Latest Technology

It’s been a tough few years for Berlin-based femtech hardware startup Inne which came out of stealth R&D in the fall of 2019, shortly before COVID-19 hit Europe. By January 2020, f ounder and CEO Eirini Rapti tells us she was busy making final inspections ahead of the launch of its debut product — a connected device it calls a “minilab” for at-home, saliva-based hormone testing to support fertility and cycle tracking — but then, in just a few weeks, the region was plunged into lockdown and everything changed. Hardware startups are rarely smooth sailing at the best of times. But the coronavirus pandemic created a cascade of new challenges for Rapti and her team around supply chain and logistics — upsetting their careful calculations on unit economics. The pandemic also called a halt to a major piece of research work the startup had lined up with a US university to study its hormone-tracking method for a key contraceptive use-case — a product it had intended to prioritize but co...

Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is something I look forward to every year. The students and young entrepreneurs who submit their extremely early stage projects to this global competition are like the seeds of future startups and potentially world-changing projects. This year’s winner, V Bionic , created a robotic glove to help patients with neurological damage recover faster at a fraction of the price of other options. The team, from Saudi Arabia, was led by Zain Samdani, who although he is a student has been researching and inventing things in the robotics category for years. The rest of the crew are similarly at the starts of interesting careers in the industry. The ExoHeal glove is a mechanized exoskeleton made to be worn by people who have suffered neurological damage causing problems with hand movements. We’ve seen a few of these efforts come out of robotics labs and startups over the years; the general line of thought is that of replicating the work of a physical therapist, who observ...

If I were to make a list of things that I didn’t think needed to get smarter, bike pedals would be somewhere near the top of the list. And yet, when Redshift Sports showed me its shiny (literally!) new pedals, I had one of those “omg this makes so much sense” moments. In a nutshell, it’s simple: Stick bike lights inside pedals to help draw attention to the cyclist as they are pedaling about. Stationery bike lights disappear in the rich visual landscape of traffic, the company suggests, but by attaching it to the part of the bike that moves more than anything else — i.e. the pedals — the theory is that the additional movement will catch someone’s eyes and make you more visible in traffic. Makes sense to me; we’ve stuck reflectors on bike pedals for as long as I can remember (and I’m an old man who grew up in the Homeland of Bicycles as Transportation ), so it stands to reason when the technology catches up to be able to actually stick lights inside the pedals, it’s a natural evolutio...

I tried out the brand new Withings ScanWatch about six months ago, and concluded that it was a great smartwatch for people who prioritize their health over wearing a tiny iPhone-like device on their wrists. Today, the French company announced a classier-looking version of the same watch, borrowing design language from dive watches of yore. As an avid scuba diver, I’m always a little confused by “dive watches”. Sure, the 10-bar water resistance means that you can go to 100 meters (300 ft), which is deeper than any recreational diver would — but if you’re going to those depths, you’d be well advised to bring a real dive computer along. Still, the style is snazzy; the luminescent watch face and the rotating bezel make it look even less like a smart watch, which is a bonus, if you, like me, care about such things. Carrying a $499 price tag, it isn’t cheap, but with an impressive set of health-focused features and good looks, it’s still reasonably priced. The watch can go up to a month ...

Apple has released a bevy of new accessibility features for iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac, including a universal live captioning tool, improved visual and auditory detection modes, and iOS access to WatchOS apps. The new capabilities will arrive “later this year” as updates roll out to various platforms. The most widely applicable tool is probably live captioning, already very popular with tools like Ava, which raised $10 million the other day to expand its repertoire. Apple’s tool will perform a similar function to Ava’s, essentially allowing any spoken content a user encounters to be captioned in real time, from videos and podcasts to FaceTime and other calls. FaceTime in particular will get a special interface with a speaker-specific scrolling transcript above the video windows. The captions can be activated via the usual accessibility settings, and quickly turned on and off or the pane in which they appear expanded or contracted. And it all occurs using the device’s built-in ML ...

Most of the time no one has to think about how the mobile networks we all rely on work. But it won’t surprise many to hear that, as is often the case with infrastructure, some pieces are the latest tech and others haven’t changed in decades. Eridan is a well-funded startup aiming to replace one of the latter with fundamentally different hardware approach could make mobile networks an order of magnitude more efficient. Everywhere you look — or more likely, just above where you look — there are cell towers that connect your phone to the broader internet. You can think of these as being made up of three big pieces: the modem, which exchanges data with the rest of the net; the antenna, which beams out the radio signal in synchrony with dozens or hundreds of devices nearby; and the transceiver, which sits in between and converts the digital data of the modem to the actual RF signal the antenna puts out. Obviously the modem must change with the times and increase capacity, and it has done...

DJI has just introduced a new drone — its most capable ever to squeak under the 250 gram limit that keeps operators free from a whole host of headaches and restrictions for flight (note that local laws and rules still do apply — being small doesn’t mean you can do anything you want). The DJI Mini 3 Pro drone is the first in the series to add that ‘Pro’ moniker, and it does a lot to earn it, making this the best overall value yet in the consumer/enthusiast drone space for people who want portability, affordability and image/video quality. The Basics The DJI Mini 3 Pro is still small enough to earn its name, but it is a bit larger than prior iterations. While the drone’s weight comes in at 249 grams with the included standard battery pack, the wingspan in particular is a lot larger than the original Mini in particular, when the arms are extended for flight. This provides additional flight control capabilities, and it only barely changes the drone’s profile when it’s folded for carry, ...

If you’ve always wanted Giancarlo Esposito — the actor playing the meth-slinging Los Pollos Hermanos boss Gustavo Fring from “Breaking Bad” — to guide you through your choice of music, ho boy does Sonos have a treat for you. Esposito lent his voice to a Sonos speaker near you, alongside its long-awaited voice control feature set. The new voice functionality will be available as a free update for supported speakers. The company’s implementation of voice functionality is privacy-forward, and promises to keep the dulcet tones of your top-secret conversations to itself; the voice command systems are entirely on-device, without shipping clips of your voice or transcripts to Sonos. A nice touch in a world where it seems that the other voice-controlled speakers take great pleasure in livestreaming your commands to Google, Amazon or Apple servers. You can shout at your Sonos speakers to control Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer and Pandora at launch, with other services to follow in due tim...

Offering a sneak preview of the Pixel 7 wasn’t enough, so Google’s really leaning in. Today at I/O, the company announced that it’s returning to the tablet business with a new device set for, get this, a 2023 launch. “Normally we wouldn’t tease a new product before it’s ready,” said Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh, “but there’s so much amazing energy around tablets in the developer community that we wanted to bring you all into the loop.” The Pixel Tablet is going to be something of a spiritual successor to 2018’s Pixel Slate, which the company quietly discontinued last year. Like the Pixel Book, the hardware was nice, but in a world full of super cheap Chromebooks, Google never really nailed the “why.” The Pixel Tablet does break from those products in one key way: it’s actually an Android device. In a world of ChromeOS dominance, the company is attempting to reinvigorate the Android tablet market. Presumably part of the thinking here was to find another home for Google’s c...

The last thing we need in this world is more guns. But we’re getting them whether we like it or not, so wouldn’t it be nice if those guns had safety mechanisms like our phones, making them impossible for anyone but their owners to use? That’s what Biofire is building, and it has raised $17 million to finalize and commercialize its biometric-secured firearm. Founder Kai Kloepfer said he began looking into the idea after the Aurora mass shooting in 2012. “I started to think, what could I possibly do to have an impact on this? How can I apply product building skills to what would appear to be a public health challenge? The problem of children and teens finding guns, accidents and suicides — that was the place where I really saw tech and a physical, product-based solution having an impact,” he said. Let’s be clear on something first. A gun that only the shooter can use could hardly have prevented most mass shootings. Gun ownership is also closely correlated with suicide, increasing risk...

A long, long time ago before the iPod, MP3 players were badly designed devices with insufficient storage. The market was ripe for a change, and Steve Jobs, who had returned to Apple four years prior , was ready to give it to us. On October 23, 2001 the company released its first music player with a scrolling wheel and 5GB and 10GB storage options. Who would ever need so much? And it was a design like no other. In fact, it would have a similar impact on music lovers that the Sony Walkman had two decades earlier . We would fall in love with it and the device would be the first of many that led Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to multi-trillion dollar company . And a humble music player got it all started. Just yesterday, the company announced the end of the road for venerated device. That it lasted this long, was a testament to its popularity, but when the company released the iPhone in 2007 , it seemed to mark the beginning of the end for a music-only gadget. Why would you need...