Latest Technology

No one knows exactly how drone delivery will fit into the future of logistics, but one thing is for sure: the aircraft aren’t going to drop off important payloads directly onto someone’s lawn. Matternet’s Station, an automated landing space and payload control tower, may be the solution, and the flower-like structure has finally made the jump from render to reality at a medical facility in Switzerland. The Station was teased early last year, but one never knows with these concept renders whether the final result will be anything like the idea. In this case it’s dead on, looking for anything like a prop from a ’60s sci-fi flick. The unusual shape serves a purpose, however, providing a safe place for a cargo drone to land and swap its battery out, protected from the elements and the type of ne’er-do-wells who would snatch a medical payload from an innocent robot. That package, in the case of this first installation, will be a temperature-sensitive hardshell case with numerous vials in...

DroneSeed started as a tech-powered alternative to the backbreaking work of large-scale tree-planting, but this important task is only one small part of forest restoration, the infrastructure for which is being pushed to the breaking point by wildfires. Armed with $36M in new funding, the company is reimagining reforestation from root to crown in a modern and vertically integrated way, grafting carbon futures and AI to century-old machinery and logistics. When I first wrote about DroneSeed , the company had just made its debut, showing off its custom-built drones and systems for accelerating reforestation efforts. All the problems and solutions discussed in that article are ongoing — though the company is expanding, it isn’t by any means changing its core product, which is (as you might guess from the name) using drones to deliver seeds to forests damaged by wildfires. Seeds, meet drones DroneSeed co-founders Grant Canary (CEO), left, and Ben Reilly (CTO) hold a pair of the company...

Amazon today announced a new subscription service called “Alexa Together,” designed for families with aging family members who are still living independently, but who may need extra support. The $19.99 per month subscription expands on Amazon’s existing product, Alexa Care Hub, an earlier investment in elder care, by taking many of Care Hub’s features and adding on new protections, like an urgent response feature and access to a professional emergency helpline. The company in November 2020 first introduced Care Hub, an option in the Alexa mobile app, which has allowed family members to keep an eye on older parents and loved ones — with their permission — in order to receive general information about their activities and to be alerted if the loved one has called out for help. Image Credits: Amazon With Alexa Together, family members can continue to access features like care alerts, which are designed to keep family members in the loop when an aging family member asks Alexa for he...

Amazon is introducing two new services tied to user health and fitness, and its Halo personal health devices. They include Halo Fitness, a new service for interactive home video workouts that looks a lot like Apple Fitness+, and Halo Nutrition, a personalized, guided meal planner. Both of these services will be included as part of Amazon’s Halo membership for users of its Halo line of fitness trackers, which include the new Halo View activity tracker that adds an OLED display . The Halo subscription costs $3.99 per month after a six-month free trial bundled with Halo Band, or a 12-month trial with Halo View, and Amazon says it’ll include both of these new features starting later this year for Fitness, and in January 2022 for Nutrition. Halo Fitness offers “studio quality workouts” led by “industry experts,” and offers real-time display of metrics like heart rate and heart rate intensity zone as captured by the Halo fitness bands. The workouts include coaches like Michael Hildebrand, ...

Ring is just one part of Amazon’s annual devices and services event this year, but they’re bringing a lot of updates, including a new Pro Alarm suite that includes refreshed hardware and integrated Eero Wi-Fi 6 router capabilities. They also have a new service offering called ‘Virtual Security Guard’ that basically keeps an eye on your Ring feeds the way you would in case you can’t, and they’re improving alerts on their existing Doorbells and Cams with smarter event recognition. Ring Alarm Pro Ring Alarm Pro is an upgraded home security system suite that includes a base station with Eero built-in. The base station doubles as a Wi-Fi 6 router that is mesh capable for linking up to other modern Eero hardware (which is some nice consumer brand synergy for another Amazon acquisition). Ring Alarm Pro also includes 24/7 backup internet thanks to 3GB of included cellular data use per month, with extra data available at $3/1GB. Ring’s Power Pack accessories can be attached to the base statio...

Last year, Ring announced at futuristic (slightly dystopian?) take on in-home security with its Always Home Cam, a drone equipped with sensors and a camera that can navigate the interior of your home along custom paths laid out by a user, in response to triggers including Ring Alarm sensors, or a manual command from the Ring app itself. Now, the concept becomes a reality as it starts shipping out to users in the United States — though it’s an invite-only launch at first. Ring revealed the $249 Always Home Cam just over a year ago, and it said at the time it would ship in 2021, which it now is. The small drone only measures around 5″ by 7″ by 7″, which should make it more nimble when navigating your halls. The idea behind the device was to provide a way to essentially have a camera everywhere inside your home when you’re away, without requiring that you actually buy a whole bunch of individual cameras and put them in every corner. Ring stresses that the Always Home Cam will only take ...

Amazon today introduced Amazon Glow , a new, interactive device aimed at families that allows kids to interact with family members and other remote loved ones over video calls. While something of a competitor to Facebook’s line of Portal devices , which are also largely aimed at connecting families over video, Amazon Glow differentiates itself by providing more than just another connected screen experience. It also uses technology to create an interactive, projected space in front of the device to provide a surface for virtual activities — like games, art, puzzles, and more — to give the feeling of an in-person experience, To do so, Amazon Glow combines immersive projection, sensing technologies, and video into a single device. Unlike other smart screens on the market, the Glow doesn’t look like a tiny TV. Instead, its 8-inch display stands up vertically and a projector creates a 19-inch touch-sensitive space in front of the display for playing virtual games and engaging in other acti...

The FCC has sent out the first checks from its Emergency Connectivity Fund , an effort to help close the “homework gap” at schools by covering the cost of computers and internet services. Thousands of school districts, in every state plus D.C., Guam and Puerto Rico, will split this first $1.2 billion distribution, and there’s still lots more to come. The problem they are looking to mitigate is the large number of students who, in an age when studying, homework, and now even classes are all done online, lack a device or adequate internet connection to participate. This exacerbates an existing inequality, for these students often lack access to other resources and end up falling behind through no fault of their own. The ECF was conceived to combat this , and funded earlier this year as part of the big pandemic recovery bill. It’s a $7B program in total, but the money is being distributed over time as schools and libraries make their formal requests, saying they need to cover the cost ...

Making smartphones more accessible is always a good idea, and Google’s latest features bring quick actions and navigation to people whose expressions are their primary means of interacting with the world. Project Activate and Camera Switches let users perform tasks like speaking a custom phrase, or navigating using a switch interface, through facial gestures alone. The new features rely on the smartphone’s front-facing camera, which can watch the user’s face in real time for one of six expressions: a smile, raised eyebrows, opened mouth, and looking left, right, or up. It relies entirely on local computing and no image data is saved, nor is it doing what is generally understood as “facial recognition” — this type of machine learning can focus specifically on, for example, identifying the eyebrows and sending a signal whenever they move past a certain, customizable threshold. Each expression can be assigned a different role. Camera Switches integrates with Android’s existing switch...

EU lawmakers are finally set to standardize charging ports for consumer electronics devices like smartphones and tablets — announcing a proposal today that, once adopted, will see the region settle on USB-C as a universal charging port for gadgets which will also include cameras, headphones, portable speakers and handheld videogames consoles. Some smaller consumer electronics devices — like smart watches and fitness bands — are being excluded owing to factors like their size and conditions of use. The Commission plan will also see regional lawmakers unbundle the sale of chargers from mobiles so they are not automatically included in the box. Fast charging standards will also be harmonized under the proposal — while device makers will have requirements to provide users with “relevant information about charging performance”, including info on the power required and if a device supports fast charging. “This will make it easier for consumers to see if their existing chargers meet the ...

The ocean is important to countless industries, but we still only have a rough idea of what it’s like as a whole at any given time. To foster a new generation of ocean-monitoring floats and other devices, Sofar Ocean Technologies and DARPA are publishing an open hardware standard called Bristlemouth so that researchers will have an off-the-shelf option rather than wasting their precious grant dollars solving the same engineering problems from scratch. Sofar calls itself a “real-time ocean intelligence platform,” which you might think of as a sort of weather service for the seven seas. Unlike the atmosphere, however, the ocean is not easy to remotely observe with satellites and radar — you need to have hundreds, perhaps thousands of devices actually out there bobbing on the waves to understand its motions, salinity, pollutant levels, temperature, and so on. While the company has its own line of business maintaining a network of its own floats, which produce valuable data it can sell ...

Pollutants pouring from smokestacks around the world may be bad news for the atmosphere, but if you catch them before they get out there, you could reduce emissions and collect some valuable materials at the same time. That’s what Carbix aims to do with its carbon-sequestering reactor, which would extract minerals from emissions while staying carbon-negative. Carbix, which presented today at the Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is capitalizing on the pressure being placed on industries to decarbonize or face fines and high taxes. Cement manufacturing alone accounts for some 8 percent of carbon emissions, and executives are scrambling to go green. It turns out that minerals needed for cement and many other industries are being literally thrown away — puffed out of flues and allowed to settle wherever they drift. In fact, these minerals are valuable enough that Carbix can afford to pay factories for the privilege of siphoning them off and reselling them. “We’re essentially paying emitter...

Owners of Alexa devices will soon be able to use OnStar’s emergency services from their homes, under an expanded partnership between OnStar’s parent company General Motors and Amazon. OnStar already expanded OnStar Guardian earlier this year with the introduction of the Guardian app, which lets customers access the service via their mobile device. This latest expansion will now bring customers’ voice-enabled home devices into that ecosystem. While a customer could theoretically use the Guardian app inside their home today, GM’s head of Product Jeff Wajer told TechCrunch in a recent interview that there are many instances where people don’t have their phones on them but nevertheless may need to access emergency help. He noted that people with different accessibility levels, who may be unable to use a phone, could nevertheless shout for help using the OnStar-Alexa integration. The integration will be rolled out gradually, first to an initial cohort of existing OnStar customers and the...

Smart fitness gear is often limited by being static and non-portable. (And, well, eye-wateringly expensive.) Think Peloton ‘s stationary bike for spin classes or wall-mounted strength training rig Tonal . Great if you’re at home and can afford to shell out thousands on a fancy home gym, but what if you want to take your workout with you wherever you go? Meet Straffr , a German startup that’s exhibiting at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley this week. The company sells a smart fitness band that you can just pop in your backpack and take with you when you hit the road. Originally opting for a crowdfunding route via Kickstarter  last year, the hardware startup has gone on to sell “a few thousand” bands since getting the product to market in March this year. They’ve also bagged backing from business angels and have just closed a second seed round with an international investor as they gear up to expand their fledgling fitness business. Straffr’s smart resistance band, which comes...

Traditional meat production is about as far from a sustainable process as we’ve got, but our chances of getting everyone to give up “real” meat are lean. Animal Alternative is one of several companies looking to make meat indistinguishable from the animal-based kind using bioreactors and cultured cells, and it aims to empower local producers to do so with a customizable process powered by data and AI. Animal Alternative , which presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is the brainchild of two Cambridge grads who repeatedly encountered each other during their studies in biotech there. Clarisse Beurrier and Yash Mishra found that they shared a conviction that meat production desperately needs a reboot, and their skills complemented each other as well. They decided to start a company to pursue a new, data-heavy approach that could make cultured meat production as much a software problem as a hardware one. Cell-cultured meat, in case you’re not familiar, is where cells ...