times, encapsulating a lot of public and private fears about big tech. The device, which took over a year of planning to come to life, is a novelty item, b

Analogue has repeatedly proven that it’s the gold standard when it comes to retro gaming, delivering extremely faithful, but modern hardware to play original NES, SNES, Sega cartridges and more. The company revealed its forthcoming Analogue Pocket last October , and now it’s about to kick off pre-orders for the portable classic console, which can play Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games out of the box, and works with even more classic handheld game systems via adapters. The Analogue Pocket will be available to pre-order for $199.99 on August 3, starting at 8 AM PST (11 AM EST). The actual ship date is quite a while after that, however: Analogue estimates that the hardware should actually start to be delivered to customers in May, 2021. That’s due to “the unfortunate global state of affairs and supply chain challenges outside of our control,” according to the company, and they’re hardly the only indie hardware outfit feeling the pinch of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic a

I’ve been following consumer audio electronics company Nura with great interest for a few years now — the Melbourne-based startup was one of the first companies I met with after starting with TechCrunch. At the time, its first prototype was a big mess of circuits and wires — the sort of thing you could never imagine shrunk down into a reasonably-sized consumer device. Nura managed, of course. And the final product looked and sounded great; hell, even the box was nice. If I’m lucky, I see a consumer hardware product once or twice a year that seems reasonably capable of disrupting an industry, and Nura’s custom sound profiles fit that bill. But the company was unique for another reason. A graduate of the HAX accelerator , the startup announced NuraNow roughly this time last year. Hardware as a service (HaaS) has been a popular concept in the IT/enterprise space for some time, but it’s still fairly uncommon in the consumer category. For one thing: a hardware subscription presents a new

An ongoing global outage at sport and fitness tech giant Garmin was caused by a ransomware attack, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the incident. The incident began late Wednesday and continued through the weekend, causing disruption to the company’s online services for millions of users, including Garmin Connect , which syncs user activity and data to the cloud and other devices. The attack also took down flyGarmin , its aviation navigation and route-planning service. Portions of Garmin’s website were also offline at the time of writing. Garmin has said little about the incident so far. A banner on its website reads: “We are currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin.com and Garmin Connect. This outage also affects our call centers, and we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails or online chats. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologize for this inconvenience.” The two sources, who spoke on the condition of anon

Apple’s contract manufacturing partner Foxconn has started to assemble the current generation of iPhone units — the iPhone 11 lineup — in its plant near southern city of Chennai, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. A small batch of locally manufactured iPhone 11 units has already shipped to retail stores, but the production yield is currently limited, the person said, requesting anonymity as matters are private. Apple, in general, has ambitions to scale up its local production efforts in India, the person said. The local production of current iPhone 11 models illustrates Apple’s further commitment to India, the world’s second largest smartphone market, as it explores ways to cut its reliance on China, which produces the vast majority of iPhone models today. Apple’s contract manufacturing partner Taiwan-based Wistron first began assembling older iPhone models in 2017. But until now, Apple has not been able to have an assembly partner produce the current generation iP

Back in 2016, Mobalytics wowed the judges at Disrupt SF with its data-based coach for the exploding competitive gaming world , winning the Startup Battlefield . The company is building on the success of the past few years with a new funding round and a compelling new collaboration with Tobii that uses eye-tracking to provide powerful insights into gamers’ skills. Mobalytics began with the idea that, by leveraging the in-game data of a competitive e-sport like League of Legends (LoL), they could provide objective feedback to players along the lines of how fast or effective they are in different situations. Quantifying things like survivability or teamplay provides an analogue to similar measures in physical sports. “On an athlete you have all these measurements, like pulse oximeters, ECGs, the 40-yard dash,” said Amine Issa, co-founder and “Warchief of Science.” Not so much with PC games. Their challenge at that time was to take the LoL API provided by Riot and transform it into act

Apple recently announced that they would be transition their Mac line from Intel processors to their own, ARM-based Apple Silicon. That process is meant to begin with hardware to be announced later this year, and last two years according to Apple’s stated expectations, and while new Intel-powered Macs will be released and sold leading up to that time, it does mean that the writing is on the wall for Intel-based Apple hardware. Existing Macs with Intel chips will still be useful long after the transition is complete, however, and software porting means they might even support more of your existing favorite applications for the foreseeable future, which is why adding an external GPU (eGPU) likely makes more sense now than ever. Apple added support for eGPUs a few years ago, made possible by the addition of Thunderbolt 3 ports on Macs. These have very high throughput, making it possible for a GPU in an internal enclosure to offer almost a much graphics processing capability as one conn

Bang & Olufsen is taking its excellent track record for delivering maximum quality, natural-sounding audio and wrapping it in a sports-oriented package with the Beoplay E8 Sport  ($350). These totally wireless earbuds come with a long list of great features, including IP57 water resistance, 30 total hours of battery life including up to seven hours on a single charge, and transparency mode for external audio pass-through. The basics The E8 Sport is a new version of the three-generation E8 totally wireless earphone that Bang & Olufsen has produced for a while now. It’s the first in the series to feature sport-specific water and sweat-resistance. That’s not to say you couldn’t probably get away with using the existing E8 headphones for exercise (I definitely have), but the the E8 Sport’s IP57 rating, you can be confident they’ll stand up to a run in the rain or any amount of sweat, since they’re technically able to be fully submerged in shallow water for as long as 30 minutes.

Even the world’s second largest smartphone market isn’t immune to Covid-19. Smartphone shipments in India fell 48% in the second quarter compared with the same period a year ago, the most drastic drop one of the rare growing markets has seen in a decade, research firm Canalys reported Friday evening. About 17.3 million smartphone units shipped in Q2 2020, down from 33 million in Q2 2019, and 33.5 million in Q1 2020, the research firm said. You can blame coronavirus for it. New Delhi ordered a nationwide lockdown in late March to contain the spread of the virus that saw all shops across the country — save for some of those that sell grocery items and pharmacies — temporarily cease operation . Even e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Flipkart were prohibited from selling smartphones and other items classified as “non-essential” by the government. The protracted lockdown lasted until mid-May after which the Indian government deemed that other stores and e-commerce deliveries could

The potential for the Internet of Things to lead to distortion in market competition is troubling European Union lawmakers who have today kicked off a sectoral inquiry. They’re aiming to gather data from hundreds of companies operating in the smart home and connected device space — via some 400 questionnaires, sent to companies big and small across Europe, Asia and the US — using the intel gleaned to feed a public consultation slated for early next year when the Commission will also publish a preliminary report.  In a statement on the launch of the sectoral inquiry today, the European Union’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said the risks to competition and open markets linked to the data collection capabilities of connected devices and voice assistants are clear. The aim of the exercise is therefore to get ahead of any data-fuelled competition risks in the space before they lead to irreversible market distortion. “One of the key issues here is data. Voice assista

A new gadget called the OpenCV AI Kit, or OAK, looks to replicate the success of Raspberry Pi and other minimal computing solutions, but for the growing fields of computer vision and 3D perception. Its new multi-camera PCBs pack a lot of capability into a small, open-source unit and are now seeking funding on Kickstarter . The OAK devices use their cameras and onboard AI chip to perform a number of computer vision tasks, like identifying objects, counting people, finding distances to and between things in frame, and more. This info is sent out in polished, ready-to-use form. Having a reliable, low cost, low power draw computer vision unit like this is a great boon for anyone looking to build a smart device or robot that might have otherwise required several and discrete cameras and other chips (not to mention quite a bit of fiddling with software). Image Credits: Luxonis Like the Raspberry Pi, which has grown to become the first choice for hobbyist programmers dabbling in hardw

Logitech has released new versions of its MX peripherals in Mac-friendly finishes, as well as a new K380 wireless Bluetooth keyboard designed for Apple devices. These aren’t dramatically different devices from the existing versions that Logitech offers – but that’s a good thing in this case, and it elevates what were already amazing peripherals to no-brainer default choices for Mac users. MX Master 3 for Mac Image Credits: Darrell Etherington The MX Master 3 for Mac is a very slightly altered twist on the MX Master 3 – consisting mostly of a new paint job that actually pretty closely resembles the old one. Specs are the same for the Mac-specific version, including its quiet scroll wheel with 1,000 lines per second maximum scroll speed, and Logitech’s MagSpeed tech that dynamically enables freewheel scrolling when you’re going fast. The MX Master 3 for Mac does ship with a USB-C to USB-C cord in the box, instead of the USB-A to USB-C cable that comes with the non-Mac version,