Elderly people are not typically thought of as early adopters of cutting-edge technology, but there are startups looking to buck that trend, banking on an opportunity to provide them with them with new services like VR, to address the specific needs of elderly consumers, Today one of the bigger startups in the space, Rendever, is announcing an acquisition to expand its business. The company, which builds virtual reality experiences designed to help elderly people feel less lonely and currently has some 600,000 users, has acquired Alcove, a platform developed at AARP — the organization that both lobbies for and provides services like insurance and support to members, who are typically retirees and older people.

Rendever operates as a B2B service — it works with care homes and other organizations to create customized VR experiences that are in turn used those organizations’ elderly residents — but Alcove is more consumer-facing and is currently sold as a service to AARP’s members. It describes itself as a “family-oriented virtual reality app”. Available to use on Meta (Oculus) Quest, the app is laid out as a virtual living room where families can “meet” and look at photos, play games, watch movies or just converse together.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed but from what we understand Rendever is paying cash for Alcove, and AARP is taking equity in Rendever as part of the deal.

Rendever and AARP are not strangers. The latter is one of the startup’s investors (others include Mass Challenge and the Dorm Room Fund; it’s also had grants from the National Institute on Aging and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) and they had initially co-developed Alcove together before AARP decided that it no longer wanted to invest in developing it in house.

“We at AARP are thrilled to have Rendever acquire and continue expanding the capabilities of such an impactful product as Alcove,” said Rick Robinson, VP & GM of the AgeTech Collaborative at AARP. “We know virtual, immersive experiences can demonstrate tremendously positive outcomes, especially for the socially isolated and we expect Alcove will continue helping even wider audiences under Rendever’s leadership.” The org, he said, is not pulling away from tech, but it will pursue it in collaboration with third parties more in the future.

That shift — along with this piece of M&A — both underscore part of a bigger trend that is being played out in tech. Not only has the bear market led to startups having a harder time raising money right now; but similarly organizations and reining in budgets for tech projects (if not completely killing them off) if those projects are not showing a strong return or quick path to profitability. This in turn is spurring more M&A activity as a means to giving those startups and those projects a lifeline in these leaner times.

The fact that the asset in question here is focused on elderly people is also significant. Technology is now part and parcel of how we interact with each other, something that became ever more the case in the peak of Covid-19 as people had to isolate more from each other and travel got curtailed. Although there are a lot of older consumers who resist a lot of tech — they may not have mobile phones, or can’t solve simple glitches on their computers, or they don’t use any kind of social media — that population is evolving as more digitally-savvy consumers age.

All of this will lead to a bigger market and a bigger demand for services and devices aimed at older people’s specific needs and preferences. (And this week at CES, building for that population, not just VR like this but gadgets like hearing aids, is forming a big part of what might more generally be described as “accessibility” tech but could just as accurately be seen as more sophisticated approaches for specific audiences.)

The idea that there is an untapped market of users, but those who could be a perfect audience for VR, formed part of the premise for Rendever getting started in the first place, CEO and co-founder Kyle Rand said.

“We had the idea of bringing VR into senior living communities to address social isolation,” he said of the original idea for the startup in 2016. At the time, most were skeptical, he said.

“Back then, when we told people this idea, and we provided some demos, we got laughed at. No, they said, you’re going to use this technology with this demographic [because] they must be tech averse. But what we found was that if you can make it easy to get somebody into the experience, and provide something meaningful and joyfus, the opportunities were just limitless.” He said when users come into virtual rooms for the first time, or use them to “travel” back to their childhood neighborhoods using Google Maps and Street View, people would “light up.”

Although providing ways to ease social isolation might have previously been seen as a nice-to-have, the premise took on a different urgency during Covid-19 when so many were isolated out of caution and sometimes actual public health regulations, and people started to understand just what toll isolation could have on mental health, regardless of the age. Today, the startup works with some 500 senior living communities in North America, and it has to date delivered more than 2 million VR experiences to older adults.

Rendever is largely bootstrapped — it has raised less than half a million dollars in the last eight years — but it’s now using the fact that it is profitable and growing while addressing an evolving market to go out for its Series A. we’ve delivered over 2 million experiences in VR to older adults.

VR comes of age, as Rendever, a mixed reality startup focused on the elderly, acquires Alcove from AARP by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Media streamer Plex was promising to expand its free streaming service to include rentals years ago, but that announcement arrived just ahead of the pandemic — at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2020. The company then also faced a host of other issues, including technical concerns, that required the company to reprioritize its plans. Now, Plex says it’s finally nearing the launch of a marketplace that will allow consumers to find movies and TV shows for rent or purchase, making Plex even more of a one-stop-shop for all your media content.

The company said it expects to launch its TVOD store (transactional video on demand, aka rentals) by the second quarter of this year, if not sooner.

Asked what the holdup was, Plex admitted the project was more challenging than it first anticipated.

“It was a lot harder than we thought,” said Plex co-founder and Chief Product Officer Scott Olechowski. “Getting all the DRM stuff working everywhere — we switched DRM providers. And we had to get approval from all the studios,” he explained. Plex also decided to move away from another third-party partner it had been working with to power its AVOD service (ad-supported video on demand) — a hurdle it decided needed to be completed before launching its rentals marketplace.

And then the company was hit with something they’ve now internally dubbed “Androidgeddon.” This was essentially an all-hands-on-deck nightmare technical snafu that was causing streams to randomly stop at ad breaks on Android TV, Android mobile and Amazon Fire TV platforms. The problem was eventually tracked down to a change in an SDK (software development kit) provided by Google, but it took several months to fix, using up all engineering resources in the process.

In addition to this combination of factors delaying the launch of its rentals marketplace, Plex over the past year chose to focus on another popular product: its FAST channels, or free ad-supported streaming TV. FAST channels are basically anything that looks like the same kind of TV guide a cable provider offers, similar to something like Pluto TV or Xumo. (Roku and Amazon offer FAST channels as well, via The Roku Channel’s Live TV Guide and Amazon Freevee, respectively.) This is a growing area of the streaming market and serve as a way for advertisers to reach consumers as cable TV viewership declines.

Image Credits: Getty Images

FAST channels have been a big area of growth for Plex’s business, consumer engagement, and revenue. The company announced during CES this week it doubled its FAST programming over the past year to reach over 300 channels, including A+E’s Crime 360, Hallmark Movies & More, and The Walking Dead on Stories by AMC. In addition, it grew its user base to 16 million monthly active users who have streamed billions of minutes of content, including through FAST programming and ad-supported content, allowing Plex to nearly triple its annual ad revenue. Ad-supported video, however, still outpaces FAST, in terms of ad revenue, but both are growing.

While Plex doesn’t publicly disclose its revenue, it’s in the double-digit millions. The company now has 175 employees and, unlike many in the tech industry, hasn’t had to resort to layoffs.

In addition, the tightening of ad budgets hasn’t yet hurt its business.

“It’s been healthy,” remarked Olechowski. “We haven’t seen from year to year any huge shift in the programmatic market that’s impacted us…we’re pretty happy with where we are,” he said.

Image Credits: Plex

Video rentals aren’t the only thing on Plex’s roadmap this year. The company is still hoping to launch a subscriptions offering — another idea it’s been kicking around for some time — which would allow users to subscribe to paid streamers through Plex. And it aims to introduce recommendations in its “Discover” section launched earlier this, offering users a Universal Watchlist and its first social experiences — the latter of which will roll out to all Plex users later this year, all well, instead of just Plex Pass premium subscribers.

The company says it wants to introduce a way for users to leave reviews of the shows and movies they watched instead of just leaving a star rating, too, but the timing on that feature isn’t quite as set. All these changes will also include some UX updates (design changes to the user experience), as well.

Streamer Plex finally ready to launch a TV and movie rentals marketplace by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

At CES, Amazon today announced that a number of new devices from four manufactureres will soon join its Sidewalk network. Sidewalk, Amazon’s long-range, low-bandwidth IoT mesh network that is powered by sharing a small portion of a user’s bandwidth from devices like the company’s Echo speakers and Ring cameras, currently supports the Tile tracker, Amazon’s own Ring cameras and sensors, as well as Level smart locks and CareBand’s senior-care systems. Now, you can add sensors from Browan and New Cosmos, Meshify and Deviceroy’s Aria to this list, though only the Deviceroy system, which will connect solar inverters to the internet, is currently available, with the rest launching later this year.

For the most part, these four new partners are not exactly household names. Amazon’s Tanuj Mohan, the company’s GM and CTO for Sidewalk, however, told me that a number of new partners will launch over the course of this year. More importantly, he also said that Amazon plans to open up the Sidewalk network to developers in the first half of this year. This, he noted, will enable virtually anyone who wants to get started with building IoT products to order a reference kit from Amazon’s partners and get going in days, all without having to worry about connectivity.

“Anybody who has an idea should be able to go to an AWS website, find a hardware kit from Silicon Labs, TI or from somebody, order the kit and be able to get this kit flowing data via AWS into an application,” he explained. “They can start writing literally as soon as the kit is in their hands. So that is what we expect [when we] open for developers. My vision is that with some of these kits and devices, they could actually try building something real out of it and maybe even in low numbers for proof of concepts to prove their business case in a timespan that was never before possible.”

As Mohan noted, one of the major challenges for the Sidewalk team is to get people to change the way they think about IoT connectivity. “The market doesn’t fully appreciate why sidewalk is different,” he said when I asked him what his team’s hardest challenge is. “They have heard that, oh, Matter solves everything, or ZigBee solves everything, or we have had this forever. But not really. You haven’t had a network that’s just there and a device that ships to your house that you power on and it’s on. Yes, maybe a cell phone with a SIM card does that. But nothing else.”

Some manufacturers may have gotten started with ZigBee or WiFi to add smarts to everyday devices like a faucet, he noted, but then learned that people didn’t have a ZigBee hub or just wouldn’t configure it. “It was an investment that wasn’t worthwhile,” he said. “If you look at the percentages of some of these smart things that smartness was forced on, a very low percentage of them got ever got connected.”

Ideally, that’s not a problem with Sidewalk and while Matter is trying to solve some of these problems, Mohan argued that Sidewalk may actually help Matter to grow because it can provide the initial networking capabilities for the Matter network to allow for setting up new devices.

Image Credits: Meshify

Amazon Sidewalk adds new partners, plans to open to developers soon by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

At CES, BMW today unveiled its new i Vision Dee concept car, an E Ink-clad four-door sedan that can shift colors on demand. Why ‘Dee,’ you surely ask? It stands for Digital Emotional Experience. We’ll leave it at that, but what matters here is that it’s BMW’s platform for showing off its new head-up display, which is all about giving drivers a choice of how much augmented reality they want to see as they drive.

Using a five-step selection, drivers can choose if they only want to see driving-related information or if they want to add data from their communications systems, an augmented reality project or a completely virtual experience with blacked-out windows (while driving autonomously).

Image Credits: BMW

Obviously, this is a concept and I don’t think we’ll see people lounge and play VR racing games in their car while their autonomous chauffeur handles the mundane task of driving them to their next meeting. But BMW also says that some of this technology will make it into production in its ‘Neue Klasse’ — its next generation platform — launching in 2025. This will include a head-up display that will use the entire width of the windscreen.

Continental recently showed off its Scenic View HUD, which also spans the entire windscreen (though only as a small strip at the bottom of the window), while automotive technology company Harman also today announced its new head-up display hardware, which isn’t quite as futuristic, but also focuses on larger fields of view and includes integrations with driver-assistance systems and real-time 3D object detection.

Image Credits: BMW

And while BMW previously talked about using E Ink as the outer skin of its vehicles, the i Vision Dee now brings this to life with an exterior that’s covered by 240 E Ink segments that can display 32 colors. The car maker actually worked with E Ink to develop the technology that allows it to adapt these display films for curved surfaces. There’s no word yet on when this technology will come to a production model. Earlier this week, VW showed off its light-up paint, so it’s probably only a matter of time before we see cars with these chameleon-like capabilities on the street.

“A BMW lives by its unparalleled digital performance. BMW i Vision Dee is about perfect integration of virtual and physical experiences” said Frank Weber, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG responsible for Development. “Whoever excels at integrating the customer’s everyday digital worlds into the vehicle at all levels will succeed in mastering the future of car-building.”

BMW reimagines the head-up display by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

When Apple’s AirTag came onto the scene in 2021, competitors like Tile were quick to bash the tech giant for antitrust issues, saying smaller companies had no chance of competing with Apple’s massive network of a billion iPhones. As it turns out, that’s not how another rival sees the situation. Chipolo, the 10-year-old maker of similar lost item location devices, has remained self-funded all these years, having sold 3.5 million devices and growing its revenue to the double-digit millions.

Instead of fighting Apple, Chipolo has opted to work with the Cupertino tech giant — and even credits Apple for helping further grow the item tracker industry. The team also sees the opportunity to integrate with the Find My app as a better consumer experience compared with its much smaller first-party finding network, which today is around 1 million monthly active users.

Without a large network, explains the company, it may take much longer for a device to alert its owner to its location when it’s misplaced and outside of Bluetooth range.

“It just comes down to do you want the customer to be happier with the bigger network?… We decided this is better,” said Chipolo co-founder Domen Barovic, in a conversation with TechCrunch at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “It’s easier to replace this,” he said, referring to Chipolo’s original non-Find My-integrated product, “than to try to build a huge network. We’ve seen that, actually, it’s really hard to do,” he added.

Image Credits: Chipolo

Tile, for comparison, is going a different route — it teamed up with Life360 by way of an acquisition — to combine their respective networks in order to compete more directly with Apple. Tile also sat down with the Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyers, who are now building an antitrust case against Apple, to register its complaints about Apple’s entry into this market.

Tile repeatedly stressed how Apple has the advantage of its sizable customer base and platform. Meanwhile, Tile would have to give up its direct relationship with its customers through its own app, as well as pay a commission on any subscription sales or other services made through in-app purchases. In addition, Apple hasn’t yet allowed third parties to access its U1 chip (ultra-wideband) chip for precision finding, giving AirTag a competitive advantage on that front.

Image Credits: Chipolo

Chipolo, however, feels much differently about this situation. Though the company has had ultra-wideband (UWB) prototypes on hand for a few years, it doesn’t feel it’s at a loss for the lack of support.

“We’re not seeing that ultra-wideband is actually needed for these use cases,” noted Chipolo co-founder Primoz Zelensek — Chipolo’s algorithm focuses on delivering quicker reminders when you leave an item behind, then customers can ring the device to see where their item is located. “The sound is much more important,” he said.

Image Credits: Chipolo

If anything, Chipolo sings Apple’s praises for creating more consumer awareness about the lost item finder market in general with the launch of AirTag. Plus, the company believes Apple has a shared mission.

“They’re solving the problem that we wanted to solve,” said Barovic. “We’re not building a company because we want to build a company, right? We’re building the company because we want to help people. And that’s what Apple is also doing. So actually, it’s good.”

Interestingly, Chipolo shared these same sentiments with the DoJ’s lawyers last year, the co-founders told TechCrunch. The company had a couple of meetings over Zoom about the matter of AirTag and its impact on Chipolo’s business. Its comments, seemingly, could complicate the DoJ’s ability to effectively prosecute Apple. After all, here is a competitor happy to be offered access to Apple’s Find My platform — and one that says its own sales have grown as a result.

The co-founders told TechCrunch that Chipolo’s 2022 revenue topped that of the revenue it generated in its pre-Find My days — though the company clarified it’s not what you’d call “hockey stick” growth.

Still, said Barovic, “it’s going up.”

The device maker is at the Las Vegas trade show to promote its current line of lost item trackers and to celebrate its 10-year anniversary. Today, Chipolo sells two versions of a keychain dongle ($28) that work either with its own app or with Apple’s Find My Network, and a wallet card ($35) that is slim enough to fit into a credit card slot. Unlike AirTag, Chipolo fully supports Android phones.

Image Credits: Chipolo

The company differentiates its products by the nature of the form factor — it’s plastic, comes in many colors, and its keychain dongle has a hole in the top so you don’t have to buy a separate accessory. It also costs a little less. The device also has baseline functions –like beeping to help you find your lost item, if nearby, and a finding network of some sort, when the item is out of Bluetooth range. (The non-Find My version, however, will not alert you if someone is trying to use the device for stalking purposes. But with its smaller network, its GPS updates are not as quick or as effective.)

Chipolo believes its feature set, along with what it believes are its better alerts, are what will help it to remain competitive with AirTag in the long term.

The company is also not slowing down development, either, but rather sees Apple’s lack of variety with AirTag as a niche to exploit. In addition to the multiple form factors and colors, it has built prototypes for two more form factors, including a location tracker designed for luggage and a screw-on tracker for bikes. It’s hoping to launch those next year.

Chipolo funds its new products with sales from its existing trackers, despite offers of outside funding.

“We’ve had a few [investors approach], but we didn’t find anyone who actually fits our culture,” said Zelensek. “But, of course, we are always open for new opportunities,” he added.

10-year old Chipolo explains why it’s not worried about Apple’s AirTag by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

A picture is worth 1,000 words, as the saying goes, and now a startup called Nuralogix is taking this idea to the next level: soon, a selfie will be able give you 1,000 diagnostics about the state of your health.

Anura, the company’s flagship health and wellness app, takes a 30-second selfie and uses the data from that to create a catalogue of readings about you. They include vital stats like heart rate and blood pressure; mental health-related diagnostics like stress and depression levels; details about your physical state like body mass index and skin age; your level of risk for things like hypertension, stroke and heart disease; and biomarkers like your blood sugar levels.

Some of these readings are more accurate than others and are being improved on over time. Just today, to coincide with CES in Vegas — where I came across the company — Nuralogix announced that its contactless blood pressure measurements were becoming more accurate, specifically with accuracy corresponding to a standard deviation of error of less than 8mmHg.

Anura’s growth is part of a bigger trend in the worlds of medicine and wellness. The Covid-19 pandemic gave the world a prime opportunity to use and develop more remote health services, normalizing what many had thought of as experimental or sub-optimal.

That, coupled with a rising awareness that regular monitoring can be key to preventing health problems, has led to a number of apps and devices proliferating the market. Anura is by far not the only one out there, but it’s a notable example of how companies are playing out the equation of relying on low friction to yield big results. That in a way has been the holy grail of a lot of modern medicine — it’s one reason why so many wanted Theranos to be real.

So while some pandemic-era behaviors are not sticking as firmly as people thought they might (e-commerce has not completely replace in-person shopping, for one) observers believe there is a big future in tele-health and companies like Nuralogix providing the means to implement it.

Grandview Research estimates that tele-health was an $83.5 billion market globally in 2022, and that this number will balloon to $101.2 billion in 2023, growing at CAGR of 24% to 2030, when it will be a $455.3 billion market.

The startup — which is based out of Toronto, Canada, and backed by the city’s Mars Innovation effort (a consortium of universities and research groups helping to spin out academic research) and others — uses a B2B business model and counts Japan’s NTT and Spanish insurance provider Sanitas among its customers. It’s also talking to automotive companies that see the potential of being able to use this to track, say, when a driver is getting tired and distracted, or having a health crisis of some other kind.

Right now, the results that Anura comes up with are positioned as guidance — for “investigational” insights that complement other kinds of assessments. The company claims to be compliant with HIPAA, GDPR and other data protection regulations as part of its wider security policy, and it’s currently going trough the process of FDA approval so that its customers can use the results in a more proactive manner.

It also has a Lite version of the application (on iOS and Android) where individuals can get some — but not all — of these diagnostics.

The Lite version is worth looking at not just as a way for the company to publicize itself, but how it gathers data.

Nuralogix built Anura on the back of an AI that was trained on data from some 35,000 of different users. A typical 30-second video image of a user’s face is analyzed to see how blood moves around it. “Human skin is translucent,” the company notes. “Light and its respective wavelengths are reflected at different layers below the skin and can be used to reveal blood flow information in the human face.”

Ingrid testing out the app at CES

That in turn is matched up with different diagnostics from those people using traditional measuring tools, and uploaded to the company’s “DeepAffex” Affective AI engine. Then users of the Anura app are essentially “read” based on what the AI has been trained to see: blood moving in one direction or another, or a person’s skin color, can say at lot about how the person is doing physically and mentally.

DeepAffex is potentially being used for more than just tele-health diagnostics. Previous to its pivot to health, company’s AI technology and using this technique of “transdermal optical imaging” (shortened to TOI by the company) to “read” faces, was being applied to reading users’ emotions. One potential application of that was using the tech to augment or even replace traditional lie detector tests, which are regularly used by police and others to determine whether a person is representing things truthfully, but have been proven to be flawed.

There are also horizons that extend into hardware. The current version of Anura is based an app that you access via smartphones or tablets, but longer term the company might also work on their own scanning devices to add in other kinds of facial scanning and other tools such as infrared to pick up even more information and produce more diagnostics. (One area for example that’s not currently touched is blood oxygen, an area that the company definitely wants to tackle.)

I tried out the full version of the Anura app this week in Las Vegas and have to say it’s a pretty compelling experience and indeed is low-friction enough to likely catch on with a lot of people. (And as a measure of that, the company’s demo had a permanent queue of people waiting to try it out.)

Seen at CES: Nuralogix uses AI and a selfie to measure your heart rate, BP, body mass, skin age, stress level, and more by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Last year, Amazon and Disney announced a plan to develop a custom voice assistant that combined Alexa’s smarts with Disney’s library of character voices and original recordings. Dubbed “Hey Disney!,” the voice assistant was the first non-Alexa assistant to become available on Echo devices and installed at select Disney Resort hotels. Now, for the first time, Amazon is showing off the new voice assistant to the general public at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And soon, it says, customers will be able to purchase the Disney Magical Companion voice assistant for use in their own homes, as well.

The launch of the Disney voice assistant has been something of an experiment for Amazon, which has struggled to get its own Alexa users to use its voice assistant for anything more than basic tasks — like setting timers, making lists, or controlling their smart home via their Echo smart speakers and smart screens or other Alexa-powered devices. Unfortunately for Amazon, shopping via Alexa also didn’t take off — nor did other attempts to monetize Alexa through things like in-app purchases or subscriptions to voice apps.

As a result of this and other economic forces, workers in the Alexa division, were among those hardest hit by Amazon’s recent layoffs.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s Disney partnership, which includes access to Disney’s intellectual property,  allows Alexa’s technology to be used for a broader range of experiences, while also offering Amazon a potential revenue stream from custom client solutions.

Image Credits: Amazon/Disney

Before today, the Disney voice assistant was available in select Disney Resort hotel rooms, as a free service for the guests. Visitors could ask the assistant for pertinent information like park hours, directions to the park, or where to eat. They could also make guest service requests at the hotel, like ordering extra towels or room service.

And, of course, the assistant is packed with Disney features — like jokes, interactive trivia, greetings from favorite Disney characters, and access to “soundscapes” inspired by Disney films. Supported voices include those from over 20 popular characters from Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, and more. When you ask for the weather, Olaf from “Frozen” might tell you when it’s cold outside, for instance. The experience itself is guided by the Disney Magical Companion, not Alexa — but some guests have complained the voice is not a known character, like Mickey.

The assistant itself was built using Amazon’s Alexa Custom Assistant (ACA) solution, which allowed Disney to customize Alexa’s technology while also supporting its own in-house tech. To start, Hey Disney! will work with Disney’s interactive wearable, the Disney MagicBand+, which will enhance Disney’s trivia game by turning the band into a game show buzzer of sorts that reacts with lights and haptics as players answer the trivia questions. The band, which is typically used in the park for entry and other things like Lightning Lane access, will also light up and buzz when an alarm or timer the guest sets goes off.

Amazon aided in the development of the assistant, it says, helping Disney to create hundreds of pieces of custom content. It’s also using the platform to introduce voice assistants to consumers who have yet to interact with them by offering hints and prompts about things they can do — like hear a joke or play a game.

“Disney is the master storyteller, and its stories are so powerful for so many people,” noted Aaron Rubenson, the vice president of Alexa, in a statement released during CES. “Now people can keep talking to a character, they can continue with the storyline when they go back to their room at the end of the day, or when they go home after the vacation is over. It’s just gratifying to imagine that we’re a part of literally bringing that magic home,” he added.

Disney and Amazon will make the Disney Magical Companion available to U.S. customers for purchase later this year, but does not have a launch time at this time.

Amazon’s custom-built ‘Hey Disney!’ voice assistant will become available for purchase later this year by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Roku today is expanding its product line to include a range of smart TVs that are the first ever to be both designed and built by Roku itself. The Roku Select and Roku Plus Series TVs will be Roku-branded HD and 4K TVs available across 11 models, ranging from 24” to 75” in size, and made to work well with Roku’s growing line of audio products, like its Roku TV Wireless Soundbar, as well as other Roku accessories, like its Voice Remote.

All of Roku’s new HD TVs will include the Roku Voice Remote, while the Plus models will come with the higher-end Roku Voice Remote Pro. All models will support popular features like “Find My Remote” and Private Listening.

Image Credits: Roku

The TVs, like those from Roku’s partners, will run the Roku OS — the company’s own smart TV operating system that provides access to ad-supported movies and shows through The Roku Channel, live content through the Live TV Channel Guide, a curated selection of free in-season movies and shows through its “Featured Free” collection, voice search, and the ability to add on various streaming channels, both free and subscription-based.

Until today, Roku’s OS has only been available on TVs from partners like Sharp, TCL, Hisense, RCA, Philips, JVC, and others — similar to Google’s strategy with Google TV. Amazon had also only worked with partners until last year when it launched its first Fire TVs with Alexa built in.

The company says its new Roku Select and Plus Series TVs will be available in the U.S. beginning spring of 2023 with retail prices that range from $119 to $999 for the lineup of 24” – 75” models.

The company will also make an OLED TV reference design available to its Roku TV partners, to supplement the 11 reference designs that have already gone into production, including those for 2K, 4K, and 8K TVs.

The new product announcements come on the heels of Roku’s third-quarter earnings, which worried investors despite topping Wall Street estimates with revenue of $761.4 million, up 12% year over year, and a net loss of 88 cents per share, below the $1.28 expected. The company was then projecting a weak Q4 — typically a top quarter — with expectations of total net revenue of around $800 million or a decline of 7.5% year over year, Variety reported at the time. Roku said the decline was related to “macroeconomic headwinds” and advertisers’ tightened budgets.

New Roku-branded TVs could, in theory, help to boost device sales as consumers could opt for the company’s own brand other others, while also allowing Roku to generate revenue from its own hardware.

“Our goal is to continue to create an even better TV experience for everyone,” said Mustafa Ozgen, Roku’s President of Devices. “These Roku-branded TVs will not only complement the current lineup of partner-branded Roku TV models, but also allow us to enable future smart TV innovations,” Ozgen added.

Roku unveils its first-ever TVs designed and built by the company by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Bird Buddy, the maker of a smart bird feeder that snaps photos of your bird visitors which are collected in a companion mobile app, is out today with another product for its nature enthusiast and birdwatching community. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company is showing off a prototype of its new A.I.-powered Smart Hummingbird Feeder, which is able to take photos and videos of 350 different hummingbird species with wing speeds of up to 60 mph.

Like its original smart bird feeder, the new feeder’s camera is triggered by motion which prompts it to take photos of the bird. Those are then run through an A.I. program to help identify the species, alerting the user to their visitor through the Bird Buddy mobile app.

Originally a crowdfunded startup through Kickstarter, Bird Buddy realized it couldn’t rely on open databases to help it properly identify bird photos. So in 2021, it built around 250 test cameras and sent them out to volunteer Kickstarter backers to help it develop its own A.I. tech. The company collected around 3 million photos, then hired an ornithologist and team of interns to manually process over 2 million photos to train its bird identification A.I. That has allowed Bird Buddy’s system to identify around 1,000 birds — now including hummingbirds.

Bird Buddy also comes with a nicely designed mobile app that gamifies the birdwatching experience. In the app, users build out their collection of birds, track birds’ visits over time, learn about their habits, and share bird photos with the community, giving a bit of modern-day flair to what’s often thought of as an older person’s hobby.

Image Credits: Bird Buddy

The company says there are now 100,000 users in the Bird Buddy community who have a smart feeder. A new Heartbeat Map website, also launching at CES, lets others outside of Bird Buddy’s own customer base track the bird sightings in real-time.

At CES, the company demonstrated its new Hummingbird Feeder, noting it plans to build the feeder with recyclable and sustainable materials while also offering new features to cater to hummingbirds, like ports with a lily-shaped red flower that provides access to the nectar the birds will eat. The two-part design snaps together with a seal to prevent mold and leaks, but can easily be unsnapped to clean. And like the original Bird Buddy smart feeder, the new feeder features a swappable camera module, optional solar roof, motion sensors, and A.I. tech.

The company’s original feeder is $199 or $269 with a solar roof and has only been shipping since September. The Hummingbird Feeder isn’t yet priced but will be comparable or maybe a little less, we’re told. The company hopes to launch the new feeder later this year.

Image Credits: Bird Buddy

Longer-term, Bird Buddy’s ultimate success may not be from its feeders themselves but from the data it collects.

“We get timestamps, and we know the species and we know — generally — the location based on the town that you put in,” explains Bird Buddy co-founder Kyle Buzzard, in a chat at CES. “We’re building the largest database of bird visits.”

He says the company wants to open-source this data to allow organizations like the Audubon Society and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, as well as universities, to have access. The team has also discussed allowing users to photograph and ID birds using just their phones.

In addition to Kickstarter funds the Slovenia- and Kalamazoo, Michigan-based startup raised $8.5 million from General Catalyst and Backed in a seed round last year.

Bird Buddy’s new smart hummingbird feeder can photograph and identify 350 different bird species by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Intel is taking a more subdued approach to CES these days — forgoing a splashy event staged in a big hotel showroom in the wake of Covid-19, and a wider change in PR strategy after years of making bullish investments in next-generation tech like drones and moonshots like Volocopter and using them as showpieces at those events. Remember the year when Intel imported a whole Volocopter aircraft on to the stage, and placed its then-CEO into it, for its “first US flight”?

Yet the Vegas mega-show remains a key moment for Intel. It’s not just a bellwether for the state of the consumer electronics industry, but it’s an important marketing opportunity as a swathe of consumer electronics companies size up and buy in components for their devices. Today, the company unveiled a host of news related to processors and computer specifications using them, including a new 13th generation of its Intel Core processor, an all-new 24-core processor, the i9, and — addressing the fact that there is over-penetration of computers among business and developed world users — a new N-series specifically for what it describes as “entry-level” education and mainstream laptops, desktops and edge-native applications.

The breadth here is intentional: Intel made its name decades ago for its revolutionary approach to computer processors, which helped usher in a new generation of smaller devices, but it has arguably met some very stiff competition at the higher end of the market, and some would say missed the boat on mobile years ago. These new releases aim to address all of this: providing leadership in the bigger processing race of tomorrow but also hoping for a role in the making of devices for the mass market of today, not least after announcing in September 2022 that it would sunset its iconic Celeron and Pentium processor brands.

“The 13th Gen Intel Core mobile processor family delivers unrivaled, scalable performance for leadership platforms across all laptop segments,” said Michelle Johnston Holthaus, executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group at Intel, in a statement. “With our industry-leading technologies and unmatched global partner ecosystem, people can expect a high-caliber mobile experience in new and unique form factors so they can game or create from anywhere.”

The 13th generation Intel core mobile processor family being unveiled today is spearheaded by the i9-13980HX, which is Intel’s first 24-core processor designed for laptops. Intel claims it is now the world’s fastest mobile (that is, laptop) processor clocking up speeds of 5.6 gigahertz (GHz) turbo frequency and 11% faster and 49% faster performance respectively for single-purpose and multitasking usage. As a measure of what the race is like in processors today, this is less about Intel really setting a new bar as much as it is about keeping up: it notes in a disclaimer that it’s worlds-fastest claim is only valid as of December 2022.

The 24 cores are divided up into 8 Performance-cores and 16 Efficient-cores, it says, and also are complemented by 32 threads and “enhanced Intel Thread
Director” with memory support of up to 128 gigabytes total covering two classes of SDRAM, DDR5 (up to 5,600 megahertz) and DDR4 (up to 3,200 MHz). The state of features today expected by consumers in these devices is laid bare too with a wide range of other support including superfast Wi-Fi 6E (Gig+) support; Bluetooth LE Audio and Bluetooth 5.2 support for faster speeds, multiple devices and lower power consumption (so critical given earlier Bluetooth does drain battery); Thunderbolt 4 support for 40 gigabits per second transfer speeds; and more.

The H-, P- and U-series mobile processors are addressing IoT, “enthusiast” and thinner devices. Intel says that more than 300 models from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Razer, Republic of Gamers, Samsung and others are going to be released this year based on the them.

All of the processors in the 13th generation will also include a Movidius vision processing unit (VPU), built in collaboration with Microsoft to integrate closely with its Windows Studio Effects to handle processing of more AI-based tasks to speed up overall CPU and GPU performance of machines. That collaboration is a notable mark of how hardware and software have had to tie up closer to evolve, and how hardware is becoming increasingly a software play, for more complex applications and faster speeds. Without its own chip-based vertical strategy in-house, Microsoft is an obvious partner.

“Together with Intel we continue to innovate to deliver powerful PC performance and experiences with Windows 11 and all of the products Intel is announcing today,” said Panos Panay, EVP and product head for Microsoft, in a statement. “We’re excited for customers to benefit from substantial optimizations, like improved Windows support for Intel Hybrid Guided Scheduler, and meaningful new experiences, like with the Intel Movidius VPU unlocking a new era of AI acceleration, starting with Windows Studio.”

Intel is describing its new N-series chips, meanwhile, as a direct replacement for the Penium and Celeron lines. “Purpose-built” for the education segment, entry-level computing and IoT edge-native applications, this also means that they will be marketed as more cost-effective and aimed and overall lower-priced and lower-specced devices, while being more modern than the previous generations and being a more evolutionary product for the company.

With new Gracemont-based cores, Intel 7 process technology means 28% better application performance and 64% better graphics performance at the peak compared to the older (now sunset) processors; up to 10-hours of HD video playback (if nothing else is being used) with better camera and display support as well as upgraded WiFi and Bluetooth (they are based also on the i3 tech). Intel said that some 50 new ChromeOS and Windows designs from Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and ASUS are due to be launched this year based on these chips.

IoT is also getting addressed with these new N-series chips, which will be appearing, Intel said, in devices used in retail signages, kiosks, point of sale systems, portable medical imaging devices, office automation equipment like copiers, and in safety and security devices.

In addition to the chip news, Intel has also continued iterating on its laptop and portable computing specifications, this year with new developments called Intel Evo.

These are based on the new 13th generation processor and focus on extended battery life to improve both the speed of charging but also how long devices can run unplugged; improved performance for videoconferencing and other video and collaboration applications; and better bridging between laptops and other keyboard computing and mobile handsets and tablets, which it’s terming “Intel Unison.” Again, in the endgame of vertical integration, this was an essential move for Intel, in an environment where those who do still use laptops are always doing it in complement with handsets, something that device makers are keen to make as easy as possible, not least to lose those users as customers of the former products.

Intel Evo will also work with hardware made by accessory providers, covering Thunderbolt 4 docks, monitors, storage and wireless headsets, mice, keyboards and other access points. Whether those will ultimately feel like gimmicks or buggy hardware that no one ultimately uses remains to be seen: at the end of the day, the easiest and most foolproof tools tend to win the day.

Intel unveils high-end 13th-gen 24-core processors plus N-series workhorse to fill the the Pentium and Celeron gap by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Nvidia announced some new features for its cloud gaming service during its virtual CES press conference. The company is upgrading its premium plan by adding new servers with better hardware components. Users on the $19.99 plan should expect better performance for more demanding games.

The company is now using GeForce RTX 4080-class graphics processing units on its high-end servers. Before today, users paying for the most expensive subscription plan could access servers with server-grade GPUs that are equivalent to GeForce RTX 3080 GPUs.

As a reminder, GeForce Now lets you play your own games from the cloud. The game is running in a data center near you and the video feed is then relayed to your device. GeForce Now supports Windows, macOS, Android (as well as Android TV) and some web browsers (including Safari on the iPhone and iPad).

GeForce Now customers still have to buy games on Steam, the Epic Games Store and other digital stores — they own the games even if they stop subscribing to the service. But the biggest issue with the service is that some game publishers refuse to let Nvidia support their games on GeForce Now. There are currently 1,500 supported games, including Fortnite, League of Legends, Cyberpunk 2077 and many Ubisoft games. But you can’t play Overwatch 2 or Elden Ring for instance.

Customers can try out GeForce Now for free. There is a queue system and you are limited to 60-minute gaming sessions. If you want to use the service on a daily basis, a ‘Priority’ membership lets you launch a game right away and play for up to six hours at a time for $9.99 per month. You are limited to a 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second.

Last year, Nvidia added a premium tier called GeForce Now RTX 3080 for $19.99 per month. Because of today’s update, this tier is getting a new name. The company is now calling it GeForce Now Ultimate.

In addition to access to more powerful servers, GeForce Now Ultimate supports 4K resolution. If you have a gaming monitor, the Ultimate membership now also supports 240Hz (up from 120Hz). Users can also enable Nvidia’s proprietary features, such as DLSS 3 and Nvidia Reflex.

If you have an Nvidia G-Sync monitor, GeForce Now will adapt the streaming rate depending on how many frames per second you get in your Nvidia Reflex-compatible game. That’s neat! But if you have an Nvidia G-Sync monitor, you likely also have a gaming PC so you may not need GeForce Now.

Existing GeForce Now RTX 3080 members are going to be automatically upgraded to the GeForce Now Ultimate plan in late January. GeForce Now Ultimate will still cost $19.99 per month.

Nvidia upgrades GeForce Now with RTX 4080 performance for premium users by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Ecobee started in 2007 when connected thermostats were an entirely different product and nothing like what’s available today. Ecobee released its Smart thermostat in 2008, bringing modern connectivity and usability to the device. I’m excited to host a special irl TechCrunch Live event at CES 2023. We’re filming in the LVCC Grand Concourse on the first day of CES, and hope you can stop by to watch.

Stuart Lombard is sitting down with me to talk about the growth and development of his startup, ecobee. He started the company in 2007 with fellow Canadians to improve household energy use. He raised $159 million to fund the effort and sold the company for $750 million.

At TechCrunch Live, we host conversations with successful founders who took an interesting path, and Lombard journey is filled with twists and turns. The company raised its $2.23 million Series A in 2007, released its first product in 2008, and then in 2011, had to fight for attention after the sleek Nest Learning Thermostat release. Ecobee kept at it. In 2021, Generac Power Systems bought ecobee for $750 million.

This TechCrunch Live will be filmed at CES 2023, and it’s free to attend. Watch the broadcast at booth #60488, located in the LVCC Grand Concourse, at 11:00 on Thursday, January 5. The event will also be streamed live on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

TechCrunch Live returns to its normal, weekly schedule starting on February with Benchmark’s Sarah Tavel and Cambly CEO and co-founder Sameer Shariff.

Hear from Ecobee CEO and Founder at a special, in-person TechCrunch Live at CES by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch