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Today’s cars are dumb where they should be smart, and smart where they should be dumb. Enough already. Make a car that’s pretty much all dumb and watch it sell — because what automakers are giving people is so bad, they’ll pay more to have less of it. Cars now are like budget smartphones with wheels: loaded with bloatware, unintuitive and slow to operate. Carmakers have always struggled with user interfaces, but until recently the biggest problem we had was “too many knobs.” How I long for those days! The proliferation of touchscreens and LCDs has made every car feel like a karaoke booth. Animations show reclaimed energy from braking, the speedometer changes color as you approach the limit, the fan speed and direction is under three menus. And besides being non-functional, these interfaces are even ugly! The type, the layouts, and animations scream “designed by committee and approved by someone who doesn’t have to use it.” Not to mention the privacy and security concerns. I was dub

Igor Bonifacic Contributor Igor Bonifacic is a contributing writer at Engadget . More posts by this contributor US airlines warn C-Band 5G could cause ‘catastrophic disruption’ Magic Leap grants healthcare startups access to its new AR headset ahead of mid-2022 release Following a two-month delay , Valve’s Steam Deck will launch on February 25th. In a blog post the company published on Wednesday, Valve said it would open orders to the first batch of reservation holders that day. Those customers will have 72 hours to purchase the handheld. If they don’t use the opportunity, Valve will release their spot to the next person in the reservation queue. The first orders will then ship on February 28th. Moving forward, Valve says it plans open orders to more customers on a weekly basis. Steam Deck launches on February 25th, 2022! https://t.co/6WKynbibkv pic.twitter.com/Un54Jwdq1H — Steam (@Steam) January 26, 2022 Valve had planned to release the Steam Deck at the e

NASA’s Spinoff magazine is one of the things I look forward to reading every year. The space agency’s research trickles down to the rest of the world in surprising and interesting ways, which it tracks and collects in this annual publication. This year is no different, and NASA tech can be found in everything from hiking gadgets to heavy industry and, funnily enough, space. There are dozens of technologies that have made their way to everyday use in a variety of places highlighted in this year’s issue , which you can browse here . (It’s about 60 pages long, so pour some coffee and settle in.) I talked with Daniel Lockney, the head of NASA’s Tech Transfer Program overseeing the deployment of its tech and research among terrestrial companies looking to put it to good use. “Typically what happens is: NASA develops something, they report it to my office, and we look at it to figure out, first, does it work? And second, who else can use it? And if someone can, we figure out how to get i

There’s a global competition to build the biggest, most powerful computers on the planet, and Meta (AKA Facebook) is about to jump into the melee with the “AI Research SuperCluster,” or RSC . Once fully operational it may well sit in the top ten fastest supercomputers in the world, which it will use for the massive number crunching needed for language and computer vision modeling. Large AI models, of which OpenAI’s GPT-3 is probably the best known, don’t get put together on laptops and desktops; they’re the final product of weeks and months of sustained calculations by high performance computing systems that dwarf even the most cutting-edge gaming rig. And the faster you can complete the training process for a model, the faster you can test it and produce a new and better one. When training times are measured in months, that really matters. RSC is up and running and the company’s researchers are already putting it to work… with user-generated data, it must be said, though Meta was ca

Peloton ended 2020 on top. Its own supply chain issues had presented a hurdle — but if anything, these were side effects of the company’s own stratospheric successes. It simply couldn’t keep up with demand , one of the better problems to have as a business on the rise. Always leave them wanting more, as P.T. Barnum may or may not have once said. The connected fitness firm had already developed a kind of cultish following in various upscale circles, well before most of us had an inkling of knowledge about novel coronaviruses. But the pandemic accelerated Peloton’s success beyond what most could have reasonably predicted. Gyms across the world began to shut down, and with everyone stuck inside, home fitness provided a solution. Peloton, offering some extra connectedness in a socially distanced world, was a hit. Investors bought in, sending Peloton’s share from around $30 at the start of 2020 to above $160 in the closing days of the year. In 2021, however, things hit the skids, with Pel

Tech sees differently, and can fuse multiple types of data we can’t even perceive: lidar, IR, ultrasonic, and so on. Metalenz , maker of highly compact “2D” cameras for advanced sensing, hopes to bring polarized light into the mix for security and safety with its PolarEyes tech. Polarization isn’t a quality of light that’s often paid much attention. It has to do with the orientation of the photon’s movement as it waves its way through the air, and generally you can get the info you need from light without checking its polarization. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless. “Polarization generally gets thrown out, but it really can tell you something about what the objects you’re looking at are made out of. And it can find contrast that normal cameras can’t see,” said Metalenz co-founder and CEO Rob Devlin. “In healthcare, it’s been used historically to tell whether a cell is cancerous or not — the color and intensity don’t change in the visible light, but looking at polarization it works.”

French startup Exotec has raised a $335 million Series D round in a new round of funding led by Goldman Sachs’ Growth Equity business. Following today’s investment, the company has reached a valuation of $2 billion. Exotec sells a complete end-to-end solution to turn a regular warehouse into a partially automated logistics platform. It’s a hardware and software solution that replaces some human tasks. 83North and Dell Technologies Capital also participated in the funding round. Previous Exotec investors include Bpifrance, Iris Capital, 360 Capital Partners and Breega. Image Credits: Exotec The key component of the Exotec system is called the Skypods. These low-profile robots roam the floor autonomously. When they’re next to the right rack, they can go up the rack to pick up a bin and then go down with the right bin. This is particularly useful to increase the storage density of a warehouse as you can store products a few meters above ground. The Skypod then caries the bin to

Leica’s a strange one. It only puts out a handful of cameras every year, and most of them are remixes or minor iterations on previous models. Since 2017 its flagship has been the solid but still somewhat archaic M10, but now the company has revealed its successor: the even more solid and also still somewhat archaic M11 . Leica really defined the rangefinder style in cameras and its film models are legendary. In the digital era they are known more for their prices than anything else. While the build and image quality of the M10, Q2, and other cameras was unimpeachable, you could get a lot more camera for considerably less money elsewhere. That won’t change with the M11, but at least the new model brings some much-needed modern features. Perhaps the most important is the switch to a backside-illuminated sensor. This misleading term refers to putting the light-sensitive part of the sensor towards the aperture rather than letting it sit behind wiring and other components. BSI sensors usu

Perhaps 2022 will be the year consumer health tracking moves beyond the wrist. We’ve seen Oura’s rise over the past few years and a CES that brought with it a couple of ring fitness trackers. Following Google’s addition to vital and sleep tracking on the Nest Home, Sengled is adding the feature to a smart lightbulb. So, why not the face mask? Health-related face coverings have long been a fixture in a number of countries, like China, and are pretty much everywhere in this pandemic world. It’s hard to say whether mainstream adoption of masks will outlive COVID-19 in the U.S., but as the pandemic drags on, it seems increasingly likely that they’ll remain a part of daily lives for the foreseeable future. Image Credits: Northwestern University The face is a solid position from which to monitor certain vitals, and the widespread adoption of masks offers a relatively fixed spot to collect that data. Accordingly, a team at Northwestern University is showing off FaceBit — the “FitBit

French startup Back Market has raised another mega round of funding. In May, the company raised a $335 million Series D round . Today, the company is announcing a $510 million Series E round, which values the company at $5.7 billion. If you’re not familiar with Back Market, the company operates a marketplace of refurbished electronics devices — mostly smartphones. In other words, if you think smartphones are expensive, you can get a phone that is still in good condition without paying full price. There are many reasons why consumers might buy a phone on Back Market instead of buying a new phone from a carrier or smartphone manufacturer. In addition to saving money, many customers think new phones only feature incremental updates compared to previous generation models. Many customers also want to avoid generating additional waste and choose a used device for that reason. Many old smartphones simply end up in a drawer after all. A new battery and sometimes a new display might be eno

For fifty-four years, big and small hardware manufacturers that hoped to reach their target audiences rolled out new products at the Consumer Electronics Show. The first CES event in June 1967 drew 17,500 attendees, where many in the crowd were absolutely dazzled by GE’s new 24-pound color television. In the intervening decades, the conference grew so much, it essentially created its own gravity. The last in-person CES held in 2020 attracted a total verified attendance of 171,268, according to organizers. The trade show shifted to online-only in 2021, but CES returned last week, even though many exhibitors and publications (including this one) declined to send representatives, citing the ongoing omicron surge. “It’s time we return to making the world better rather than living in fear,” wrote Consumer Trade Association president and CEO Gary Shapiro in an opinion column . But just 40,000 people attended, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal . That’s a 75% decline. If an event o

Long gone are the days when CES actually stood for “Consumer Electronics Show” — the CTA has seen to that in its various small print. I recommend you check out our recent best of CES 2012 story for a look back on the days when things like smartphones took center stage at the event. Mobile World Congress has taken some of the wind out of CES’s sails, along with an increased push for companies to debut flagships at their own events. This year we got, what, Samsung budget-flagship and a preview of the latest OnePlus device from a parallel event? Certainly things weren’t helped along by the fact that LG and HTC — which were both involved in the show in some form — are either mostly or entirely out of the smartphone game. And Huawei, which had a major presence at the show a few years back, won’t be participating in CES any time soon. Much of that vacuum has been filled by transportation. Over the past decade, CES has transformed into a major automotive show, as carmakers look to prove to

US medical device maker, Abbott, is moving into making general purpose consumer biosensing wearables. The company has been making continuous glucose monitor (CGM) hardware for diabetes management for years (since 2014) — but in a healthtech keynote at CES yesterday, Abbott’s chairman and CEO, Robert B Ford, announced it’s developing a new line of consumer biowearables — called Lingo — intended for more general fitness and wellness purposes. “Technology gives us the power to digitize, decentralize and democratize healthcare, create a shared language between you and your doctor — and put more control of your health in your hands,” he said during the keynote. “We’re creating a future that will bring you and your loved ones care that’s more personal and precise. It’s happening right now. And its potential is no less than incredible.” Ford said the Lingo sensing technology is being designed to track “key signals” in the body — such as glucose, ketones and lactate — adding that it could

For four weeks during 2021, this TechCrunch reporter took the plunge and tested a “metabolic fitness” service from Bangalore-based startup Ultrahuman . The tracker program, branded Cyborg, uses arm-mounted medical grade hardware to get a real-time read-out of your blood glucose — using that dynamic data-point to power a quantified health service that scores what you eat and how you move, nudging you to make healthier lifestyle choices throughout the day. Research has linked chronic metabolic inflammation, from factors such as poor diet and physical inactivity, to the risk of developing a number of diseases — from diabetes to cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and even cancer. So the theory behind the product is that lots of incremental lifestyle choices can stack up to a healthier long term outlook — if you’re able to ‘optimize’ these decisions to avoid triggers for inflammation and oxidative stress. Here follows my long read on the curious experience of living with a ski