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On a congested sidewalk next to a busy mall in Shenzhen, a 20-something woman uses a smartphone app to order a milk tea on Meituan, a major food delivery company. In under ten minutes, the pearl-white drink arrives, not on the back of one of the city’s ubiquitous delivery bikes, but descending from the cloudy heavens, in a cardboard box on the back of a drone, into a small roadside kiosk. The only thing the scene is missing is a choir of angels. Over the past two years, Meituan, one of China’s largest internet companies, has flown 19,000 meals to 8,000 customers across Shenzhen, a city with close to 20 million people. The pilot program is available to just seven neighborhoods, each with a three-kilometer stretch, and only from a select number of merchants. The drones deliver to designated streetside kiosks rather than hover outside people’s windows as envisioned by sci-fi writers. But the trials are proof of concept for Meituan’s ambitions, and the company is now ready to ramp up its

As nostalgia goes, the Fisher-Price Chatter phone doesn’t disappoint. The classic retro kids toy was given a modern revamp for the holiday season with the new release for adults which, unlike the original toy designed for kids, can make and receive calls over Bluetooth using a nearby smartphone. The Chatter — despite a working rotary dial and its trademark wobbly eyes that bob up and down when the wheels turn — is less a phone and more like a novelty Bluetooth speaker with a microphone, which activates when the handset is lifted. The Chatter didn’t spend long on sale; the phone sold out quickly as the waitlists piled up. But security researchers in the U.K. immediately spotted a potential problem. With just the online instruction manual to go on, the researchers feared that a design flaw could allow someone to use the Chatter to eavesdrop. Ken Munro, founder of the cybersecurity company Pen Test Partners, told TechCrunch that chief among the concerns are that the Chatter does not h

Ameelio , a nonprofit startup that intends to replace inmate-paid video calling in prisons with a free service, is making inroads against the companies that have dominated the space for decades. With 9 facilities in Iowa up and running and talks progressing with dozens more ahead of a planned 2022 launch, the company may soon usher in a fundamental change in how incarcerated people access communication and education. Founded less than two years ago , Ameelio had its sights set on the calling system from the start, but began by offering a web and mobile service to send letters to inmates, which ordinarily is a surprisingly difficult process. “We maybe had 8,000 users when we spoke to you, and a few months later we launched our mobile app. Now we’re hosting something like 300,000 users, in every state and some territories,” said Uzoma Orchingwa, founder and CEO of the company. But while letter writing is a useful service, the team’s efforts have been focused on developing and testing t

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. Check back from now until the end of December for more !  Less than two weeks left until Christmas! Got your shopping done? No? Yeaaaah me neither. Want to buy someone a great gadget but don’t want to break the bank? You’ve got options! Down below you’ll find a list of some of our favorite gadgets that (A) you should still be able to get in time for Christmas and (B) won’t cost you more than $100. This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission. AirTags Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino Earlier this year, Apple debuted the AirTag — a little puck-shaped widget meant to be thrown into your bag or attached to your keys to track their location. Know your bag is in the house somewhere but just can’t find it? Tap a button, make it beep. And, well, these things are quite good! I bought fou

Steve Dent Contributor Steve Dent is an associate editor at Engadget . More posts by this contributor William Shatner’s space voyage is becoming an Amazon documentary Nissan to invest $17.6 billion in EV development over the next five years The US government will place eight Chinese companies including drone manufacturer DJI on an investment blocklist for alleged involvement in surveillance of Uyghur Muslims , the Financial Times has reported. The firms will reportedly be put on the Treasure department’s “Chinese military-industrial complex companies” list on Tuesday, meaning US citizens will be barred from making any investments. DJI is already on the Department of Commerce’s Entity list, meaning American companies can’t sell it components unless they have a license. At the time, the government said it was among companies that “enabled wide-scale human rights abuses within China through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high-technology surveillance.” However

Chinese smartphone giant Oppo revealed its first in-house chipset at its annual innovation event hosted in Shenzhen on Tuesday. The MariSilicon X chip announced — named after the Mariana Trench — is a neural processing unit that aims to boost photo and video performance through machine learning. The move adds Oppo to a list of smartphone makers that are designing their own chips, such as Apple. The MariSilicon project, headed by Qualcomm veteran Jiang Bo, started only in 2019. The silicon is being manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC)’s 6-nanometer process technology and will be featured in Oppo’s upcoming flagship handset in the first quarter of 2022. The ongoing global chip shortage will not affect the production of MariSilicon X, Jiang told the press at the event. Oppo also unveiled the third generation of its self-developed smart glasses, dubbing it an “assisted reality” device instead of an augmented reality one. The description is apt. The headpiece, w

After the resounding success of several crowdfunding campaigns for its gamified smart bird feeder, Bird Buddy has raised an $8.5 million seed round. Its first product will ship in a few months, but it’s just the start of what the company hopes will be a new approach to using tech to better enjoy nature. It’s an ambitious statement of purpose from a company working on something as apparently trivial as a bird feeder. But co-founder and CEO Franci Zidar explained how this market is something of a sleeping giant. “Birdwatching is the second biggest outdoor hobby in the U.S., and huge internationally,” he said. No doubt this trend accelerated during the pandemic, when for many people birds provided a pleasant reminder that there is indeed a world outside their windows. “We spent the first half of 2020 doing a lot of validation, and it’s something people are really passionate and active about. Every metric that came back was insane.” Still, one wonders, if everyone loves birds so much,

Candela makes an unusual style of watercraft called a hydrofoiling boat, which glides above the sea on fins for a smoother, more efficient ride — doubly unusual, in fact, in that it is electrically propelled. The company has raised $24M to accelerate production of its existing small craft and a larger commercial one, in pursuit of cleaner and generally more future-proof waters. The principle on which these boats work is actually fairly easy to understand. As a boat moves through the water, it tends to propel itself upwards and out as well as forward, and in a traditional watercraft — especially in choppy seas — this leads to the boat bouncing up and down on the water as it goes. Hydrofoiling watercraft rise up too, but unlike a normal keeled boat the craft has a set of strong, bladelike fins attached to the powertrain and a horizontal fin below. At cruising speed the boat rises up on these fins so that they are the only things under the water, reducing drag and chop considerably and

Berlin-based smartphone-as-a-service provider, Everphone , has topped up with $65 million in a Series C equity raise in addition to taking $135M in debt financing — for a total raise of $200M. The latest tranche of funding is led by German private equity investor, Cadence Growth Capital (CGC), which is now Everphone’s biggest shareholder. Deutsche Telekom, AlleyCorp and signals Venture Capital also participated as returning investors. The new financing follows Everphone’s $40M Series B, closed in summer 2020, as the 2016-founded startup reported an uplift in interest driven by the COVID-19-triggered remote working boom. Everphone’s business takes care of the supply, support, repair/replacement and recycling of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) for enterprises customers — billed under a per-user monthly subscription. It’s a device rental model the startup touts as being more sustainable than alternative routes for provisioning mobile devices (such as buying devices outright

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. Looking for our other guides? Find them here! As we wade into the second pandemic-era holiday season, there’s no better time to throw yourself headlong into a new hobby. Or that’s what you should tell your loved ones when you gift them one of the cameras on our list of photography gift ideas this year. Mobile photography is ubiquitous but it still can’t compete with the control and quality afforded by some of the most innovative cameras around, so don’t rule out a serious upgrade for anyone on your gift list who’s looking to get more creative this winter. GoPro Hero 10 Black Image Credits: GoPro For action and sports, GoPro still leads the pack. The tiny cube-like GoPro Hero 10 Black can record any thrill-seeking endeavor you can dream up and pull off, with excellent waterproofing and a wealth of useful accessories to make it happen. The GoPro Hero 10 Black is the cream of the