Month: August 2018

Back in March, Nest and Yale teamed up to release a smart door lock to complement Nest’s then brand-new video doorbell. It’s a solid piece of hardware, but it had a curious quirk for something made under Google’s watch: it didn’t work with Google Home or Google Assistant.

That’ll change later this week.

On August 29th, the lock will be getting an update that adds Google Assistant and Home support to bring a handful of voice-powered tricks into the mix. Things like:

• Locking the door with a “Hey Google” command
• Asking Google Assistant whether or not the door is locked
• Add locking the door to part of a custom, multi-step routine, like a “Goodnight” routine that shuts off the lights, turns off the TV and bolts the doors.

You’ll be able to lock the door by voice — but, it’s worth noting, not unlock it… because, you know, security. If some rando can shout to lock your door, it’s an annoyance — but if they can stand outside the door and unlock it just by shouting loud enough, that’s a whole different story. Google Assistant has tech to identify users by their voice, but it’s not quite up to the task of playing bouncer at your front door. So no unlocking by voice at this point.

Alas, no word on support for any other voice-powered assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa or Siri (by way of HomeKit) on iOS. While some of Yale’s other smart locks support other voice assistants, they’ve yet to make any promises with this one.

Android One is one of a handful of Google projects aimed at helping the mobile operating system run better on entry level devices. As such, those handsets that qualify for the program are generally pretty middling, at best.

But LG’s G7 One bucks the trend, with some specs that wouldn’t be out of place on a 2018 flagship. Leading the way is the Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm’s top of the line processor, coupled with a 6.1 inch QHD+ display and a 3,000mAh battery. There’s also that familiar notch up top design that’s all the rage on flagships these days.

There are certain cost cutting measures. The bleeding edge dual camera tech that LG prides itself on isn’t on board here. The 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage are not great, but perfectly acceptable for most. The headphone jack is still in place — which is a good thing for a budget device — it’s silly to expect users to have to factor in the price of bluetooth headphones.

The handset will be debuting at IFA in Berlin this week. Price is still TBD, but LG promises an “exceptional” one. At the very least, that should mean it comes in well under the company’s flagships.

If LG is able to offer up something truly exception from a price perspective, it could be the thing the company needs to help stand out in a smartphone race that has largely left it behind. It’s a strategy that has worked well for OnePlus, and LG could certainly use the hook.

VRV, a fandom-focused digital streaming service, has signed a deal with Viacom and Nickelodeon to launch a new streaming channel dedicated to Nick’s classic 90’s shows and more. The new channel, called NickSplat (yes really), will stream via VRV as an over-the-top service, and will offer fans access to nearly 30 classic series, the companies say.

Its lineup includes series like “AAAHH!!! Real Monsters,” “CatDog,” “Doug,” “Rocko’s Modern Life,” “All That,” “Are You Afraid of the Dark?,” “Clarissa Explains It All,” “Kenan & Kel,” “Legends of the Hidden Temple,” “The Angry Beavers” “The Wild Thornberrys,” and many others.

VRV says additional shows will be added at a later date.

The channel will also be available both as a $5.99 per month a la carte subscription and it will be included in the VRV premium bundle, which is $9.99 per month. In a sense, the a la carte option is the equivalent of it being its own streaming service, but one without its own standalone platform, as with Viacom’s Noggin, aimed at the preschool set.

VRV’s premium bundle offers a variety of channels beyond NickSplat, including also Ellation’s anime streaming service Crunchyroll, Funimation, Rooster Teeth, Shudder and others, as well as exclusive series like “HarmonQuest,” “Killjoys,” “Thundercats,” and “Gary and His Demons.”

“VRV, with a sophisticated user base that loves the best in animation, is the perfect platform to launch our NickSplat channel,” said Sam Cooper, Viacom Executive Vice President of Distribution and Business Development Partnerships, in a statement about the launch.

“Viacom’s content – including our deep library of genre-defining television – is highly in demand, and our audiences are always looking for new and innovative ways to enjoy our programming. We’re committed to finding the best partners to bring our individual brands direct to the consumer, and this relationship with VRV is an exciting step forward in our strategy,” Cooper added.

VRV arrived in 2016 as something of a competitor to Amazon’s Prime Video Channels, which also provides access to niche digital streaming content in a single destination. However, VRV offers members over 20,000 hours of free content, with the option to upgrade to the Premium tier for more, as well as its exclusives. Amazon’s Channels, on the other hand, is only an a la carte service where members pick and choose which channels they want. There aren’t any channel bundles available at this time.

In addition, unlike Amazon Channels, VRV isn’t targeting a mainstream user base, but has been more focused on serving various fandoms – anime fans, gamers, comics fans, sci-fi and fantasy fans, and others.

With NickSplat, it’s now going after a slightly different demographic – kids who grew up watching Nickelodeon on linear TV and are nostalgic for those old shows. Maybe they even want to stream them for their own kids these days.

For Viacom, a partnership with VRV gives it a chance to monetize its older library content in a different way than throwing it out on a bigger platform, like Netflix (where, frankly, it would be seen by more viewers). However, VRV is not the only place some of these old shows can be found – there are also Nick classic series on other services, like Hulu and Amazon – the latter where they can be purchased by episode or season. In other words, if you’re sorta obsessed with one or two old Nick shows, you may want to just go find them elsewhere. NickSplat only makes sense if you want a big back catalog of classic Nickelodeon.

VRV is available online and as an app on Xbox One, PS4, Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, Chromecast, Android and iOS.

The promise of home robotics has been a persistent one over the decades. After all, who wouldn’t want a Rosie the Robot to help out with chores around the house? In spite of the mutually agreed upon coolness of such an idea, however, the idea has proven elusive — for all but one company.

iRobot has given the world the one true mainstream home robot in the form of the Roomba. The robotic vacuum features complex underlying technology to help it perform one of the most mundane domestic tasks. The product has only grown in popularity since launching in 2002. In 2017, it was the best-selling vacuum in the United States.

iRobot CEO Colin Angle cofounded the company 28 years ago, alongside fellow roboticist Rodney Brooks and Helen Greiner. In its earliest days, iRobot built everything from moon rovers to baby dolls, but, as Angle jokes, he found his greatest success as a vacuum salesman.

For their next trick, Angle and iRobot plan to use Roomba to unlock the smart home. The company sees the popular robotic vacuum serving as a kind of connective tissue for the growing popularity of smart devices and assistants. In its latest iteration, the company announced indoor mapping, the first step toward that larger goal.

Angle will be joining us on stage at Disrupt SF to outline the future for the Roomba line and how the company plans to become an integral part of the smart home puzzle.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

The number of complaints filed with the UK data protection watchdog has more than doubled since the introduction of new European regulations.

There were 6,281 complaints filed with the Information Commissioner’s Office between May 25 when the new GDPR rules went into effect and July 3, a rise of more than double from the 2,417 complaints during the same period a year earlier.

The ICO, which enforces the new rules in the UK, did not say if the bulk of the new cases are GDPR related as the watchdog doesn’t separate out its complaints by type, but said that the agency expects the figures will continue to climb.

“Generally, as anticipated, we have seen a rise in personal data breach reports from organizations,” said an ICO spokesperson. “Complaints relating to data protection issues are also up and, as more people become aware of their individual rights, we are expecting the number of complaints to the ICO to increase too.”

It follows a similar reported rise in figures from neighboring Ireland, with over half of new complaints falling under the GDPR umbrella since the law was introduced.

The new EU-wide rules replace long overdue and fragmented data protection and privacy rules across the 28 member state bloc from two decades ago. Under the new regulations, European citizens can request their data from companies, and can ask for their data to be corrected and deleted under the so-called “right to be forgotten” provision.

Companies that fail to abide by the new rules can face steep fines.

Under the new GDPR regulations, each fine is capped to about €20 million (£16.5m) or four percent of global annual revenue. Previously, the maximum fine was set at £500,000 — a drop in the ocean to some major companies.

Law firm EMW obtained the figures following a Freedom of Information request.

“Despite this being on the horizon for a couple of years, the reality of the work involved in implementation and ongoing compliance may have taken many businesses by surprise,” said James Geary, principal at EMW. “Failing to respond promptly to subject access requests or right to be forgotten requests could result in a fine and the time involved in responding properly should not be underestimated.”

“The more data a business has, the harder it is to respond quickly and in the correct compliant manner,” he said.

What do you do if you’re a European startup competing against the likes of Box and Dropbox, and are looking to make a splash in international markets like the U.S.?

Well, if you’re the Dutch startup WeTransfer (which raised a cool $25 million about three years ago to take the U.S. market by storm), you get weird. Really, really, avant garde-level weird.

The latest overture to the hipsterati is the company’s three video set collaboration with King Krule (which I applaud for no other reason then it lets me write about King Krule on the site).

Here’s the first video from the collaboration between the (Beyonce-and-Tyler-the-Creator-and-New-Yorker-approved) artist and the file transfer and storage service.

The King Krule collab isn’t the first time that WeTransfer looked to cash in on some cultural cache. The company has teamed up with McSweeney’s on a story collaboration called “Clean” written by Shelly Oria and Alice Sola Kim.

Whether or not these forays into the world of the Kool Kidz are the result of a shift in strategy brought on by the company’s relatively new chief executive, Gordon Willoughby (formerly of Amazon), they’re pretty great. (At least, in the sense that we’re writing about WeTransfer for the first time in a few years.)

I can’t say whether WeTransfer’s file sharing service is notably better or worse than Box or DropBox, but their hipster cred is undeniable. Points to you, WeTransfer. Points to you.

Shoes of Prey, a Khosla Ventures-backed shoe retailer whose website let women customize footwear purchases by selecting the color and material of the sandals or pumps they wanted to order as well as the size, has announced it’s stopped taking orders after almost ten years trading.

The management team will now decide whether to sell or otherwise pivot the business.

Founder Jodie Fox announced the shut down in an Instagram post in which she writes about the struggles to scale the company’s early profitability.

“We tested many channels to scale what we had created. From award-winning physical stores, to wholesaling, and of course our direct to customer online experience,” she writes. “While all the indicators and data were positive, we were not able to truly crack mass-market adoption.”

“We are making the difficult decision today to pause orders and actively assess all our options to either sell, or at a later date, reboot the business with substantial changes,” she adds.

“We will cease normal trading as we go through this process. Our customers with outstanding orders will either receive their shoes as promised, or a full refund if we have been unable to make their shoes before this pause.”

A note on the company’s website also reads: “When we started Shoes of Prey back in 2009, we couldn’t have dreamed that we would have the opportunity to share in such an incredible adventure. And you were the most wonderful people to have that adventure with. Today we’re pausing to consider our options for the future of our business, and we have stopped taking orders. We have reviewed all of our orders and if we see that we are unable to make your shoes, you will be fully refunded.”

Customers with questions or queries are asked to email help@shoesofprey.com

Fox does not specify how many customers Shoes of Prey had been able to attract over its near decade run, starting in Australia and later moving its headquarters to LA — beyond referring to “millions of women around the world who have designed shoes with us”.

The company had shown signs of trouble this year, with the Sydney Morning Herald reporting it secured a small bridge round in March at terms which that were said to be “significantly lower” than its previous round of funding (it raised $15.5M in 2015).

In an email to investors at the time, CEO Michael Fox said the bridge round would be used to keep operations afloat and help it seek a new business model.

“Over the last 2 years we’ve made very good progress with our manufacturing capability however we’ve struggled to grow at the rates we’d forecast,” he wrote. “The terms are significantly lower than our last round of funding, but with no alternatives other than winding up the company our board today resolved to recommend this offer to shareholders.”

Last month it also emerged that Shoes of Prey investor Blue Sky had cut the value of its investment in the startup by 12%.

According to Crunchbase the custom footwear retailer had raised a total of $25.9M since 2009.

The latest Echo devices are a touch more premium than their predecessors, but Amazon hasn’t gone out of its way to compete with Apple’s HomePod head-on. And why bother, really, when hardware partners are willing to do the heavy lifting?

Bose is certainly making a compelling case with the Home Speaker 500. The compact smart speaker finds the audio company going all in on the smart assistant market, along with a pair of new soundbars that also sport Alexa functionality.

The company has cautiously embraced Amazon’s smart assistant in recent years, but the trio of new products are the first Bose speakers to feature Alexa built-in, rather than relying on a skill. The Home Speaker is a fairly compact device, measuring 8 x 6 x 4 inches, with two custom drivers built-in, designed to reflect sound off of walls. The looks are a little lacking, but the sound is really what counts. 

There are eight microphones on board that support Amazon’s far-field tech, which means it should play nicely with other Echo devices. Those mics, along with the ones of the soundbars, are built from the same tech found on the company’s headsets.

The smart speaker runs $400, and the soundbars are $550 and $800. All will hit the market in October. Support for other smart assistants is forthcoming (including, one assumes, Google Assistant), with AirPlay 2 functionality arriving early next year.

Xage, the company that wants to help make infrastructure more secure using the blockchain, announced a new policy manager tool to help protect utilities and other critical infrastructure from hackers and automate regulatory compliance.

Xage CEO Duncan Greatwood says the product is partly to fill in a need in the product portfolio, but also is designed to help customers comply with a new wave of regulations coming out of the Department of Homeland Security designed to protect the electricity grid from hacking, particularly from a hostile nation-state.

Greatwood says the government previously was only worried about the core network assets, but over time, it has become clear that hackers have been looking to attack technology on the edge of the utilities network like substations and local control centers, even as granular as sensors and voltage controllers.

The New York Times reported earlier this year that Russian hackers had been targeting the U.S. electrical grid, which is a big reason DHS has been pushing the utilities to upgrade the way they handle password rotation and control remote access, among other things.

This is a big scale problem because you could be talking about a single utility having between 10,000 and 20,000 substations with each of those having hundreds of components inside them. With the new DHS regulations going into effect next year, companies have to start thinking about how to implement them now.

“Between now and the end of next year, utilities are going to have to have a way of automating that system,” Greatwood explained. Xage provides way to set policy to comply with the new set of U.S. government regulations, and then enforce it on the blockchain, ensuring that it hasn’t been tampered with.

Xage Policy Manager. Screenshot: Xage

Part of the problem is that end users have devices like laptops, tablets and smartphones, that they are using to access the network. Xage’s policy management tool can provide clear definitions of who can access the system on what device, helping to block out hackers.

“Part of our data policy management is to define rules around who is allowed to get access and from what machines. Not all laptops will be allowed onto network,” he said. It will require an approved MAC address with an approved fingerprint and a certificate installed from an appropriate department to ensure it is the machine it purports to be.

The blockchain helps ensure that if (or when) a bad actor does penetrate the system, they won’t be able to move freely throughout the network. “If something does go wrong, then it is localized. If you have a bad acting node in the blockchain, it’s detected and you can lock down that sector. It makes it much more difficult to spread the software across entire grid or region,” he said.

Amazon today publicly launched a new perk for Prime members with young children, with the broad release of the new subscription-based “Prime Book Box” service. The $22.99 per box offering ships Prime members in the U.S. a curated selection of kids’ books every 1, 2 or 3 months, at up to 35% off the list price, Amazon says. The service was first launched in May, but was only available in an invite-only basis at that time.

Members will receive 2 hardcover books or 4 board books per box, depending on the child’s age.

The books chosen are curated by Amazon editors and include a combination of new releases, classics and “hidden gems,” and are tailored to the reader’s age range of “Baby-2,” “3-5,” “6-8,” or “9-12.” For example, some current selections include Amazing Airplanes, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, Malala’s Magic Pencil, and Nevermoor. 

However, parents can log on to the Book Box site and preview their selections before the box ships, then customize the list as they choose. This would make sense for families with an existing book collection – because their child is older, an avid reader, or because they have hand-me-down books from other children.

If they’re new parents just starting their book collection, they may instead opt to just wait for their shipment, and have the books be a surprise.

The Book Box FAQ also noted that Amazon will use members’ recent purchase history on its site to make sure the box doesn’t include any books the customer had already purchased.

“As a mom who’s spent over 20 years reading and reviewing children’s books, the best part of my job is sharing a love of reading with kids and their families,” said Seira Wilson, Senior Editor, Amazon Books, in a statement about the launch. “Over the past few months, it’s been both exciting and rewarding to hear that Prime Book Box is encouraging kids to spend more time reading. Now that Prime Book Box is available to all U.S. Prime members, I hope we can inspire even more children to discover a love of reading that will last a lifetime.”

The Book Box service is another way for Amazon to retain Prime members – especially the valuable memberships from heads of U.S. households, who are likely to spend more on the retailer’s e-commerce site, as they have more people using the Prime membership.

And, as TechCrunch previously noted, the service will also help Amazon to build a reading profile for the family’s younger members, which can help it to improve its recommendations across the board.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that physical book subscription startups aimed at children have tried and failed to make such a service work, in the past. For example, Sproutkin, The Little Book Club, and Zoobean, are no more.

The challenge for some of these startups was bringing the cost down – something Amazon appears to have managed through its existing publisher relationships. But even in the case of those startups that had offered more affordable plans, they simply didn’t have the reach that Amazon does.

The timing for the startups may have been off, as well – they arrived at a time before we had fully embraced the idea of subscriptions for everything. Today, it’s commonplace.

Plus, Amazon also allows members to control the pace of the shipments further – you don’t have to pay monthly, which can help to attract the more budget-minded shoppers.

Book Box is now one of many subscription boxes Amazon offers. Others include Candy Club, beauty and skin care boxes, STEM Club Toys, and Carnivore Club. It also sells a variety of sample boxes to introduce brands to shoppers.

The service is open today for U.S. Prime members.