Year: 2018

Autonomous systems are coming. In fact, they’re already here thanks to Alphabet’s Waymo, Uber and smaller startups like Aurora, Embark Trucks and Voyage . Although there have a been a couple of fatal crashes involving autonomous software, the consensus seems to be that self-driving is still the way to go.

Last year, 37,150 people died in car accidents nationwide, according to a statistical projection from the U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Worldwide, nearly 1.3 million people die every year, according to the Association for Safe International Road Travel.

“The only plausible strategy that we have as a society to get to zero [fatalities] is driverless,” Embark CEO Alex Rodrigues told me at TC Sessions: Robotics last week. “It’s not plausible to get all the drunk or distracted or unsafe humans off the road. The only realistic way we can get to zero is driverless.”

Rodrigues added that it’s not a question of whether or not we should do driverless, but “it’s a question of how can we roll it out safely and responsibly and how soon is it ready for primetime.”

As it stands today, it’s clear that most autonomous vehicles are not ready, Rodrigues said. As Rodrigues noted, it’s obvious that companies aren’t ready today, but to determine when companies will be ready will require “a judgment that is going to be very nuanced.”

Instead of companies reporting thousands of miles without disengagements (human interventions), he said we need to see millions of miles.

Waymo, which has driven over four million miles across the U.S., has a disengagement rate of 0.18 events per 1,000 miles driven, according to the California DMV’s annual report in January. That’s about 5,555 miles between engagements on average. Cruise, on the other hand, had an average of 4,600 miles between disengagements.

The idea that a software system will never fail is a fallacy, Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron said. He noted that software fails all the time, but that it’s about having appropriate levels of redundancy in the system.

“It’s how you handle those [failures] gracefully that’s really crucial,” Cameron said.

Still, many companies are working on autonomous ride-hailing services. Drive.ai, for example, recently announced its plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing network in Frisco, Texas. And General Motors’ Cruise says it’s on track to launch its ride-hailing service by 2019. But autonomous nationwide ride-hailing is probably a bit further down the road.  

“I think that’s going to take a while,” Aurora CEO Chris Urmson told me at Robotics. “I expect that the technology is going to be deployed in city by city for a long time.”

In case you had any doubts that original content is a big priority at Netflix, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos estimated that 85 percent of the company’s total spending is going to new shows and movies.

That’s according to Variety, which reported on Sarandos’ remarks today at MoffettNathanson’s Media & Communications Summit 2018 in New York. He also said Netflix has a 470 originals scheduled to premiere between now and the end of the year, bringing the total up to around 1,000.

It’s probably not surprising that the service is prioritizing originals. After all, Netflix seems to be highlighting a new one every time I open it up, and competitors like Apple, Amazon and Hulu are ramping up their own spending.

But the depth of Netflix’s library, which is achieved by licensing content from others, has always seemed like a strength — in fact, a recent study found that licensed content generates 80 percent of Netflix viewing in the United States.

Part of the context here is that many of the studios that have sold their content to Netflix in the past are now either saving it for their own streaming services or looking to raise the prices.

And while movies account for one-third of viewing on Netflix, Sarandos pointed to new, big budget titles as one area where it no longer makes sense for the streaming service to spend a ton of money — because if you really want to catch the latest blockbuster, you probably already saw it in theaters.

“We said, maybe we can put the billion dollars we’d put in an output deal into original films,” he said.

Sarandos also sees an opportunity to develop more unscripted content like Queer Eye, and to sign big deals with high-profile showrunners like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy.

Netflix had previously projected that it would spend $7 billion to $8 billion on content this year. And just today, Netflix announced that it’s renewing Lost in Space for a second season (we were fans of season one) and picked up 10 After Midnight, a horror anthology series from Shape of Water director Guillermo del Toro.

In case you had any doubts that original content is a big priority at Netflix, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos estimated that 85 percent of the company’s total spending is going to new shows and movies.

That’s according to Variety, which reported on Sarandos’ remarks today at MoffettNathanson’s Media & Communications Summit 2018 in New York. He also said Netflix has a 470 originals scheduled to premiere between now and the end of the year, bringing the total up to around 1,000.

It’s probably not surprising that the service is prioritizing originals. After all, Netflix seems to be highlighting a new one every time I open it up, and competitors like Apple, Amazon and Hulu are ramping up their own spending.

But the depth of Netflix’s library, which is achieved by licensing content from others, has always seemed like a strength — in fact, a recent study found that licensed content generates 80 percent of Netflix viewing in the United States.

Part of the context here is that many of the studios that have sold their content to Netflix in the past are now either saving it for their own streaming services or looking to raise the prices.

And while movies account for one-third of viewing on Netflix, Sarandos pointed to new, big budget titles as one area where it no longer makes sense for the streaming service to spend a ton of money — because if you really want to catch the latest blockbuster, you probably already saw it in theaters.

“We said, maybe we can put the billion dollars we’d put in an output deal into original films,” he said.

Sarandos also sees an opportunity to develop more unscripted content like Queer Eye, and to sign big deals with high-profile showrunners like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy.

Netflix had previously projected that it would spend $7 billion to $8 billion on content this year. And just today, Netflix announced that it’s renewing Lost in Space for a second season (we were fans of season one) and picked up 10 After Midnight, a horror anthology series from Shape of Water director Guillermo del Toro.

There’s about $140 billion lost every year in the U.S. healthcare system thanks to inefficient management of basic internal operations, according to a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association.

While there are many factors that contribute to the woeful state of healthcare in the U.S., with greed chief among them, the 2012 study points to one area where hospitals have nothing to lose and literally billions to gain by improving their patient flows.

The problem, according to executives and investors in the startup Qventus, is that hospitals can’t invest in new infrastructure to streamline the process that’s able to work with technology systems that are in some cases decades old — and with an already overtaxed professional staff. 

That’s why the founders of Qventus decided to develop a software-based service that throws out dashboards and analytics tools and replaces it with a machine learning-enhanced series of prescriptions for hospital staff to follow when presented with certain conditions.

Qventus’ co-founder and chief executive Mudit Garg first started working with hospitals ten years ago and found the experience “eye-opening”.

“There are lots and lots of people who really really care about giving the best care to every patient, but it depends on a heroic effort from all of those individuals,” Garg said. “It depended on some amazing manager going above and beyond and doing some diving catch to make things work.”

As a software engineer, Garg thought that there was a simple solution to the problem — applying data to make processes run more effectively.

In 2012 the company started out with a series of dashboards and data management tools to provide visibility to the hospital administrators and operators about what was happening in their healthcare facilities. But, as Garg soon discovered, when doctors and nurses get busy, they don’t love a dashboard.

From the basic analytics, Garg and his team worked to make the data more predictive — based on historical data about patient flows, the system would send out notifications about how many patients a facility could expect to come in at almost any time of day.

But even the predictive information wasn’t useful enough for the hospitals to act on, so Garg and company went back to the drawing board.

What they finally came up with was a solution that used the data and predictive capabilities to start suggesting potential recipes for dealing with situations in hospitals. Rather than saying that a certain number of patients were likely to be admitted to the hospital, the software suggests actions for addressing the likely scenarios that could occur.

For instance, if there are certain times when the hospital is getting busier, nurses can start discharging patients in anticipation of the need for new capacity in an ICU, Garg said.

That product, some six years in the making, as garnered the attention of a number of top investors in the healthcare space. Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners led the company’s first round, and Qventus managed to snag a new $30 million round from return investors and new lead investor,  Bessemer Venture Partners. Strategic backer New York Presbyterian Ventures, the investment arm of the famed New York hospital system also participated.

So far, Qventus has raised $43 million for its service.

As a result of the deal, Stephen Kraus, a partner at Bessemer, will take a seat on the company’s board of directors.

“Hospitals are under tremendous pressure to increase efficiency, improve margins and enhance patient experience, all while reducing the burden on frontline teams, and they currently lack tools to use data to achieve operational productivity gains,” said Kraus, in a statement. 

For Kraus, the application of artificial intelligence to operations is just as transformative for a healthcare system, as its clinical use cases.

“We’ve been looking at this space broadly… AI and ML to improve healthcare… image interpretation, pathology slide interpretation… that’s all going to take a longer time because healthcare is slow to adapt.” said Kraus. “The barriers to adoption in healthcare is frankly the physicians themselves…the average primary care doc is seeing 12 to 20 patients a day… they barely want to adopt their [electronic medical health records]… The idea that they’re going to get comfortable with some neural network or black box technology to change their clinical workflow vs. Qventus which is clinical workflow to strip out cost… That’s lower hanging fruit.”

 

There’s about $140 billion lost every year in the U.S. healthcare system thanks to inefficient management of basic internal operations, according to a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association.

While there are many factors that contribute to the woeful state of healthcare in the U.S., with greed chief among them, the 2012 study points to one area where hospitals have nothing to lose and literally billions to gain by improving their patient flows.

The problem, according to executives and investors in the startup Qventus, is that hospitals can’t invest in new infrastructure to streamline the process that’s able to work with technology systems that are in some cases decades old — and with an already overtaxed professional staff. 

That’s why the founders of Qventus decided to develop a software-based service that throws out dashboards and analytics tools and replaces it with a machine learning-enhanced series of prescriptions for hospital staff to follow when presented with certain conditions.

Qventus’ co-founder and chief executive Mudit Garg first started working with hospitals ten years ago and found the experience “eye-opening”.

“There are lots and lots of people who really really care about giving the best care to every patient, but it depends on a heroic effort from all of those individuals,” Garg said. “It depended on some amazing manager going above and beyond and doing some diving catch to make things work.”

As a software engineer, Garg thought that there was a simple solution to the problem — applying data to make processes run more effectively.

In 2012 the company started out with a series of dashboards and data management tools to provide visibility to the hospital administrators and operators about what was happening in their healthcare facilities. But, as Garg soon discovered, when doctors and nurses get busy, they don’t love a dashboard.

From the basic analytics, Garg and his team worked to make the data more predictive — based on historical data about patient flows, the system would send out notifications about how many patients a facility could expect to come in at almost any time of day.

But even the predictive information wasn’t useful enough for the hospitals to act on, so Garg and company went back to the drawing board.

What they finally came up with was a solution that used the data and predictive capabilities to start suggesting potential recipes for dealing with situations in hospitals. Rather than saying that a certain number of patients were likely to be admitted to the hospital, the software suggests actions for addressing the likely scenarios that could occur.

For instance, if there are certain times when the hospital is getting busier, nurses can start discharging patients in anticipation of the need for new capacity in an ICU, Garg said.

That product, some six years in the making, as garnered the attention of a number of top investors in the healthcare space. Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners led the company’s first round, and Qventus managed to snag a new $30 million round from return investors and new lead investor,  Bessemer Venture Partners. Strategic backer New York Presbyterian Ventures, the investment arm of the famed New York hospital system also participated.

So far, Qventus has raised $43 million for its service.

As a result of the deal, Stephen Kraus, a partner at Bessemer, will take a seat on the company’s board of directors.

“Hospitals are under tremendous pressure to increase efficiency, improve margins and enhance patient experience, all while reducing the burden on frontline teams, and they currently lack tools to use data to achieve operational productivity gains,” said Kraus, in a statement. 

For Kraus, the application of artificial intelligence to operations is just as transformative for a healthcare system, as its clinical use cases.

“We’ve been looking at this space broadly… AI and ML to improve healthcare… image interpretation, pathology slide interpretation… that’s all going to take a longer time because healthcare is slow to adapt.” said Kraus. “The barriers to adoption in healthcare is frankly the physicians themselves…the average primary care doc is seeing 12 to 20 patients a day… they barely want to adopt their [electronic medical health records]… The idea that they’re going to get comfortable with some neural network or black box technology to change their clinical workflow vs. Qventus which is clinical workflow to strip out cost… That’s lower hanging fruit.”

 

The Amazon Echo and Google Home are amazing devices and both have advantages over the other. In my home, we use the Amazon Echo and have them around the house and outside. I have the original in the living room, a Dot in bedrooms, my office and outside, a Tap in my woodworking workshop and Spots in the kids’ room (with tape over the camera). They’re great devices but far from perfect. They’re missing several key features and the Google Home is missing the same things, too.

I polled the TechCrunch staff. The following are the features we would like to see in the next generation of these devices.

IR Blaster

Right now, it’s possible to have the Echo and Home control a TV, but only through 3rd party devices. If the Echo or Home had a top-mounted 360-degree IR Blaster, the smart speakers could natively control TVs, entertainment systems, and heating and cooling units.

Echo and Homes are naturally placed out in the open, making the devices well suited to control devices sporting an infrared port. Saying “turn on the TV” or “turn on the AC” could trigger the Echo to broadcast the IR codes from the Echo to the TV or wall-mounted AV unit.

This would require Amazon and Google to integrate a complete universal remote scheme into the Echo and Home. That’s not a small task. Companies such as Logitech’s Harmony, Universal Remote Control and others are dedicated to ensuring their remotes are compatible with everything on the market. It seems like an endless battle of discovering new IR codes, but one I wish Amazon and Google would tackle. I would like to be able to control my electric fireplace and powered window shades with my Echo without any hassle.

A dedicated app for music and the smart home

The current Home and Alexa apps are bloated and unusable for daily use. I suspect that’s by design, as it forces the users to use the speaker for most tasks. The Echo and Home deserve better.

Right now, Amazon and Google seemingly want users to use voice to set up these devices. And that’s fine to a point. If a user is going to use these speakers for listening to Spotify or controlling a set of Hue lights, the current app and voice setup works fine. But if a user wants an Echo to control a handful of smart home devices from different vendors, a dedicated app for the smart home ecosystem should be available — bonus points if there’s a desktop app for even more complex systems.

Look at Sonos. The Sonos One is a fantastic speaker and arguably the best sounding multi-room speaker system. Even though Alexa is built into the speaker, the Sonos app is still useful as it would be for the Echo and Home, too. A dedicated music app would let Echo and Home users more easily browse music sources and select tracks and control playback on different devices.

The smart speakers can be the center of complex smart home ecosystems and deserve a competent companion app for setup and maintenance.

Logitech’s Harmony app is a good example here as well. This desktop app allows users to set up multiple universal remotes. The same should be available for Echo and Home devices. For example, my kids have their own Spotify accounts and do not need voice access to my Vivint home security system or the Hue bulbs in the living room. I want a way to more easily customize the Echo devices throughout the home. Setting up such a system is currently not possible and would be clunky and tiresome to do through a mobile app unless it’s dedicated to the purpose.

Mesh networking

Devices such as Eero and Netgear’s Orbi line are popular because they easily flood an area with wi-fi that’s faster and more reliable than wi-fi broadcasted by a single access point. Mesh networking should be included in the Google Home or Amazon Echo.

These devices are designed to be placed out in the open and in common spaces, which is also the best placement for wi-fi routers. Including a mesh networking extender in these devices would increase their appeal and encourage owners to buy more while also improving the owner’s wi-fi. Everyone wins.

Buying Eero seems like the logical play for Amazon or Google. The company already makes one of the best mesh networking products on the market. The products are well designed and packaged in small enclosures. Even if Google or Amazon doesn’t build the mesh networking bits directly into the speaker, it could be included in the speaker’s wall power supply allowing both companies to quickly implement it across its product lines and offer it as a logical add-on as a secondary purchase.

3.5mm optical output

I have several Dots hooked up to full audio systems thanks to the 3.5mm output. But it’s just two-channel analog, which is fine for NPR but I want more.

For several generations, the MacBook Pro rocked an optical output through the 3.5mm jack. I suspect it wasn’t widely used, which led to Apple cancelling it on the latest generation. It would be lovely if the Echo and Home had this option, too.

Right now, the digital connection would not make a large difference in the quality of the audio since the device streams at a relatively low bit-rate. But if either Google or Amazon decide to pursue higher quality audio like offered from Tidal, this would be a must-have addition to the hardware.

Outdoor edition

I spend a good amount of time outside in the summer and managed to install an Echo Dot on my deck. The Dot is not meant to be installed outside, and though my setup has survived a year outside, it would be great to have an all-weather Echo that was much more robust and weather resistant.

Here’s how I installed an Echo Dot on my deck. Mount one of these electrical boxes in a location that would keep the Echo Dot out of the rain. Pop out one of the sides of the box and fit the Dot inside the box. The Dot should be exposed and facing down. Plug in the power cable and 3.5mm cable through the hole in the side and run the audio to an amp like this to power a set of outside speakers. I used asphalt shingles to cover the topside of both devices to protect them from water dripping off the deck. This setup has so far survived a Michigan summer and winter.

I live outside a city and have always had speakers outside. From my Dot’s location under the deck, it still manages to pick up my voice allowing control of Spotify and my smart home while I’m around my yard. It’s a great experience and I wish Amazon or Google made a version of its smart speakers so more people could take their voice assistants outside.

Improved privacy

There’s an inherent creepiness with having devices always listening throughout your home. An early bug caused the Google Home Mini to record everything and sending the recordings back to Google. Consumers should have more options in how Amazon and Google handle the recorded data.

There should be an option to allow the user to opt out of sending recordings back to Amazon or Google even if concessions have to be made. If needed give the user the option of opting out of several features or let the user decide if the recordings should be deleted after a few days or weeks.

Consumers are soon going to be looking for this sort of control as the topic grows in intensity following Facebook’s blunder and it would be wise for Google and Amazon to get ahead of consumers’ expectations.

A new portable speaker

I use a Tap in my workshop and it does a fine job. But the cloth covering gets dirty. And I discovered it’s not durable after dropping it once. What’s worse, if the always-listening mode is activated, the speaker must be put back on its dock after 12 hours or the battery completely dies.

The Tap was one of the first Amazon Echo devices. Originally users had to hit a button to activate Alexa, but the company added voice activation after it launched. It’s a handy speaker but it’s due for an upgrade.

A portable Echo or Home needs to be all-weather, durable and easily cleanable. It needs to have a dock and built-in micro-USB port, and it must have voice activated control — bonus points if it can lock out unknown voices.

Improved accessibility features

Voice assistant devices are making technology more accessible than ever but there are still features that should be added. There are lots of people who have speech impairments who can hear perfectly well, but an Alexa Echo or Google Home won’t recognize their speech accurately at all.

Apple added this ability to Siri. Users can text it queries. The option is available on iOS 11 under the accessibility menu. The Google Home and Amazon Echo should have the same feature.

Users should be able to send text queries to Echo via their mobile phone (from within the Alexa app via a free form text-styled chatbot) and still listen to the response and still take advantage of all the skills and smart home integration. From a technical point of view, it would be trivial since it wouldn’t need any voice to text translation and it would increase the appeal of the device to a new market of shoppers.

Motion sensors

There are several cases where an included motion sensor would improve the user experience of a voice assistant.

A morning alarm could increase in intensity if motion isn’t detected — or likewise, it could be deactivated by sensing a set amount of motion. Motion detectors could also act as light switches, switching on lights if motion is detected and then switching off lights if motion is no longer detected. But there’s more, automatic lowering of volume if motion is not detected, additional sensors for alarms, and detecting users for HVAC systems.

The Amazon Echo and Google Home are amazing devices and both have advantages over the other. In my home, we use the Amazon Echo and have them around the house and outside. I have the original in the living room, a Dot in bedrooms, my office and outside, a Tap in my woodworking workshop and Spots in the kids’ room (with tape over the camera). They’re great devices but far from perfect. They’re missing several key features and the Google Home is missing the same things, too.

I polled the TechCrunch staff. The following are the features we would like to see in the next generation of these devices.

IR Blaster

Right now, it’s possible to have the Echo and Home control a TV, but only through 3rd party devices. If the Echo or Home had a top-mounted 360-degree IR Blaster, the smart speakers could natively control TVs, entertainment systems, and heating and cooling units.

Echo and Homes are naturally placed out in the open, making the devices well suited to control devices sporting an infrared port. Saying “turn on the TV” or “turn on the AC” could trigger the Echo to broadcast the IR codes from the Echo to the TV or wall-mounted AV unit.

This would require Amazon and Google to integrate a complete universal remote scheme into the Echo and Home. That’s not a small task. Companies such as Logitech’s Harmony, Universal Remote Control and others are dedicated to ensuring their remotes are compatible with everything on the market. It seems like an endless battle of discovering new IR codes, but one I wish Amazon and Google would tackle. I would like to be able to control my electric fireplace and powered window shades with my Echo without any hassle.

A dedicated app for music and the smart home

The current Home and Alexa apps are bloated and unusable for daily use. I suspect that’s by design, as it forces the users to use the speaker for most tasks. The Echo and Home deserve better.

Right now, Amazon and Google seemingly want users to use voice to set up these devices. And that’s fine to a point. If a user is going to use these speakers for listening to Spotify or controlling a set of Hue lights, the current app and voice setup works fine. But if a user wants an Echo to control a handful of smart home devices from different vendors, a dedicated app for the smart home ecosystem should be available — bonus points if there’s a desktop app for even more complex systems.

Look at Sonos. The Sonos One is a fantastic speaker and arguably the best sounding multi-room speaker system. Even though Alexa is built into the speaker, the Sonos app is still useful as it would be for the Echo and Home, too. A dedicated music app would let Echo and Home users more easily browse music sources and select tracks and control playback on different devices.

The smart speakers can be the center of complex smart home ecosystems and deserve a competent companion app for setup and maintenance.

Logitech’s Harmony app is a good example here as well. This desktop app allows users to set up multiple universal remotes. The same should be available for Echo and Home devices. For example, my kids have their own Spotify accounts and do not need voice access to my Vivint home security system or the Hue bulbs in the living room. I want a way to more easily customize the Echo devices throughout the home. Setting up such a system is currently not possible and would be clunky and tiresome to do through a mobile app unless it’s dedicated to the purpose.

Mesh networking

Devices such as Eero and Netgear’s Orbi line are popular because they easily flood an area with wi-fi that’s faster and more reliable than wi-fi broadcasted by a single access point. Mesh networking should be included in the Google Home or Amazon Echo.

These devices are designed to be placed out in the open and in common spaces, which is also the best placement for wi-fi routers. Including a mesh networking extender in these devices would increase their appeal and encourage owners to buy more while also improving the owner’s wi-fi. Everyone wins.

Buying Eero seems like the logical play for Amazon or Google. The company already makes one of the best mesh networking products on the market. The products are well designed and packaged in small enclosures. Even if Google or Amazon doesn’t build the mesh networking bits directly into the speaker, it could be included in the speaker’s wall power supply allowing both companies to quickly implement it across its product lines and offer it as a logical add-on as a secondary purchase.

3.5mm optical output

I have several Dots hooked up to full audio systems thanks to the 3.5mm output. But it’s just two-channel analog, which is fine for NPR but I want more.

For several generations, the MacBook Pro rocked an optical output through the 3.5mm jack. I suspect it wasn’t widely used, which led to Apple cancelling it on the latest generation. It would be lovely if the Echo and Home had this option, too.

Right now, the digital connection would not make a large difference in the quality of the audio since the device streams at a relatively low bit-rate. But if either Google or Amazon decide to pursue higher quality audio like offered from Tidal, this would be a must-have addition to the hardware.

Outdoor edition

I spend a good amount of time outside in the summer and managed to install an Echo Dot on my deck. The Dot is not meant to be installed outside, and though my setup has survived a year outside, it would be great to have an all-weather Echo that was much more robust and weather resistant.

Here’s how I installed an Echo Dot on my deck. Mount one of these electrical boxes in a location that would keep the Echo Dot out of the rain. Pop out one of the sides of the box and fit the Dot inside the box. The Dot should be exposed and facing down. Plug in the power cable and 3.5mm cable through the hole in the side and run the audio to an amp like this to power a set of outside speakers. I used asphalt shingles to cover the topside of both devices to protect them from water dripping off the deck. This setup has so far survived a Michigan summer and winter.

I live outside a city and have always had speakers outside. From my Dot’s location under the deck, it still manages to pick up my voice allowing control of Spotify and my smart home while I’m around my yard. It’s a great experience and I wish Amazon or Google made a version of its smart speakers so more people could take their voice assistants outside.

Improved privacy

There’s an inherent creepiness with having devices always listening throughout your home. An early bug caused the Google Home Mini to record everything and sending the recordings back to Google. Consumers should have more options in how Amazon and Google handle the recorded data.

There should be an option to allow the user to opt out of sending recordings back to Amazon or Google even if concessions have to be made. If needed give the user the option of opting out of several features or let the user decide if the recordings should be deleted after a few days or weeks.

Consumers are soon going to be looking for this sort of control as the topic grows in intensity following Facebook’s blunder and it would be wise for Google and Amazon to get ahead of consumers’ expectations.

A new portable speaker

I use a Tap in my workshop and it does a fine job. But the cloth covering gets dirty. And I discovered it’s not durable after dropping it once. What’s worse, if the always-listening mode is activated, the speaker must be put back on its dock after 12 hours or the battery completely dies.

The Tap was one of the first Amazon Echo devices. Originally users had to hit a button to activate Alexa, but the company added voice activation after it launched. It’s a handy speaker but it’s due for an upgrade.

A portable Echo or Home needs to be all-weather, durable and easily cleanable. It needs to have a dock and built-in micro-USB port, and it must have voice activated control — bonus points if it can lock out unknown voices.

Improved accessibility features

Voice assistant devices are making technology more accessible than ever but there are still features that should be added. There are lots of people who have speech impairments who can hear perfectly well, but an Alexa Echo or Google Home won’t recognize their speech accurately at all.

Apple added this ability to Siri. Users can text it queries. The option is available on iOS 11 under the accessibility menu. The Google Home and Amazon Echo should have the same feature.

Users should be able to send text queries to Echo via their mobile phone (from within the Alexa app via a free form text-styled chatbot) and still listen to the response and still take advantage of all the skills and smart home integration. From a technical point of view, it would be trivial since it wouldn’t need any voice to text translation and it would increase the appeal of the device to a new market of shoppers.

Motion sensors

There are several cases where an included motion sensor would improve the user experience of a voice assistant.

A morning alarm could increase in intensity if motion isn’t detected — or likewise, it could be deactivated by sensing a set amount of motion. Motion detectors could also act as light switches, switching on lights if motion is detected and then switching off lights if motion is no longer detected. But there’s more, automatic lowering of volume if motion is not detected, additional sensors for alarms, and detecting users for HVAC systems.

Netflix today announced that it will release a second season of Lost In Space, the big-budget scifi that first debuted earlier in April of this year.

The series is a revamp of the original show from the 1960s. Season One, which included 10 episodes, follows the Robinson family on their journey from Earth to Alpha Centauri. Along the way, they stumble across extraterrestrial life and a wide array of life-or-death situations.

Many of the elements from the original show have been reimagined, not least of which being the role of Mr. Smith going to Parker Posey, who plays the delightfully wicked villain.

We reviewed the show on the Original Content podcast in this episode, and struggled to find any meaningful flaws.

Apple now has 55 self-driving cars registered with the DMV, compared to 27 earlier this year and just three last year. That means Apple has the second largest fleet of self-driving cars in California.

Apple now has more cars registered than Waymo, which has 51, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles. General Motor’s Cruise, however, leads the pack with 104 vehicles. In total, the DMV has provided self-driving car permits with safety drivers to 53 companies, resulting in a total of 409 vehicles and 1,573 safety drivers.

Here’s a quick overview of where some of the autonomous driving leaders stand in terms of registered cars:

• General Motor’s Cruise: 104
• Apple: 55
• Waymo: 51
• Tesla: 39
• Drive.ai: 14
• Toyota: 11
• NVIDIA: 8
• Lyft: 4
• Aurora: 4
• Voyage: 3
• Didi: 1

Number of safety drivers approved:

• Apple: 83
• Waymo: 338
• GM Cruise: 407

To be clear, the companies listed above only have permits to test self-driving cars with safety drivers on board. As of now, the DMV has not issued any permits for complete driverless testing. In order to conduct driverless testing, companies must have previously tested the vehicles in controlled conditions. The vehicles must also, among many other things, meet the definition of an SAE Level 4 or 5 vehicle. The DMV is currently reviewing two driverless testing permit applications, a DMV spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Remember Project Jacquard? Two years ago, Google showed off its “connected” jean jacket designed largely for bike commuters who can’t fiddle with their phone. The jacket launched this past fall, in partnership with Levi’s, offering a way for wearers to control music, screen phone calls, and get directions with a tap or brush of the cuff. Today, Google is adding more functionality to this piece of smart clothing, including support for ride-sharing alerts, Bose’s “Aware Mode,” and location saving.

The features arrived in the Jacquard platform 1.2 update which hit this morning, and will continue to roll out over the week ahead.

 

It’s sort of odd to see this commuter jacket adding ride-sharing support, given that its primary use case, so far, has been to offer a safer way to interact with technology when you can’t use your phone – namely, while biking, as showcased in the jacket’s promotional video. (See above).

But with the ride-sharing support, it seems that Google wants to make the jacket more functional in general – even for those times you’re not actively commuting.

To use the new feature, jacket owners connect Lyft and/or Uber in the companion mobile app, and assign the “rideshare” ability to the snap tag on the cuff. The jacket will then notify you when your ride is three minutes away and again when it has arrived. When users receive the notification, they can brush in from their jacket to hear more details about their ride.

Another new addition is support for Bose’s Aware Mode, which picks up surrounding sounds and sends them to the user’s ear through supported headphones. The feature is helpful in terms of offering some noise reduction without losing the ability to hear important things happening around you – like approaching vehicles, horns, and other people, for example.

Jacquard will now allow users to turn any gesture into a toggle for Aware Mode to turn it on or off for Bose’s QC30 and QC35 headphones.

And lastly, the jacket will support being able to drop a pin on the map to save a location then see, share or edit it from the app’s Activity screen.

The jacket continues to be a curious experiment with connected clothing – especially given that much of what the jacket can do, can now be accomplished with a smartwatch these days.

Google and Levi’s aren’t sharing sales numbers, so it’s hard to speak to adoption at this point, either.

However, a Google spokesperson did tell us that “[Levi’s is] pleased with the response and continue[s] to be excited to hear from people about what’s useful and what requests they have once they purchase the jacket.”

Given the addition of ride-sharing support, one wonders if maybe the focus is expanding beyond the bike commuters crowd, to those who just don’t like having their smartphone out, in general.