Author: azeeadmin

I have an Echo Spot by my bed right now, and I feel kind of weird about it. Have a camera and microphone that close to where I sleep is probably not a great idea. This alarm clock from Anker, on the other hand, is something I can get behind.

The Soundcore Wakey is actually pretty nice look looking, so far as these things go. And better yet, it’s got an inductive charging pad on top, so you can just plop your phone on when it’s time to catch a few Zs.

As someone who falls asleep with his phone in his bed more often than he cares to admit, perhaps this could help shake that terrible habit. I mean, probably not, but it’s worth a shot, certainly.

The Wakey has two five-watt speakers, 10 preset alarms and does FM (but not AM) radio, if rousing to the sounds of a Morning Zoo crew is more your thing. There are also six white noise sounds to help lull you to sleep in the first place.

The alarm clock is due out in the Spring for $100.

Announced way back at CES 2016, Motiv’s fitness ring was surprisingly capable and accurate for its tiny form factor. Earlier this year, the startup promised to bring even more functionality to the finger, starting with biometric authentication that uses a wearer’s gait to unlock devices.

This year at the show, the company’s got a handful of additional new features to showoff. Most interesting among them is upcoming addition of mobile payments, via NFC. How, precisely the platform works remains to be soon, though the company promises security through the biometrics.

Interesting, the company also claims to be adding ECG (electrocardiogram) readings. Again, details are pretty scant on the feature, which is due out next year. Of course, Apple recently brought the feature to its smartwatch,  and others are no doubt following suit soon.

It will be interesting to see how the company manages to fit that into the ring’s form factor —surely it must be running out of unused space by now. Ditto for how all of this ultimately impacts the life of the ring’s tiny built-in battery. No word on whether Motiv is actively pursuing FDA approval for the new medical feature.

When Electric Objects was bought by Giphy, the company soon shutdown the hardware team and got rid of the subscription fees for existing content. While Meural actually bumped up its annual subscription after getting acquired by Netgear, the company is also continuing to release new hardware.

The company just took the wraps off its Meural 3.0 art display.

Its latest offering doesn’t shake things up too much. There’s no Netgear router embedded beneath the display. The new release is all about a sleeker more modern design for the smart art screen, alongside a new smaller 21.5″ size designed to bring a cheaper entry price (though pricing has oddly not been finalized yet) and some nice size contrast with the 27″ model so people can get all crazy with Instagram-friendly gallery layouts.

The frames come in black, white, light wood and dark wood designs. While you were totally stuck with whatever frame you initially purchased in previous gen designs, the new look also brings modularity so if you have a change of heart or need to adapt your art display to a new look you’ll be able to swap frames easily.

The company’s working to bring more art collections to its subscription product, and will be adding collections from National Geographic, Norman Rockwell & Saturday Evening Post, and The Little Prince.

Specs obviously only matter so much on a device like this, which is still very much exclusively designed for showcasing artwork. That being said, it’s rocking 8GB of onboard memory, 2GB of RAM and a quad-core 1.8 Ghz CPU. It being a Netgear company now, the company has updated the WiFi chipset as well with the goal of “mor stable, higher performance.” The display has been updated to be more power efficient as well, using about 20 percent less energy than previous generations.

Still waiting on a price and release date for the new displays though the previous-gen 27″ screen started at $595.

Nvidia’s automotive ambitions seemed targeted solely on creating a platform to enable fully autonomous vehicles, notably the robotaxis that so many companies hope to deploy in the coming decade.

It turns out that Nvidia has also been working a more near-term product that opens it up to a different segment in the automotive industry. The company announced Monday at CES 2019 that it has launched Nvidia Drive AutoPilot, a reference platform that automakers can use to bring more sophisticated automated driving features into their production vehicles. This is not a self-driving car product, although it will likely be misinterpreted as such.

The Drive AutoPilot system is meant to make those advanced driver assistance system in today’s cars even better. It enables highway merging, lane changes, lane splits, pedestrian and cyclist detection, parking assist, and personal mapping as well as in-cabin features like driver monitoring, AI copilot capabilities, and advanced in-cabin visualization of the vehicle’s computer vision system. It also allows for over-the-air software updates, a capability that automakers, with the exception of Tesla, have been slow to adopt.

Nvidia already has two customers for Nvidia Drive AutoPilot — a name not to be confused with Tesla’s consumer-facing semi-autonomous system Autopilot. (It should be noted that a Tesla uses a derivative of Nvidia’s Drive platform, although that could change. Tesla has been developing its own chip, otherwise known as “Hardware 3.”

On Monday, Tier 1 suppliers Continental and ZF announced that by 2020 they will have partially automated driving systems ready for production that are based on the Drive AutoPilot platform.

Nvidia argues that there’s a market for this improved automation, noting a recent Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study that found existing Level 2 ADAS systems “offer inconsistent vehicle detections and poor ability to stay within lanes on curvy or hilly roads, resulting in a high occurrence of system disengagements where the driver abruptly had to take control.” Level 2 is a designation from SAE that means the vehicle’s automated system can handle accelerating, braking and steering, but must still be monitored by the driver, who should be prepared to take control at any time.

Nvidia doesn’t make plug-and-play type systems. Instead, Continental, ZF or other suppliers can take this reference platformand use it to deliver any combination of more advanced automation. For example, Continental will use it to produce an automated driving and parking solution that will be available to customers by 2020.

The foundation of the Drive AutoPilot is Nvidia’s Xavier system-on-a-chip processor, which can handle some 30 trillion operations per second. Then it adds Nvidia’s Drive software to process deep neural networks for perception as well as data pouring in from surround camera sensors.

The Drive AutoPilot system is part of Nvidia’s broader Drive platform. It’s also designed to complement the company’s Nvidia Drive AGX Pegasus system that provides Level 5 capabilities for robotaxis.

“A full-featured, Level 2+ system requires significantly more computational horsepower and sophisticated software than what is on the road today,” Rob Csongor, vice president of Autonomous Machines at Nvidia said, adding that the company’s system makes it possible for carmakers to quickly deploy advanced autonomous solutions by 2020 and to scale this solution to higher levels of autonomy faster.

Where does one go after launching a fairly successful bone conduction headphone line? Sunglasses. Seems as good an option as any. This week at CES, AfterShokz announced the launch of sub-brand OptiShokz, which leverages the company’s technology for a line of active sunglasses.

OptiShokz’s first product is the unfortunately named Revvez, which will launch via Indiegogo campaign mid-February. No price yet (likely that will depend on whether you opt-in to the pre-sale), but the glasses are IP55 water resistant and should get around six hours of playback on a charge. The lenses, meanwhile, are available in a bunch of different color options, including Polarized Grey, REVO Blue, Gradient Grey, Transparent, and Bright Yellow.

I tried an early version of AfterShokz and was a bit underwhelmed by the quality of of the bone conduction, but things seem to have improved a fit bit since then. Also, there’s something to be said for an audio technology that doesn’t obstruct your ears when you’re out, say, mountain biking. Of course, attaching this to a pair of sunglasses ultimately makes them less versatile than a standard pair of headphones.

Says AfterShokz, “In a six-year study, experts found that 116 people in the US died or seriously injured themselves due to a lack of environmental awareness that stemmed from wearing headphones. Most often, these injuries occurred in urban environments as headphone users were struck by oncoming trains or traffic.”

Not a big number granted, but better safe than sorry, certainly.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing the name Ubtech, Honestly, I wasn’t really familiar with the Chinese company until late 2017, when they brought a biopedal stormtrooper robot by our offices. The company’s about to get a pick up some traction, however. Last year, it announced that it had scored an $820 million Series C, led by Tencent.

With that little bit of wind it its sails, the company took to CES this week in full force, showing off a small army of robots. At the center of the announcements are updates to the company’s humanoid bots, Walker and Cruzr.

The bipedal Walker stands nearly five feet tall and weighs a beefy 170 pounds. The robot’s newly redesigned hands are capable of grasping and manipulating objects, while the self-balancing torso makes for smooth bipedal movement The robot interacts with its environment in a number of ways, including voice, touch and vision. Ubtech says Walker will be launching “in the very near future.”

Cruzr, meanwhile, is designed to help provide customer service, making it something akin to Softbank’s Pepper. The wheeled robot is already in use in a number of locations. A revamped version of the robot with an amped up processor, LTE connectivity and improved servos will be arriving soon, marking the first time Cruzr has been on sale in North America.

Specific timing and price are still TBD.

Media software maker Plex is preparing to take on The Roku Channel and Amazon Prime Video Channels, possibly as soon as this year. The company is in discussions with rights holders and content providers, with a focus on bringing free, ad-supported movies to the Plex platform – similar to how The Roku Channel got its start. It’s also talking to premium networks and content providers about offering their programming and subscriptions through Plex.

The talks follow the company’s recent partnership with music service TIDAL.

By working with TIDAL to sell bundled subscriptions to its streaming music service along with the Plex Pass subscription, Plex had to build certain transactional capabilities into its platform that it didn’t have before. That has paved the way for Plex to expand its subscription offerings to include new partners in the future.

“Now we have the ability to sell other services and bundles,” noted Plex co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Scott Olechowski, in a discussion this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “We’re bundling a Plex Pass with TIDAL. That took a little bit of backend work,” he continued. “You can imagine a bunch of different premium [content] that comes together in a single or multiple bundles, potentially.”

In Plex, content is organized not by source but by type – like music, movies, TV, etc. So when Plex rolls out premium content and subscriptions, it would show its users what sort of movies they have access to based on their subscriptions within the app’s movies tab. The same goes for TV and so on.

Premium content is only one area of interest for Plex going forward. It’s also looking to offer ad-supported content – like ad-supported movies.

As Plex expanded beyond organizing personal media collections to offer access other media – like podcasts, news, and web series, for example – it built out its ad tech platform, too. Today, Plex serves ads in its streaming news and web series, and is now capable of doing so for ad-supported movies.

“We have the ad integration that we didn’t have before. That wasn’t there a year and a half ago,” Olechowski pointed out.

“I think, from a commerce perspective, we’ll have ad-supported, we’ll have free obviously, and we’ll have subscriptions. And I think we would like this year to launch transaction [capabilities] as well, just as an option for certain types of content,” he said.

Plex isn’t ready to launch these new offerings yet, to be clear. It needs to work on the DRM portion and the transactional components for one-off purchases before it’s able to finalize deals with content providers or launch features for the Plex user base.

However, that could be coming as soon as this year, Plex believes.

“We have a bunch of conversations that make it potentially possible in 2019,” Olechowski said.

Beyond the technical considerations, there are also larger issues Plex needs to figure out before these products would launch to users – like which deals make sense for Plex, how will the offerings be bundled together, how the economics will work, and more.

“Now, it’s really a question of what’s the right order of battle, given the conversations we’re having with content providers who are all super excited about getting content into Plex,” added Plex CEO Keith Valory. “We can’t do it all at once,” he said.

While Plex doesn’t have deals to announce at this time, it’s confident it will get them done.

“The market is heading in this direction,” said Valory. “People realize there are too many services, too many silos. There’s just too much. It’s just madness. So if there’s a way to get in front of these users – and do it in a way that they love it – they want to be part of that,” he said.

Just imagine, a pair of noise-canceling headphones without a smart assistant on-board. What is this, 2017? Thankfully, Sony used its CES press conference today to announce that it’s finally addressing its well-received WH-1000XM3’s lack of Alexa.

The headphones will be getting Amazon’s smart assistant via a firmware update at some point during the first quarter of this year. Tapping a button will trigger Alexa, who can perform a variety of different media playback tasks, like playing music, changing tracks, along with more standard smart assistant fare, including connected home device control.

Along with the WH-1000XM3, the firmware update will also work with their predecessor, the WH-1000XM2, as well as the WH-1000X in-ear model. It seems our long national nightmare of not having Alexa on every single gadget is finally drawing to a close. 

In a new deal Toyota, AT&T and KDDI are bringing 4g connectivity to Toyota and Lexus vehicles. This will start with the 2020 model year vehicles that are slated to hit dealers in late 2019.

Previously, Toyota worked with Verizon to offer a similar connectivity package to vehicle owners. The deal today, however, seems to be focused on bringing even more connectivity services to Toyotas and Lexus vehicles.

The AT&T and KDDI deal will lean towards Toyota’s Global Communications Platform initiative the auto maker and Japanese communication giant KDDI formed in 2016. Under this banner, the companies are developing a future where vehicles are connected throughout the world. This deal puts AT&T as the carrier to connect vehicles in the U.S.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“This is just the beginning. With this type of connected technology, we’ll be delivering new, convenient and predictive experiences to our customers,” said Steve Basra, Vice President, Toyota Motor North America. “This Global Communications Platform, together with Toyota’s Mobility Services Platform, will also help us drive and achieve our vision of Mobility for All.”

For drivers, feature will include remote car start through a smartphone app, remote diagnostics, and the ability to send navigation information from a smartphone to a vehicle’s navigation unit.

Disclosure: TechCrunch is a Verizon Media company.

It’s hard to get excited about bluetooth speakers. Believe me, I’ve tried. But damn if this isn’t a nice one. As someone who spent a good part of the last year traveling, I’ve been using the Harman/Kardon Traveler a bit, to make hotel rooms slightly more bearable.

The Lenovo 700 Ultraportable Bluetooth Speaker might end up finding its way into my bag, though. This thing is slick — and super thin at 11 millimeters. It’s got five buttons on the front for manual control and can take calls, which makes it a solid addition for business travelers.

It’s splash-proof, so you can stick it near the sink while you brush your teeth in the morning, and the battery should get up to eight hours on a charge. Unlike the Harman, though, it doesn’t double as a phone charger.

The speaker arrives in April priced at $150. Which is, admittedly, pricey as far as portable bluetooth speakers go.