Latest Technology

It looks like Miko’s participation in the Disney Accelerator is paying off in a big way, as the company is bringing Disney and Pixar characters to its Miko 3 robot for kids. The company launched its Disney collaboration today, available to customers in more than 140 countries. The funky little robot can play animated story books with stories featuring stars from “Moana,” “Frozen,” “The Lion King,” “Toy Story,” “Big Hero 6,” “Coco” and a bunch of other well-loved stories. “Bringing the imaginative worlds of Disney and Pixar to our platform represents a big step in kids robotics” Sneh Vaswani, Miko co-founder and CEO said in an email to TechCrunch. “Miko is thrilled to be the first robotics platform to have such an innovative collaboration with Disney, and we look forward to raising the benchmark for kids engagement together.” The company has more than 170 employees globally and offices in the innovation hubs of Silicon Valley and Mumbai. It was founded in 2015, and was the only part...

Imagine building some of the most sophisticated hardware-driven technologies in the world – spacecraft, drones or autonomous vehicles. Then imagine being unable to easily share your data to different teams, having to use clunky user interfaces, and relying on a single person manually inputting data in an Excel spreadsheet to bottom line your project. “You’d be shocked at how archaic the tools are,” Lucy Hoag, co-founder of Violet Labs , said. She wasn’t referring to the sophistication of the tools, but the way in which the hardware production toolset is balkanized across both teams and tasks. It’s a problem, common across the industry, that she and her co-founder Caitlin Curtis say leads to major inefficiencies. To solve this problem, Violet Labs is developing a cloud-based platform that can act as a single source of truth, collecting the data from all the tools and making them easily accessible across teams. Hoag likened the product to Zapier, which uses APIs to talk to different to...

Fresh produce is an important cornerstone of a healthy diet, and if Click & Grow gets a say, it wants to make that easier by inviting you to grow your own food, right at home. The company today launches the Click & Grow 25, which the company says is designed “to provide a farmers’ market food experience.” The company’s product comes with a plant subscription, and is aiming to “disrupt inefficient food supply chains and lower the cost of enjoying healthy food,” focusing in particular on leafy green vegetables. The benefit is two-fold; of everything you have in your fridge, leafy greens get sad the fastest — according to some studies, 60% of ’em go to waste before we get a chance to make like rabbits and wolf ’em down. Leafy greens are also one of the most readily available sources of vitamin A, vitamin C and other nutrients. Red and dark green leafy vegetables are high in antioxidants, Vitamin B6 and other nutrients. Click & Grow is offering an opportunity to make food hy...

Four months after opening its Self Service Repair offerings to iPhone owners in the U.S. , Apple is adding a handful of MacBooks to the mix. When the laptop repair program opens tomorrow, it will include the 2020 M1 MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro and the 14- and 16-inch 2021 M1 Pros. As with the iPhone before it, Apple will continue adding more models (and repair types) moving forward. That includes the new M2 MacBooks (released after work began on the project) and additional systems like the iMac and Mac Studio Display. There’s already a fairly wide range of repairs available, including the display, battery, top and bottom case, TrackPad, Touch ID module, speakers, audio board and Logic Board, among others. Prices, predictably, range fairly dramatically, from $5 for five screws, $12 for an audio board and $29 for speakers to ~$580 for the logic board. The company says prices are the same as what it charges for the 5,000 or so Apple Authorized Service Providers around the count...

One doubts Samsung’s convictions at their own peril. The company will be the first to point to the O.G. Note phablet as the ultimate expression of this phenomenon. The line may be gone, having been absorbed into the flagship Galaxy S product, but its influence on the industry is still being felt a decade after its release left pundits wondering whether the company had utterly lost it. A convincing argument could be made that the Note, too, gave birth to Samsung’s foldable ambitions, as well. While it’s true the company has done an increasingly good job shrinking the screen-to-body ratio, there’s a very practical limitation in smartphone screen size. At a certain point, one simply runs out of pocket, and 6.8 inches might just be that figure. When the first Galaxy Fold arrived in late 2019, it delivered the promise of a 7.3-inch, pocketable screen. For whatever issues that first device may have had (and it had plenty), it had cracked the code. For that reason alone, it felt like a tast...

I have been carrying both of Samsung’s new foldables on my person when I leave the house for the last few days. It’s mostly for testing purposes, of course, but there’s also a fun game I like to play when I see people I know. I pull them both out, stick them in front of the person and see how they react. This entirely unscientific approach has yielded results I’d say are roughly in line with the numbers the mobile giant threw out just ahead of the recent Unpacked event. “Last year, 70% of Galaxy foldable users turned to the Flip to help them see the world from a different point of view,” mobile head TM Roh noted in a blog post . The sentiment, I think, was a surprise to Samsung. The company has previously positioned the Galaxy Z Fold as the flagship of its foldables play. And why not? It’s bigger, flashier, pricier and — perhaps most important of all — it was first. The device has been a kind of platonic representation of foldable phones. It is, likely, the form factor most imagine w...

Snap may have flown a bit too close to the sun in its development of the palm-sized selfie drone, Pixy. Following a late-April announcement , the social media firm has already begun pumping the brakes on the project, per a Wall Street Journal report . CEO Evan Spiegel has apparently relayed the message that the hardware is one causality of re-prioritization, amid broader economic concerns. All is not lost for the product, exactly. Snap will apparently continue selling through its already existing limited inventory of the $250 device. The company declined to offer a comment on the report. The firm hasn’t exactly been a hardware powerhouse. The Pixy joined the company’s Spectacle glasses, which have been something of a mixed bag – though the product recently shifted from the novelty of face-worn cameras to a product focused on the burgeoning AR category. Pixy, it seems, won’t be afforded the luxury of finding market fit. Hardware is hard, of course. Meta has notably been going through...

The power grid supply in Africa is erratic and inconsistent, affecting rural and urban households and businesses. For restaurants or neighborhood stores dealing with perishables, frozen foods and beverages, having intermittent electricity inhibits the growth of their businesses. Some of them turn to diesel-fueled generators, which are expensive and toxic, to provide electricity. Companies such as Koolboks are providing an alternative by creating a solution that can generate refrigeration without power. The sustainable cooling company, which offers accessible cold storage solutions to businesses across Africa, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. Nigeria-based growth equity fund Aruwa Capital Management led the round with participation from Acumen, Blue Earth Capital, All On, GSMA and other investors. Koolboks has raised $3.5 million since Ayoola Dominic and Deborah Gael founded the company in 2018. At the time, Koolboks’ initial product was essentially an outdoor camping refr...

Some parts of China are suffering from record high temperatures in the past few weeks, prompting local governments to halt industrial power use, including those of battery plants. When news reaches the West, it generates fear-mongering headlines like “China heat wave shuts Tesla suppliers” which have likely rattled investors (because Tesla is all we care about, right?). But is the EV giant really suffering from China’s scorching heat? First off, we need to look at which factories are affected. Lithium battery giant CATL is among the companies that have been ordered to shut down production in the landlocked province of Sichuan, according to a local media report . The pause, which lasts from August 15 to 20, is part of the province’s effort to ration electricity as it suffers from a devastating drought and heat wave. While CATL, a major battery supplier to Tesla, might have trouble fulfilling some orders for customers, there’s no indication that Tesla is the one to bear the cost. For ...

If you’ve heard of Tineco , it’s probably because the 24-year-old company has been making vacuums and hair dryers for a hot minute. The company’s next product is a $339 toaster that connects to your Wi-Fi network and can toast your toast with science and precision, and makes me wonder if there’s any device in our house that’s safe from the internet-of-everything wave. It’s not a great sign when I get a PR pitch for a company, and my first thought is that a certain Twitter account will have a field day with it. In mid-September, Tineco’s Toasty One is going on sale. The company even trademarked part of its tech (IntelliHeat USPTO 97453909 , I just know you were curious) to show how much it means business in the universe of perfect toast. “Two slices don’t have to be the same, meaning that you can individually adjust the toast for each slot. Crucially, this means you no longer need to worry about “who goes first” – two people can have their ideal toast cooking away, simultaneously,” ...

South Korean company Naver Z is the brain behind the popular 3D-avatar app Zepeto . Today, the company announced it made a strategic investment in the Danish animation and motion capture company Rokoko . The mocap (motion capture) company has more than 50,000 users all over the world, including some of the biggest names in the biz, but the majority of its customers are emerging indie creators who, until Rokoko came along, had no affordable way to use high-end motion capture and animation tools. With Rokoko’s mocap suit and gloves and an advanced motion editing software suite, Rokoko’s ecosystem of tools is a lifesaver for creators who have to animate characters; without having to use a specialized studio with cameras that capture the movement, the suit itself tracks how the character is moving and translates that into movements that animators can use to animate their characters. “We raised $3m as it was primarily a strategic round to bring Naver Z in, and then some of our previous in...

Happy unofficial foldables week! An increasingly rare bright spot in the broadly struggling smartphone space, manufacturers are looking toward the emerging form factor to help kickstart them out of the doldrums. Following announcements by Xiaomi and category-leader Samsung , Motorola returned this week with the latest version of the revived Razr brand. The latest version of the product finally bumps it up to legitimately flagship specs with the inclusion of the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip — much like the new Galaxy Fold and Flip and Xiaomi’s Mix Fold 2. And also, much like the new Xiaomi, the 2022 Motorola Razr comes with a major catch: it’s China-only . For now, at least. The device was announced at an event in parent company Lenovo’s home country, alongside the new Moto X30 Pro and S30 Pro. Given the brand’s strength in other markets like Brazil and, surprisingly, the U.S., it would be a strange move to keep this thing China-only. For the moment, however, wider availability is very ...

FundamentalVR , an immersive simulation platform for medical and healthcare professions, has raised $20 million in a round of funding to “accelerate skill-transfer and surgical proficiency” through virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) applications. Despite its decades-long promise, VR hasn’t traveled too far beyond gaming circles or niche industrial use-cases, though this is something that Meta and its Big Tech ilk are pushing aggressively to change . However, among the industries that have long embraced VR are medicine and healthcare . By way of example, back in 2009, a neurosurgeon in Canada used a VR-based simulator to carry out a dry-run of a real brain tumor surgery in what was thought to be a world’s first at the time. More recently, VR has been used in all manner of healthcare scenarios, from treating social anxiety and other mental health conditions to surgical training . Big impact Medical simulation serves as a powerful example of how VR and related MR systems ...

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of needing continuous EKG monitoring, you’ve probably used a Holter monitor . It’s like carrying a 1980s walkman made of metal with a bunch of wires going from it to your chest. If that sounds uncomfortable, and as if you won’t sleep or enjoy showers much for the two weeks you need to carry it around, you’ve neatly stumbled across the use case for the Mawi Heart Patch. The company just released its product, a two-lead cardiac monitor that can be read in real time. There are consumer-grade products that can do EKG readings, including the Withings ScanWatch (and its fancier-looking sibling, the ScanWatch Horizon), and there are other patches on the market, such as the Zio patch , but Mawi claims to have done something unique, and suggests that its Heart Patch is the first ever single-use, two-lead cardiac monitor to reach the market. Withings doubles down on the classy with ScanWatch Horizon The company describes it as “a stick-and-go, wireless...

Over the past year, Samsung recognized something we’d known all along: The clamshell form factor makes sense. It’s something those of us who are old enough to remember a pre-smartphone era are wired to appreciate. It’s small, it fits in your pocket, it opens up and gets bigger. That’s not to take away from the impressive bit of engineering that is the Galaxy Fold . It’s more that the current state of foldable production means that the “space saving” design of Samsung’s ur-foldable still results in what is effectively a big, heavy object. The first time I reviewed the Galaxy Flip was the first time I could legitimately imagine myself owning one of these devices. Not to mention the fairly significant price gulf between the two. Image Credits: Brian Heater Today at its twice-yearly Unpacked smartphone event , the company unveiled the latest additions to its foldable line, the Galaxy Flip 4 and Galaxy Fold 4. Together, the two devices have taken the secondary flagship spot formerly ...