Category: Hardware

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Bossa Nova’s inventory robots are rolling out in 1,000 Walmart stores

Bay Area-based Bossa Nova Robotics this morning announced plans to bring its shelf-scanning inventory robot to 1,000 Walmart stores in the U.S. The plan adds an additional 650 locations to the growing army of retail robots, up front its current number of 350.

It’s a sizable presence for the startup, which was founded in Pittsburgh in 2005 as a robotic toy startup. The company announced an initial deal with Walmart back in 2017, starting with a modest 50 robots.

The six-foot-tall robot doesn’t have any arms, meaning it can’t perform pick and place functions that other companies are attempting to rollout. The means it’s not designed to directly replace the task of manually restocking. Instead, the robot is designed to supplement or replace the tedious task of inventory.

It scans the shelves looking for missing items, sending that information back to a central computer. From there, employees can find the right product to replace on the shelf. Clearly the robots have been something right with such a large order this last time around. Of course, it’s still a fraction of the overall number of Walmart locations in the U.S., which are currently at around 5,000.

This latest rollout should be completed this summer.

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CES was a snoozefest

At a certain point during the last week, I found myself wandering the halls of CES, looking for the gadget that would fix all of my problems. Maybe it’s the modern condition, or just a sign of having been involved in this industry for far too long.

Technology, of course, has a long and sometimes spotty history of attempting to resolve problems it exacerbated in the first place. Fighting fire with fire, as it were. The Nintendo Wii, for instance, was heralded as fight against a sedentary population to which video games have significantly contributed. Hell, Fitbit helped build an entire industry out of it.

Having utterly matured the world of wearable fitness devices, however, the industry has moved on to the next bit frontier: sleep. There’s about a dozen reasons why sleeping with your smartphone is a bad idea, but I’ve woken up with an iPhone imprint on the side of my face more times than I’d care to admit. We know it’s bad and yet, we still do it. But the depths of our addiction are a topic for another time.

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Smasung launches the rugged, enterprise-ready Galaxy XCover Pro

We got a bit of a surprise at the end of CES: some hands-on time with Samsung’s latest rugged phone for the enterprise, the Galaxy XCover Pro. The XCover Pro, which is officially launching today, is a mid-range $499 phone for first-line workers like flight attendants, construction workers or nurses.

It is meant to be very rugged but without the usual bulk that comes with that. With its IP68 rating, Military Standard 810 certification and the promise that it will survive a drop from 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) without a case, it should definitely be able to withstand quite a bit of abuse.

While Samsung is aiming this phone at the enterprise market, the company tells us that it will also sell it to individual customers.

As Samsung stressed during our briefing, the phone is meant for all-day use in the field, with a 4,050 mAh replaceable battery (yes, you read that right, you can replace the battery just like on phones from a few years ago). It’ll feature 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage space, but you can extend that up to 512GB thanks to the built-in microSD slot. The 6.3-inch FHD+ screen won’t wow you, but it seemed perfectly adequate for most of the use cases. That screen, the company says, should work even in rain or snow and features a glove mode, too.

And while this is obviously not a flagship phone, Samsung still decided to give it a dual rear camera setup, with a standard 25MP sensor and a wide-angle 8MP sensor for those times where you might want to get the full view of a construction site, for example. On the front, there is a small cutout for a 13MP camera, too.

All of this is powered by a 2GHz octa-core Exynos 9611 processor, as one would expect from a Samsung mid-range phone, as well as Android 10.

Traditionally, rugged phones came with large rubber edges (or users decided to put even larger cases around them). The XCover Pro, on the other hand, feels slimmer than most regular phones with a rugged case on them.

By default, the phone features NFC support for contactless payments (the phone has been approved to be part of Visa’s Tap to Phone pilot program) and two programmable buttons so that companies can customize their phones for their specific use cases. One of the first partners here is Microsoft, which lets you map a button to its recently announced walkie talkie feature in Microsoft Teams.

“Microsoft and Samsung have a deep history of bringing together the best hardware and software to help solve our customers’ challenges,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in today’s announcement. “The powerful combination of Microsoft Teams and the new Galaxy XCover Pro builds on this partnership and will provide frontline workers everywhere with the technology they need to be more collaborative, productive and secure.”

With its Pogo pin charging support and compatibility with third-party tools from a variety of partners for adding scanners, credit card readers and other peripherals from partners like Infinite Peripherals, KOAMTAC, Scandit and Visa.

No enterprise device is complete without security features and the XCover Pro obviously supports all of Samsungs various Knox enterprise security tools and access to the phone itself is controlled by both a facial recognition system and a fingerprint reader that’s built into the power button.

With the Tab Active Pro, Samsung has long offered a rugged tablet for first-line workers. Not everybody needs a full-sized tablet, though, so the XCover Pro fills what Samsung clearly believes is a gap in the market that offers always-on connectivity in a smaller package and in the form of a phone that doesn’t look unlike a consumer device.

I could actually imagine that there are quite a few consumers who may opt for this device. For a while, the company made phones like the Galaxy S8 Active that traded weight and size for larger batteries and ruggedness. the XCover Pro isn’t officially a replacement of this program, but it may just find its fans among former Galaxy Active users.

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After delays, noise-adapting NuraLoop earbuds are coming soon and sound great

A few buffet mistakes aside, NuraLoop were the biggest disappointment of my 2019 CES. When the headphones showed up at the show as dummy units, it hurt my heart a little. The original Nuraphones made an appearance on my 2017 best of the year list, and the idea of a portable version I could take on long flights seemed almost too good to be true.

And for a full year, it was exactly that. Understandably, the Australian startup ran into a few roadblocks attempting to bring the product to market. It’s still a young company, even though its first gen product when over remarkably well. The noise-adapting headphones were extremely well thought out, right down to the package.

The hangup for their portable, in-ear counterparts is pretty surprising, to be honest. For much of the year, Nura just couldn’t crack the code of the cable, of all things. It’s a doubly odd sticking point, given how many of its competitors have ditched the cabling altogether. It should be noted up front, however, that the decision to keep things tethered is more pragmatic than aesthetic (honestly, it wouldn’t have been choice from a design standpoint).

As CEO Dragan Petrovic mentioned in a briefing at the show this week, the customer base for the original over-ears includes a pretty strong base of professional musicians, The cable includes a magnetic adapter for an analog headphone jack, so they can be used on stage monitors. There are a number of other times that still require capable — I’m writing this on a plane, for example. What am I supposed to do, just stare at Gemini Man?

There are other benefits, including a stated 16+ hours of battery life, without requiring a charging case. Also, you can wear them around your neck while not in use, if that’s a thing you like to do.

It’s never fun to have to delay a product, of course. In the year between CESes, Apple launched the AirPods Pro. The devices are two distinctly different approaches to the category, but Apple’s product does edge into NuraLoops’ territory, with a built-in fit check and great noise canceling. Again, different products with different audiences, but one has to wonder how many folks waiting for the NuraLoop pulled the trigger on the new AirPods, instead.

I’m happy to report that the sound quality on the NuraLoop is still extremely excellent. Sure, you lose the over-ear immersive bass effect without the ear cups, but the customized sound profile is still firmly in tact. The calibration is more or less the same, and when you’re done, you can swap between profiles to see how big a difference the customization makes (hint: it’s big).

The headphones are a bit on the bulky side. I’m definitely going to go exercise with them as soon as I get a review pair to see how well they stay put. The control scheme is clever — a touch well on the outside of each ear that perform a variety of different functions.

The year-long wait was less than ideal, but if you held out, you’ll probably find them worth it. The Nuraloop are another excellent product from the small Australian startup, which has managed to distinguish itself well in an overly crowded category. They run $200 and will start shipping in March.

CES 2020 coverage - TechCrunch

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Product Development Across Hardware, Software and Learning by Toby Hughes

In this ProductTank London talk, Toby Hughes, Senior Product Manager at pi-top explains how to combine product development across hardware, software, and learning.

He takes us through the following:

  • A learning framework based around constructionism
  • Developing software and hardware for products
  • The pilot run for pi-top 4

Watch the video to see Toby’s talk in full. Or read on for an overview of his key points.

A learning framework based around constructionism

The goal of pi-top is to teach kids about circuitry and computer science by getting them to play. This builds an ecosystem of learning by making. In developing a learning backbone across everything physical and digital, this can feed into projects that excite both students and teachers. Toby explains the importance of preparing the next generation for the fourth industrial revolution by helping them to develop critical thinking, problem-solving and collaboration skills from an early age. Products such as pi-top also help to eliminate the pain points of teachers and students regarding computer science in the classroom. Teachers are able to take learning outside of the classroom and students find it easier to grasp more complicated concepts.

Developing software and hardware for products

By developing software and hardware products for learning, we can eliminate some of the silos which future makers may find themselves in. Toby explains how they used design thinking to develop the project and create various prototypes. From the beginning with a simple greenscreen to creating a modular unit and then adding a battery so that teachers could take the product outside. Eventually, they were able to connect the dots between software, hardware, and learning by running experiments and then applying the feedback they received.

Pi-top 4 pilot run

The main takeaways from this talk are that in building a product you will go through a number of small iterations and prototypes, as well as many disagreements. By the time Toby and his team launched the pi-top 4 they had stopped 3D-printing and building prototypes. As a product manager, it was evident that he needed to be a mediator between the heads of departments and connect them towards the common goal.

The post Product Development Across Hardware, Software and Learning by Toby Hughes appeared first on Mind the Product.

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A sex tech startup’s triumphant return to CES

When the Lora DiCarlo wagon finally arrives, the rolling glass box’s back door opens and another journalist pops out to get on his way. The sex tech company has a week packed full with 20-minute rolling interviews with a curious tech press. No time to spare; I step up, sit down, and we’re on our way.

Driving down the Strip in a transparent box is a curious, extremely Vegas experience: puzzled tourists and confused CES attendees gawk from the sidewalks. Four of us are sitting in a makeshift living room with fuzzy white carpet: CEO Lora Haddock, Enzo Ferrari Drift DiCarlo (her fuzzy black-and-white Pomeranian), and a colleague, who holds Enzo in their lap. A four-foot-tall faux sex toy sits in a corner, swaying occasionally.

It’s been a hell of a year since the sex tech startup was at the center of a firestorm after the CTA unceremoniously revoked its Innovation Award. By July, the CES organizer found itself eating crow via a press release and agreed to allow sex tech companies to exhibit on a “one-year trial bias,” spreading them out amongst the broader category of health tech at the show’s Eureka Park startup exhibit space.

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Cherry goes downmarket with its new Viola mechanical keyboard switches

Cherry has long been the de facto standard for mechanical keyboard switches. Since mechanical keyboards are, almost by default, significantly more expensive than membrane or dome-switch keyboards, that has kept the company out a large part of the market. Now, on the last day of CES 2020, the company is launching its new Viola switch, the company’s first fully mechanical switch for the value market, meant for keyboards that will cost somewhere between $50 and $100.

As the Cherry team told me ahead of today’s announcement, its engineers spent well over a year on designing this new switch, which only has a handful of parts and which moves some of the complexity into the circuit board on the keyboard itself. A lot of the work went into the design new self-cleaning contact system (which the company quickly patented) and to ensure that the switches’ materials would be able to handle regular use despite the simplicity of the design.

Because of this new design, the new Viola switches are now hot-swappable, so if one ever goes bad, swapping in a new one shouldn’t take more than a few seconds. And because the company stuck with the same industry-standard cross-stem design for attaching keycaps, keyboard manufacturers can reuse their existing designs, too.

Like most new switches, the Cherry Viola supports LED lighting, which in the case of this new design, can be mounted right on the circuit board of the keyboard.

If you’re a keyboard aficionado, you won’t confuse the new Viola switch with any of Cherry’s high-end MX switches. For a lot of users who want a mechanical keyboard at a value price, this looks like it’ll be a great option.

I didn’t get a chance to spend a lot of time with the new switches, but as best as I could tell, the current version resembles a quiet MX Brown switch. Cherry itself discourages any comparison’s, though. Even the name is clearly meant to remove any confusion that this switch is part of the MX series and while Cherry has plans to offer similar switch variants as the MX Black, Brown, Blue, Red, it won’t recycle those colors for those switches either. While the company tells me it isn’t all that worried about the new switches cannibalizing the MX market, it’s not leaving that to chance either.

One major difference with the Viola switches is that Cherry isn’t giving any guarantee for how many keystrokes they will withstand — at least not yet. The company tells me it may give some guidance at a later point.

Like all other Cherry switches, the Viola switches are built in the company’s factory in Germany and all of its suppliers, too, are building their products in the country as well.

For the MX switches, though, the company is now raising its guarantee from 50 million keystrokes (which was already a lot) to 100 million. Some pro-gamers actually reach those numbers (and the switches usually continue to function well beyond that), but for everybody else, it’s just an assurance that the company stands behind its products. To achieve this, the team made some minor adjustments to switches and especially the guide rails on the inside of the switch housing. That won’t change the actual typing experience, though.

The first keyboards with the 100-million MX switches are already available and the first Viola keyboards will become available soon.

CES 2020 coverage - TechCrunch

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Is Clicbot a spiritual successor to Cozmo? (Mostly no, but maybe a little yes)

Anki’s true legacy in robotics will only be sufficiently determined over the course of a few years. But while the startup’s vision for Cozmo ultimately failed, I suspect while see its take on the category of home robotics leaving a lasting legacy.

The Keyi Tech representative I spoke to at CES was quick to deflect a comparison to the company, mostly on the basis that its own modular robots are designed for STEM learning, rather than Cozmo’s friendly home companion vibe.

But the animation-inspired characterization is clear front and center with Clicbot. In fact, Keyi says it even followed in Anki’s footsteps by hiring a Kickstarter animator to create the single, cycloptic eye int he middle of its cylindrical head. And, indeed, it goes a way toward giving the product a warm, lifelike appearance.

Demos were limited at the show, though a row of Clicbots were lined up, performing a choreographed dance to Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love.” It’s a jam, for sure. Not sure if it’s licensed or not, but it’s all over the promo videos the company issued ahead of CES. Another quick demo found Clicbot responding affectionately when a Keyi rep rubbed the side of its face.

Again, there are big differences between the devices, their claims and what sector of the market they intend to fill. The product is modular and designed to be built according to a connected app. Once built, it can do things like serve coffee, but nowhere does it claim to be the kind of autonomous robotic pet Anki was shooting for.

The ‘bot kits will start at around $300, and should be available through Amazon soon.

CES 2020 coverage - TechCrunch

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Virtual Incision Corporation raises $20 million for its abdominal surgery robot

Over the past several years, surgical has become one of the hottest — and best funded —categories in robotics. That’s thanks, in no small part, to the massive success of companies like Intuitive. Virtual Incision Corporation has also had a pretty solid fundraising streak since its 2006 founding.

Today the Lincoln, Nebraska startup announced its latest funding round. The $20 million Series B+ brings its total funding up to $51 million. This time out, things were lead by Bluestem Capital, with participation from PrairieGold Venture Partners and Genesis Innovation Group.

VIC’s primary product is the MIRA (“miniaturized in vivo robotic assistant”), a two-pound robot designed for minimally invasive abdominal surgery. Among is biggest value propositions is the relative portability of the product, versus many existing surgery robots, which are downright massive.

“We designed the MIRA Surgical Robotic Platform with the fundamental understanding that minimally invasive procedures offer tremendous benefits to patients,” President and CEO John Murphy said in a release. “We believe our portable and affordable abdominal robot has the potential to bring these benefits to many more patients. The planned IDE clinical study of MIRA is the critical next step for the company.”

The round will to helping prep the product for an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) with the FDA. VIC will also use it to help get the device ready for commercialization.

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Huami and Studio take on Peloton with the Amazfit HomeStudio treadmill

Chinese wearable company Huami and fitness startup Studio are teaming up to build a connected treadmill, which they unveiled today as part of Huami’s keynote as CES.

The most notable feature of the Amazfit HomeStudio is its lack of a traditional treadmill front. Instead, you control the device using your smartphone, while content is delivered to a separate, vertically-oriented 43-inch HD screen that the companies are calling the Glass.

The Glass kind of looks like a giant phone, and it also includes a camera that can analyze your movements with computer vision (if you’re worried about privacy, there’s a slide piece that covers the camera).

As for the treadmill itself, it’s 20 inches wide and 53 inches long, with a slat belt surface for a softer running feel.

Huami may be an unfamiliar name to most U.S. readers, but the company says it shipped 18.1 million wearable devices in 2017, and it went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018. Studio, meanwhile, has created more than 1,000 online fitness classes with a focus on treadmill running.

Studio founder and CEO Jason L. Baptiste (who previously founded mobile publishing company Onswipe) told me that with his vision of making running more fun and accessible to non-runners, he’s always seen creating a treadmill as part of Studio’s roadmap, allowing the startup to offer a fitness experience that’s truly “immersive and personal.”

Amazfit HomeStudio

And while Peloton sells a connected treadmill with a 32-inch screen, Baptiste said most treadmill makers are “manufacturing companies or devices something without great software or content or community.” He added, “We wanted to get the content and software right before we ever thought about doing anything with hardware.”

So the Amazfit HomeStudio combines Studio’s content with Huami’s hardware expertise, and it integrates with Huami devices and other wearables to track heart rate. And while a treadmill is obviously best for running, the Glass can also offers classes in sculpt, yoga and stretching.

Huami and Studio are not announcing pricing or timing, but Baptiste said the treadmill will be “an incredible value compared to competing products on the market.” (Pricing for the Peloton Tread starts at $4,295.) He also acknowledged that the real moneymaker will be the content subscription, which will cost $34.99 per month.

“At the end of 2019, Huami defined a new mission: Connect Health with Technology. STUDIO’s passion for fitness has proven to be a perfect match,” said Huami Chairman and CEO Wang Huang in a statement. “We want to bring the latest in fitness to our users, through products and services they can count on. That’s what Huami Amazfit is bringing to the new decade – cutting-edge innovation in health technology.”

CES 2020 coverage - TechCrunch