On the heels of EVgo‘s announcement that it was breaking ground on its first 350-kW public charger, ChargePoint announced at CES that it has developed what it calls an ultra-fast DC charging station that can deliver up to 400 kW. The ChargePoint Express Plus is aimed at cutting-edge cars that charge quickly and have long ranges, like the Tesla Model 3 and Chevy Bolt — cars that… Read More
When it comes to isolating weight loss or weight gain on different parts of your body, it’s a lot more complex than just tracking a single number. ShapeScale, competing today on the TechCrunch CES Hardware Battlefield stage, is aiming to build a more visual way of tracking your fitness. The company’s product, a connected smart scale, creates 3D scans of a user’s body and… Read More
The imaging technologies used in the medical and biotech fields may be powerful and indispensable for research and diagnosis, but they also can be slow and clumsy — relics of techniques that go back decades. Venneos wants to change that with its new device, which allows easy and continuous monitoring of a handful of individual cells without any of the fuss or mystery of existing solutions. Read More
Now you can post GIFs to Instagram Stories even if you didn’t shoot them in its standalone app Boomerang. Apple Live Photos can now be converted into Boomerangs. Meanwhile, new iPhone owners can share even more vividly, as Instagram on iPhone 7 and 7 Plus now supports wide color capture and display. Today Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger announced the new features have been almost… Read More
Cadillac is among the many car manufacturers looking at alternate ownership models, and its new Book subscription service is a unique twist on something like a Zipcar or GM’s Maven. With Book, luxury customers who might ordinarily consider buying or leasing one of Cadillac’s vehicles can instead choose to sign up for a $1,500 per month service that provides on-demand delivery of… Read More
What do you do when you rapidly become one of the most important chip manufacturers in the world and your stock price more than triples in a single year? For Nvidia, it means you throw a massive keynote stuffed with announcements that are setting the stage for a suite of products built around your core technology — building GPUs — that will make you the center of the… Read More
Somehow, I can never find a direct flight from Paris to Las Vegas. This year, even though I had to make a stop in London, my transatlantic flight was filled with French entrepreneurs going to CES, ready to show their latest and greatest products to an international audience. I already wrote that French startups were taking over CES last year, but it’s worth using this opportunity to… Read More
The forthcoming 10th Annual Crunchies Awards are exactly one month away.
Coincidentally, the gadgets here at CES are a fond reminder of our incredible finalists for the Hardware of the Year award. Given the timing — we’ve all got gadgets on our mind — we thought it fitting to properly introduce you to the products that have been nominated for Best Hardware at the… Read More
Xiaomi today revealed its newest Mi TV at CES. The Mi TV 4, which will come in three sizes (45, 55 and 65 inches) is 30 percent thinner than an iPhone. It’s only 4.9 mm wide at its thinnest point. As Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra noted in today’s announcement, it’s essentially invisible when you look at it from the side and has virtually no bezel. The back of the Mi TV 4 features… Read More
GoPro is facing a bit of an existential crisis as it starts to contend with other wearables — like the Snapchat Spectacles — cropping up to capture moments in peoples’ lives that they can share with their friends. So GoPro needs to basically find ways to get the footage it captures on its cameras on the internet as fast as Snapchat can, without having to do any major editing.… Read More
To the untrained eye, most pills tend to look the same. Hell, even to the trained eye, differences can be slight. It’s a problem that Stratio — a company competing in TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield at CES 2017 — is trying to solve. They’ve built a portable device that can identify a pill in seconds. Read More
Computers aren’t blind, but they can’t see. They can detect objects, but must be trained to understand what those objects are. That takes two things: a ton of example data collected and organized by artificial intelligence and humans to accurately label and verify that data. Done right, this process can teach self-driving cars to avoid pedestrians, detect parking lot usage by… Read More
At this year’s CES Hardware Battlefield, Japet announced Atlas, a device designed to tackle back pain, which is the No. 1 cause of employee sick leave. Antoine Noel and Damien Bratic met at engineering school. The pair worked together developing robotic hands for children with disabilities, before parting ways to start on other projects in health technology. Bratic started work on… Read More
GoPro recalled its Karma drone around 16 days after it launched in November last year for an issue with the battery. According to CEO Nick Woodman, that can even be fixed with a piece of tape. The problem with the drone stems from the battery basically popping out a few millimeters and causing a power failure in the drone, Woodman said at TechCrunch’s stage at CES this year. So, if a… Read More
As you can probably guess from the company’s name, SmartyPans is building a smart frying pan — which it just demonstrated onstage at TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield at CES.
As explained to me by CTO Rahul Baxi (he co-founded the company with his sister Prachi Baxi, a nutritionist), SmartyPans aims to make it easier for users to track nutrition and recipe… Read More
Honda is looking to nature to improve the safety of driving, using bio-mimicry of the behavior of a school of fish to inform a new technical concept it’s unveiling at CES called Safe Swarm. Safe Swarm uses vehicle-to-vehicle communication based on the dedicated short range communication standard to provide assistance to a human driver. Safe Swarm essentially means that cues picked up by… Read More
Every day brings another exciting story of how artificial intelligence is improving our lives. But for every AI success story, countless projects never make it out of the lab. That’s because putting machine learning research into production and using it to offer real value to customers is often harder than developing a scientifically sound algorithm. I call this “crossing the AI… Read More
Honda’s new Riding Assist motorcycle model isn’t a shipping product yet, but it is an impressive technical demo. The concept at CES showed how it can help motorcycles maintain balance while traveling at low speed, something particularly tricky for even experienced drivers. Speeds between 2 and 3 mph actually prove among the most challenging in terms of making sure a motorcycle… Read More
Honda is another carmaker focused on supplementing the driving experience with an emotional, AI-based component. The NeuV, Honda’s latest concept which it unveiled at CES on Thursday, is a city-friendly lightweight electric car that has Honda’s Automated Network Assistant (HANA), built with SoftBank, on board to help personalize the driving experience. Through HANA, the car… Read More
Microsoft’s Surface Studio was one of 2016’s surprise hits. It was a sort of one-two punch that arrived the same week that Apple released its new MacBook Pros to mixed reaction. Microsoft had seemingly come into its own as a producer of serious hardware for content creators. Dell previewed its own solution shortly thereafter by way of a quick online trailer. When we met with… Read More
