Author: azeeadmin

Amazon this morning introduced a new device called the Fire TV Recast that allows you to watch and record live TV via a connected digital antenna and stream the content anywhere both inside and outside the home. The fairly hefty device allows you to place your digital antenna anywhere in the house where you can get good reception, without having to worry about having your connected media player device – like a Fire TV or Echo Show – also having to be nearby.

As Amazon explained, the Recast allows you to separate out where the actual recording happens and where the viewing happens.

The Fire TV Recast also helpfully ships with an app that will help you find the spot that has the highest attenuation for your antenna, so you can place it appropriately. The device then uses “an advanced wireless system,” to deliver the streams to other connected devices.

It can stream to your Fire TV, Echo Show, Echo Spot (the alarm clock) or even iOS and Android devices, Amazon says.

With your antenna, you can pick up over-the-air channels like ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and others. How well you receive them, of course, will depend on your geographic location. However, most U.S. consumers are able to access a number of stations through a connected TV setup.

The device allows you to record two or four shows at a time, depending on which version of the Recast you choose, them stream to multiple devices.

When you set up a Fire TV Recast, your Fire TV software will automatically recognize it’s attached to your network and update its own user interface accordingly. A new DVR menu will appear on the top of the screen alongside other navigation options, and the Home screen’s “On Now’ row will inform you about live programming.

There’s also a new Channel Guide that looks a lot like a traditional cable TV guide to show you what’s currently airing on your over-the-air TV channels. A small thumbnail of the channel you’re currently tuned to will display at the bottom right as you browse through the available programming. Included in this guide is the live content from any streaming service you subscribe to that offers live programming. PlayStation Vue is Amazon’s first partner on this front, but the company notes that if you subscribe to an Amazon Channel that offers live content – like HBO or CBS All Access – that will appear here, too.

The DVR feature, meanwhile, will show you all your recordings.

For the time being, you can record TV shows and movies, but it doesn’t allow you to make specific choices like, “only new episodes.” This a software feature that will come in time. However, you can prioritize which programs should record first if you’re running out of room.

You can stream the programming, including HD content, from the Fire TV Recast over Wi-Fi in the home or over cellular when outside the home. A companion app lets you stream to your mobile device, like an iPhone or Android smartphone.

Preorders for the Fire TV Recast start today at $229.99. That’s for two tuners and a 500 gigabyte DVR that holds up to 75 hours of HD programming. Amazon also offers a four tuner one terabyte version that holds up to 150 hours of programming for $279.99. Soon, you’ll be able to add on extra storage by connecting a USB hard drive on the port that’s already on the back of the device.

The Fire TV Recast itself is fairly sizable – it’s not a slim little thing you can hide anywhere. But the idea here is that you can tuck the device away somewhere else in your house – not necessarily nearby the Fire TV setup in your living room, den or bedroom.

Amazon says there are no monthly subscriptions for Recast, or other fees. That’s obviously a competitive advantage, as competitors like TiVo require subscriptions.

All models will ship before the holidays, Amazon notes.

News of the device’s existence was previously reported by Bloomberg, who said it was referred to internally as the codename “Frank.”

The idea here is to complement Amazon’s other Fire TV media players – devices that Amazon wants to become more of a central part of the home not only for entertainment, but also for smart home control, and of course, for adding things to lists and shopping Amazon.

The new hardware unveiled today will compete with Dish’s Slingbox and AirTV, TiVo devices, and to some extent, with home media software platforms, like Plex, which also allows for watching and recording live TV with select third-party hardware.

Amazon’s device is meant to serve the growing number of cord cutters who are ditching cable TV for ad hoc solutions combining favorite streaming services, and sometimes, local over-the-air channels.

 

As Amazon noted at today’s event, the company has already been working with a number of car companies to bring Alexa to vehicles. There are already a number of high-profile partners, including Toyota, Ford, Lexus, BMW and Audi. Today, it announced its plan to bring the assistant to the rest of the “hundreds of millions” of auto models out there — Echo Auto.

The device is a small dongle that plugs into the car’s infotainment system, giving drivers the smart assistant and voice control for hands-free interactions. Users can interact with the product’s mic array in standard fashion and ask for things like traffic reports, add products to shopping lists and play music through Amazon’s entertainment system.

The product also integrates with Amazon’s routines, making the product an interesting part of the company’s growing smart home experience. That means it can turn lights and appliances on/off as you’re coming and going.

The Drop-In feature, already available on products like Fire tablets and the Echo Show, is here as well. Using it, you can speak directly with those on your contacts list with a simple voice command. 

Of course, the product also integrates with various mapping services, so you can get driving directions. It works with Waze by default, but Apple and Google Maps will also be available. The product will run $50, though early adopters can get their hands on it this year for testing, with an added bonus of a price discount down to $25.

Check out our full coverage from the event here.

Today’s Amazon event is full of surprises, but you could have predicted this one from a mile away. The Echo show is a couple of years old now, and honestly, the hardware was never really that spectacular in the first place. Well, Amazon just introduced a new version of the screen-sporting smart speaker, which features a much nicer design and more.

Like the rest of the company’s recently introduced Echo products, the new device features a more premium cloth design, similar to Google’s Home products and the Apple HomePod. The screen size has been doubled to 10 inches, while the speaker has been tweaked to now feature real-time Dolby processing.

The product features an eight-microphone array and will integrate Microsoft’s Skype for non-proprietary chatting. The company has also added third-party browsers, including Firefox, further blurring the line between the display-enabled smart speaker and the company’s Fire tablet offerings.

There are various other fun new skills for the refreshed product, including a Battleship game. The product will also integrate with Amazon’s security offerings through the camera and new doorbell API.

The newly designed Show should help Amazon compete with the various third-party Smart Displays introduced for Google Assistant, along with a proprietary Google device expected to be announced next month.

Like its predecessor, the product runs $229. Pre-orders open today. It will start shipping next month.

Check out our full coverage from the event here.

Among the slew of devices Amazon announced this morning is a new Ring Stick Up Cam – stick up, because it’s designed to go anywhere. (And is not, apparently, a reference to being robbed at gunpoint?) The camera comes in two versions – one that’s battery powered and could be more easily used outdoors, as well as one that’s wired, which may make more sense indoors.

The device also supports power over internet – so if your house is wired for that specifically, you’ll have another option to power the device, Amazon says.

The company didn’t detail many specs for this device – we’ll add those later, as they become available.

These devices – which come in both black and white –  will be available later this year.

They’ll cost $179.99 and be available in the UK, US, France, Germany, Australia, and a number of other countries around the world.

more to come….

Here’s another unexpected surprise, as the hardware announcements have started coming fast and furious. Alexa Guard is a home security device that integrates with existing Echos. When the users is away, the product, flips the smart speakers in “Guard Mode,” so they listen out for sounds like breaking glass.

The product features smoke and carbon monoxide and integrates with existing security products, including those from ADT and Amazon’s own Ring products. The company didn’t highlight much in the way of information beyond that, but it promises that the offering is part of a much larger security offering, moving forward.

Along with the Guard offering, the company also announced the new Ring Stick Up, a camera powered by batteries that works outdoors.

Amazon keeps rolling out new Alexa devices this morning, with the launch of a new Alexa device – in a clock. Yes, there’s now an Echo Wall Clock available that has Alexa voice capabilities built in. That means you can ask Alexa to do things like set alarms and timers – and the lines on the clock will illuminate as the time progresses. Alarms and timers, of course, are two of the most used Echo features – and a wall clock makes sense as a place where people might like to use them, or so Amazon thinks.

The Wall Clock is designed to have an easy-to-understand interface so anyone who walks into the room could use it, without a long learning curve, the company claims.

The company demonstrated using the clock for setting a pasta timer, where a little LED shows up to tell you where the timer is, and then it begins to count down.

Amazon also pointed out that an Alexa-connected wall clock would mean you’d no longer have to update your clock for daylight savings time.

The device sort of feels like Amazon is throwing out a bunch of stuff just to see what sticks. Do people want an Alexa microwave or wall clock? The holiday shopping season will give us that answer.

The Wall Clock will ship later this year for $30.

One of the weirder rumors ahead of today’s Amazon event has come to fruition. The company’s attempting to make a big push into home appliances, so it’s leading the way with its very microwave. The Amazon Basics Microwave apparently began life as an in-house reference product, as the company was developing an API for third-parties to develop their own Alexa-powered devices.

The microwave is “still stuck in the late 70s,” the company said at the event. So it built a new one.

Among the other things the company had to solve was the ability to make the microwave work with WiFi signals — which has proven a difficult problem to solve. Unlike early rooms, Alexa isn’t built in, rather the appliance works with a nearby Echo, so you can cook things via voice.

The real killer app, however, is a built-in Dash replenishment, so you can order popcorn directly from the device. Seriously. The other big upside here is the price — the microwave will be available later this year for $60.

Amazon today is giving its premium smart home-ready Echo Plus device a notable update. The device, which includes a smart home hub built into the Echo, is now getting a new fabric design, and a temperature sensor. However, what’s more interesting is the addition something Amazon calls “local voice control.” What this means is that if the internet goes down, you’ll still be able to use Alexa to control your smart home devices.

As the company explained this morning at an event in Seattle, a hub that works with a cloud-based system can often run into trouble when internet access becomes spotty or unavailable. So what the company did to address this is build in a new capability, local voice control, that takes the best of its natural language understanding and its automatic speech recognition, and runs it all locally on the device.

So when the internet goes down – and Amazon says it’s starting with the smart home capabilities here, when it comes to local voice control – you can still say “Alexa, turn on the lights” or “Alexa, turn on the plug,” and  it’ll work. This feature will get  better over time as the devices add more local control more capabilities, the company noted.

Meanwhile, the temperature sensor feature will allow Alexa owners to add temperatures into their routines. For example, if the room gets too chilly, Alexa can tell you.

The updated version of the Echo Plus will still remain $149 and it will be shipping in every country that Alexa is in today.

Amazon wants to make it easier to set up your smart home. Today, the company introduced a new Smart Plug device that brings Alexa’s voice control capabilities to anything you want to control – a coffee pot, a light, or anything else that can be powered on or off at a power outlet. What makes the device interesting is that it won’t require a smart home hub in order to work – that is, something like the premium Echo Plus it introduced last year.

However, the price of this new device – $125 –  could be a breaking point for some potential smart home adopters, especially considering they could get a fancy Echo for not that much more. Pre-order starts today and the product starts shipping next month.

It’s not the the first smart plug by any stretch, but it’s a big part of Amazon’s plans to be the connective tissue for the smart home. The device works instantly, for those with an Echo at home. Plug it in and Alexa will recognize the device. From there, you can rename the device, to designate which room it works in, making it easier to control devices remotely.

Alchemist is the Valley’s premiere enterprise accelerator and every season they feature a group of promising startups. They are also trying something new this year: they’re putting a reserve button next to each company, allowing angels to express their interest in investing immediately. It’s a clever addition to the demo day model.

You can watch the livestream at 3pm PST here.

Videoflow – Videoflow allows broadcasters to personalize live TV. The founding team is a duo of brothers — one from the creative side of TV as a designer, the other a computer scientist. Their SaaS product delivers personalized and targeted content on top of live video streams to viewers. Completely bootstrapped to date, they’ve landed NBC, ABC, and CBS Sports as paying customers and appear to be growing fast, having booked over $300k in revenue this year.

Redbird Health Tech – Redbird is a lab-in-a-box for convenient health monitoring in emerging market pharmacies, starting with Africa. Africa has the fastest growing middle class in the world — but also the fastest growing rate of diabetes (double North America’s). Redbird supplies local pharmacies with software and rapid tests to transform them into health monitoring points – for anything from blood sugar to malaria to cholesterol. The founding team includes a Princeton Chemical Engineer, 2 Peace Corps alums, and a Pharmacist from Ghana’s top engineering school. They have 20 customers, and are growing 36% week over week.

Shuttle – Shuttle is getting a head start on the future of space travel by building a commercial spaceflight booking platform. Space tourism may be coming sooner than you think. Shuttle wants to democratize access to the heavens above. Founded by a Stanford Computer Science alum active in Stanford’s Student Space Society, Shuttle has partnerships with the leading spaceflight operators, including Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures, and Zero-G. Tickets to space today will set you back a cool $250K, but Shuttle believes that prices will drop exponentially as reusable rockets and landing pads become pervasive. They have $1.6m in reservations and growing.

Birdnest – Threading the needle between communal and private, Birdnest is the Goldilocks of office space for startups. Communal coworking spaces are accessible but have too many distractions. Traditional office spaces are private but inflexible on their terms. Birdnest brings the best of each without the drawbacks: finding, leasing, and operating a network of underutilized spaces inside of private offices. The cofounders, a duo of Duke and Kellogg MBA grads, are at $300K ARR with a fast-growing 50+ client waitlist.

Tag.bio – Tag.bio wants to make data science actionable in healthtech. The founding team is comprised of a former Ayasdi bioinformatician and a former Honda Racing engineer with a Stanford MBA. They’ve developed a next-generation data science platform that makes it easy and fast to build data apps for end users, or as they say, “WordPress for data science.” The result they claim is lightning-fast analysis apps that can be run by end users, dramatically accelerating insight discovery. They count the UCSF Medical Center and a “large Swiss pharma company” as early customers.

nCorium – They’ve built a new server architecture to handle the onslaught of AI to come with what they claim is the world’s first AI accelerator on memory to deliver 30x greater performance than the status quo. The quad founding team is intimidatingly technical — including a UCSD Professor, and former engineers from Qualcomm and Intel with 40 patents among them. They have $300K in pilots.

Spiio – Software eats landscaping with Spiio, which combines cloud-driven AI with physical sensors to monitor watering and landscaping for big companies. Their smart system knows when to water and when not to. This reduces water consumption by 50%, which means their system pays for itself in less than 30 days for big companies. They want to connect every plant to the internet, and look like they are off to a good start — $100K in orders from brand name Valley tech firms, and they are doubling monthly.

Element42 – Fraud is a major problem — For example, if you buy a Rolex on eBay, you run the risk of winding up with a counterfeit. Started by ex-VPs from Citibank, the founders are using risk models and technologies that banks use to help brands combat fraud and counterfeiting. Designed with token economics, they also incentivize customers to buy genuine products by serving exclusive content and promotions only to genuine product holders. Built on blockchain at the core, they claim to be the world’s first peer-to-peer authentication platform for physical assets. They have 45 customers across two industry verticals, 800K in ARR and are a member of World Economic Forum’s global initiatives against corruption.

My90 – Distrust between the public and the police has rarely been more strained than it is today. My90 wants to solve that by collecting data about interactions between the police and the public—think traffic stops, service calls, etc.—and turn these into actionable intelligence via an online analytics dashboard. Users text My90 anonymously about their interactions, and My90’s dashboard analyzes the results using natural language processing. Customers include major city police departments like the San Jose Police Department and the world’s largest community policing program. They have booked $150K in pilots and are expanding aggressively across the US.

Nunetz – A Stanford Computer Science grad and UCSF Neurosurgeon have come together to try to build a single unifying interface to replace the deluge of monitors and data sources in today’s clinical health environment. The goal is to prepare a daily “battle map” for physicians, nurses, and other providers, with an initial focus on the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). They have closed 3 paid pilots with hospitals through grants.

When Labs – If you hate managing people, When Labs wants to unburden you. Using an AI-powered assistant that texts with employees to negotiate assignments for hourly work, WhenLabs is trying to free customers like Hilton from spending money on managers who would normally do this manually. As the system gets smarter, they claim employees will prefer interfacing with their AI bot more than a human. AI and HR is a crowded space, but this might be the team to separate from the pack: the founding team’s previous company had a 9 figure exit to IBM.

FirstCut – FirstCut helps businesses put video content out at scale. Video dominates social media — it creates 10x more comments than text — and is emerging as a necessity for B2B media. But putting video out if you are a B2B marketer normally requires using agencies that charge hefty fees. FirstCut wants to disrupt the agencies with software and marketplaces. They use software automation and an on-demand talent marketplace to offer a fixed price product for video content. They are at $180k revenue, and most of it is moving to recurring subscriptions.

LynxCare – LynxCare claims that 90% of healthcare data goes untapped when doctors make critical decisions about your life. Further, they claim the average person’s life could be extended by 4 years if that data can be converted into insights. Their team of clinicians and data scientists aims to do just that — building a data platform that aggregates disparate data sets and drive insight for better clinical outcomes. And it looks like their platform has fans: they are active in 9 hospitals, count Pharma companies like Pfizer as Partners, and grew 4x over the past year and now are at $800K ARR.

ADIAN – Adian is a B2B SaaS product that digitizes the complex agrochemical supply chain in order to improve the sales process between manufacturers and distributors. The company claims manufacturers reduce costs by 20% and increase sales by 4% by using their online framework. $1.5 Billion and 70,000 orders have gone through the platform to date.

Hardin Scientific – Hardin is building IoT-enabled, Smart Lab Equipment. The hardware becomes a gateway to become the hub for monitoring, controlling, and sharing scientific data across teams. They’ve closed over $1.5m in revenue, and raised $15m in equity and debt financing. One of their smart devices is being used to 3D print bio-tissues and human organs in space.

ZaiNar – This team of 5 Stanford grads — 3 PhD’s and 2 MBAs — joined up with the Co-Founder of BlueKai to build the world’s best time synchronization technology. ZaiNar claims their ability to wirelessly synchronize and distribute time between networked devices is a thousand times better than existing technologies. This enables them to locate RF-emitting devices (i.e. phones, cars, drones, & RFID) at long distances with sub-meter accuracy. Beyond location, this technology has applications across data transmission, 5G communications, and energy grids. ZaiNar has raised a $1.7M seed from AME Cloud and Softbank, and has built an extensive patent portfolio.

SMART Brain Aging – This startup claims to reduce the onset of dementia by 2.25 years with software. They are the only company approved by Medicare to get reimbursed on a preventative basis for the treatment of dementia. In conjunction with Harvard University, they have developed 20,000 exercises that are clinically proven to reduce the onset of dementia and, they claim, help build neurotransmitters. The company works with 300 patients per week ($2.2m annual revenue) and is building to a goal of helping 22,000 people in 24 months.

Phoneic – Phoneic believes the data trapped in voice calls from cellphones is a gold mine waiting to be unleashed. Their app records and transcribes cell phones conversations, and the company has built an integration layer to enterprise AI and CRM systems that traditionally didn’t have access to voice data. The team is led by the co-founder of 3jam, one of the first group SMS and virtual number companies, which was acquired by Skype in 2011. He is keenly aware of the power of virality — and like Skype, the use of Phoneic spreads its adoption. The company has already raised $800,000 in seed funding.

Arkose Labs – Whether or not you think Russia interfered with the 2016 election, it’s no secret that bots are having significant impact on society. Arkose Labs wants to fight fraud, without adding friction to legit users. Most fraud prevention platforms today focus on gathering info from the user and providing a probability score that the traffic is good or bad. This leaves companies with a difficult decision where they may be blocking revenue generating users. Arkose has a different approach, and uses a bilateral approach that doesn’t force this tradeoff. They claim to be the only solution to offer a 100% SLA on fraud prevention. Big companies like Singapore Airlines and Electronic Arts are customers. USVP led a $6m investment into the company.