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Boating is a hobby steeped in history and tradition — and so is the industry and those that support it. With worldwide connectivity, electric boats, and other technological changes dragging the sector out of old habits, Orca aims to replace the outdated interfaces by which people navigate with a hardware-software combo as slick as any other modern consumer tech. If you’re a boater, and I know at least some of you are, you’re probably familiar with two different ways of chart-plotting, or tracking your location and route: the one attached to your boat and the one in your pocket. The one on your boat is clunky and old-fashioned, like the GPS interface on a years-old budget sedan. The one in your pocket is better and faster — but the phone isn’t exactly seaworthy and the app drains your battery with a quickness. Orca is a Norwegian startup from veterans of the boating and chart-plotters that leapfrogs existing products with a built-from-scratch modern interface. “The industry hasn’t

Many launch providers think reusability is the best way to lower the cost and delay involved in getting to space. SpaceX and Rocket Lab have shown reusable first stages, which take a payload to the edge of space — and now Stoke Space Technologies says it is making a reusable second stage, which will take that payload to orbit and beyond, and has raised a $9.1M seed round to realize it. Designing a first stage that can return to Earth safely is no small task, but the fact that it only reaches a certain height and speed, and doesn’t actually climb into orbit at an even higher velocity, means that it is simpler to try. The second stage takes over when the first is spent, accelerating and guiding the payload to its destination orbit, which generally means it will have traveled a lot farther and will be going a lot faster when it tries to come back down. Stoke thinks that it’s not just possible to create a second stage that’s reusable, but crucial to building the low-cost space economy

China’s Xiaomi had dominated the Indian smartphone market for three consecutive years until recently losing the top spot to Samsung . It has played by the Indian government’s rulebook to support domestic manufacturing, making smartphones in India rather than shipping them from its home country of China. Now it is further ramping up production in India by adding two new supply chain partners, BYD and DBG, the company said in an announcement on Thursday. The move comes at a time when the Indian government is applying more pressure on Chinese tech companies. Along with TikTok, dozens of other popular Chinese apps were banned in India last June over national security concerns. So far the hardware companies have remained largely unaffected, but worsening India-China relations won’t likely bode well for Chinese companies that are wooing Indian consumers. Xiaomi and its Chinese competitors Vivo, Oppo and Oppo-affiliated Realme together commanded as much as 64% of the Indian market in the

Rode Microphones has a new and improved version of its much-loved Go portable mic, the Wireless Go II, which uses the same form factor as the original but adds a list of new and improved features. Most notably, the Go II offers two transmitter packs that can simultaneously talk to a single receiver, letting you record two individual speakers to the same camera or connected device. Basics The Rode Wireless Go II  ($299) ships with everything you need to begin recording high-quality audio to a camera or anything else that can connect to a 3.5mm jack. The transmitter packs – there are two of them in the box – have built-in microphones that offer great sound on their own, or you can use them with any 3.5mm-equipped lavalier mic depending on your needs. The receiver pack can output to 3.5mm TRS, but it can also transmit using USB Type-C (which is also for charging). This is new for this generation, and Rode also sells USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to Lightning cables so that you can use them

We crawled into an abandoned school bus, trespassed through dilapidated hallways, dodged fleeting thunderstorms, and wandered the empty streets of Chinatown late into the evening. For two summery weeks, I couldn’t have been happier. New York City was in lockdown. I’d been quarantined in my dinky apartment, disheartened and restless. I was anxious to do something creative. Thankfully, the Hasselblad X1D II 50C arrived for review, along with approval from the studio heads for socially-distanced, outdoor shoots. Taking pictures of the mundane (flowers, buildings, and such) would’ve been a disservice to a $10,000 camera kit, so instead, my friends and I collaborated on a fun, little project: we shot portraits inspired by our favorite films. Image Credits: Veanne Cao Equipped with masks and a bottle of hand sanitizer, we put the X1D II 50C and 80mm F/1.9 lens (ideal for close-ups without actually having to be close up) through its paces in some of NYC’s less familiar backdrops. [g

As impressive as the cameras in our smartphones are, they’re fundamentally limited by the physical necessities of lenses and sensors. Metalenz skips over that part with a camera made of a single “metasurface” that could save precious space and battery life in phones and other devices… and they’re about to ship it. The concept is similar to, but not descended from, the “metamaterials” that gave rise to flat beam-forming radar and lidar of Lumotive and Echodyne . The idea is to take a complex 3D structure and accomplish what it does using a precisely engineered “2D” surface — not actually two-dimensional, of course, but usually a plane with features measured in microns. In the case of a camera, the main components are of course a lens (these days it’s usually several stacked), which corrals the light, and an image sensor, which senses and measures that light. The problem faced by cameras now, particularly in smartphones, is that the lenses can’t be made much smaller without seriously

With more of us spending significant amounts of time at home because of Covid-19, our attention has turned increasingly to how and what we eat. Today, one of the startups that has seen a lift in its business as a result of that is announcing a round of funding to expand its operations. Tovala , the smart oven and meal kit service — has closed a Series C of $30 million. David Rabie, the Chicago startup’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that it plans to use the funding in large part to open a second facility, most likely in Utah, to help with fresh food distribution to the western half of the U.S. Other investments will include improving customer service and bringing in more talent. It will also slowly start to bring in more options for pre-made meals and recipes: Rabie said it is working on ways of working with leading restaurants and chefs to create meals to sell and cook in the Tovala oven. “We think we can come closer to the restaurant experience because of the oven,” said R

Canon is embracing the AI-infused future with a strange new robotic camera called the PowerShot PICK. This little device swivels and keeps its subjects in view, taking commands or snapping shots on its own. It’s a bit like a smart security camera or Facebook’s Portal, but meant to be taken with you wherever you go, attached to a selfie stick, and so on. Its body is about the size of a juice box, making it portable but not quite pocketable. The camera company appears to be hedging its bets by offering the PICK not as a retail product but through the Japanese crowdfunding site Makuake , where it has already blasted through its trumpery $10,000 goal (currently at about ten times that, which is still just a fraction of what it must have cost to develop this thing). “PICK… stop watching me.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dennis.” A promo video for the campaign shows the PICK being used in a variety of circumstances: recognizing faces and shooting during a party; tracking a person ridin