While the thought of a machine that can squirt out endless ropes of molten glass is a bit frightening, the folks at MIT have just about perfected the process. In a paper published in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing, researchers Chikara Inamura, Michael Stern, Daniel Lizardo, Peter Houk, and Neri Oxman describe a system for 3D printing glass that offers far more control over the hot material and the final product.
Their system, called G3DP2, “is a new AM platform for molten glass that combines digitally integrated three-zone thermal control system with four-axis motion control system, introducing industrial-scale production capabilities with enhanced production rate and reliability while ensuring product accuracy and repeatability, all previously unattainable for glass.”
The system uses a closed, heated box that holds the melted glass and another thermally controlled box where it prints the object. A moveable plate drops the object lower and lower as it is being printed and the print head moves above it. The system is interesting because it actually produces clear glass structures that can be used for decoration or building. The researchers take special care to control the glass extrusion system to ensure that it cools down and crystallizes without injecting impurities or structural problems.
“In the future, combining the advantages of this AM technology with the multitude of unique material properties of glass such as transparency, strength, and chemical stability, we may start to see new archetypes of multifunctional building blocks,” wrote the creators.
Sony, the leader in the image sensing market ever since it pioneered CCD development, is hoping that 3D image sensors will revive the flagging smartphone industry which is estimated to have fallen about 3% this year Sony’s sensor boss, Satoshi Yoshihara (pictured), says the company will ramp up 3D sensor production in later summer 2019 in ...
In a move which could be seen as a Chinese initiative to defuse the trade war, China’s Supreme Court has said it will now hear IP-related cases. The decision takes effect on January 1st. Up to now, cases concerning IP have been decided at the district court level. The lack of legal protection for IP ...
Dell went back onto the New York stock exchange on Friday nearly six years after Michael Dell (pictured) took the company public. The complicated deal saw a group led by Michael Dell pay a Dell subsidiary $24.4 billion for control of Dell – a valuation which infuriated activist investor Carl Icahn who says the company ...
On April 1, Toshiba’s SCiB li-ion battery business will be transferred from Toshiba Infrastructure Systems & Solutions Corporation (TISS) to will become an independent business unit within Toshiba. The move is part of the Toshiba Next Plan and positions the battery business as a new growth business. Positioning the business as an independent operation will ...
At half past midnight tonight NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft (pictured) flies past Ultima Thule which, at four billion miles, is the most distant object a man-made object has seen. Because of the distance, it will take ten hours for the first images of Ultima Thule to reach Earth. However NASA is showing footage of events ...
Face recognition technology has received a boost from the decision in Rivera v Google in a Chicago District Court. The plaintiffs alleged that Google’s Photo service violated their rights by collecting and storing biometric data from people’s photographs using facial recognition software without their permission. The judge decided that Google’s photo sharing and storage service ...
It may not be entirely fair to group these stories together — some companies likely failed because of specific management or business issues, while others fell victim to broader shifts and still others may bounce back after figuring things out. But collectively, they paint the picture of an intensely challenging time.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Csathy argued that it’s become a best-of-times, worst-of-times world. The worst-of-times side seems obvious — the companies that are struggling due to the “devastation of certain business models,” particularly reliance on big platforms like Facebook, and on an online ad business that’s currently “under tremendous pressure.”
At the same time, he said, “The best of times are the companies like Netflix, the Amazons, the Apples — some of these major new tech-driven media companies.”
Of course, Amazon and Apple make most of their money outside the media business, leaving Netflix as the industry’s big success story. But even there, Csathy predicted that in 2019, “Netflix will be challenged like never before” as it tries to compete with a vast array of new streaming services, many of them created by the same companies that have been selling content to Netflix.
A remote control is seen being held in front of a television running the Netflix application on October 25, 2017. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“Ultimately, the question becomes whether Netflix can prove long-term that it is more than a ‘House of Cards,’” he added via email.
And what about companies that aren’t already big, dominant players — the entrepreneurs who want to build the next Netflix or the next BuzzFeed? It won’t be easy, particularly when it comes to convincing venture capitalists to come on-board. Still, there were some digital media startups that successfully raised funding in 2018, like podcast network Wondery and theSkimm, maker of female-focused newsletters.
And New York-based startup studio Betaworks recently announced an early-stage program focused on “synthetic media,” which Partner Matt Hartman explained is an area taking advantage of advances in graphics and artificial intelligence. This could include companies fighting against misleading, manufactured news stories and videos (“The need for deep fake detection is growing”), but also the ones trying to create new kinds of content, like “virtual” characters such as Instagram celebrity Lil Miquela.
More broadly, Hartman suggested that business models in the media world are changing, particularly as publishers experiment with paywalls and also explore bundling their products together.
Lil Miquela
“I think that next year, we’re going to see a lot of experiments — skinny bundles, thick bundles, companies you wouldn’t expect to come together saying, ‘These things work together,'” he said.
And even if many of these experiments fail, Hartman suggested that they’re pushing things in the right direction: “The last 10 years have been about building companies that have turned out to be harvesting our attention. I think what we’re really excited about is companies that treat their users more humanely. How do we align the incentives for the companies that are entertaining us and educating us and informing us, but also being respectful of our time and our attention?”
Csathy made a similar point, saying, “These new companies that are ad-driven have no choice but to reinvent their business models. [Otherwise] they’ll be lost in the shuffle, because the monetization just isn’t there.”
Does that mean that as a reader and a viewer, you’re going to keep hitting paywalls everywhere? It will probably become increasingly common (New York magazine, for one, just introduced a paywall), but Parse.ly CEO Sachin Kamdar suggested that subscriptions won’t solve things on their own.
“The best publishers are probably going to have five or six revenue streams,” Kamdar said. “It’s not just going to be one.”
As the CEO of an analytics company that sells its products to publishers (as well as marketers), Kamdar has a vested interest in the continued health of the media business.He worried that in the industry’s “echo chamber,” publishers may simply follow the latest trend, but he warned, “Just because everybody else goes that direction doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you.
The key, he suggested, is “figuring out the existential thing — who you are as a publisher.” So he’s hoping they move on from “a very short-term view” of chasing the latest platforms and sources of traffic: “Now, I think, people are finally coming to the conclusion that sustainability needs to be a priority.”
And despite the current business climate, Kamdar said there’s a straightforward reason for optimism.
“More time is being spent reading things and watching things,” he said. “You take the long-term picture, there’s a big opportunity to figure out what is happening with that, where they’re going, how you can capture those audiences.”
We are living in an interstitial period. In the early 1980s we entered an era of desktop computing that culminated in the dot-com crash – a financial bubble that we bolstered with Y2K consulting fees and hardware expenditures alongside irrational exuberance over Pets.com. That last interstitial era, an era during which computers got smaller, weirder, thinner, and more powerful, ushered us, after a long period of boredom, into the mobile era in which we now exist. If you want to help innovate in the next decade, it’s time to admit that phones, like desktop PCs before them, are a dead end.
We create and then brush up against the edges of our creation every decade. The speed at which we improve – but not innovate – is increasing and so the difference between a 2007 iPhone and a modern Pixel 3 is incredible. But what can the Pixel do that the original iPhone or Android phones can’t? Not much.
We are limited by the use cases afforded by our current technology. In 1903, a bike was a bike and could not fly. Until the Wright Brothers and others turned forward mechanical motion into lift were we able to lift off. In 2019 a phone is a phone and cannot truly interact with us as long as it remains a separate part of our bodies. Until someone looks beyond these limitations will we be able to take flight.
While I won’t posit on the future of mobile tech I will note that until we put our phones away and look at the world anew we will do nothing of note. We can take better photos and FaceTime each other but until we see the limitations of these technologies we will be unable to see a world outside of them.
We’re heading into a new year (and a new CES) and we can expect more of the same. It is safe and comfortable to remain in the screen-hand-eye nexus, creating VR devices that are essentially phones slapped to our faces and big computers that now masquerade as TVs. What, however, is the next step? Where do these devices go? How do they change? How to user interfaces compress and morph? Until we actively think about this we will remain stuck.
Perhaps you are. You’d better hurry. If this period ends as swiftly and decisively as the other ones before it, the opportunity available will be limited at best. Why hasn’t VR taken off? Because it is still on the fringes, being explored by people stuck in mobile thinking. Why is machine learning and AI so slow? Because the use cases are aimed at chatbots and better customer interaction. Until we start looking beyond the black mirror (see what I did?) of our phones innovation will fail.
Every app launched, every pictured scrolled, every tap, every hunched-over moment davening to some dumb Facebook improvement, is a brick in bulwark against an unexpected and better future. So put your phone down this year and build something. Soon it might be too late.
A project by students at Carnegie Mellon could save lives. Called the HopeBand, the wristband senses low blood oxygen levels and sends a text message and sounds an alarm if danger is imminent.
“Imagine having a friend who is always watching for signs of overdose; someone who understands your usage pattern and knows when to contact [someone] for help and make sure you get help,” student Rashmi Kalkunte told IEEE. “That’s what the HopeBand is designed to do.”
The team won third place in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Opioid Challenge at the Health 2.0 conference in September and they are planning to send the band to a needle exchange program in Pittsburgh. They hope to sell it for less than $20.
Given the more than 72,000 overdose deaths in America this year a device like this could definitely keep folks a little safer.
2018 was a bad year for tech, EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager told Martha Lane-Fox in a BBC interview. Vestager instanced “forced misuse of data, manipulation, supervision, no respect of the citizen, no respect of individual” as examples of abuse and stated “there is an increasing awareness of the fact that we really need to ...
Yesterday, China’s BeiDou satellite positioning system BDS became fully operational. “This signifies that BDS has officially entered the global era as the BDS expands from a regional system to a global navigation system,” said BeiDou’s Ran Chenqi at the launch event, “from now on, no matter where you go, BDS will always be with you.” ...
Next week the legality of the most notorious business model in the tech industry’s history will come under the scrutiny of a judge. The judge is Lucy Koh who has shown a very independent streak in judgments affecting big companies who have used bully-boy tactics. The case is the US Federal Trade Commission v Qualcomm. ...
The Emergency Services Network (ESN), which is being built by BT to provide priority access to mobile phone services for the emergency services, will be delayed as plans to use Huawei switchgear are being dropped. The ESN was to have been in place next year. The new date for completion of an Huawei-free ESN is ...
It’s probably not just a regular episode of the critically acclaimed science fiction anthology series. Netflix has been pretty cryptic about it, only announcing its existence last week, ahead of a December 28 release.
Given the reported 5 hour, 12-minute runtime, “Bandersnatch” may be the choose-your-own-adventure episode that we know was in the works — in that case, it wouldn’t actually take hours and hours to watch, but instead would incorporate multiple paths totaling five hours of footage.
Today, Netflix released a trailer for what it’s describing as “a Black Mirror event.” The story takes place in 1984 and focuses on a programmer (Fionn Whitehead) adapting a fantasy novel into a computer game.
The trailer doesn’t quite come out and say that this will be an interactive episode, but the subject matter and the tagline (“change your mind — change your life — change your past — your present — your future”) seem to be awfully suggestive.
And we won’t have to wait much longer to find out: Netflix says “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” goes live tomorrow.
Sharp is to spin off its semiconductor business, reports The Japan Times. The spin-off, which is designed to speed up management decision-making, enable outside investment and facilitate external partnerships could happen as early as April. The spin-off will see the semi business split into two wholly-owned subsidiary companies one for chips and sensors and the ...
HiSilicon, Huawei’s chip subsidiary, will be the first customer to use a TSMC process using EUV, reports China’s Commercial Times. The process labelled N7 Plus, is due for production in Q1 2019. A follow-up process using EUV, N5, is due for production in 2020. Huawei is TSMC’s second largest customer after Apple. TSMC is expected ...
President Trump is considering an executive order upping the stakes in the US-China trade war, reports Reuters. The order would ban all US companies from buying switchgear from Huawei and ZTE. Since Huawei equipment is said to cost a quarter of Ericsson equipment, this would hit US companies, especially smaller ones in rural areas, very ...
Intel is to get a $185 million grant for expanding its Kiryat Gat fab in Israel. Earlier this year, Intel submitted plans for the expansion which will cost $5 billion and add 250 employees at the site. Intel also undertook to make local purchases worth $500 million. Earlier this month, Intel said it had begun ...
Huawei reckons it could be the world No.1 smartphone vendor in 2019. “In the global smartphone market, Huawei has gone from being dismissed as a statistical ‘Other’ to ranking among the top 3 players in the world,” says the company, “in Q4 next year, it’s possible we become No. 1” The company says it sold ...
We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups, so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off.
The event will be held at Work In Progress, 317 South 6th Street on Wednesday, January 9, 2019 between 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM PST.
There are only 200 tickets, so if you want to come please pick one up ASAP. The meetup is open to everyone, so head over if you’d like to talk tech. You can pick up a ticket here.
If you’d like to pitch at the event I’ll be picking 10 companies that will have three minutes to pitch without slides. Because this is a hardware event I recommend bringing a few of your items to show off. If you’d like to pitch, fill this out and I will contact those who will be coming up on stage.
Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, while testing the “station keeping” functions of the glass knifefish, have created an augmented reality system that tricks the animal’s electric sensing organs in real time. The fish keeps itself hidden by moving inside of its various holes/homes and the researchers wanted to understand what kind of autonomous sensing functions it used to keep itself safe.
“What is most exciting is that this study has allowed us to explore feedback in ways that we have been dreaming about for over 10 years,” said Eric Fortune, associate professor at NJIT. “This is perhaps the first study where augmented reality has been used to probe, in real time, this fundamental process of movement-based active sensing, which nearly all animals use to perceive the environment around them.”
The fish isn’t wearing a headset but instead the researchers have simulated the motion of a refuge waving in the water.
“We’ve known for a long time that these fish will follow the position of their refuge, but more recently we discovered that they generate small movements that reminded us of the tiny movements that are seen in human eyes,” said Fortune. “That led us to devise our augmented reality system and see if we could experimentally perturb the relationship between the sensory and motor systems of these fish without completely unlinking them. Until now, this was very hard to do.”
To create their test they put a fish inside a tube and synced the motion of the tube to the fish’s eyes. As the fish swam forward and backward, the researchers would watch to see what happened when the fish could see that it was directly effecting the motion of the refuge. When they synced the refuge to the motion of the fish, they were able to confirm that the fish could tell that the experience wasn’t “real” in a natural sense. In short, the fish knew it was in a virtual environment.
“It turns out the fish behave differently when the stimulus is controlled by the individual versus when the stimulus is played back to them,” said Fortune. “This experiment demonstrates that the phenomenon that we are observing is due to feedback the fish receives from its own movement. Essentially, the animal seems to know that it is controlling the sensory world around it.”
Whether or not the fish can play Job Simulator is still unclear.
“Our hope is that researchers will conduct similar experiments to learn more about vision in humans, which could give us valuable knowledge about our own neurobiology,” said Fortune. “At the same time, because animals continue to be so much better at vision and control of movement than any artificial system that has been devised, we think that engineers could take the data we’ve published and translate that into more powerful feedback control systems.”
There are few things in this world more difficult than launching a successful startup. It takes talent, know-how, money and a hell of a lot of good timing and luck. And even with all of those magical components in place, the odds may still be against you.
At TechCrunch, we take pride at covering the best and brightest of the startup world. But while covering the startup world is one of the most exciting and fulfilling parts of our job, death is a part of any lifecycle. Sadly, not all startups that burn bright ultimately make it. In fact, most don’t.
As we wrap up this year and look forward to the next, let’s take a moment to remember some of those startups we lost in 2018.
Airware created a cloud software system to help construction companies, mining operations and other enterprise customers use drones to inspect equipment for damage. It also tried to build its own drones but found that it couldn’t compete with giants like China’s DJI.
The shutdown appears to have been very sudden, coming just four days after Airware opened a Tokyo office, with an investment and partnership from Mitsubishi. In a statement, the company said, “Unfortunately, the market took longer to mature than we expected. As we worked through the various required pivots to position ourselves for long-term success, we ran out of financial runway.”
Blippar was one of the early pioneers in augmented reality, but unfortunately the AR market has yet to live up to the hopes for mainstream adoption. And despite raising a funding round earlier this year, the startup was apparently losing money quickly as it searched for new customers.
Not helping matters was some shareholder drama, where an emergency influx of $5 million was blocked by Khazanah, a strategic investment fund from the Malaysian government. In a blog post, the company said this was “an incredibly sad, disappointing, and unfortunate outcome.”
One of the major casualties of the FAA’s ban on smart luggage, this New York-based startup was forced to close its doors in May. CEO Tomi Pierucci was extremely outspoken when airlines started to enforce the new rules early this year, calling the news “an absolute travesty.”
From the standpoint of Bluesmart, he was right. The startup went all-in on connected luggage, and ultimately found it impossible to adapt when battery packs were no longer allowed on flights. The startup ended all sales and manufacturing, selling what was left of its tech, designs and IP to luggage giant TravelPro.
Things came crumbling down for San Francisco-based Doughbies in July, when the 500 Startups-backed, same-day cookie delivery service announced it was shutting down immediately. But it wasn’t because the startup ran out of money. Doughbies was actually profitable. Rather, its founders, Daniel Conway and Mariam Khan, just wanted to move onto something new.
TechCrunch’s Josh Constine argued at the time that Doughbies really didn’t need venture backing and that pressure to deliver adequate returns may have weighed more heavily on Doughbies than it was willing to admit. RIP Doughbies.
Like many failed startups before it, San Francisco-based Lantern was forced to shutter operations after an acquisition deal fell through. The mental health startup, founded by Nicholas Bui LeTourneau and Alejandro Foung, had raised millions in venture capital funding from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s venture arm, Mayfield and SoftTechVC, but failed to follow through on its promise.
What was that promise? To offer personalized tools to deal with stress, anxiety and body image based on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques via a mobile application. Despite being an early mover in a now overly-crowded field of mental wellness apps, Lantern wasn’t able to find enough customers to survive.
Smart security camera maker Lighthouse AI had a promising product with a natural language processing system that allowed users to navigate their footage. But it also faced a crowded market, and it seems consumers didn’t embrace the product. The company announced this month that it’s winding down.
“I am incredibly proud of the groundbreaking work the Lighthouse team accomplished – delivering useful and accessible intelligence for our homes via advanced AI and 3D sensing,” wrote CEO Alex Teichman. “Unfortunately, we did not achieve the commercial success we were looking for and will be shutting down operations in the near future.”
Mayfield Robotics (2015-2018)
Total Raised: N/A
Mayfield, which was originally part of Bosch, created the adorable home robot Kuri. However, it announced in July that it would stop manufacturing Kuri, and followed with an announcement that it would cease operations altogether.
“Our team is beyond disappointed,” the company said in a blog post. “Together we’ve spent the past four years designing and building not just Kuri, but also an equally incredible company culture and spirit.”
A major player in industrial robotics, Rethink was founded by iRobot cofounder Rod Brooks and former MIT CSAIL staff researcher, Ann Whittaker. The Boston area startup grew into one of the most important players in both the collaborative and educational robotics space, courtesy of creations like Baxter and Sawyer.
Ultimately, however, the company served as yet another testament to just how difficult it is to launch a robotics startup. Even with brilliant minds and nearly $150 million in funding, the company couldn’t turn enough profit to stay afloat. A last-minute planned acquisition fell through, and Rethink was forced to close up shop in October.
Startup stories don’t come more film ready than this. Even before it officially closed its doors, Theranos was set to be the subject of a book, documentary and an Adam McKay directed feature film starring Jennifer Lawrence as founder Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes founded the company in 2003, promising a breakthrough in blood testing. By age 31, she became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.
Theranos would go on to raise $1.4 billion, with a $10 billion valuation at its peak. In 2015, medical professionals began to mount criticism against the company’s methods. The following year, the SEC began investigating Theranos, ultimately charging it with “massive fraud.” In September, the company finally called it quits, with Holmes agreeing to pay a $500,000 penalty, while being barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years.
NEW YORK, NY – MAY 06: Co-Founder and CEO of Shyp, Kevin Gibbons speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015 – Day 3 at The Manhattan Center on May 6, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
A $250 million valuation and capital from some of the best investors (Kleiner Perkins, Slow Ventures) failed to keep on-demand shipping startup Shyp from dissolving. The San Francisco-based startup raised multiple rounds of venture capital amid a major hype cycle for on-demand shipping companies but wasn’t able to scale successfully beyond the Bay Area.
“To this day, I’m in awe of the vigor the team possessed in tackling a 200-year-old industry,” CEO Kevin Gibbon wrote at the time. “But, growth at all costs is a dangerous trap that many startups fall into, mine included.”
Over the past few years, Telltale Games seemed to reinvent adventure gaming, adapting big franchises like The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and Batman into episodic stories where players’ choices seemed to have real weight. It even partnered with Netflix to bring a version of “Minecraft: Story Mode” to the streaming service.
But it seems the company has had longstanding business issues, with 90 employees laid off in November 2017, then another 250 let go in September of this year. Although a skeleton crew remained employed to finish the work for Netflix, it looks like Telltale is dead. And the fact that those employees were let go without severance seems to reinforce an earlier report of toxic management.
Captiv8, a company offering tools for brands to manage influencer marketing campaigns, has released its 2018 Fraud Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report. The goal is to give marketers the data they need to spot fake followers — and thus, to separate the influencers with a real following from those who only offer the illusion of engagement.
The report argues that that this a problem with a real financial impact (it’s something that Instagram is working to crack down on), with $2.1 billion spent on influencer marketing on Instagram in 2017 and 11 percent of the engagement coming from fraudulent accounts.
“For influencer marketing to truly deliver on its transformative potential, marketers need a more concrete and reliable way to identify fake followers and engagement, compare their performance to industry benchmarks, and determine the real reach and impact of social media spend,” Captiv8 says.
So the company looked at a range of marketing categories (pets, parenting, beauty, fashion, entertainment, travel, gaming, fitness, food and traditional celebrity) and randomly selected 5,000 Instagram influencer accounts in each one, pulling engagement from August to November of this year.
The idea is to establish a baseline for standard activity, so that marketers can spot potential red flags. Of course, everyone with a significant social media audience is going to have some fake followers, but Captiv8 suggests that some categories have a higher rate of fraud than others — fashion was the worst, with an average of 14 percent of fake activity per account, compared to traditional celebrity, where the average was just 4 percent.
So what should you look out for? For starters, the report says the average daily change in follower counts for an influencer is 1.2 percent, so be on the lookout for shifts that are significantly larger.
The report also breaks down the average engagement rate for organic and sponsored content by category (ranging from 1.19 percent for sponsored content in food to 3.51 percent in entertainment), and suggests that a lower engagement rate “shows a high probability that their follower count is inflated through bots or fake followers.”
Conversely, it says it could also be a warning sign if a creator’s audience reach or impressions per user is higher than the industry benchmarks (for example, image posts in fashion have an average audience reach of 23.69 percent, with 1.32 impressions per unique user).
My aunt and uncle lived up the hill from Martins Ferry, Ohio, high above the river. My uncle ran a used car lot – Snezek’s – and so it was understood that they had a little bit of money and a bigger house than the rest of the family in the Valley.
We would drive there every year at Christmas, first the two and a half hours to Martins Ferry, a pit-stop at my grandmothers, and then a drive up the woods that covered the winding upper roads like a dark cloud. These were family gatherings before distractions, before everyone carried their lives with them in their pocket, so you had to prepare.
I always brought a few books or some Christmas presents to play with. One year I brought my entire Dungeons & Dragons set in an effort to learn how to play – even though I had no one to play with.
We’d shiver in the backseat as we wound through up the hill. House windows faced us, candles aglow. White glowing reindeer and sleighs peeked between pines. At the house we’d coast into the driveway and hop out into the crystalline cold. A few steps more and we would be warm.
Walking into the that house through door next to the garage, into the warmth of a home fired with cooking and laughter, is one of my fondest memories. The family made pierogi and lasagna, two staples in the pot-luck rotation of those old coal and steel towns. There would be plates of cookies and plenty of ginger ale and Buckeyes, the best candy on earth. There were jars of pretzels and nuts here and there, a sprinkling of gumdrops or hard candy for the old folks. There was fried chicken someone made and wedding soup my mother made. As you walked into that warm place you heard the clack of billiard balls and the roar of the game in the other room. My dad cracked a beer. I got kissed by my aunts a few times and then hid, perhaps in a corner or maybe upstairs by their big tree in a darkened room lit only by a fire roaring on a tube television.
That was the height of interactivity, then: a live fire on TV (or, more likely, a looped fire.) You imagined what it must be like on the other end of that picture, how much technology you needed to make something so primal and imperative appear on a glass tube. It was as if we had traversed space into a strange craft outfitted with the comforts of home and none of the discomforts. Nestled on the couch, the TV crackling, you were on a space station and safe, a self-sufficient place where memories of cold were far distant.
They aired the first Yule log in 1966 from New York’s Gracie Mansion. By the time I was watching it it had been around for twenty years. It was a holdover from the early days of broadcast, from the days when the air was dead if there was no one to play in front of the cameras. In a few years the tradition would vanish but in 2001, in the wake of 9/11, it came back, a reminder of simpler times.
There was something about it that could change your outlook. A distant roaring fire was almost as good as one in the house and far less work. I’d curl up, read, and nod off, the voices of the adults below lulling me to sleep.
Now we carry things that burn brightly in our pockets. We don’t need these camera tricks to see fires everywhere. We don’t curl up to the magnet hum of a cathode ray tube and the tinny crackle and pop of facsimile logs. We’re beyond that.
Maybe we aren’t, though. Maybe there’s still a warm place, the umbilicus to get there a crystalline moment between the backseat of car and warm basement rec room. And maybe upstairs there’s a dozing kid watching the last drops of Christmas burn away into the country dark.
The inventive Sinclair gene rides again as Sir Clive’s nephew, Grant Sinclair, launches a build-your-own pocket games machine. Grant’s product is called POCO, standing for Pocket Raspberrry Pi Gaming Kit. It includes a Raspberry Pi motherboard, a wide-angle camera, loudspeaker, touch screen and control pads. About the size of a smartphone, POCO allows users to ...
TSMC has advised customers for 8-inch wafers to use multiple sources, reports Digitimes, because demand looks like exceeding supply right through 2019. Last week TSMC said it was looking to build a new 8-inch fab in Tainan. The last time it built an 8-inch fab was 15 years ago The demand is coming from customers ...
Foxconn is said to be planning a $9 billion foundry in Zhuhai (pictured). The city of Zhuhai is putting up most of the money. Foxconn, its subsidiary Sharp and the city are expected to form a jv to build and run the fab. Initial products are expected to be 8K TV chip-sets, and imaging and other ...
Mobile Semiconductor has announced a 22nm FDX ULP (Ultra Low Power) Memory Compiler. The Memory Compiler offers an Ultra-Low Power mode at 0.65V that is useful to a wide range of wearable and battery powered devices. The 22nm FDX ULP joins their expanding 22nm FDX Memory Compiler family that currently covers a wide range of ...
ROHM claims to have launched the industry’s smallest contactless current sensor, the BM14270MUV-LB. It achieves minimum power loss (no heat generation) in an ultra-compact size, making it ideal for industrial equipment and consumer devices that detect operating conditions via current, including battery-driven drones, solar power systems, and servers in data centers requiring high power. In ...
NTT Communications is to buy a majority stake in the French virtual mobile network company Transatel. Transatel, established in 2000, has deployed a data MVNO network compliant with Embedded SIM (eSIM) technology to address three key market segments: Consumer Electronics, Automotive and Industrial IoT (IIoT). Its SIM 901 platform claims to deliver secure, global cellular connectivity ...
Here, Cuarón tells the story of his childhood in Mexico City — but through the eyes of Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio), based on the real maid who played a crucial role in raising Cuarón and his siblings. It’s a largely plotless film, particularly in its the first half, but it’s beautifully shot in black-and-white, capturing the rhythms and subtle power dynamics of everyday life in this family.
To discuss “Roma,” we’re joined by Brian Heater, who said he was hard-pressed to think of a better movie released this year. We had a few reservations — about the film’s pace, about some of the plotting and about whether Cleo is depicted as a fully three-dimensional person — but none of us denied that Cuarón has staged scenes here that are suspenseful as anything in “Gravity.” And as the credits rolled, at least one of your hosts was in tears.
You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
If you’ve ever found yourself lugging a big suitcase from meeting to meeting, a startup called Bounce could make your life easier. Using Bounce, you’ll be able to pay for short-term storage at hotels, dry cleaners and other local businesses.
The San Francisco-based startup is announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from investors including Structured Capital managing partner Jillian Manus, Seabed VC, Airbnb general counsel Rob Chesnut and Canadian entrepreneur Michael Hyatt.
CEO Cody Candee (pictured above with his co-founder and CTO Aleksander Rendtslev) said he’s actually not someone who owns a lot of stuff himself, but he realized that “people are constantly planning their days and planning their lives around the things that they own,” whether that’s running home to drop something off or heading straight to your hotel from the airport because you need to get rid of your luggage.
So Bounce has already signed up more than 100 locations across New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC and Chicago, and it says they’ve been used to store tens of thousands of bags. You currently browse these locations through the Bounce website, but Candee said an iOS app launch is imminent.Apparently Bounce vets its locations, partly to ensure that they have secure storage areas and that their posted store hours are accurate — so that you don’t rush to the store to pick something up before closing, only to discover that everyone left early. Candee added that the most common use cases include travelers who have checked out of their hotels, people attending events (I once tried to carry my gym bag into Madison Square Garden andI will never do that again) and salespeople who are hopping from meeting to meeting.
There are other companies that appear to have a similar idea — for example, Vertoe was part of winter class at Techstars NYC — but Candee said that competitors are mostly “attacking just the luggage storage space,” which he suggested is “relatively easy to build.”
In contrast, he said, “The way we see it is, we’re really building a tech platform and basically thinking about these broader use cases.” In fact, he said Bounce is already testing out a system where items are transported by local couriers between different storage locations.
“We’re thinking about what could be built on top of that platform,” Candee said. “A drycleaner could come on our platform and they could basically say, ‘Hey, drop your clothes off’ and then Bounce it back to wherever that user is.”
We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups, so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off.
The event will be held at Work In Progress, 317 South 6th Street on Wednesday, January 9, 2019 between 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM PST.
There are only 200 tickets, so if you want to come please pick one up ASAP. The meetup is open to everyone, so head over if you’d like to talk tech. You can pick up a ticket here.
If you’d like to pitch at the event I’ll be picking 10 companies that will have three minutes to pitch without slides. Because this is a hardware event I recommend bringing a few of your items to show off. If you’d like to pitch, fill this out and I will contact those who will be coming up on stage.
The Consumer Electronics Show, like Burning Man, is a massive event in the middle of the desert. Also like Burning Man it is populated by some of the greatest minds in technology. But, unlike Burning Man, these people are all dressed and only a few of them are on hard psychotropic drugs. Also CES is mostly inside.
Here are some tips and tricks I’ve collected over a long career spent staying in awful hotels and wandering around massive conference halls full of things that won’t be released for another year. Hopefully they can be of some use.
Why should you go?
CES is not about innovation. It is about networking with potential buyers. The show is massive and it is popular primarily because it is in Las Vegas, a city so nice they made the movie Casino about it. But the days of you and your brother being dragged out into the corn and beaten to death are gone and what’s left is an adult playground of 24 hour craps and bad drinks.
You are not going to CES to drink and gamble, however. As a startup you are going there to find customers or get press. If you have the hustle and the will you can easily meet hundreds of potential buyers for your technology including some big names who usually buy massive booths to show off their “innovative” systems. When you go bypass the armed booth guards who stand at the front directing traffic and go talk to the most bored person at the booth. This is usually some middle manager who was wrangled into telling people about his company’s most boring innovation. Talk to him or her like a human being, offer to take them out for a coffee, do whatever it takes to get a warm lead inside that massive company. Repeat this hundreds of times.
CES costs $300 and the tickets to LV and the hotel will cost far more. Be sure you’re not cash poor before you go. This isn’t a Hail Mary for your startup, it’s a step along the way.
If you don’t think you can pull off this sort of social engineering I describe then please don’t go to CES or instead send the most personable member of the team. It’s too big and there are already enough nervous nerds walking around.
You haven’t planned yet?
So you’ve decided to go. Do you have tickets? A hotel? At least an AirBnB? It’s pretty much too late right now to get any of those things in time for January 8th but you can try.
Further, if you have a friend who lives there go stay with them. The hotels gouge you during this week. Check out the Excalibur hotel, arguably one the worst on the strip. Right now, you can stay at this illustrious medieval-themed hotel for $25:
Need a smoke-smelling room abutting a flying buttress topped with an animatronic Merlin around January 9? Fear not, my liege!
The best time to book for CES is a year before CES. The second best time is never.
Maybe you’re going to buy a booth. I wouldn’t, but go ahead and give it a try. I like what my friend Tommy here did. Instead of going through one of the countless staffing agencies in Las Vegas he put out a general call for help and he got plenty of responses. Lots of people would be willing to go to Las Vegas to help out for not much cash.
Do everything in your power to stay as close to the Convention Center or Sands (the hall with all the startups) as possible. It is a living hell trying to get around Las Vegas and you’ll thank me later for every hour in a cab line you save for yourself.
Go to where the action is
If you are trying to get press for your product launch then you came to the wrong place. First, if you’re going to CES to launch then you MUST LAUNCH AT CES. I’ve seen too many idiotic startups who flew in, paid for everything, and then told the world they’d launch in like two months or whenever Sven back at the main office in Oslo was done putting the finishing touches on the device driver. If you’re not ready to ship then don’t go.
Do not spam journos about your product unless you know them. Your emails will fall into a black hole.
Further, instead of getting a booth at the show I recommend getting a booth at Showstoppers or Digital Experience. The events costs about $8,000 for a booth and are approximately the same. They are held before the main event and they’re where all the journalists go to get free prime rib and ignore you. It’s also where all of the small market journalists and the weird freelancers who wear fishing vests and live in Scranton wander around so be ready to do a little target acquisition.
Want my advice? Put one person at your booth who can tell your story in two minutes exactly. That person must tell that story as many times as possible and give the odd journalist who will stand there asking dumb questions for an hour the stiff arm whenever someone else comes up. Maximize your message dispersal. Also, if you have product then have about 20 pieces there ready to give away to Engadget, Gizmodo, the New York Times, The Verge, and the like. Don’t give anything to me if I see you. I don’t want that crap in my suitcase.
Now for the ingenious part. Find the most popular food item at the buffets and stand next to it. When a hungry journo comes up to grab a spaghetti taco or whatever you scope out their badge and offer to walk them over to your booth. They’ll harrumph a little but unless they are one of the countless millennial reporters who believe they have to liveblog these events they have nothing else to do that night except for get drunk on gin and tonics. Drag them over to your booth and give them the two-minute pitch. They’ll be so busy eating they won’t be able to ask questions. Write down their email address – don’t ask them for a card – and give them yours. Then email the heck out of them for the next few days to remind them about your launch.
Further, never rent a suite and invite journos to come to you. They have enough trouble getting out of bed let alone getting a cab to your dumb room. If a journo wants to meet you MUST go to them. Don’t make them come to you.
Manage expectations
Like Burning Man, CES is the worst show on the planet held in one of the most unforgiving habitats known to man. As long as you accept these two points you will be fine. You will not “win” CES. At best, CES will give you a kick in the pants in regard to your competition and actual value to the world. Want to know if you have customer fit? Go to CES and meet your customers. Want to see if journalists care about your idea? Pitch them when they are fat and sassy at CES and feeling powerful. That experience will humble even the biggest ego.
Remember: the world is a cold, uncaring place and this is doubly true at CES.
Be careful with PR people
See that animated GIF above? That’s how I manage my CES email. I scroll through the subject lines, look for people I know, and then select all unread and delete them. One of the worst things about CES is that the letters “CES” show up in multiple words and barring writing a regular expression it is very difficult to filter them out. 99% of your CES emails will go unread.
So should you hire a PR person? Yes and no. If you hire them to just send emails then you might as well burn your money. However, if that PR person can lead you around the show and introduce you to folks who can help you get your story out then it might be worth it. Sadly, there is no way to tell how incompetent a PR person is until you get on the ground with them. I know a few I can recommend. Email me. Otherwise be very careful.
Don’t go
Look, CES sucks. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s too big, everyone there is distracted by potential Blackjack winnings and trying to get noticed or launch at CES is akin to holding a poetry reading in the middle of a rock concert: nobody is paying attention and you actually may annoy more people than you reach. It’s your call whether or not you want to give it a try but be ready to hustle. Besides, there’s always next year.
Bonus Tip: Buy a humidifier
I learned this trick from Brian Lam, formerly of Gizmodo: when you land go to Walgreens and buy a very cheap humidifier. Put it in your room and leave it on all day. Las Vegas air is very dry and you’re almost guaranteed to get chapped lips and a cough if you don’t have at least one spot where it doesn’t feel like you’re on the surface of Mars.
This was us at CES 2008 or so. We were such sweet summer children.
The UK National Cyber Security Council set up by the Department for Culture Media and Sport has developed new initiatives which include: Appointing independent Ambassadors to help promote the attractiveness and viability of a career in cyber security to a broader and more diverse range of individuals. Launching the refreshed CyberFirst brand in 2019 which ...
Growth in the global economy is expected to slow in 2019 from 2018 dragging down semiconductor market growth in its wake, according to Bill Jewell’s Semiconductor Intelligence. Ten economic forecasts released in the last two months show the percentage point change in World GDP from 2018 to 2019 ranging from minus 0.1 points to minus ...
The EC has found that a joint microelectronics project between Germany, France, Britain and Italy qualifies for state aid. The countries will put up $1.75 billion between them which will, it is hoped, be met with $6 billion from industry. “Innovation in microelectronics can help the whole of Europe leap ahead in innovation,” says Commissioner ...
Graphcore, the Bristol neural chip start-up founded by Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles (pictured), has raised another $200 million, taking the total it has raised to $300 million. Graphcore has reached a $1.7Bn valuation with new funding from leading venture capital, financial and strategic investors including Atomico, BMW i Ventures, Merian Chrysalis Investment, Microsoft, Sequoia ...
MagnaChip, the Korean mixed-signal specialist, is offering foundry customers its third generation 0.18 micron Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process technology. The technology is suitable for PMIC, DC-DC converters, battery charger ICs, protection ICs, motor driver ICs, LED driver ICs and audio amplifiers. The third generation 0.18 micron BCD process technology offers improved specific on-resistance (Rsp) of power ...
MACOM has announced the first entries in its new portfolio of wideband, ultra low phase noise amplifiers. Available in 2.8 x 1.73 x 0.1 mm bare-die and 5x5mm, 32-lead AQFN packaged formats, the new MAAL-011151 is ideally suited for use as a low phase noise amplifier stage for signal generation applications spanning system designs targeting ...
The server market grew 5% in 2018 to 12,4 million units, reports TrendForce. Dell EMC, HPE (including H3C), and Inspur will be the top three server suppliers with the shipment market shares of 16.7%, 15.1%, and 7.8% respectively. Enterprise servers account for the majority of the global shipments while the percentage of servers used for ...
Look, I get it. Even when executed well, superhero origin stories on the big screen have become depressingly formulaic — and with the exception of “Wonder Woman,” the ones in the DC Extended Universe haven’t been executed well.
And although I was one of the few moviegoers who actually enjoyed last year’s “Justice League,” I’ll admit the Aquaman material didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the character’s solo film. Jason Momoa’s charm couldn’t obscure the fact that he was largely reduced to grunting catchphrases like “My man!”, or that the one or two scenes delving into his backstory were easily the least comprehensible parts of an often incomprehensible film.
But now that “Aquaman” is about to open domestically (a couple weeks after kicking off a hugely successful run in China), I have to tell you: I loved it.
It certainly has its flaws, like a script full of clunky exposition, stretched out by fetch quests that were transparently designed to keep our heroes occupied until the grand finale. It’s also insanely overstuffed, trying to make room for a star-crossed romance, an Indiana Jones-style archeological adventure, a fantasy epic with giant sea monsters and the standard reluctant hero beats, all in a runtime that’s a hair under two-and-a-half hours.
But that four-films-for-the-price-of-one quality is exactly why I liked it so much. “Aquaman” is a big, crazy movie, full of big, crazy moments. And while some of those moments are pretty dumb (this movie is absolutely unafraid of looking dumb), very little of it is boring.
Take the opening, which doesn’t actually start with Aquaman. Instead, we see a lighthouse keeper (Temuera Morrison) stumbling across a mysterious, wounded woman from the sea (Nicole Kidman). The romance that ensues may be pretty standard fare, but Morrison and Kidman are talented enough to make it funny and — when circumstances inevitably pull them apart — a little sad.
Of course, the couple has a son, and that son grows up to be played by the hulking Momoa. The adult Arthur Curry can talk with fish and other sea animals, and he’s also got superhuman strength and toughness. Plus, he’s the firstborn heir to the throne of Atlantis — a fact that becomes more pressing with the arrival of Mera (Amber Heard), who’s hoping to enlist him in her plans to stop his brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) from declaring war on the surface world. Soon enough, Arthur and Mera are searching for a mythical trident while being hunted by Orm and and the vengeful pirate Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II).
Like I said, that search involves several more steps than necessary, but I really didn’t mind. Although Momoa’s version of Aquaman as a gruff, hard-drinking superhero bro can be grating (particularly in a solo movie, where he doesn’t have the counterbalance of a Wonder Woman or a Flash), I found myself warming to him as the story went on. And most of the action scenes are impressively staged, particularly a long, brutal fight between Aquaman, Mera and Black Manta in Sicily.
That scene aside, the movie is at its best when it stays underwater, where director James Wan and his design team have created a vivid fantasy world. It can take a few minutes to get used to the wavy hair and distorted speech (because they’re speaking underwater, see?), but once you do, you’ll enjoy the sight of royalty riding sharks and manta rays, and you’ll get to visit kingdoms where fish people and crab people rule. (My zoological knowledge may be failing me here, but I think the movie actually has two different kinds of crab people.)
Is it silly? Of course. But the instant I saw a manta ray shooting laser beams, I was on-board. And when Aquaman and Mera entered the sprawling, psychedelically-colored city of Atlantis, my inner 13-year-old nearly fainted from excitement.
That was all before before the final battle, which saw vast armies of underwater creatures charging at each other while colossal sea beasts erupted from the ground beneath their feet. It’s like a deranged cross between “Lord of the Rings” and “Pacific Rim,” and it is glorious.
This movie isn’t for everyone, but I think I’ve figured out a simple litmus test to determine whether you’re in the target audience: Do you want to see Jason Momoa face off against a multi-tentacled monster? And what if that multi-tentacled monster was voiced by Julie Andrews?
If that’s what you’re looking for, “Aquaman” will not disappoint.
ST launching an “Open Innovation Challenge” for startups (“Challenge”) during the upcoming CES 2019. The effort, based on ST’s product portfolio including the STM32 microcontroller platform, is aimed to promote ST technology and solutions to founders and developers of French Tech startups in France and overseas. In addition, the Challenge offers development and promotional expertise ...
Small Robot Company, the Shropshire agritech start-up, has reached its Crowdcube equity crowdfunding funding target of £500,000 within minutes of its launch. The campaign is continuing to gather momentum, and the company is now working to reach its stretch targets. The company’s successful start to its campaign was was overwhelmingly due to backing from the ...
BrainChip, the spiking neural net specialist, has announced the BrainChip Studio 2018.3 update for its AI-powered video analysis software. The latest update has acnew mode that improves the software’s face classification accuracy by 10-30 percent. To date, BrainChip Studio utilized spiking neural networks to enable facial classification on partial faces. This partial-face mode is useful ...
MinerEye, the AI-powered data governance specialist, has been awarded an SME Instrument Grant from the EC worth $2.5 million. The Grant organization selected MinerEye’s Data Tracker to provide EU companies with a solution to ensure secure and compliant cloud adoption which is currently lacking in the market today. According to the Grant organization, “The solution is ...
Despite its political woes, Huawei has won top spot in the IHS IoT Platform Vendor rankings. Cisco, Microsoft, and PTC were No.s 2, 3 and 4. Completing the top ten were:, Alibaba, AWS, GE, IBM and SAP. “Huawei was the leading IoT platform vendor, based on its market-leading number of devices under management, the high ...
ACEINNA has posted a video on the ACEINNA YouTube Video Channel – “How to measure dynamic Tilt and orientation with an IMU” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnPzCbfCS3s Why would you want to know the dynamic tilt angle on a vehicle? Consider a classic example of a plane in the clouds. The pilot cannot see the ground, nor can ...
