Year: 2019

Depending on your portable power needs and propensity for lower-back pain, the Omni Ultimate is either a godsend or something wholly ridiculous. The new power pack from L.A.-based Omnicharge has certainly charged up its fans, however, having raised north of $1 million on Indiegogo — nearly 2,000 percent of its initial goal.

The Ultimate appears to live up to its name, with a 40,300 mAh battery that’s swappable, so you’re never out of juice. It’s got an AC outlet, two full-size USB ports, one USB-C and DC in/out.

It’s also, as you’d expect, a downright beast of thing and could probably serve as a weapon in a pinch. Fittingly, you probably won’t be able to take it on a plane with with you. It’s not cheap, either, at $350 for early backers and $399 for those who pick it up, standard retail. The extra batteries, meanwhile, run $150 a pop. It’s shipping now for early backers and could be a lifesaver for long outdoorsy trips.

The company’s also releasing a trio of far more portable OmniMobile chargers ranging from 3,000 to 26,800 mAh, the latter of which is the upper threshold for flights here in the States. There’s also a Pro mobile that sports Wireless charging. Those hit Indiegogo later this month and will start shipping in March.

OmniCharge is also bringing wireless and USB C to its flagship Omni 20 in mid-February.

People have been talking about foldable smartphones for years, but it’s finally happening. Chinese company Royole was showing off the FlexPai at CES in Las Vegas, and we got to play with it for a few minutes.

It’s hard to say if it’s a phone or a tablet as you can basically use it as a phone and a small tablet. Arguably, the tablet form factor is the most usable one. It’s a 7.8-inch device that runs Android.

When you fold the AMOLED display, there’s still a small gap between the two halves of the screen. But it’s also much smaller than the unfolded version. It’s a bulky phone, but it’s still much easier to store in a purse compared to a tablet.

You can already buy a developer version of the device if you live in the U.S. for around $1,300. It runs Android with a bunch of custom software features. If you fold the device, all your content moves to one part of the screen. It’s not a fluid experience, but it works.

It’s impressive to see that Royole managed to beat Samsung and other manufacturers to the market with this technology. Now, let’s see if Royole will sell its own devices, partner with other manufacturers or both. We have a video of the device coming up later this week.

Like many small companies at CES, most of Nura’s time this week will be spent in meetings behind closed doors. Among other things, the Australian startup seems confident that it will be in a lot more stores by the time it releases its second product in May of this year.

Distribution for the Nuraphones was limited — no surprise, really, for a young company. Nura managed to strike deals with some brick and mortars, including specialty stores like B8ta, but sales for its first product were mostly restricted to online channels. It’s a shame, really, for the sort of product one really needs to experience in order to really understand.

Still, the over-ear headphones did generate substantial buzz through word of mouth. And while the company doesn’t disclose sales figures, it told TechCrunch that just north of 100,000 calibrations have been performed with company’s app. How, precisely, that translates to sales is unclear, however, as some users opt to share their headphones with other, leading to multiple calibrations per device.

The company has no doubt learned about sales and manufacturing lot since those early days. When we first met with Nura during its Kickstarter phase, there were only four employees. Thanks to sales, crowdfunding and a $5 million Series A last year, however, the company has since grown to around 50 people, spread out throughout the world.

The forthcoming NuraLoop will also no doubt have a broader appeal. The company has dropped the bass-pumping ear cups here, in order to focus on the sound-adapting earbuds. The bluetooth headphones feature a tether than connects behind the wearer’s back.

In the middle is a magnetic module that plugs into the charging cable and can also be used to hardwire the device for better sound. The price will also be considerably lower. A rep for the company told me that it will be around half of the larger model.

Nura also tells me it’s committed to manufacturing its own product, going forward, in spite of early discussions around licensing the tech to third-parties.

“We already were getting [interest] with the Kickstarter prototypes,” cofounder and CTO Luke Campbell told TechCrunch. “There were some larger companies that were open to it. A licensing model is something we were looking at initially, because hardware is hard. We had people telling us not to do it. To be honest, that’s not something that excites me.”

If you’re tired of firing up Photoshop for lightweight image editing tasks, this little tool is good news for you. Called Remove.bg, it can clear out the background of an image in seconds, no lassoing or any other editing hassle required. Because it uses AI trained on images of people, Remove.bg only works on photos of humans for now, immediately separating subject from background and leaving your image clean and ready for whatever you plan to do with it.

While Remove.bg has attracted a bit of attention before, we noticed it this time around when Twitter user Matt Haughey tested it out on Gritty, everyone’s favorite ambiguously anthropomorphic leftist meme. And it worked! Gritty is people, too.

When we tested it out, we were impressed by its ability to account for pesky, feathery hair without making an image look jagged and amateurish. Even if you’ve been using it for ages, dealing with hair can be tricky and time consuming in Photoshop. Best to shave it off.

 According to Remove.bg’s website, the creators were similarly fed up with the time and resource intensive process of leveraging powerful image editing software for trivial editing tasks.  

“Initially we had plans to build an app that uses the generated transparent images as the basis for something else. Given the promising results we thought: Why not release the background removal algorithm as-is, as a tool for the many designers, photographers, artists and other people who regularly need to remove backgrounds from images? So that’s what we did.

Since the release of remove.bg we have received a lot of great feedback and we are currently making plans for the future of the tool. We don’t have definite announcements about this yet, the only thing that’s clear is: We want to keep offering the current service free of charge on a permanent basis.”

On the about page, its creators also reassure users that they aren’t training AI on images edited with the tool. That’s it, no catch, it just works. We need more things that just work.

At Amazon’s event in September, the company announced an aftermarket product designed to bring Alexa to cars called the Echo Auto. But the device has remained in pre-order status, even as other products also unveiled at the same event – like the Fire TV Recast, AmazonBasics microwave, and various Echo devices for the home – went on sale and shipped to customers. The Echo Auto, meanwhile, is still only available on an invite-only basis. But Amazon confirmed to TechCrunch that it has begun to ship the device to pre-order customers.

In fact, some Echo Auto customers received their new device in time for Christmas, according to Steve Rabuchin, VP, Alexa.

Apparently, the Echo Auto was in demand, too.

“We had over a million [pre-order] requests,” Rabuchin told us. “Now, we’re just starting to ship.”

Amazon says the device began to ship the first set of customers in December, and the pre-orders continue to be fulfilled.

What Amazon didn’t explain is why the device has remained in pre-order status for so long, why it largely missed the holiday season with this ideal stocking stuffer-type of product, or when it would finally exit “invite only” status for good. (That’s right – you still can’t just buy one!)

The Echo Auto isn’t the only Echo product that ran in short supply in recent days.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon’s online retail store in North America and Europe had some issues keeping some of its Echo devices in stock in time for Christmas delivery, too.

It’s not all bad news, however. Despite the shortages, the retailer reported a record-breaking holiday season, including “millions more Amazon devices” sold compared the 2017 holidays. Over the course of the year, Amazon says it sold “tens of millions” of Echo products, and it just announced a milestone of 100 million Alexa devices sold to date.

Here’s a quick tidbit buried beneath today’s deluge of Google Assistant news (not to mention the bizarre waking nightmare that is the CES Small World ride). The company announced today that the smart assistant will be accessible on more Android phone lock screens.

The feature was first announced back at Google’s hardware event in October, though, at the time, it was limited to the company’s new Pixel 3 handset. For security reasons, it’s available through opt-in, meaning you’ve got to tick the box in settings.

Certainly adding that kind of access to the lock screen can open your handset (and by extension you) to malicious parties. Though once set up, it will only respond to your own voice (unless, of course, someone with access to your handset can do a really good impression of you).

Once enabled, you can get restaurant recommendations, turn off alarms and schedule reminders, among other features, all without having to unlock the handset. No word yet on when it will be arriving on specific models. 

Bowery Valuation, a New York-based company that we told you about last year, has raised $12 million in Series A funding for its tech-enabled real estate appraisal platform. The 3.5-year-old company raised the capital from Corigin Ventures, Camber Creek, Navitas Capital, Fika Ventures and Builders.

Bowery caught our attention initially because, like a lot of real estate technology companies, it’s tackling some clunky processes that you might imagine would have been solved long ago. For example, its mobile app enables appraisers to tick off items, rather than write everything down. It automatically pulls in public record data so that appraisers needn’t surf the web to find what they need. It enables passive databasing, meaning that rental and sales comps that are often lost today can be found via a map-based search. It also uses natural language generation to help its appraiser clients produce reports.

What has changed since we last talked: the company was beginning to sell a white-label version of its app to customers, and it has since shifted toward focusing its entire product and engineering team on its own internal software.

It has also expanded its footprint more slowly than it thought it might. Though the company is currently licensed and working throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, it hasn’t reached numerous farther-flung cities that continue to remain in its sights, including L.A. and Chicago.

Both are “still our first two choices for expansion,” says co-founder and CEO Noah Isaacs, adding that Bowery’s goal is now to “be in at least one of those two markets within the next nine to 12 months, with the other to follow shortly. We held off on expanding into new geographies prematurely, as we felt we had a lot more room to grow just in the tri-state area.” (Isaacs says the company has more than tripled its customer base and revenue since we last talked with the company last March.)

Though Bowery today focuses on multi-family and mixed-use assets, it also plans to expand to other commercial properties this year, says Isaacs.

Isaacs and his best childhood friend, John Meadows, founded Bowery in 2015 after working together at the same appraisal firm in New York and seeing plenty about the business on which they could improve. After bringing aboard as CTO Cesar Devars, a Princeton grad who’d studied economics and worked on several startups after graduating, the three got to work, applying and gaining acceptance shortly afterward to MetaProp NYC, a local accelerator program that focuses exclusively on real estate.

Bowery, where Meadows and Isaacs are co-CEOs, has since raised $18.8 million altogether, including from real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield.

Facebook has confirmed it has removed the pages and profiles of a far-right political activist in the U.K. after concerns were raised in parliament about aggressive intimidation of politicians and journalists trying to go about their business in and around Westminster.

PayPal has also closed an account that was being used to solicit donations for “political activism.”

The intimidation is being conducted by a small group of extreme Brexit supporters who have — ironically enough — lifted the “yellow vest” dress code from French anti-government protestors, and are also making use of mainstream social media and crowdfunding platforms to fund and amplify attacks on public figures in an attempt to squash debate and drive an extreme “no deal” Brexit. (Context: The clock is ticking down to March 29; the date when the U.K. is due to leave the European Union, with or without a withdrawal deal.)

In incidents widely shared on social media this week, individuals from the group were filmed live-streaming harassment of Remain supporting Conservative MP Anna Soubry who was mobbed and shouted at as she walked down the street to return to parliament after being interviewed live on TV in front of the Palace of Westminster where the group heckled her with repeat chants of “Nazi.”

Members of the same group were also filmed with fisted smartphones, chasing and hurling abuse at left-wing commentator Owen Jones as he walked down a London street.

In another video, one of the individuals leading the verbal attacks, who has been identified in the press and online as a man called James Goddard, can be seen swearing viciously at Met Police officers and threatening to bring “war.”

The speaker of the House of Commons said today that he had written to the head of the Met Police to urge action against the “aggressive, threatening and intimidating behaviour towards MPs and journalists” around Westminster.

The Guardian reports that at least 115 MPs have written to police requesting extra protection.

Contacted today about Goddard’s presence on its platform, Facebook later confirmed to us that it had pulled the plug. “We have removed James Goddard’s Facebook Pages and Groups for violating our policies on hate speech,” a spokesperson told us. “We will not tolerate hate speech on Facebook which creates an environment of intimidation and which may provoke real-world violence.”

Earlier today one of his pages was still live on Facebook, and in a post from December 14 Goddard can be seen soliciting donations via PayPal so he can continue “confronting” people.

We also asked PayPal about Goddard’s use of its tools, pointing to the company’s terms of use, which prohibit the use of the platform for promoting “hate, violence, racial and other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory.”

PayPal declined to comment on “any specific customer’s account,” citing its privacy policy, but a spokesperson told us: “We do review accounts that have been flagged to us for possible breaches of our policies, and we will take action if appropriate.”

A few hours later PayPal also appeared to have pulled the plug on Goddard’s account.

A Patreon page he had seemingly been using to solicit donations for “political content, activism” is also now listed as “under review” at the time of writing.

But Goddard remains on Twitter, where he is (currently) complaining to his ~4K followers about being de-platformed by Facebook and PayPal, and calling other people “fascists.”

How should mainstream tech platforms respond to people who use their tools for targeted harassment? If you read companies’ terms and conditions, most prohibit abusive and intimidating conduct. Though in practice, plenty flows until flagged and reviewed. (And even then, take-downs frequently fail to follow.)

For all the claims from platforms that they’re getting better about enforcing their claimed community standards, there are countless examples of continued and very abject failure.

Facebook’s 2.2 billion-plus users especially make for an awful lot of content to wrangle. But none of these platforms is renowned for being proactive about weeding out violent types of speech they claim to forbid. And when intimidation is dressed up as political speech, and public figures are involved, they appear especially paralyzed.

Social media-savvy far-right groups grokked this loophole long ago (see: Gamergate for a rough start date); and are continuing to exploit default inaction to get on with the violent business of megaphoning hate in the meanwhile.

You could say platforms are being gamed, but the money they make off accelerated outrage makes them rather more complicit in the problem.

The irony is it’s free speech that suffers in such a thuggish and febrile atmosphere. Yet platforms remain complicit in its undoing, doing nothing to stop hate mongers turning hugely powerful high-tech soapboxes into abuse funnels.

They do this by choosing to allow groups with fascist ideologies to operate freely until enough reports are filed and/or high-level political attention frowns down on particular individuals that they’ll step in and act.

Facebook’s community standards claim it aims to prevent “real-world harm.” But with such a narrow prescription, it’s failing spectacularly to prevent deliberate, malicious and coordinated harassment campaigns that are designed to sew social division and upend constructive conversation, replacing the hard-won social convention of robust political debate with mindless jeering and threats. This is not progress.

There’s nothing healthy for society or speech if mainstream platforms sit on their hands while abusive users bludgeon, bully and bend public debate into a peculiarly intolerant shape.

But we’re still waiting for the tech giants to have that revelation. And in the meantime, they’re happy to let you watch a live-streamed glimpse of mob rule.

The road to consumer robots is littered with the remains of failed startups. Jibo and Kuri mark two recent examples of just how hard it is bringing such a device to market. In fact, with the exception of the single-minded Roomba line, you’d be hard-pressed to name a product that has truly hit mainstream acceptance.

It’s with that in mind, that Misty has given its substantial runway. The startup has long term goals of bringing a truly accessible mainstream robotic to market — but it’s going to take a few years and a lot of baby steps.

Things started with last year’s Misty I, a handmade version of the company’s modular robotics platform. CEO Tim Enwall tells me the company ultimately sold “dozens” of the machines, with the express plan to eventually phase the product out in favor of the more polished Misty II. The second robot is set to arrive in April, following a successful crowd funding campaign in whcih the company raised just short of $1 million.

 

At $2,399, the new Misty isn’t cheap (thanks, in part, to the current administration’s trade tariffs). But, then, mainstream accessibility was never really the point. Misty II may be reasonably adorable, but it’s a platform first. The company is current software and hardware developers and the maker community in an attempt to build a robust catalog of skills. Think of it something akin to the app store approach to creating robots.

The plan here is to have a full selection of skills in place before the company targets consumers, while having third-party developers do much of the heavy software lifting. Developers, meanwhile, get a reasonably accessible hardware platform on which to test their programs. By the time company eventually comes to market, the theory goes, Misty will have a robust feature set that’s been lacking in just about every consumer robot that has preceded it.

That means that Misty II is less personality driven that, say, Cosmo. The on-board sensors and data collection is far more important to the product’s appeal that Pixar-animated eyes.

Of course, the product’s success will hinge entirely on that adoption, and it’s hard to say how large the potential market is, especially at that price point. Misty II is reasonably sophisticated and could have appeal for educators, among others, but it’s not really the same class of product as, say, those developed by the now-defunct Willow Garage.

Early last year, LinkedIn co-founder and prolific venture capital investor Reid Hoffman called Chris Urmson “the Henry Ford of autonomous vehicles (AV).” The vote of confidence and big check from Hoffman, coupled with a team of deeply knowledgable AV entrepreneurs, has catapulted his company, Aurora Innovation, squarely into “unicorn” territory.

Aurora, the developer of a full-stack self-driving software system for automobile manufacturers, is raising at least $500 million in equity funding at more than a $2 billion valuation in a round expected to be led by new investor Sequoia Capital, according to a Recode report. A $500 million financing would bring Aurora’s total raised to date to $596 million and would provide a 4x increase to its most recent valuation.

The company, founded in 2016, raised a $90 million Series A last February from Hoffman’s Greylock Partners and Index Ventures . Hoffman and Index general partner Mike Volpi joined Aurora’s board as part of the deal. Greylock and Index are Aurora’s only existing investors, per PitchBook data. The young business has a lean cap table often characteristic of startup’s led by experienced entrepreneurs able to secure financing deals briskly from top VCs.

Aurora’s C-suite is chock-full of veteran AV workers. Urmson, for his part, formerly headed up the self-driving vehicles program at Google, now known as Waymo. Chief technology officer Drew Bagnell was head of perception and autonomy at Uber and Sterling Anderson, Aurora’s chief product officer, directed the autopilot program at Tesla from 2015 to 2016.