Year: 2018

A pair of Canadian students making a simple, inexpensive prosthetic arm have taken home the grand prize at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, a global startup competition the company holds yearly. SmartArm will receive $85,000, a mentoring session with CEO Satya Nadella, and some other Microsoft goodies. But they were far from the only worthy team from the dozens that came to Redmond to compete.

The Imagine Cup is an event I personally look forward to, because it consists entirely of smart young students, usually engineers and designers themselves (not yet “serial entrepreneurs”) and often aiming to solve real-world problems.

In the semi-finals I attended, I saw a pair of young women from Pakistan looking to reduce stillbirth rates with a new pregnancy monitor, an automated eye-checking device that can be deployed anywhere and used by anyone, and an autonomous monitor for water tanks in drought-stricken areas. When I was their age, I was living at my mom’s house, getting really good at Mario Kart for SNES and working as a preschool teacher.

Even Nadella bowed before their ambitions in his appearance on stage at the final event this morning.

“Last night I was thinking, ‘What advice can I give people who have accomplished so much at such a young age?’ And I said, I should go back to when I was your age and doing great things. Then I realized…I definitely wouldn’t have made these finals.”

That got a laugh, but (with apologies to Nadella) it’s probably true. Students today have unbelievable resources available to them and as many of the teams demonstrated, they’re making excellent use of those resources.

SmartArm in particular combines a clever approach with state of the art tech in a way that’s so simple it’s almost ridiculous.

The issue they saw as needing a new approach is prosthetic arms, which as they pointed out are often either non-functional (think just a plastic arm or simple flexion-based gripper) or highly expensive (a mechanical arm might cost tens of thousands). Why can’t one be both?

Their solution is an extremely interesting and timely one: a relatively simply actuated 3D-printed forearm and hand that has its own vision system built in. A camera built into the palm captures an image of the item the user aims to pick up, and quickly classifies it — an apple, a key ring, a pen — and selects the correct grip for that object.

The user activates the grip by flexing their upper arm muscles, an action that’s detected by a Myo-like muscle sensor (possibly actually a Myo, but I couldn’t tell from the demo). It sends the signal to the arm to activate the hand movement, and the fingers move accordingly.

It’s still extremely limited — you likely can’t twist a doorknob with it, or reliably grip a knife or fork, and so on. But for many everyday tasks it could still be useful. And the idea of putting the camera in the palm is a high-risk, high-reward one. It is of course blocked when you pick up the item, but what does it need to see during that time? You deactivate the grip to put the cup down and the camera is exposed again to watch for the next task.

Bear in mind this is not meant as some kind of serious universal hand replacement. But it provides smart, simple functionality for people who might otherwise have had to use a pincer arm or the like. And according to the team, it should cost less than $100. How that’s possible to do including the arm sensor is unclear to me, but I’m not the one who built a bionic arm so I’m going to defer to them on this. Even if they miss that 50 percent it would still be a huge bargain, honestly.

There’s an optional subscription that would allow the arm to improve itself over time as it learns more about your habits and objects you encounter regularly — this would also conceivably be used to improve other SmartArms as well.

As for how it looks — rather robotic — the team defended it based on their own feedback from amputees: “They’d rather be asked, ‘hey, where did you get that arm?” than ‘what happened to your arm?’ ” But a more realistic-looking set of fingers is also under development.

The team said they were originally looking for venture funding but ended up getting a grant instead; they’ve got interest from a number of Canadian and American institutions already, and winning the Imagine Cup will almost certainly propel them to greater prominence in the field.

My own questions would be on durability, washing, and the kinds of things that really need to be tested in real-world scenarios. What if the camera lens gets dirty or scratched? Will there be color options for people that don’t want to have white “skin” on their arm? What’s the support model? What about insurance?

SmartArm takes the grand prize, but the runners up and some category winners get a bunch of good stuff too. I plan to get in touch with SmartArm and several other teams from the competition to find out more and hear about their progress. I was really quite impressed not just with the engineering prowess but the humanitarianism and thoughtfulness on display this year. Nadella summed it up best:

“One of the things that I always think about is this competition in some sense ups the game, right?” he said at the finals. “People from all over the world are thinking about how do I use technology, how do i learn new concepts, but then more importantly, how do I solve some of these unmet, unarticulated needs? The impact that you all can have is just enormous, the opportunity is enormous. But I also believe there is an amazing sense of responsibility, or a need for responsibility that we all have to collectively exercise given the opportunity we have been given.”

Coming to the U.S. on a work visa is getting harder across the board, but workers from India in particular are feeling the effects of recent policy shifts from the Trump administration. A new report from the National Foundation for American Policy sheds light on how the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order from April 2017 has impacted H-1B applicants in the last year. The H-1B visa, popular in Silicon Valley, lets skilled foreign workers live and work in the U.S. for a six year term.

For the three months period starting in July 2017, H-1B denial rates went from 15.9% to 22.4%. In the same time period, Requests for Evidence seeking additional documentation in the fourth quarter of 2017 nearly equaled the total amount of Requests for Evidence from the year’s other three quarters combined (63,184 and 63,599 requests, respectively).

Drilling down, workers from India appear to be the most affected. From July to September 2017, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) demanded additional documentation from 72% of Indian H-1B applications, compared to the 61% rate of other countries considered together. During that same three month period, 23.6% of Indian applications were rejected, up from 16.6% between April and June 2017.

“The increase in denials and Requests for Evidence of even the most highly skilled applicants seeking permission to work in America indicates the Trump administration is interested in less immigration, not ‘merit-based’ immigration,” the report adds.

“… U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has enacted a series of policies to make it more difficult for even the most highly educated scientists and engineers to work in the United States.”

In January, rumors of a ban on H-1B extensions for green card applicants had H-1B workers nervous. In June, new rules shortening visas for Chinese STEM students went into effect. While China only accounted for 9.4% of total H-1B visa applications in the 2017 fiscal year compared to India’s whopping 76%, the Trump administration will likely continue to tighten immigration policies targeting China as it obsessively tries to turn the screws on its perceived trade nemesis.

Facebook today for the first time announced that 2.5 billion use at least one of its apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger. That’s a helpful number because it counts real people, rather than accounts, since people can have multiple accounts on a single app. That’s compared to 2.23 billion monthly users on Facebook, 1 billion users on Instagram and, 1.5 billion users on WhatsApp, and 1.3 billion users on Messenger.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the new stat on Facebook’s Q2 2018 earnings call following a tough report that saw its user growth slow to its lowest rate ever.

Zuckerberg said the 2.5 billion count “Individual people rather than active accounts” which he says “excludes when people have multiple accounts on a single app. And it reflects that many people use more than one of our services.”

We’ll have more details shortly

Qualcomm today said it wouldn’t extend its offer to buy NXP for $44 billion today as part of its release for its quarterly earnings, and instead be returning $30 billion to investors in the form of a share buy-back.

So, barring any last-second changes in the approval process in China or “other material developments”, the deal is basically dead after failing to clear China’s SAMR. As the tariff battle between the U.S. and China has heated up, it appears the Qualcomm/NXP deal — one of the largest in the semiconductor industry ever — may be one of its casualties. The White House announced it would impose tariffs on Chinese tech products in May earlier this year, kicking off an extended delay in the deal between Qualcomm and NXP even after Qualcomm tried to close the deal in an expedient fashion. Qualcomm issued the announcement this afternoon, and the company’s shares rose more than 5% when its earnings report came out.

“We reported results significantly above our prior expectations for our fiscal third quarter, driven by solid execution across the company, including very strong results in our licensing business,” Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said in a statement with the report. “We intend to terminate our purchase agreement to acquire NXP when the agreement expires at the end of the day today, pending any new material developments. In addition, as previously indicated, upon termination of the agreement, we intend to pursue a stock repurchase program of up to $30 billion to deliver significant value to our stockholders.”

Today’s termination also marks the end of another chapter for a tumultuous couple of months for Qualcomm. The White House blocked Broadcom’s massive takeover attempt of Qualcomm in March earlier this year, and there’s the still-looming specter of its patent spat with Apple. Now Qualcomm will instead be returning an enormous amount of capital to investors instead of tacking on NXP in the largest ever consolidation deal in the semiconductor industry.

Y Combinator backed Zbiotics has spend two years developing what they’re billing as the world’s first genetically engineered probiotic. The startup’s initial product isn’t exactly world-changing but it might just save your day — given they’ve invented an elixir of ‘next day’ life: Aka a hangover cure.

Although you actually have to take it before — or, well, during — drinking rather than waiting until the moment of regretful misery when you wake up.

How have they done this? For their first product they’ve bioengineered probiotic bacteria to produce more of the enzyme that the body naturally uses to break down a toxic chemical byproduct of alcohol which is in turn responsible for people feeling awful after too many alcoholic drinks. So you could say they’re hoping to put probiotics on steroids. (NB: No actual steroids are involved, obviously.)

While probiotics themselves aren’t at all new, having been in the human diet for thousands of years — with wide acceptance that certain strains of these live ‘friendly’ bacteria/microorganisms can be beneficial for things like human gut health — the team’s approach of using gene editing techniques (specifically fiddling with the bacteria’s DNA) to enhance what a probiotic can deliver to the person who’s ingested it is the novel thing here.

So new they haven’t yet conducted the placebo controlled, peer-reviewed clinical trials that will ultimately be necessary to back up the efficacy claims they’re making for their biotech enhanced hangover cure.

Nor are they therefore in a position to defend their forthcoming hangover elixir from accusations of supplementary ‘snake oil’ — and, well, the supplement industry as a whole often has that charge leveled at it. And yet people keep buying and popping its pills. (Therein lies the temple rub, vitamin potion and wellness capsule. And, well, also the investor appetite for carving a fresh chunk out of a very large pie.)

Zbiotics co-founders Zack Abbott and Stephen Lamb freely admit it’s going to be a challenge to stand out — and be considered credible amid all this, er, goop noise.

“This consumer space is rife with pseudo science,” agrees Abbott, who has a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of Michigan. “Everybody is banging the drum of real science. And so we have a huge challenge to differentiate ourselves. And really convince the consumer that we’ve built something specific.

“And it really is a first effort to invent a product to specifically address their problem, as opposed to grabbing vitamins off a shelf, putting them in a bottle and labelling it.”

“There are some companies… [that] address dehydration [for hangovers]; that’s not enough. There are other companies they just put [vitamins] into a bottle, that’s not enough. There’s so much noise out there. How do we break through that? It could take some time,” admits Lamb. “And it could take a lot of work.”

Tested in vitro — and on birthday beers

At this pre-launch stage, the founders say they’ve tested their beefed up probiotic on themselves — and will go so far as to say they’ve seen “promising results”.

“I had the fortune of having the final prototype built just a week or two before my birthday and so I ended up trying it out for my birthday and it was great,” adds Abbott.

They are also keen to say they don’t want to encourage irresponsible drinking. So don’t expect their future marketing to talk about ‘a biotech license for your next bender’. Product pricing is tbc but they say they’re aiming for widely affordable, rather than lux or overly premium.

With hangover results that could speak for themselves, their hope is that people will feel confident enough to have a pop and see whether the idea of a biotech enhanced probiotic that’s pumping out extra alcohol-metabolizing enzymes stands up to several pints of lager and a few chasers (or not).

Though — when asked — they do say they also want to carry out clinical trials to glean data on the efficacy of their hangover cure.

“We are a very science-first company and so we don’t want to be making any claims about anything that we don’t have data to back up,” says Abbott.

“At this point… we’ve done significant testing in a test tube, in vitro, and shown that the bacteria we’ve built do perform the function that they’re supposed to perform. Which is to break down acetaldehyde. But we can’t make further health claims until we do clinical trials. And we in the process of drafting up a protocol for a human clinical study with one of our scientific advisors — Dr Joris Verster — a world expert in academic hangover research. But in the meantime we can’t make those claims until we have that.”

They are also planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign later this year — in order to start making some of their own noise and trying to drum up interest and, well, willing guinea pigs.

Though they are also adamant the product is entirely safe. It’s just the efficacy vs hangover misery that’s yet to be stood up in human clinical trials.

While a hangover cure might seem a trivial problem to focus high tech bioengineering effort on, they say the unmissable fact of a hangover — or indeed the lack of one — was one of the reasons why they selected such an “everyday problem” for the first application of their technique vs going for a more fuzzy (and, well forgiving on the efficacy front) generic goal like ‘wellness’. Or indeed targeting an issue where a ‘cure’ is pretty subjective and hard to quantify (like anti-aging).

Absolutely no one is going to mistake a hangover for feeling great. Though of course the power of the placebo effect working its psychological magic cannot be ruled out — not until they’ve clinically tested their stuff against it in robust trials.

On the other hand, even if it ends up that a placebo effect is what’s making people feel better, given that the target problem is (just) a hangover there aren’t likely to be too many consumer complaints and cries for money back.

“One of the reasons why we chose this use-case was that it would allow people to try it and feel the advocacy for themselves. That was very important,” says Abbott. “It’s something you can feel the results of. So that was really important. Having a visceral read-out of efficacy. People can experience the product working for themselves.”

The other reason for choosing a hangover cure was more practical: They needed a problem that could be solved with an enzyme and therefore which could be helped by genetically engineering bacteria to produce more of the sought for substance.

“The whole point here is that we’ve engineered a bacteria to express an enzyme specifically that can solve a problem,” he explains. “Enzymes are these really powerful complex molecules that are not easy to deliver to people. So it has to be a problem that you can solve with an enzyme.

“There has to be a nice fit with the technology. So we look for things where parts of the body where bacteria has access to you; you have a lot of bacteria in your gut, in your skin, in your mouth, in your nose… places were we can deliver bacteria and they can express these enzymes to solve problems of everyday health.”

“We start with probiotics that have an extremely good safety profile, have been used in regular food by humans for centuries. And we identify those because we know that they’re going to be safe, and we know that they’re going to be able to interact with your body in the way that we want them to. And then we engineer those bacteria as oppose to choosing something that your body may never have seen before,” adds Lamb, who brings prior experience helping food companies enter new markets to the startup.

He says they’ve been safety testing their prototype probiotic for the past year and change at this point — “making sure that this is ready for market before we actually launch anything”.

“We are not going to launch any kind of product until it’s completely safety tested according to every regulatory framework here in the U.S. — and we’re totally comfortable with that,” he adds emphatically.

They do also intend to move beyond hangover cures, with the plan being to develop additional probiotics that target other use-cases. And say they’ve been building a gene editing platform that’s flexible for that purpose. Though they’re not disclosing exactly what else they’re working on or eyeing up — wanting to keep that powder dry for now.

“I spent over a year building the first product, and the lion’s share of that time was spent making sort of a genetic platform… that was adaptable to multiple use-cases,” says Abbott. “At first I just engineered the bacteria to be able to make a lot of enzyme generally. Whatever enzyme I put into the platform. And so the first enzyme I put in was to break down acetaldehydes. That being said it could be easily switched out for an enzyme to break down… a different toxin that your body has to deal with. So the platform is very adaptable and it was designed to be that way.”

“That being said there are certain use-cases we’re really excited about that may require additional optimization techniques in order to make them work specifically for that use-case. So, generally speaking, some may require more work than others but the platform we started with gives us a good launch pad,” he adds.

As well as YC’s standard startup deal, the team has raised an additional $2.8M in seed funding this year for R&D and the initial product roadmap. They’re hoping the forthcoming crowdfunding campaign will give them the additional lift to ship the consumer product into the US market.

Investors in the seed round aren’t being disclosed at this stage. Abbott also notes that he previously got a small amount of pre-seed funding, early on, to fund building the prototype.

It’s fair to say that biotech as an investment space isn’t a bet for every investor — given product development risks, timeframes and perhaps also some of the deflated hype of past years. Which perhaps explains why Zbiotics investors aren’t ready to shout all about it just yet. Even if they’re feeling great about not having a hangover.

“We’ve found different levels of success with different investors,” agrees Lamb. “Where we’ve found the most success is in investors who see the vision for the technology and understand it as something that is and can be truly innovative relative to what’s on the market today. So probiotics themselves — traditional probiotics —  are a $40BN industry, and the fact is that most of those probiotics don’t do anything or are inconsistent at best. So we found investors who have a mindset where they can see how a novel probiotic, something that actually is engineered to work and is based in a high level of biotech is something that can really disrupt that area. And that may or may not be traditional biotech investors. Oftentimes it’s investors who are really looking to push the envelope.

“We definitely had to find the right investor and the traditional biotech investor often is looking for different things than we had to offer,” adds Abbott. “And different pathways — more traditional pathways. We’re going not conventionally I think with bringing this hard biotech to market quickly. So it definitely is threading the needle and finding the right investors.”

Facebook has hit a wall. The social network succumbed to the public backlash over its handling of fake news, privacy, and digital wellbeing to miss some of Wall Street’s estimates, showing mixed results in its Q2 2018 earnings. GDPR, Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before congress, and more scandals appear to have contributed to Facebook’s weak user growth.

Facebook reached 2.23 billion monthly users, up just 1.54 percent, much slower than Q1’s 3.14 percent around where its growth rate has hovered for years. Facebook earned $13.23 billion in revenue, missing Thomson Reuters consensus estimates of $13.36 billion, but beat with $1.74 EPS compared to an estimated $1.72 EPS.

Daily active users hit 1.47 billion, up an especially low 1.44 percent percent compared to Q1’s 3.42 percent. For comparison, before now Facebook’s slowest quarter-over-quarter daily user growth rate was 2.18 percent in Q4 2017.

The stock market frowned heavily on the slow growth rates, pushing Facebook’s share price down over 7.5 percent in after-hours trading to around $200 per share. That’s down from $217.50 when the markets closed, but up from an immediate drop to $198 when the brutal earnings report was released.

The share price descent comes despite Facebook earning $5.106 billion in profit and revenue being up 42 percent year-over-year. Zuckerberg noted in the earnings release that “Our community and business continue to grow quickly”. And while that’s true if you’re looking year-over-year, Q2 could break that trend.

Facebook’s daily and monthly user counts were up 11 percent year-over-year, confirming that the momentum of its business is still overpowering its PR problems when you zoom out. And its DAU to MAU ratio held firm at 66 pecent, indicating that users are still visiting the site often. But the question for today’s earnings call will be whether time spent on the site has decreased significantly, dragging down revenue with it.

One tough spot for Facebook was that it got stuck at 241 million monthly US & Canada users, the same count as last quarter. After failing to grow in that core market in Q4 2017, it appears that Facebook finally has hit saturation at home after 14 years. And in Europe, Facebook lost 1 million users, sinking to 376 million monthlies. That could be sign that GDPR requirements and the annoying terms of service changes it had to get users to agree to deterred some from browsing.

Facebook still managed to boost its average revenue per user in all markets, growing from $23.59 to $25.91 in the US & Canada, showing its targeting continues to improve and competition for ads is strong. But the fact that it’s stopped growing at home could way heavily on its share price. Facebook will have to continue to invent more ways to squeeze dollars out of its existing users.

The quarter saw Facebook clamp down on APIs for developers in hopes of preventing another Cambridge Analytica style disaster. Its CEO faced tough days of questioning from congress over the privacy problem, alleged bias against conservatives, and its failure to protect the 2016 presidential election. Facebook has faced tough questioning from reporters about its approach to fake news and election interference. Facebook tried to redirect attention away from its troubles during its F8 conference that saw it announce plans for a dating feature.

But all the problems may be taking a toll on user engagement, leading to the revenue miss. Weak daily and monthly user growth should be a big concern, and will put even more pressure on Instagram to prop up the corporation.

For more recent Facebook news:

Nirav Tolia, CEO of Nextdoor, is stepping down from his role, Recode reports. For those unfamiliar with the company, Nextdoor is like a social network for your neighborhood. Though, over the years, there has been controversy around Nextdoor’s role in promoting racial profiling. Nextdoor later rolled out a new tool to address some of the issues around racial profiling.

In an email sent to the team today, Tolia said he’s starting to look for his replacement and once that happens, he will move into an active chairman role on the board, according to Recode.

Here’s a nugget from the email, obtained by Recode:

Yet as Nextdoor evolves, the role of the CEO needs to evolve as well. The size of our footprint is growing larger and our organization is growing more complex. The time is right to find the next CEO for Nextdoor. With our board of directors, I will be leading the search to recruit a proven operator who can take our company to the next level. We will take our time to find the right person, so this process will likely take several months. During that period, I will continue to lead as CEO. When the next CEO is selected, I will become Chair of the Board where I will continue doing whatever I can to help us succeed.

Nextdoor raised $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation last December, followed by an expansion into France in January. I’ve reached out to Nextdoor and Tolia and will update this story if I hear back.

Daimler, the owner of the Mercedes-Benz brand, and China’s Baidu are expanding their partnership with plans to cooperate more closely on automated driving and connectivity services in the German automaker’s vehicles.

The two companies have signed an agreement to collaborate in these two areas, specifically with Baidu’s Apollo program, an open-source autonomous driving platform. Both companies said they will also work to explore new fields in vehicle connectivity services.

What this deeper relationship will produce isn’t entirely clear, although there is at least one component of the announcement that provides a bit more detail.  Baidu’s connectivity services will be integrated into Mercedes-Benz’s new infotainment system known as MBUX, Daimler said.

Daimler’s relationship with Baidu has strengthened as it has expanded its presence in China. Daimler was one of the first partners to join Apollo, which Baidu launched in April 2017. Daimler is also a member of the Apollo Committee, a group that wants to accelerate research on safer solutions in automated driving in China and promotes the drafting of related laws and regulations.

Daimler  was granted in July a license to test self-driving vehicles on public roads in Beijing, making it the first international automaker to receive such permission. The automaker was given the test permit by the Chinese government after extensive closed-course testing. Daimler said, at the time, that is marked an important milestone in its research and development efforts in China.

Baidu’s open source Apollo program reflects the Chinese search engine’s strategy to gaining a piece of the autonomous vehicle industry pie. Baidu isn’t interested in making the actual car — just the software that drives it.

Baidu has focused its effort on delivering services, like data and high-skilled computing. And it’s betting that its tech will help it become China’s leading developer of self-driving vehicles.

The goal, of course, is to persuade as many companies as possible to use its Apollo platform. Some 116 partners are now on the Apollo platform, including new partners Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo, Byton, Leopard Imaging and Suning Logistics. Daimler was one of the first.

Baidu unveiled an upgrade to the Apollo platform at its developer conference in July.  Apollo 3.0, as it’s being called, aims to better support autonomous driving in geo-fenced areas. It also includes new solutions to support valet parking, autonomous mini buses and autonomous microcars.

A previous update, announced in January at CES 2018, included support for new computing platforms, new reference vehicles and more HD mapping services.

Here comes more smart clothing nobody asked for. Fashion brand Tommy Hilfiger today announced the launch of a new line of men’s and women’s clothing, Tommy Jeans Xplore, which comes with smart-chip embedded technology. Unlike, say, Google’s Project Jacquard and its partnership with Levi’s, the goal is not to offer access to calls, texts, maps and music controls when you can’t get to your phone – like when you’re riding your bike, for example. Instead, Hilfiger’s smart clothing aims to reward you with points for wearing Hilfiger clothing. Yes, really.

It’s come to this, folks.

The line includes t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, jeans, jackets, caps, and bags which pair with the Tommy Jeans Xplore (or “XPLORE” if you use their branding) iOS app over Bluetooth. Once paired, the idea is that users will compete in challenges in the app to earn points. You get points for things like how often you wear the clothes (!!!) and for walking around to find heart-shaped, Tommy-branded icons on the app’s map. (???)

The points can be translated into rewards, including gift cards, signed merchandise and pieces from the Tommy Hilfiger archives, among other things, the company says.

I guess doling out more Tommy Hilfiger merch to players makes sense because the only people who would spend $90 on smart sweatshirt just to play a marketing campaign’s idea of fun have got to be the most seriously devoted – nay, obsessed – Hilfiger fans.

But beyond that, Tommy’s smart clothes don’t make much sense for anyone.

Despite its use of smart technology – like the embedded Awear Solutions’ Bluetooth low energy smart tag – the company hasn’t actually innovated here. At best, it’s a loyalty program requiring customers to overspend in order to join.

Even the company seems to be aware of the line’s niche appeal, saying in its official announcement that its goal is to create a “micro-community of brand ambassadors.”

Yep, micro – as in really, really, really small.

The brand, however, is no stranger to experiments with new ideas and technology. But some of its prior developments have been less absurd – like testing the use of A.I. to forecast design trends, its smartwatches, or adaptive clothing for the disabled.

Smart clothing for the sake of smart clothing though?

Just no.

No.

No.

Stop.

No.

 

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Good news for people who like near-final previews of mobile operating systems. Android just dropped Beta 4 for Android P, marking the last preview milestone before the full version launches. That means the still unnamed OS is just around the corner — promised to arrive at some point later this summer.

As the all of the above implies, this build should be pretty close to final, including all of the systems you’ll see in the shipping version. The release is primarily focused on developers, looking to make sure their apps are up to date with Android P when it ships.

That includes a number of the new OS features, which will impact usage across apps, including multi-camera support, display cutout, enhanced notifications and ImageDecoder. More details on all of that can be found here.

Of course, the build is open to anyone who signs up for the Android Beta Program, so long as you also have access to a Pixel device to test it on — there’s a sign up form here. Those who have been testing out earlier builds should be receiving Beta 4 as an automatic update at some point in the near future.

No specific date has been given for the final build — just that it’s “coming soon.” Ditto for the name — though there’s no shortage of dessert foods starting with “P.” These days, I’m leaning toward Pop Rocks. But then, I’m kind of always leaning toward Pop Rocks. Hey, anyone know where a guy can get some Pop Rocks in 2018?

Anyway, more info here.