Author: Haje Jan Kamps

Posted on

Mimi teams up with Skullcandy, Cleer and Beyerdynamic to personalize audio

Audio processing startup Mimi promises to make a personalized hearing profile for you, meaning that you can hear well without having to crank the volume up too loudly. This both helps prevent hearing loss, and it helps people who’ve already suffered some hearing loss to be able to hear their content better without having to incur additional damage to their hearing.

In theory, as a science project, that sounds pretty rad, but as a company, there’s an obvious problem: Unless the technology makes its way to the products we use to listen, it’s all a bit academic. You can’t help people unless the technology is available in products. This week, Mimi announced it has a big-name breakthrough on that front, and announced some major partnerships. The company’s tech making its way into household name audio products is a huge win for the company — and for our collective hearing health.

Philipp Skribanowitz, CEO and founder of Mimi, on the TechCrunch Battlefield stage in 2014

Mimi was on the TechCrunch Distrupt stage in New York back in 2014 — and they’ve come a long way since the product was essentially a bright idea seven years ago. These days, it’s an operating company with a number of successes under its belt. And with the newly announced partnerships with Skullcandy, Cleer and Beyerdynamic, the technology is about to be available in a lot of ears near you.

“Skullcandy is dedicated to creating accessible products with meaningful technology for our fans. Supporting individually tuned and healthy listening habits with Mimi will have a positive, lifelong impact on our fans’ enjoyment and well-being,” said Jason Hodell, Skullcandy CEO. “Partnering with Mimi is a wonderful example of this core mission coming to life.”

“We are thrilled to introduce Mimi Sound Personalization into our newest earphones and headphones available through the Cleer+app,” said Patrick Huang, president of Cleer Audio. “The inclusion of hearing optimization and wellness features in our products will certainly bring added value to our products and customers.”

How does it work?

“The auditory system has a frequency resolution. You can think of that like pixels on the screen. If you have good hearing you have a high pixel count, but even then, if two different bits of information get into one pixel and the dominant information is going to dominate. That’s kind of the basis of mp3: because of the limited resolution of a healthy ear, we can throw away tons of this information and get these massive reductions in file size,” explains Nick Clark, co-founder and head of R&D at Mimi. “The unique piece of knowledge that Mimi rolls with is we have individual profiles. So if someone has slightly more compromised hearing, you can compare that with them having larger pixels — they have fewer pixels. And there’s nothing that Mimi you can do about that pixel count because that’s related to the actual hearing of the person. What we can do is that we can process the sound to fit that a little bit better. We can amplify something selectively, and decrease something else selectively to kind of get the most information through. If you do that you give someone a rich experience.”

It’s hardly the most riveting illustration I’ve ever added to a review, but it’s fascinating to see the data that Mimi captures about my hearing. From the app, you can request a CSV export. It seems like the data captured mostly covers at which frequency and volume level I start and stop hearing the beeping sound.

I had a chance to try Mimi’s technology on three different devices; Skullcandy’s $99 Grind Fuel True Wireless Earbuds, Cleer Audio’s $130 Ally Plus II Wireless Earbuds and Beyerdynamic’s $300 Lagoon ANC headphones. The setup process is pretty similar on all three devices: You download the respective manufacturer’s app, then go through the process to create a hearing profile.

The creation of a profile is pretty straightforward; tell it your birth year, and you’re ready to start the test. The hearing test itself is pretty odd — it sounds like they locked a swarm of electronic crickets in a box, and then play a beeping sound over the top. The beeping fades up, and when you can hear the sound, you hold down a button. This makes the beeping sound fade back down, and when you can’t hear the beeping anymore you let go. The beeping happens at various frequencies, and the app uses your input to create a personalized profile. Once you have your profile, you can create a Mimi account and save it — which means you can use your personalized profile on any device that supports Mimi’s tech. Super neat, and it means you don’t have to become too intimately familiar with the box’o’crickets sound — it isn’t exactly a pleasant noise.

My personalization results from the Cleer app (left) were pretty different from those from the Skullcandy app (middle and right). The two Skullcandy results were almost identical, which would indicate that there is at least consistency between the measurements. Image: Screenshots.

The hearing testing component of this product is wildly successful and in wide use. The company has the No. 1 hearing test app in the App Store, and the company claims that around 50,000 people are testing their hearing using their app every month. From the app’s reviews, it seems as if the users are finding that the tests are consistent with professional hearing tests.

“The same technology as our hearing test app is available as an SDK that our partners can build into their companion apps,” explains Philipp Skribanowitz, CEO at Mimi.

The magic in Mimi, then, is applying the results of the hearing test to a personalized profile, and then running this as a signal processor as close as possible to the user’s ears.

“[Our software] can be anywhere where the digital audio passes through. After we have created your hearing ID, you then somehow need to transfer to the processing algorithm to adjust the audio stream before it reaches your ears,” Skribanowitz explains. “We have multiple components and processing algorithms. On headphones, they run on the Bluetooth chip, on a TV they run on the audio chip. But we have also partners in public broadcast testing and streaming applications, along with scientific and smartphone partners.”

Does it make the listening experience better?

The question is: Does it work? Unfortunately, it’s a little hard to tell, and it varied a lot on the devices I tried out.

I tested the Mimi hearing test with three different products, with wildly differing results. From left to right: Skullcandy’s Grind Fuel, Beyerdynamic’s Lagoon ANC, and Cleer’s Ally Plus II. Photo: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

The Cleer earbuds had a curious hiss in them whenever they were turned on and in my ears — even when no audio was playing. When I was playing music, I wasn’t really able to tell the difference between the sound when my personalization was turned on or off. On the bright side, I was able to use the Cleer earbuds to create a profile and a Mimi account, saving my profile. This means that I could, in theory, be able to use it on other devices.

I spoke with the president of Cleer, who assures me that the hissing/buzzing noise is extremely unusual. They sent me out a second set of earbuds, but unfortunately, this set of earbuds also had the same issue. It’s possible that I just got extraordinarily unlucky, but it’s more likely that the company has some work to do before the earbuds are ready for public consumption.

Skullcandy was also having a bad run – the Skullcandy app kept crashing every time after I set up the sound personalization, failing to save my results every time. I wasn’t able to hear the personalization in action. For some reason, Skullcandy also didn’t have the option to log in to Mimi and to use my saved Mimi profile — I had to create a new one. Between the app failing to save my profile, and not being able to use a Mimi profile I had made on another device, it means that I was never able to hear the personalized audio on the Skullcandy earbuds. I talked with Skullcandy’s chief product officer about the issues with the app.

“Skullcandy takes the quality of our products very seriously. The Skullcandy mobile app was rigorously tested using various combinations of mobile devices and operating systems available at the time,” said Jeff Hutchings, chief product officer at Skullcandy. “Since that time, we have discovered that some users are experiencing issues with the brand new Pixel 6/6 Pro running on Android 12. Skullcandy is actively working on an updated release to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.”

Beyerdynamic Lagoon ANC headphones. Photo: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

On the Beyerdynamic Lagoon ANC headphones, it was a very different story. Of course, this is a different type of headphone; over-ear, and with a much beefier price tag. With the Beyerdynamic headphones, at least, the personalization made a marked difference. Especially when the active noise canceling is turned on, Mimi’s personalization feels significantly different on these headphones. Sound sounds crisper, and I could hear more details in the music than when the personalization was turned off. Music sounds like it is… more in stereo, somehow? It’s very hard to explain, but it is a good enough difference that I could be convinced to ensure that all of my headphones have Mimi’s integration in the future.

Of course, that made me wonder why the Cleer and Skullcandy earbuds didn’t have that pronounced a difference. I was wondering if I could use the profile I had made with the Beyerdynamic headphones, and use them on the others? It doesn’t appear that Skullcandy’s app lets me log into Mimi’s account, so that didn’t work. There was no way for the Cleer app to load the other profile once I had created one already. In the end, I had to delete the Cleer app from my phone, re-install it, and then log back into my Mimi account. I appreciate that not a lot of users will have the exact use case I’m describing here, but it’s pretty frustrating not to be able to copy a profile that’s already on the Mimi servers, when that’s one of the use cases Mimi’s founders is excited about.

Profile copying kerfuffle aside, with the Beyerdynamic profile, I could just about detect a difference on the Cleer earphones: the sound sounds as if the stereo channels are separated better (not unlike the “sounds more in stereo” description above), but I wouldn’t say that, on the whole, there was a dramatic difference. It’s certainly not the “woah, that’s cool!” reaction I had with the Beyerdynamic headphones. And nothing like my experience with the most obvious competitor in this space — Nuraphone.

It would be strange not to compare all of these headphones with the Nuraphone headphones. They cost a lot more — $399 — but they take a different approach in how they measure your hearing: Instead of putting the burden on you to figure out when you can and cannot hear the tones, the headphones actually measure your ears directly. The downside of this approach is that this only works in very specialized headphones, and the profiles aren’t transferable to non-Nura headphones. The result is spectacular, though — and even five years after I bought them, Nura’s Nuraphone headphones are my go-to for immersive music experiences.

On the whole, it’s exciting for the Mimi team to create these partnerships and to get their technology into people’s hands.

Ultmately, that’s the challenge with reviewing personalization technology: I can only review how these headphones land on me personally, and perhaps my hearing is uniquely good or bad, which would make Mimi’s tech less useful to me. You may have different results. To me, on higher-end headphones, it makes a world of difference, and I would certainly look for Mimi’s tech in the next set of high-end headphones I purchase. As for the earbuds; well; I only have a small sample size, where it didn’t work at all on one set of earbuds, and it was underwhelming on the other. Overall, it doesn’t really seem worth it for me, but then, if the Mimi tech doesn’t increase the price of the headphones, or degrades the audio quality in other ways, I can’t really see the harm either.

Posted on

Wishly wills the Gen Z world well with a worthy wad of angel wealth

A brand new social media platform focusing on social responsibility today announced it snagged $1.2 million to change the face of fundraising from a Gen Z perspective. Wishly is aimed at the curious Venn-diagram intersection of consumer brands, philanthropists and nonprofit organizations. The hope is to leverage the power of social media for social good.

The app was created by a couple of experienced social impact marketers, nonprofit fundraisers and administrators, Joanne Gonzalez-Forster and Justine Makoff. They saw a need for a social platform that embraced the optimism and altruism of the Gen Z generation, and to help people band together to bring about real, positive change in the world.

“In early 2020 when support for COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter were exploding, we saw our kids and their friends using social media to inspire their followers to take action and give to the causes they care about,” said Joanne Gonzalez-Forster, co-founder and CEO. “There wasn’t an easy way for them to find and vet nonprofits, make small donations and inspire their friends to get involved.”

The company was able to drum up an impressive assortment of angel investors, including now-retired founding partner of Pelion Venture Partners Jim Dreyfous and social impact investor Joshua Mailman. The duo invested into a $400,000 pre-seed round in 2020, and came back with additional investors to invest in the company’s current seed round of $800,000.

“We’re so excited to see what Gen Z and our young millennial kids are gonna do with it. There are so many opportunities and there’s so much to be done in the world. There are natural disasters every other day. There are so many social movements. We built Wishly for them — for young adults today — so that they can make a positive impact in the world with small actions,” said Gonzales-Forster. “When you Google philanthropist, you see pictures of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett, but you don’t see young faces. We want to change that. We want to see young faces of all different colors and shapes and sizes.”

The company’s business model is simple: it retains 5% of all the funds raised on the platform. Wishly also makes sure to vet every nonprofit that is featured on the platform.

“We actually pulled a list of every registered 501c3 organization from the IRS, so they are all already on our platform, and we can accept donations for them. Once a nonprofit goes on the app to claim its profile, that’s our cue to vet them,” says Gonzalez-Forster. “We use the IRS search tool to make sure they are in good standing with the IRS, which would mean that it has filed its taxes three years in a row. We also check Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau, and we do a quick Google check to make sure that there’s no scams or lawsuits or misleading information about the nonprofit. There are a lot of bad charities out there.”

The app is available now on iOS and Android, although the team suggests that the product is mostly in a friends-and-family stage until a more public launch, which is coming up soon.

Posted on

SOS raises 3.4M to add some pizazz to your local tampon vending machine

SOS already has a number of vending machines in the wild, dotted around the map in its native Boston. The company just closed a $3.4 million round to expand its offering of health and wellness products in vending machines in bathrooms. The vending machines are touch screens that also double as a “visually rich advertising and marketing platform,” just in case you were getting nervous at the desperate shortage of advertising in the world around us.

The latest round was led by the cleverly named For Later, which is the investment arm of Boston-based retail incubator For Now. Also participating in the round is a star-studded lineup of angel investors, including the Khan family; Zoe Cruz, Jerod Mayo, a New England Patriots coach and former player; Ju Rhyu of Hero Cosmetics and others.

SOS’ machines have been installed in a number of venues around Boston, including Fenway Park, Prudential Center and State Street Corporation’s offices, as well as FLA Live Arena in Sunrise, Florida.

“Our machines transform a moment of panic into a moment of empowerment and choice,” said Robina Verbeek, founder and co-CEO at SOS. “We believe that convenient access must be paired with exceptional products and an elevated retail experience. ‘Quick and easy’ shouldn’t mean ‘cheap and shoddy,’ especially when it comes to women’s health. Everyone deserves better.”

The two-woman founding team and the company’s co-CEOs are Susanna Twarog and Robina Verbeek. They met as colleagues at financial services company State Street, and combined forces to solve the perennial problem of broken, out-of-stock tampon machines.

SOS vending machine

The team built its first version of the machine in 2017, and deployed the first vending machine at a location in 2020. The company’s mission is to replace the unreliable, ugly old metal boxes with modern devices and services that “delivers essential personal care and beauty products from today’s leading brands.” The company hopes that its five design patents will hold the competition at bay for long enough to get a foothold in the market.

“We’re proud to partner with SOS to meet the wellness and personal needs of our staff, fans, and the South Florida community,” said Panthers Chief Commercial Officer Shawn Thornton. “We hope the SOS smart machines give patrons peace of mind knowing they can easily access these wellness products while enjoying concerts, games or events at FLA Live Arena.”

The company’s next installation will bring an additional 35 SOS machines to the Florida Panthers’ FLA Live Arena in Sunrise and five machines to the Panthers’ IceDen in Coral Springs. In the coming months, the company is aiming to expand to additional cities and locations across the U.S., including New York, Florida, California and beyond.

Posted on

Signos raises $13M Series A to give you real-time weight-loss advice based on your blood glucose levels

In a world where we count every step and measure every heartbeat, hopping on the scale once per week to keep half an eye on what your body is doing just won’t do. Even if you stand around on the glass oracle of mass a few times per day, the truth is that your body weight is a trailing indicator — it shows what has already happened, rather than what’s about to. One leading indicator is your blood sugar level — and weight-loss startup Signos is betting that you’re curious enough about the difference between our respective metabolisms to sign up for real-time glucose monitoring and alerts to keep you in shape. It turns out that GV believes that, too, to the tune of leading the company’s $13 million Series A round.

The basic science is this: If I eat a bowl of oatmeal, my blood sugar is going to spike. If I go for a walk or a run when it does, the glucose level in my blood will go down, which nips weight gain in the bud. My body might react differently to different kinds of foods on different days, at different times, and depending on a whole raft of unpredictable features about my body, what I eat, and how I’m doing that day. Crucially, it’s no good to use my body as an example; yours is going to be different. Signos believes that by continuously measuring, you can get the data you need to make healthier — or at least better informed — choices about what you’re putting in your body, and how often you shift your carcass around to shake off some of that weight again.

The company today revealed that it has raised a total of $17 million in funding, including a $4 million seed funding led by Courtside Ventures, 1984 Ventures and Tau Ventures back in January. In the current round, Signos raised a $13 million Series A led by GV.

The company’s founder told me he has a pretty close personal connection with the challenge of weight loss, and outlines how he got started.

“I was a fairly overweight/obese kid growing up, and I was like that up into my early teen years. I got into sports, lost weight, and actually became decently athletic. I eventually went to college to play hockey and ended up having a couple offers to play in the NHL,” said Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer, CEO of Signos. After his brush with top-tier sports, his body changed again, and he gained a lot of weight. “A few years ago, I was pretty overweight again. I started looking for some guidance. The standard advice is 2,500 calories per day for an adult male, but we all have friends that eat 4,000 or 5,000 calories and they never put on a pound. And then there’s those who eat 1,500 calories and they never lose weight. A member of my family was diagnosed as diabetic and I saw his continuous glucose monitor (CGM). He was explaining how it worked, and I found myself wishing we could take the CGM and figure out how the metabolism actually interjects itself with weight loss.”

Long story short, Fouladgar-Mercer founded a company and started building.

“We provide visibility into every body’s unique metabolic needs. Before, we were stuck with calorie reduction or counting macros or removing carbs altogether; now, we can work with people to turn diets that don’t work into plans that do,” said Fouladgar-Mercer, “We help them discover this in a matter of days or weeks and refine it over time for best weight management and overall health. Elite athletes or conscientious dieters often take an extraordinary amount of trial and error to come to the same conclusion we are able to deliver in a fraction of the time.”

The Signos platform will help develop personalized answers to basic questions like what to eat, when to eat and what exercises help encourage weight loss. At the heart of the system is Dexcom‘s G6 continuous glucose monitoring devices, which are typically used for diabetes patients. Dexcom became an investor in Signos’ most recent investment round as well, as a strategic investor.

On top of the hardware component, which measures the glucose levels in the user’s blood every few minutes, Signos created an AI-enhanced app to offer real-time data and recommendations designed to drive sustained weight loss. At the beginning of their Signos experience, users log what they eat, enabling the Signos platform to learn their body’s reaction to specific foods. Once calibrated, Signos uses that data to provide personalized nutrition suggestions, including which foods are best for each user, when to eat and when to exercise to bring glucose levels back within their optimal weight loss range.

“You wear the device for 10 days, full-time. You shower, go for a run, you sleep and the device keeps measuring. At the end of the period, it beeps to let you know that it’s time to peel it off and replace it with a new one,” explains Fouladgar-Mercer, and admits that, due to the nature of the device, it isn’t exactly the greenest tech we’ve seen in a while — it isn’t recyclable or reusable. “It’s a medical device, so it needs to be disposed of.”

To wear a continuous blood measuring device, you can’t just pop to your local pharmacy to let the tiny electronic vampires loose on your innards; a doctor needs to prescribe one of the devices for you.

“In the United States, you need a doctor’s prescription to get a CGM, and then you need a pharmacy to fulfill that order, as well. We put all those operations behind the scenes; you come to the site, and we walk you through the whole process,” says Fouladgar-Mercer. “And then when that’s done, it goes to the pharmacy licensed in the appropriate state and they send you the box that has everything in it. In addition, you’ll need our software, which is available to download.”

The magic in the system is in the near-real-time monitoring and alert system; it doesn’t help to know that your blood sugar spiked at 1:35 PM when you check your phone before bed at night. The right time to take action, the company claims, is as the glucose level is on the upswing.

“Having this immediate continuous feedback loop over a longer period of time yields better results for our members to achieve the sort of health outcomes that they’re trying to achieve,” claims Fouladgar-Mercer.

The company says it has more than 100,000 potential customers waiting for the product to become available, and it says that the new funding round means that the product will be available across the U.S. at some point in 2022.

Posted on

Mevo Multicam is a great livestreaming studio-in-a-box, if you can learn to trust it

The Mevo Start 3-pack with the Mevo Multicam App three-camera kit costs $999. Add some good lights and a half-decent microphone, and you have a full multi-cam streaming setup for less than $2,000. That would have been completely unthinkable just a few years ago, and let’s just take a minute to consider how absolutely astonishing how far we have come. Add a rock-solid internet connection, and you have essentially replicated the core functionality of a satellite van full of equipment costing two orders of magnitude more than this kit.

Could a professional broadcast news crew use a Mevo Start kit? No — you would need higher reliability, better redundancy and equipment facing the needs of a live news reporter. But if you come at the same problem from another angle, things start to make a lot more sense.

What if you are a YouTube streamer who wants to up your game? Perhaps you have been using a collection of web cameras and OBS to run your livestreaming, and you just want a setup that is easier to disassemble and re-assemble. Maybe you are a music streamer on Twitch. You’ve done a couple of streams with your band, and you are keen to up your game with multi-camera livestreaming. Or perhaps you want to start livestreaming events that happen in various venues. In that context, Mevo Start 3-pack suddenly seems to seem like an absolute bargain. Best of all, once you get it set up the first time, it is very quick to set up and re-assemble.

That’s the theory, at least. Taking a step back, the question becomes whether it works this well in practice.

Every now and again, a tech reviewer is facing an impossible task: How do you review a product that wasn’t made for you, and how do you give meaningful input on whether that product is fit for the audience it was designed for? Mevo Start 3-pack with the Mevo Multicam App from Logitech for Creators is precisely one of those products. I’m not a Twitch, YouTube or Facebook streamer — but on the other hand, I do have a journalism degree with a focus on broadcast journalism, and I fondly remember being trained as a news anchor and live television reporter. I was on the live link unit (i.e. the satellite van) for BBC News for a hot minute. I used to be a TV producer.

The problem is, when you have extensive experience in professional aspects of an industry, you approach a product with different expectations. When I was at the BBC, if the signal to the satellite dropped for even a fraction of a second in the middle of a live broadcast, you wouldn’t believe the level of stress in the RxTx (receiving and transmissions) center back at the newsroom. But, put simply, this kit isn’t designed to replace a small truck’s worth of equipment meant to broadcast breaking news to millions of people. It’s meant to make life easier for YouTube streamers.

The Mevo multi-camera app becomes the control center for your multi-camera livestreaming proclivities. It is an excellent and elegant way to do multi-camera streaming. Photo: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

On paper, the product looks like a very, very good idea — but that isn’t the same as saying that Mevo Start is perfect — it was clearly designed by people who haven’t spent a lot of time in dark clubs setting up camera equipment, and it’s obvious to me that the product team never had to set up and dismantle the kit 30 times in rapid succession. If they had, they’d have made some subtly different decisions that can have a disproportionate effect on the final product.

One truly stupid decision, for example, is the power button on the cameras. It is completely flush with the body, and while it is rubberized, it doesn’t have a divot on the button, or any way to find it by touch. To make matters worse, the button is matte black against a matte black camera body. Try to find that in the dark while trying to set up the cameras between two sets of musicians. To be fair to Mevo, this is often the case with the product design: It is designed in CAD packages and tested out in a brightly lit hardware lab, and only too late does someone think to set it up in the various use cases in which users might use the cameras.

The back of the camera includes a USB-C port for power, a MicroSD card slot for local recording, a microphone input and an almost-impossible-to-find-in-the-dark power button. Photo: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

Sorry to harp on about one design feature, but given it is literally the only button on the camera, it seems important. One thing I love about the power button is that it is pretty hard to press in — you have to use quite a bit of force to actuate it. That is great: It is hard to press the button by accident, and accidents are the last thing you want during a livestream. What is less great is that when you are setting something up for a livestream in a hurry, you’re going to have your hands full — I found myself needing to turn the cameras on and off with one hand regularly because I had a microphone or another piece of equipment in the other hand. That means that when you are pressing the power button on the camera, the only way to get real leverage is to hold the camera in place on the opposite side of the camera, at the same height as the power button. Unfortunately, that means that the only natural way to press the power button is to also grab the lens for leverage. I probably don’t have to spell this out, but I will anyway — the lens is literally the only part of the camera that would benefit from not having greasy fingerprints on it.

The only way to turn the camera on and off with one hand is to hold the camera like this. My fingers are pressing the button — but look at where my thumb goes. The very next thing you need to do is clear the thumbprints off your lens. Why?! Photo: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

Camera button aside, the cameras have a bunch of super-smart design features as well. There’s a small light hood to shield the dome-shaped lens from stray light, which hugely helps reducing light flares. The tripod thread can be taken out of the bottom of the camera, turning it into a much larger thread so you can fit it on a microphone or light stand. The light LED on the front of the camera uses a green LED to show which of the cameras are ready to go live — and a red one that shows which camera actually is live. The cameras have built-in batteries that drastically simplify the setup; you don’t need a power source to start streaming — great for on-the-go live broadcasts. All of these things are very well-thought-through features.

Getting the camera set up was profoundly frustrating. Straight out of the box, all three cameras needed firmware upgrades. It’s possible that this is an effect of me using an Android phone, and that the iOS version of the app is more mature, but the process ended up taking several hours of indecipherable error messages. I was finally able to get things to work, but that involved me having to restart my phone six times — once to get it to connect to each camera in the first place, then once to recover from a failed firmware upgrade.

I reached out to Mevo’s press team when I ran into these firmware issues. They offered to put me in touch with the development team to get me up and running. I thought about it, but decided to decline their offer. As a hardware reviewer, I get the benefit of being able to get on the phone with someone who helped build the product, but as a consumer, it’s often a very different experience.

If I had bought these cameras for my own use, at this point I would have returned them to Mevo: In my many years as a hardware reviewer, I have never tested out a product where I needed to restart my phone six times before I was even able to start the review process. I gave up for a few days, and when I finally was ready to put the cameras through their paces in earnest, there was another set of firmware upgrades. This time, I got through the process pretty smoothly, but having to update the camera firmware twice in a few weeks isn’t exactly encouraging.

The core problem is one of trust. There are a lot of products where it doesn’t matter if you have to try something twice or even three times. If you try to change the temperature on your Nest thermostat, and it doesn’t take the first time, that’s kind of okay. You try again, it works. You shrug it off. Livestreaming is not like turning on the air conditioner — when you have a couple of thousand people watching a live gig, stress levels are running high, and even the smallest technical issues can cause tremendous amounts of stress. My context for this is a live satellite link with potentially millions of viewers and a live television news broadcast getting ruined by the newsroom not getting a live report from the field. Perhaps other livestreamers are more Zen about technical issues than I am.

One extremely welcome design touch is the removable inserts. Without the insert, it fits on a microphone stand. The insert is double threaded: one side is the size of a light stand and the other side has a tripod-size thread. Very clever indeed. Also worth noting that the cameras get fingerprint marks on them very easily — not great for product photography, but not an issue when you are using the cameras. Photo: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

Once I was able to get the product set up fully, it had a chance to shine. The Mevo apps powering the cameras are outstanding. The multi-camera app lets you prepare a shot from one camera and fade between cameras. You can zoom in, use overlays and even configure digital panning movements. For what is, at its core, a pretty simple setup, you can create extraordinarily powerful results.

Despite my frustrated rage with the setup process, the Mevo cameras deserve a break: I tested the cameras in a number of different contexts, and they never let me down once. No hiccups, no buffering, no delays, no disconnections.

Multi-camera streaming is perfect for creative pursuits, live music and live-action events. Mevo represents incredible value in a small package. Photo: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

The problem was that I was never fully able to trust the cameras, and as a result, I would probably never use them for a livestream I care about. Would I set up a three-camera setup and do a livestream of my foster kittens playing? Absolutely, and that would be both worth watching and beyond adorable. Would I use it to livestream a friend playing a concert at a local bar to his dozens of livestreaming fans? Probably not — my stress level would be too high, and I would need to do many hours of streaming without any problems before I would even start to trust the cameras enough to rely on them for anything important.

And herein lies the conundrum. Livestreaming is so high-stakes and stressful that it’s crucial that you feel that you can trust your equipment. Part of building that trust is the first-use experience with a product, and Mevo’s cameras were some of the worst devices I have ever reviewed in that respect. But the flip side is also true: The life of a reviewer is that you see devices with their first versions of the firmware, and with software that was maybe not quite ready for prime time yet. I am willing to accept that Mevo might be able to sort out the problems I found in my review and that three or six months from now, the cameras will be great.

On paper and in theory, at least, they could be a cost-effective and near-perfect solution for livestreamers who want to dip their toes in the multi-cam world. I would have to revisit the product in a few months to know whether or not to recommend it. 

Posted on

Pact is a massage gun that cares how you’re feeling

There are dozens of devices out there that are eager to beat your muscles to within an inch of their tense little lives. They all have one thing in common: They’re a lot more powerful and have more endurance than the nimble fingers of a massage therapist. A trained and skilled therapist still has the upper hand when it comes to meeting your kneads, however, which is the ability to touch you and figuring out what state your muscles are in.

Enter Pact from Impact Biosystems, which today opened for preorders. The Pact system has all the muscle-mashing skills of its many competitors, but if it were yet another Theragun knock-off, you probably wouldn’t be reading about it here. Instead, the company took a broader look at why hands-on massage therapy is, generally, more satisfying than sacrificing your lot to a jackhammer. The result is the Pact Scan, a second device that seeks to emulate the tender love and care of a therapist by using technology.

“We created a system that is actually measuring your muscles and then reacting in different ways, in real time. Pact Scan is a device that you hold up to your muscles. In under five seconds, it takes a series of scans which then quantifies your muscles. Every level of stiffness has a natural frequency damping ratio. We take those parameters — we call it ‘muscle readiness’ — which is essentially giving your muscle a score. Are your muscles ready for exertion? Are they warmed up enough?” explains Bridget Hunter-Jones, the co-founder and CEO of Impact Biosystems.

“Existing muscle recovery solutions are almost exclusively one-size-fits-all types of products,” said Hunter-Jones. “But, everyone and their recovery is different, so we designed the Pact system with the belief that recovery should be informed and personalized, using data from the body, effectively eliminating the guesswork.”

The company’s products are more expensive than its premium competitors — Therabody’s Theragun starts at $399 for its most-comparable Elite model — but Impact Biosystems hopes that its data-forward approach will lure in its customers. The company claims that there are no competitors for its offering anywhere, and that the closest comparable products are medical devices costing 10 times more than its product — and are primarily used for academic and research purposes.

Bridget Hunter-Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Impact Biosystems. Image Credits: Impact Biosystems

“This will be the first device that will be collecting this data in this particular way. The competing medical devices cost more than $6,000, and they are not using the same kinds of core technologies and algorithms that we use,” explains Hunter-Jones, “These devices are used for sarcopenia patients, and to track muscle mass in other contexts. We are emulating how a therapist works. They have the experience from being able to compare your muscles to the muscles of the hundreds of people they have touched in the past, and use this to inform how to treat a particular muscle.”

Contrary to what you might expect, the Pact Scan device is not using an electric measurement. Instead, it gently uses a little built-in mallet to tap your muscles, and it measures the response of your muscles.

“I’m excited to get it into the hands of folks who are intimidated of the other brands out there. We’ve spent a lot of time on the brand, making sure it is approachable, comfortable and not hyper-masculine,” says Hunter-Jones, “I’m really excited to start targeting this to casual, occasional athletes, Pilates-goers, yoga instructors, etc. People who don’t need to be hammering their muscles blindly.”

For its launch, the company is making two kits available; the Pact Sport Kit at $499, and a Pact Pro Kit, which weighs in at $649, and includes an additional battery handle and a travel case. The company is planning to start shipping its products in May 2022.

Posted on

Withings ScanWatch is a great alternative to other smartwatches

When Apple launched the Apple Watch, they made a big hoopla out of teaching its consumers how excited it was about having a “digital crown” and “complications”. To the watch lovers among us, that was a head-scratcher — of course a watch has all of those things.

At the time, Apple was falling victim to its heritage as a computing company. In short — it wasn’t creating a smartwatch — it was creating a tiny iPhone you carry around on your wrist, while desperately trying to convince everybody that “yes, this is a wristwatch, we promise!”

Withings’ Health Mate app is exceptional, especially if you use more than one of the Withings health products. It integrates with Google Fit and Apple Health Kit so you can port the data into your preferred ecosystem. Image Credits: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

I’ve seen the parallel in the car world as well: A lot of the traditional car manufacturers scratched their heads and thought, “How can we cram a truckload of batteries and an electric drive train into one of our cars,” whereas some car manufacturers — Tesla in particular — essentially took the challenge differently. Tesla’s approach was, “What if we could take an iPhone, which just gets better with time as more software updates become available — and build a car around it.” The result, for Tesla, is a car that looks and feels spectacularly different than most of the other cars. Whether or not you prefer the interior and ownership experience of a Tesla or the newest generation of Mercedes electrical car boils down to a lot of things, but in my mind, it’s about a general philosophy and approach to design and functionality.

All of which brings us to the ScanWatch. Withings has always taken a different approach than Apple. With its relatively minimalist watches that actually look and feel like timepieces, it came at the same problem Apple was trying to solve, but the way a watchmaker would do it. How do you build a great, functional watch that looks and feels like a watch, but adds a dollop of smart features? Its Steel HR showed what was to come, and the Withings ScanWatch is a natural and more ambitious step up the ladder from there.

The upshot of the different design philosophy is that you can’t use the Withings ScanWatch as a remote control to take photos with your phone. You can’t talk to it or use it to send texts. You can’t use it to read emails or play music or record voice memos. And if those things are important to you, well, the Withings ScanWatch simply isn’t for you — you’re not looking for a smart wristwatch, you’re looking for a microscopic supercomputer.

The overall build quality and attention to detail of the ScanWatch is extraordinary. This feels more like a premium watch than a miniature computer. Image Credits: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

Having spent a little while with Withing’s top-of-the-line smart wristwatch, I found myself being delighted time and time again, both for all the things it is, but — most importantly — for all the things it is not. I stopped wearing an Apple watch because I disliked the design (it’s a soulless black square — much like a smartphone) and I hated the fact that it kept buzzing and notifying me of messages and tweets and emails. Yes, you can turn those things off, but if you turn off all the smartphone-extension features of the Apple Watch, you eventually end up with very little that makes the watch worth carrying around, especially when you have to charge it every day.

The Withings ScanWatch comes in two sizes, with a 38 mm and 42 mm watch face. Image Credits: Withings

Withings’ ScanWatch is the exact opposite. For one, it looks like a simple, minimalist wristwatch. If the little PMOLED display is off, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a high-end, understated timepiece from one of the many high-end watch manufacturers. The display isn’t a fancy retina display, but the trade-off is that you get up to a month of battery life. The watch feels like a wristwatch, too — heavier than you would think, but in a way that feels reassuring to me. You know that it is there, and if you’re used to wearing high-quality timepieces, that’s not a bad thing.

The ScanWatch also brings a ton of extremely high-end tech to a wristwatch, focusing primarily on health and wellness features — they are an extension of its fitness tracker roots, rather than extending the functionality of your phone.

Withings’ ScanWatch brings a ton of medical-grade trackers to your wrist. The EKG functionality is the crown jewel of the watch/app combo. Image Credits: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

The watch has been available in Europe for a while, and the reason for the delay for its U.S. launch further illustrates how different this device is from its competitors. To launch, it needed clearance from the FDA. Its built-in EKG is high-quality enough, the company claims, to be able to detect atrial fibrillation (afib), one of the most common cardiac arrhythmias — and a leading cause of stroke, heart failure and other heart issues.

To offer that data to you as a consumer, the company claims you need a prescription, and for the first EKG measurement to be analyzed by a medical professional — it isn’t entirely clear how other smartwatch manufacturers with similar EKG functionality get around this, or whether Withings is doing something fundamentally different.

Activating the EKG approval process is free, and you will not be charged whether you are approved or not for continued EKG use. In the meantime, the company is working to make the EKG functionality fully available to users without a prescription or additional costs, presumably by mirroring what Apple, Samsung and the others are doing to get their FDA ducks in a row.

If that all sounds a little over the top, well, you wouldn’t be the first to make that observation. The company went on the defensive before the watch was even released, and ended up publishing a FAQ especially addressing the EKG functionality.

In my mind, it serves to highlight the company’s ambitions to be a health-first device. It fits in very well with the rest of the company’s devices — it sells smart sleep trackers, blood pressure cuffs, smart thermometers and body-fat-measuring scales, for example — and the excellent Withings Health Mate app that powers all of Withings’ devices is vying for your attention as the central hub as your physical health.

Withings’ ScanWatch comes in two sizes. This is the 38 mm version, which feels about right-sized on my “do you even lift, bro?”-sized wrists. Image Credits: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

The sum of all of this is a truly exceptional (time)piece of technology. The watch crams heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen monitoring, the EKG functionality, step, workout and activity trackers, connected GPS, an altimeter, sleep trackers, smart wake-up alarms and much more, all into a sexy, easy-to-forget device that lives on your wrist.

As a tech reviewer, I don’t have the medical expertise to determine whether all of these features are as good as the company claims they are. From conversations I’ve had with medical professionals, the general consensus seems to be that it isn’t as good as the multi-thousand-dollar industrial medical equipment that lives in your doctor’s office. Frankly, that would be unreasonable in a $300 consumer-grade item you carry around on your arm.

If you are a health and fitness-forward person who cares about style, it’s hard to go wrong with the Withings ScanWatch. It’s an incredible leap forward in wrist-carriable technology and a breath of fresh, well-oxygenated blood into a category that was starting to get a little hypoxic.

For what it’s worth, while I was glad to see the back of my Apple Watch when I put it on eBay a few years ago, I will buy a ScanWatch with my own money once this review unit goes back to Withings; high praise from someone who approaches a lot of gadgets with a backpack full of skepticism these days.

Posted on

Cradlewise raises $7M to save the sleep of newborns and parents alike

By the time your baby is crying in the crib, they are over-stimulated and grumpy as can be. Cradlewise is a $2,000 smart crib that monitors a baby’s depth of sleep, and automatically tries to soothe your little bundle of joy back to sleep as soon as the first signs of wakefulness come along.

The company started taking preorders at CES in 2021, and initially focused on customers in the Bay Area, to keep the feedback loop from Cradlewise’s customers as tight as possible. To date, around 100 units of the smart crib have been sold, and the company is continuing to take preorders at a discounted price of $1,499.

The $7 million seed round was led by Footwork, with participation from CRV and follow-on from existing investors SOSV and Better Capital. Other notable investors participating in the round include founder of Stitch Fix Katrina Lake, CEO of Italic Jeremy Cai, CTO of Molekule Dilip Goswami and ex-CEO of Misfit Wearables Sonny Vu. 

The Cradlewise cradle’s bouncing motion is designed after how a human would soothe a baby back to sleep. Image Credits: Cradlewise

“There are 50 baby monitors on the market that will notify you when your baby wakes up. That’s too late. When my husband and I had our first baby, we quickly learned that as soon as she twitched, we ran over and rocked her. You can’t do that every time — you can’t watch the baby 24/7. Why isn’t there a crib that can monitor for signs of waking,” wondered Radhika Patil, the co-founder and CEO of Cradlewise. Excellent question — and when they failed to find a smart crib that acted the way they wanted, they decided to build one, starting with the quality of the bounce. “A lot of the cribs available in the market are not intuitive in the way the would rock the child. So we modeled our motion after the way I would bounce our children at 3 am on a yoga ball.”

The journey started from a combination of curiosity and the “quantified self” movement. Radhika and her husband Bharath Patil were heavily invested in tracking their own sleep and fitness patterns, and when their first baby was born in 2014, they built a prototype of the Cradlewise for her. The idea stayed on the back burner until 2019 when the idea was revived fully, the company raised some cash, and the work started in earnest.

The new money raised unlocks a new round of growth for Cradlewise. The team told me they are working on building out its 11-person team further, and focusing on technology advancements and supply-chain and operations associated with delivering a pretty complex product. The company wants to make more advanced sleep analytics available, and potentially add a smart scale to the crib, to ensure that a baby’s weight can be tracked along with their sleep patterns. The ultimate goal is to make Cradlewise the centerpiece of a smart nursery.

The final product the team created was a rather pricy cradle, and I asked the team whether the price tag made sense.

“We are very careful that the sleep monitor only checks the footprint of the crib — there are wall-mounted products out there, but that has serious privacy issues. So we combine early wakeup detection, the natural bouncing movement that imitates how a parent bounces a baby,” Radhika Patil explains, arguing that the price tag makes sense for a premium product that replaces several baby products. She also highlights the crib’s green credentials, including a reduction of plastics, and the inclusion of easy-to-recycle materials: “The mattress is made from coconut coir and natural rubber latex. This means that the mattress is fully biodegradable.”

The company says it doesn’t have plans for a second-hand market for its cribs yet, but suggests that the cradle can be disinfected pretty easily, and the mattress can be discarded and replaced by a new one from the company — hence the focus on making the mattress itself biodegradable.

“Cradlewise is the only baby product in the market that uses deep tech and AI to learn the baby’s sleep patterns and growth trends. With software updates that build on this rich data, a characteristic of the very best connected hardware companies such as Nest, Peloton, Tesla and Tonal, Cradlewise is pioneering the connected nursery,” said Nikhil Basu Trivedi, co-founder and general partner at Footwork.

“Cradlewise isn’t just a smart crib, it is a mental health solution for parents,” said Kristin Baker Spohn, general partner at CRV. “Having spent much of my career focused on the intersection of technology and health, Cradlewise is a great example of how smart technology can be used to help ensure that both babies and their parents can get a good night’s rest, which is truly one of the most important elements for staying healthy.”

The crib is sized so babies up to the age of two can use it, and preorders continue on Cradlewise’s website.

Posted on

Helion raises $2.2B to commercialize fusion energy

Helion Energy, a clean energy company committed to creating a new era of plentiful, zero-carbon electricity from fusion, today announced the close of its $0.5 billion Series E, with an additional $1.7 billion of commitments tied to specific milestones.

The round was led by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator. Existing investors, including co-founder of Facebook Dustin Moskovitz, Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital and notable sustainable tech investor Capricorn Investment Group also participated in the round. The funding includes commitments of an additional $1.7 billion dollars tied to Helion reaching key performance milestones. Round-leader Altman has been involved in the company as an investor and chairman since 2015.

Deuterium and Helium-3 are heated, then accelerated through magnets, compressed and captured as inductive current. Animation courtesy of Helion Energy.

Fusion energy has been a fiery dream for lovers of clean energy since the first controlled thermonuclear fusion reaction was accomplished some 60 years ago. The technology promises all the benefits of current-generation nuclear fission generators, at a fraction of the risk, with far less radioactivity when running, and with very little radioactive waste. There’s been one catch: So far, it has been hard to get the fusion process to generate more energy than it has been consuming to keep the reaction under control.

Helion, as a company, has been focusing less on fusion as a science experiment and more on a more important question: Can their technology generate electricity at a commercial and industrial scale?

“Some projects in the fusion space talk about heat, or energy, or other things. Helion is focused on electricity generation. Can we get it out fast, at a low cost? Can we get it to industrial-scale power?” asks David Kirtley, Helion’s co-founder and CEO. “We are building systems that are about the size of a shipping container and that can deliver industrial-scale power — say on the order of 50 megawatts of electricity.”

In June of this year, Helion published results confirming it had become the first private fusion company to heat a fusion plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius, an important milestone on the path to commercial electricity from fusion. Soon after, the company announced it had broken ground on building its factory to start the process of preparing for manufacturing of its seventh-generation fusion generator, which the company calls “Polaris.”

TechCrunch was surprised to learn of the company’s $1.5 million round back in 2014, when the company said it would be able to get net power generation of fusion up and running within three years. Here we are seven years later, and it appears that Helion hit a couple of wobbles — but the company also found a focus along the way.

“We ended up pivoting a little bit in direction, to focus less on scientific milestones of energy and focus more specifically on electricity. We had to prove some of the technologies on the electricity, and electricity extraction side of things. We also needed some funding things that had to happen to get us all the way to those technical milestones,” Kirtley reflects. “Unfortunately, that took a little bit longer than we had hoped.”

The Helion team standing by to energize you. Image Credits: Helion Energy

As part of the investment round, Sam Altman steps up from being the chairman of the board, to Helion’s executive chairman, with a higher degree of activity, including input into the commercial direction of the company.

“Our first funding round was led by Mithril Capital, and Y Combinator was part of it. That’s where we got introduced to Sam. He has been involved in our fundraising ever since. He is an ambassador that actually understands physics; it’s pretty amazing. We were really pleased that he was interested in leading the investment, rather than us having to bring in external investors that might have been differently aligned and have a less deep understanding of the technology,” Kirtley explains. “He’s seen the successes, and he has seen what they mean. That’s why we’re excited not only to have him as an investor but have him more actively involved. It means we can accelerate the timelines. The funding is part of it, and the technology is another part of it. Ultimately, we need to get it out there in the world, and that’s something Sam can help us do.”

“I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion, which is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve ever seen,” said Altman. “With a tiny fraction of the money spent on other fusion efforts, and the culture of a startup, this team has a clear path to net electricity. If Helion is successful, we can avert climate disaster and provide a much better quality of life for people.”

Helion’s CEO speculates that its first customers may turn out to be data centers, which have a couple of advantages over other potential customers. Data centers are power-hungry, and often already have power infrastructure in place in order to be able to accept backup generators. In addition, they tend to be a little away from population centers.

“They have a backup power of diesel generators, giving them a few megawatts that keep the data centers running just long enough to sustain any power grid issues,” Kirtley says, but suggests that the company is more ambitious than just replacing backup diesel generators. The low cost and high power availability mean that the company could start powering whole data centers as the default power source: “We are excited about being at the 50-megawatt scale, and being able to get electricity costs down to a cent per kilowatt-hour. You can completely change how data centers work, and you can really start answering climate change. Our focus is making low-cost and carbon-free electricity.”

Due to physical limitations with the way the power is generated, the current generation of the company’s tech wouldn’t be able to replace your Tesla Powerwall and solar panels — the size of a generator is roughly the size of a shipping container. But at 50 megawatts, the generators could power around 40,000 homes, and with that amount of power, the technology could open some really interesting opportunities for distributed power grids.

One interesting innovation in Helion’s power generation solution is that it doesn’t use water and steam as intermediary steps in the power generation.

“At the beginning of my career, I kept looking at the way we were doing fusion and said hey, you have this beautiful energy that is all electric, including the plasma. And then what do you do? You boil water, you use an old, low-efficiency, capital-intensive process,” explains Kirtley. Instead of going via water, the company decided to skip a step and use inductive energy instead. “Can you bypass that whole era? Could we do the equivalent of bypassing the gasoline engine and go right to electric cars right from the beginning? And so that’s been what we’ve been focusing on.”

The company is aiming to be able to generate more electricity than what it takes to run the fusion reactor by 2024, and the CEO points out that the goal at this point is to generate electricity at a commercial scale.

“Our 2024 date is not a key demonstration of the science at this point. The goal is to go after commercially installed power generation. There’s a huge market, and we want to be able to get this out in the world as soon as possible,” concludes Kirtley.

“By focusing on getting to electricity as soon as possible, we should be able to count on fusion as part of the natural conversation we’re having about climate change and about carbon free electricity generation. We’re really excited we’ve secured this funding, and the amount we raised should be able to get us all the way there.”

Posted on

Paranoid and on the move? Arlo Go 2 brings battery power and cell data to the surveillance mix

Aimed at construction sites, vacation homes or for other hard-to-reach locations, Arlo‘s new Arlo Go 2 LTE/Wi-Fi Security Camera is at your beck and call to keep an eye out for thieves, sneaks and other scoundrels.

The company is also peddling its Arlo Secure subscription service, which gives users access to a rolling 30-day library of cloud recordings, in addition to computer vision analysis of the footage with personalized person, animal, vehicle and package detection. The service also includes an Emergency Response feature, which can dispatch emergency services to the camera’s location at the touch of a button.

The cameras are rugged, with a weather-resistant design to withstand the test of the elements, provide secure local storage to microSD cards and have connectivity built in. The cameras can phone home to the company’s servers using your Wi-Fi connection if and when it’s available, or LTE networks as either a primary or fallback option when the Wi-Fi goes down for the seventh time just when the latest episode of your favorite TV show gets good.

“Arlo Go 2 builds on the success of its Arlo Go predecessor, serving as the most versatile solution for anyone seeking wire-free security for hard-to-access locations,” said Tejas Shah, senior vice president of Product and Chief Information Officer at Arlo. “Arlo Go 2’s ability to operate on either a mobile network or Wi-Fi puts the power in the hands of the user, allowing them to select the best connection for their use case.”

Arlo Go 2 is equipped with GPS positioning so you can keep tabs on them — making it easy to locate multiple devices across a larger area, or to go find your camera if bitter irony should strike and the thieves leave your house alone and instead just wander off with the cameras themselves. The cameras also feature two-way comms with speakers and a microphone so you can troll your would-be burglars from a safe distance, and a built-in siren so you can signal to your intruders that they’re being watched.

Carrying a $250 price tag, the cameras will be available through Verizon now-ish, with additional carriers becoming available next year.