The latest robots out of MIT are small enough to float “indefinitely” in the air. Researchers accomplished the feat by attaching 2D electronics to colloids — tiny particles measuring around one-billionth to one-millionth of a meter. All told, the devices are roughly the size of a human egg cell.
What’s more, the addition of photodiode semiconductors means the tiny individual systems are able to to be self-powered, without the need for a battery. The system converts light into a small electrical charge that’s enough to keep the device’s on-board environmental sensors running, while storing on-board information.
As to what these tiny robots are actually good for, MIT plans to send them into hard to reach spots to monitor environments. The two at the top of the list are pipelines and the human body — so, two very different kinds of plumbing systems, really.
“The researchers hope to lay the groundwork for devices that could be dispersed to carry out diagnostic journeys through anything from the human digestive system to oil and gas pipelines,” MIT says, “or perhaps to waft through air to measure compounds inside a chemical processor or refinery.”
Basically you send it in one end and retrieve it on the other — which, again, means…different things in different systems. Once retrieved, information collected by the sensors can be downloaded off the system and analyzed.
Amazon is today announcing the new batch of startups joining its Alexa Accelerator program, powered by Techstars. Members of last year’s Amazon’s Alexa Accelerator program, which backs companies developing new experiences using voice-based technologies, went on to raise over $10 million in venture capital following their participation in the program, says Amazon. The new group includes startups focused on business use cases, STEM education for kids, accessible technology, and more.
The idea behind the accelerator is to help fuel early-stage companies developing for voice, giving Amazon an equity stake in the businesses.
The teams will participate in a three-month long accelerator program that culminates on October 9th with Demo Night, where they’ll present their business to venture capitalists and angel investors, and present their new Alexa experiences.
Amazon says it received hundreds of applications from 44 countries around the world for the 2018 program, and narrowed it down to nine it believes have the most potential.
During the accelerator program, the companies will improve their products, refine their business model, and develop for Alexa, while receiving mentorship from both Techstars and Amazon, as well as the broader Seattle community.
This year’s batch includes participation from the following:
Blutag seems especially relevant to Amazon’s interests, as its company is helping stores create voice-based shopping experiences for their customers. It aims to enable retailers to build a voice-based store without coding, allowing customers to shop by asking Alexa for a particular product, then receive personalized product suggestions over text or email.
This startup is operating in the smart home space, offering a produce that connects to the home’s main water line to monitor household water use, in order to help homeowners gain money-saving insights and detect leaks.
HelixAI is taking Alexa to scientific laboratories. Not to be confused with genetic services marketplace Helix, this startup’s HelixAI digital assistant can respond to natural language queries to provide scientists and other others in lab settings with real-time information about their operating procedures, lab safety information, workflow and processes, and reference information. For example, you can ask HelixAI things like “what’s the boiling point of benzene?” or “What about the cut site for the restriction enzyme EcoRI?”
Imageous is expanding Alexa’s smart home capabilities to the “smart building.” Its smart facilities AI assistant for occupants of commercial buildings brings the benefits of AI technology to building operators. The AI can take advantage of system data (environmental), social data from the occupant population (if they’re reporting they’re hot, cold or comfortable), and external data sources (e.g weather or traffic data), to optimize the building for energy use and comfort with a focus on efficiency and cost savings.
Novalia offers a Bluetooth platform connected to paper-thin self-adhesive touch sensors that capture data through touch, in order to create immersive, touch-based experiences, Its audio platform then responds to touch, and turns it into audio through a surface sound actuator or line out. The company has worked with a number of brands on digital signage, touch-based posters, and other projects.
This company is developing AI-powered conversations for small businesses to replace phone calls for things like bookings. Currently it operates over text message, but an Alexa integration could translate this to voice. (A less troublesome version of Google’s Duplex, perhaps, as it doesn’t try to impersonate a human.)
Boston-based Unruly is combining STEM education with physical activity by building programmable, electronic floor tiles that kids can code, then jump on, and run around on to play interactive games. The startup includes former engineers from Hasbro, iRobot, Mattel and Rethink Robotics.
This company is working to make voice technology accessible, with the development of Automatic Speech Recognition technology (ASR) that allows people with severe speech impairments to communicate and be understood by voice. Customers train the software to understand their unique pronunciations, which it then translates into normalized speech output in the form of audio or text. The system can also be used to help people have face-to-face conversations.
A number of these companies in this cohort are more focused on supporting businesses, rather than consumers, using voice technology. That’s not surprising given Amazon’s recent interest in putting Alexa in the office and in hotels, for example.
Amazon’s Alexa Fund backs the participating startups with an initial $20,000 funding in return for a six percent equity stake. The startups also have the possibility of receiving another $100,000 as a convertible note.
However, there have been some concerns that along with the rewards, there are also risks for startups joining Amazon’s program. As The WSJ pointed out as did The Information, some entrepreneurs have taken a wary view of working with Amazon’s VC arm – especially after it led the Series A for home videoconferencing startup Nucleus, then proceeded to directly compete with it with the subsequent launch of the Echo Show.
But on the flip side, startups get an early peek at Amazon’s Alexa roadmap, and access to Amazon staff for help in developing Alexa skills.
Last November, Amazon announced an additional $100 million in venture capital for the fund targeted at international investment opportunities. Past Alexa Fund portfolio companies have included ecobee, TrackR, Rachio, Toymail, Ring (which Amazon acquired), Sphero, Vesper, Owlet, and many more.
Lime, the bike and scooter-share company that recently raised $335 million from GV, Uber and others, has hit six million rides since launching last June. Lime, which first launched in Greensboro, N.C., has since expanded to 70 cities.
Lime’s ridership in San Francisco is currently on hold as the city reviews permit applications from 12 companies to operate electric scooter services. But during the short period of time (from March through June) that Lime did operate in San Francisco, its scooters saw 300,000 rides. Over in San Diego, Calif., its scooters facilitated 1 million bike and scooter rides in five months.
Electric scooters are hot right now, with VCs pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the space, and ride-hailing companies placing their bets on scooter startups. Lyft, for example, has laid out its ambitions for electric scooters, as well as bikes. Meanwhile, Uber, as mentioned above, invested in Lime as part of a deal to put Uber branding on Lime scooters.
Be sure to check out TechCrunch’s scooter coverage below.
Xage (pronounced Zage), a blockchain security startup based in Silicon Valley, announced a $12 million Series A investment today led by March Capital Partners. GE Ventures, City Light Capital and NexStar Partners also participated.
The company emerged from stealth in December with a novel idea to secure the myriad of devices in the industrial internet of things on the blockchain. Here’s how I described it in a December 2017 story:
Xage is building a security fabric for IoT, which takes blockchain and synthesizes it with other capabilities to create a secure environment for devices to operate. If the blockchain is at its core a trust mechanism, then it can give companies confidence that their IoT devices can’t be compromised. Xage thinks that the blockchain is the perfect solution to this problem.
It’s an interesting approach, one that attracted Duncan Greatwood to the company. As he told me in December his previous successful exits — Topsy to Apple in 2013 and PostPath to Cisco in 2008 — gave him the freedom to choose a company that really excited him for his next challenge.
When he saw what Xage was doing, he wanted to be a part of it, and given the unorthodox security approach the company has taken, and Greatwood’s pedigree, it couldn’t have been hard to secure today’s funding.
The Industrial Internet of Things is not like its consumer cousin in that it involves getting data from big industrial devices like manufacturing machinery, oil and gas turbines and jet engines. While the entire Internet of Things could surely benefit from a company that concentrates specifically on keeping these devices secure, it’s a particularly acute requirement in industry where these devices are often helping track data from key infrastructure.
GE Ventures is the investment arm of GE, but their involvement is particularly interesting because GE has made a big bet on the Industrial Internet of Things. Abhishek Shukla of GE Ventures certainly saw the connection. “For industries to benefit from the IoT revolution, organizations need to fully connect and protect their operation. Xage is enabling the adoption of these cutting edge technologies across energy, transportation, telecom, and other global industries,” Shukla said in a statement.
The company was founded just last year and is based in Palo Alto, California.
Gideon Brothers, an ambitious startup out of Croatia that is building autonomous robots to put to work in warehouses and other industrial logistics, has quietly raised $765,000 in funding.
The round is led by TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, who has become an increasingly active investor, recently backing fintech Cleo, legal tech startup Juro, and satellite company Open Cosmos. Ex-Wired U.K. editor David Rowan and a number of unnamed Croatian angels have also participated in Gideon Brothers’ seed round.
Founded in early 2017 and comprising a 40-plus team of deep learning and robotics experts — which includes 5 PhDs and 27 Masters of Hardware and Software engineering and other related disciplines — the company is developing an AI-powered robot for various industrial applications.
Dubbed “The Brain,” the technology combines 3D computer vision and deep learning to enable Gideon Brothers’ robots to be aware of their environment and operate autonomously, similar to self-driving vehicles.
“We have been developing a technology we call a ‘robot brain’,” co-founder and CEO Matija Kopic tells me. “We believe that robots of the future will rely on the same type of vision that you and I rely on, which is basically stereo vision. We’ve deployed deep learning on top of stereo vision to give our robots a new type of perception of their environment”.
The startup’s first product is described as an “autonomous and modular intralogistics robot” that is capable of safely handling large pallets in manufacturing, warehouse and commercial environments. It is designed to work alongside humans, with minimal changes to a facility, negating the need for prohibitively expensive retrofitting or investing in brand new robot-enabled buildings, which is the route that Amazon has gone down.
More broadly, Gideon Brothers wants to help address current labour shortages in industrial logistics. Citing a research brief by DHL, Gideon Brothers says that demand for supply chain professionals exceeds supply by a ratio of six to one. The work is often painstakingly dull and physically demanding, meaning that turnover can be as high as 40 percent.
“[We use] a combination of camera-based 3D vision, primarily powered by deep learning algorithms to make sure that our robot, whatever it ends up doing, is aware of its surroundings and the dynamics that exist in these old school industrial facilities which are not highly structured or highly organised like, for example, e-commerce environments are,” adds Kopic.
“We are targeting the remaining 90 percent of the world’s industrial facilities that are completely old school, traditional and centered around human beings as the drivers of those facilities and the business model”.
In practice, this means that instead of workers rushing around a warehouse taking orders from a computer-generated voice or a scanner, and then moving several tons of product around (the so-called “man-to-goods” model), the Gideon Brothers’ robot brings the goods to the worker. It receives instructions from the Gideon Brothers fleet management system, which is integrated into an operator’s Warehouse Management System.
“It goes to the pallet position it has been sent to, lifts it off the frame it is sitting on and transports the entire pallet to a commissioning or “picking” area where workers take the product that need to be packed onto another customer-specific pallet. The robot then returns the original pallet back to its original position – autonomously and safely. The workers don’t have to zoom around and can focus on more complex tasks like picking,” explains Kopic.
If all of that sounds incredibly ambitious for a European startup that has raised less than $1 million, it’s because it is. However, Kopic says that by setting up shop in Croatia he has been able to recruit a very specialist team while keeping costs much lower than direct competitors. It also has the advantage of being close to a number of facilities where the startup is currently testing its robots, including being given access to much-needed warehouse logistics data.
Investor Hinrikus echoes this sentiment. “[Gideon Brothers is] building a killer deep tech team. This will be the best team of deep tech talent to the east from here (well, before we get to China),” he tells me.
Amazon announced some new features this morning aimed at bringing more accessibility to the Echo line. At the top of the list is Tap to Alexa (not to be confused with the Amazon Tap, mind), which circumvents the need to use voice to interact with the Echo Show.
The new feature essentially turns the device into a touchscreen tablet, by clicking the feature on in settings. Once enabled, users can choose from a number of shortcuts to add to the home screen. The list includes news and weather, along with customizable functions, like the ability to turn specific smart home devices on and off, using text inputs.
It’s a simple solution, but it should offer a way into the Alexa ecosystem for users unable to audio cues to interact with the system. It’s the kind of thing that Amazon could really only add once it introduced displays into the mix.
Same goes for Alexa Captioning. The feature was introduced for U.S. customers a few months back, and now it’s being rolled out to those in the U.K., Germany, Japan, India, France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The addition will offer an on-screen text-based Alexa responses on both the Echo Show and Spot.
Taken together, the two features should help Amazon appeal to a whole new group of users.
Let’s be real — the latest batch of Samsung ads are more about the company’s perception of Apple than its own devices. But hey, that tact has worked for the company in the past, so who can blame ‘em? They do, however, offer at least one key bit of insight into the company’s on-going plans.
In a spot titled “Dongle” that takes aim at the easiest possible joke in the smartphone world, Samsung takes Apple to task for the iPhone for its lack of headphone jack. A conversation ensues between a customer and Genius Bar employee, the term “double dongle” is coined and the former grimaces like someone just explained the plot of Human Centipede to him for the first time.
Again, the ad’s less about what Samsung has, than what Apple doesn’t, but it does appear to reaffirm the company’s commitment to the headphone jack. Granted, we’ve seen companies do about-faces on the issue before. The most notable instance is probably Google, who called Apple out one year and dropped the jack the next.
But releasing such an openly mocking ad a month or so before dropping the headphone jack would not, as the kids say, be a great look for the company. The inclusion of the port has been a selling point for Samsung ever since Apple dropped it way back in 2016 for the iPhone 6. It’s an easy win for Samsung. All the company has to do is literally nothing.
And from the leaks we’ve seen of the Note 9, it appears that the 3.5mm will once again be returning.
Of course, what felt like an act of aggression to some two year back has become increasingly common amongst the competition. I’ve talked to a number of manufacturers who’ve retained the jack over the past two years, and nearly all have acknowledged that it’s simply a matter of time before they go that route as well.
It’s tough to say how much of the decision to keep the jack around is Samsung simply giving customers what they want, and how much is the company simply trying to distance itself from Apple. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Samsung can continue to use its (admittedly pretty nice) wired AKG headphones as a selling point, while making all the “double dongle” jokes its hefty ad budget can support.
Betsie Larkin spent the first ten years of her professional career as an EDM artist. She released two solo albums, toured five continents and worked with the likes of Armin van Buuren and Ferry Corsten. But after being constantly frustrated by shapewear she wore under her stage outfits, she felt compelled to try her hand at a new industry.
HoneyLove, backed by Y Combinator, aims to disrupt the traditional shapewear market by making an affordable, high-quality product that actually works.
In her research before starting HoneyLove, Larkin identified two big problems with shapewear. The first is that it tends to bunch up, causing constant readjustment, and the second is that it tends flatten out everything, even the curves people want to show off. That’s why Larkin developed HoneyLove Sculptwear.
HoneyLove uses supportive structures in side the seams of the garment, similar to the flexible boning used in old-school corsettes, and encases those structures in a soft channel of protective fabric. This simple enhancement ensures that the garment doesn’t bunch up around the legs or waistband.
HoneyLove also inserts its patent-pending BoostBands, made from a combination of compression fabric and a flat elastic panel, in the back of the legs of the garment to accentuate the natural curve between the bottom and the upper legs, according to Larkin.
The company manufactures at a gold-certified responsible (WRAP) factory that is dedicated to shapewear in the Guangdong province of China.
HoneyLove first started out on Kickstarter in February, and raised a whopping $300,000 in pre-orders after posting a $30,000 goal. The product is now available via the HoneyLove website for $89, which sits right in the middle of the larger market, where you can find cheap shapewear for as little as $35 and high-end shapewear for as much as $150.
Startup founders don’t usually pitch their ideas by admitting that they’re solving a “boring” problem, but it seems to work for RevenueCat‘s Jacob Eiting.
In fact, Eiting alternately described his startup (which is part of the current class at accelerator Y Combinator) as handling “boring work” and solving a “boring problem.” RevenueCat helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions, which Eiting said “is just boring — developers don’t want to do it.”
And yet it can be crucial for their business. After all, Eiting and his co-founder Miguel Carranza both worked at brain training app Elevate (where Eiting was CTO and Carranza was director of engineering), and he said shifting Elevate’s business model from one-off purchases to recurring subscriptions “saved the company.”
Eiting left Elevate more than a year ago, ultimately deciding to build a startup around “this weird skill I have.” RevenueCat offers an API that developers can use to support in-app subscriptions on iOS and Android, which means they don’t have to worry about all the nuances, bugs and updates in how each platform handles subscriptions.
Eiting said this is the kind of thing that “holds a lot of companies back — maybe not forever, but it’s usually at a time when a company shouldn’t be worrying about this.”
The API also allows developers to bring all the data about their subscription business together in one place, across platforms. Ultimately, he wants to turn RevenueCat into a broader “revenue management platform,” allowing developers to try out strategies like offering different prices to different customer segments.
More broadly, Eiting suggested that subscriptions offer a way out of the current “race to the bottom in how software is sold” — particularly in mobile app stores, where many of us expect everything to be free or dirt cheap. Obviously, that’s not a great situation for someone hoping to make money by selling software, but Eiting pointed out that it can be bad for the consumer too, because it means the developer has less financial incentive to support and update the app.
“Someone who pays for your 99-cent app once, they think they own your time,” he said. “You want to be helpful, you don’t want to let down a paid user, but your incentives aren’t really aligned.”
Subscriptions, even if they’re just for 99 cents a month, can re-align those incentives — Eiting has described this as a system of app patronage: “You want this thing to stay working, you need to pony up some money to developers.”
He also acknowledged that as more apps shift to this model, there’s a risk of subscription fatigue, which could lead to “maybe not a harsh backlash, but there might be a secondary correction.”
But in Eiting’s view, that’s less a problem for individual developers, more for the mobile platforms, which should be building better tools for consumers to manage all their subscriptions in one place.
Apple Business Chat, Apple’s new platform for allowing companies and brands to communicate with customers over iMessage, is expanding. In addition to Dish becoming the first TV provider to support Business Chat, Apple says it has also added four other brands, Aramak, Four Seasons, Harry & David, and American Express, in addition to five new technology platforms businesses can integrate with.
The platforms that now support Apple Business Chat include Cisco, eGain, Kipsu, Lithium and Quiq. They allow the brands to develop their Business Chat systems with a variety of features, integrate them with their own apps and services, track activity through reporting, and more.
The new brand partners represent a variety of use cases for Business Chat, from real-time ordering to shopping to general customer service.
As noted last week, Dish will now allows its pay TV customers to reach a live agent with their questions over iMessage, make account changes, schedule an appointment, and even order pay-per-view.
DISH on Apple Business Chat (PRNewsfoto/DISH Network Corporation)
Meanwhile, the Four Seasons will allow guests to search for any Four Season property and engage with “Four Seasons Chat,” a multi-lingual service that will connect guests with the hotel’s team for any need.
Harry & David will help customers shop over Business Chat, by allowing them to ask questions about products and services and get help from a gift concierge. When customers are ready to buy, they can check out with Apple Pay – as they can with 1-800-Flowers, an existing Business Chat partner.
Aramak is piloting a 10-game “Brew2You” program at Citizens Bank Park, the home of the Philadelphia Phillies. Fans will be able to scan a QR code on their seat back in three sections to order beer or water over iMessage, and have it delivered right to their seat.
And American Express is piloting a program for card members to allow them to get their account information, including their balance, payment due dates, and points balance over Business Chat. They’ll also be able to ask for a card replacement, dispute a charge, or get information about card benefit.
In addition to the five new brand partners, Business Chat also powered the official concierge service for the Cannes Lions festival in June, with LivePerson, notes Apple.
Launched into beta in March with the release of iOS 11.3, Business Chat offers companies an alternative to using social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, to reach their customers.
It arrives at a time when messaging is becoming an important means of addressing the needs of consumers, including the millennial audience, analysts claim.
According to Gartner, support requests over consumer messaging apps will exceed those coming in from social media by 2019. And Nielsen says that 56% of consumers prefer messaging to calling, with 67% expecting to message more over the next two years.
Research from Sapio says that 63% of consumers cite satisfaction when reaching out to brands via messaging to resolve their issues. And digital natives (aka millennials) turn to direct messaging to first reach out to brands 40% of the time.
To some extent, businesses may prefer Apple’s Business Chat system, as it allows them to get closer to their customers – their chats live right in the same Messages app, alongside conversations the customer has with friends and family. Plus, they can brand their service as they like – like as Four Seasons is doing, for example – and keep their customers’ data in-house, instead of making it available to a third-party like Facebook.
Plus, Business Chat can benefit from integrations with other macOS and iOS apps and features, including Spotlight Search, Siri, Apple Maps, and Safari, and can be added to brands’ websites and apps.
However, it’s not likely that businesses will drop social media-based customer service and support for Business Chat, so it becomes another platform for them to manage and support.
