New Technology News

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Smart glasses! Smart watches! Smart… rings?

While many in the tech world would agree that wearable devices are the natural next stage of computing, no one has really cracked the code. As much as we geeks love to chat about Google Glass and Pebble watches, no wearable has breached the mainstream and achieved any degree of ubiquity just yet.

RHL Vision, a competitor in the TechCrunch CES Hardware Battlefield today, thinks they have the answer: Bluetooth rings that turn your fingers into buttons.

Here’s how it works: by tucking an optical sensor into a small ring placed around your thumb, the Fin is able to detect swipes and taps across your hand. When it detects a gesture, it sends that command off to your connected device — be it a smartphone, TV, or another wearable device.

Swiping your thumb down your index finger, for example, could turn your phone’s volume down. Want to turn it back up? Just swipe back up across the same finger. Want to skip the current track? Swipe your thumb across the palm of the opposite hand.

In future iterations, they hope to use biometrics to distinguish each segment of each finger. This would allow them to assign each segment a different behavior, essentially turning each section of your hand into a different button.

While the team has renders showing the ring as they hope it will look once they reach the early stages of actual production, the current prototype shown on stage (and pictured above) is a bit more… extensive. Whereas they plan to use flexible circuitry (think Jawbone Up) to shrink the design and allow it to wrap around your thumb, the current prototype relies on more traditional PCBs and off-the-shelf sensors to get the job done. It’s not nearly as small and not nearly as pretty, but it does do a good job of proving the concept.

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The Fin Is A Bluetooth Ring That Turns Your Hand Into The Interface

3:39 PM

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Smart glasses! Smart watches! Smart… rings? While many in the tech world would agree that wearable devices are the natural next stage of com...

At least eight security experts who had signed up for the RSA 2014 security conference to be held Feb. 24-28 have publicly pulled out. They include F-Secure Chief Security Researcher Mikko Hypponen and Taia Global founder and CEO Jeffrey Carr, who is also founder of the Suits and Spooks conference. The departures are part of the backlash within the cybersecurity community against the RSA reportedly accepting $10 million from the NSA in exchange for embedding a flawed random number generator into one of RSA's Bsafe security products.

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RSA Could Pay Dearly for $10M NSA Gig

3:10 PM

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At least eight security experts who had signed up for the RSA 2014 security conference to be held Feb. 24-28 have publicly pulled out. The...

Oscar, the New York-based startup in the decidedly unsexy world of health insurance, has just picked up an additional $30 million in funding.

Why? Promising numbers in the product’s first 90 days since launch. The company debuted last October just as the federal government and states unveiled new health insurance exchanges where consumers can pick and choose plans in compliance with the Affordable Care Act.

Oscar has since enrolled “thousands” of customers and has “tens of millions” of dollars in annualized revenue. While the federal government’s exchange had an embarrassingly messy launch, state programs in places like New York and California rolled out more smoothly.

That’s where Oscar has picked most of its new clientele. Apparently, the numbers were good enough that Founders Fund, which had been a minority investor in the company, decided to increase its stake at a $340 million valuation. Other firms including Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Kushner’s firm, Thrive Capital, also participated. Founders Fund put in $25 million, while the other firms added the remaining $5 million.

Oscar tries to marry many of the design and user experience lessons from the consumer web and mobile world with health care.

They have a clean and clear sign-up flow and they offer amenities like telemedicine or the ability to talk to a doctor within one hour of making a request. Generic drugs and primary care visits are also free.

The company has a notable team behind with it Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, Vostu co-founder Mario Schlosser, Kevin Nazemi and Fredrik Nylander, who ran engineering and operations and Tumblr. That’s just on the tech side. They also picked up executives with about 1,000 years of health insurance career experience behind them. On the company’s board is Charlie Baker, who ran insurer Harvard Pilgrim out of Massachusetts, the only state with an insurance exchange before the Affordable Care Act was passed.

Oscar’s timing was incredibly lucky. The team looked at the healthcare space before they really understood what the full impact of the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) would be. But the act fortuitously offered them a window to pick up customers just as the U.S. government enacted an individual mandate, or a requirement that people buy insurance or face penalties. That has meant a host of previously uninsured customers have come online the last several months.

In total, Oscar has raised $75 million, about $29 million of which has gone toward a capital reserve that the state of New York requires for health insurance providers.

The company only caters to customers in New York and has no immediate plans to expand outside of the state (although that is the goal long-term).

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With An Eight-Figure Runrate, Oscar Doubles Down on Health Insurance Through $30M In New Funding

2:39 PM

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Oscar , the New York-based startup in the decidedly unsexy world of health insurance, has just picked up an additional $30 million in fundin...

Back in August, I wrote about Closing Time, the new service that was launched to simplify the process of buying a house. It does so by creating a comprehensive list of things that the home purchaser needs to do in the month or so between signing a contract and picking up the keys.

The company recently closed on a $2.7 million round of funding that will help them expand the service and maybe, in the future, attack new verticals. (But that’s a long way off.)

Along with Accel Partners, the list of investors in this round reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of former Yahoo execs. That includes Yahoo founder and former CEO Jerry Yang, former SVP and treasurer Gideon Yu, former SVP Vish Makhijani, former CTO Zod Nazem, and former CPO Ash Patel. Oh yeah, Rob Chandra, formerly at Bessemer Ventures, and Owen Van Natta, former COO of Facebook, Myspace, and Zynga, are also investors.

The investor list makes a lot more sense when you consider that Amitree founders Jonathan Aizen and Paul Knegten sold their last company, display ad startup Dapper, to Yahoo in 2010. So there’s some confidence among that group that whatever these guys do, it’s probably going to be good.

The funny thing is that the Amitree guys didn’t really know very much about real estate when they started. But you know, one of them was going through the process of buying a house and then realized how much it sucked and how there needed to be better tools for completing the process. So they built that tool.

(They didn’t know much about ads either when they started Dapper either, Aizen tells me, but that worked out ok.)

Anyway, in the process of building Closing Time, the two founders spent a significant amount of time educating themselves and talking to agents and brokerages to figure out what their needs were and how the product could help their clients through the home-buying process.

Aizen tells me that a big reason for that is that they wanted to be a partner to brokerages and agents, you know, something that helps them out, rather than compete with them. And that, in turn, will help Closing Time get better distribution, as it’s a tool that agents can offer up to their clients.

To enable that, the company has created a way for brokerages to create their own branded Closing Time portals, which shepherd the home buyer through the process. In that way, agents can provide a smoother transition, increasing customer satisfaction and hopefully increasing referrals. With that in mind, it’s partnered with some brokerages — like Zephyr in the San Francisco Bay Area — to offer it to clients.

Amitree’s seeing pretty good traction among active users, with most opening its emails and going to the site every day. It’s also getting good feedback, with 85 percent of users who went through the process saying that they’d refer their agents to other buyers.

Amitree is still pretty lean at just three employees. Aizen and Knegten recently brought on former Dapper coworker Tony Novak as their CTO, and are looking to double in size thanks to the new funding.

For now the team is focused on real estate but they see huge opportunities to expand into other verticals with the abstract rule engine that they’ve built. And hey, they’ve now got some money to play around with.

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Amitree, The Company Behind Home Buying To-Do Service Closing Time, Raises $2.7 Million

12:09 PM

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Back in August, I wrote about Closing Time , the new service that was launched to simplify the process of buying a house . It does so by cre...

No one is more concerned with health than the mother of an infant, and with the rising availability of wrist-worn fitness tracking devices, it only makes sense that a baby-sized health tracker would pop up.

Meet Owlet, one of our hardware battlefield companies.

Owlet is an ankle-worn health tracking device for your baby, with an accompanying app that gives you a readout on your little bundle of joy’s health at any time.

Owlet tracks heart rate, oxygen levels, skin temperature and even provides rollover alerts during sleep.

It all works with a system called Pulse oximetry, which has been used in hospitals and in pediatrics for years. By using red and infrared lights, the “smart sock” as they call it, can measure heart rate and oxygen levels without being invasive.

The smart sock then transmits the information its recording to a smartphone app via Bluetooth 4.0. If you don’t have a smartphone, you can plug in the smart sock via USB to see metrics on your computer, or connect the smart sock to your home Wifi network to see readouts on any connected device.

The sock is hypoallergenic, wireless, and all the electronic components are housed in a resistant silicone case to make sure no one gets electrocuted.

Battery on the Owlet smart sock lasts up to two full days, with notifications letting you know when it’s running low on jive juice.

The company claims that the Owlet helps in more ways than just tracking your baby’s health, as it offers peace of mind for an often times stressed and restless mother.

Owlet is in the process of crowdfunding to bring the device to market, with a retail price of $250. If you’re interested in reserving a unit for yourself, head over to the Owlet website.

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Owlet Infant Health Tracker Takes The Wearable Revolution Into The Crib

12:09 PM

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No one is more concerned with health than the mother of an infant, and with the rising availability of wrist-worn fitness tracking devices, ...

"A more robust entertainment delivery system will be a hallmark of Sony as we move into the future," Sony CEO Kaz Hirai said Tuesday in a keynote address at CES. "We will be offering customers a single source of entertainment that is less complicated, more cost-effective and more accessible than ever before." Sony will be taking bold steps with its future consumer electronics products, Hirai pledged, adding that he is dedicated to creating a Sony culture that will evolve and mature over time to deliver products with emotional value.

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Sony Banks On Life Space UX to Regain Faded Glory

12:09 PM

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"A more robust entertainment delivery system will be a hallmark of Sony as we move into the future," Sony CEO Kaz Hirai said Tue...

Access to clean water is something that most us probably take for granted — after all, it just comes out of taps and faucets and hoses and shower heads with little more than the twist of a spigot. Using all that water can cost a pretty penny (especially in certain foreign countries), but Monterrey, Mexico-based Driblet wants to make sure that people can easily track how much water they’re using in their homes with a device they’re showing off at our Hardware Battlefield here at CES.

The Driblet is a smart water meter that connects to both your pipes and your Wi-Fi network. Meanwhile, a slew of sensors baked into the Driblet box itself constantly keeps tabs on the rate of water flow and all the foreign particulate bits floating around in that water, all of which gets phoned home to the Driblet backend.

Speaking of the backend, the team has made some crucial progress on the software side of things — all of that water quality information can be accessed through a revamped mobile app that also allows users to get water usage goals and forge social connections to see who can be the most environmentally conscious. A bit of a peculiar approach, sure, but a little personal accountability couldn’t hurt.

The TechCrunch historians among you may notice that the Driblet team aren’t strangers to our stage — they showed off a very, very rough prototype of their device at the Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon to a pretty receptive audience. So what happened from there? Well, the team launched a crowdfunding campaign on Dragon Innovation because of its greater focus on hardware projects, but it couldn’t manage to raise the requested $98,000 to get the Driblet monitor manufactured en masse.

That led to a trip back to the drawing board — the new chassis (seen above) is more attractive and more robust than the 3D-printed prototypes that came before it — and along with it came a pretty savvy shift in vision. The ability to monitor and dig into water consumption tickled some consumers’ fancies but the process of installation and occasional maintenance meant that the end user would have to be at least a little comfortable with getting their hands dirty. This time around though, Driblet is focusing on bigger fish — specifically businesses and buildings that have a vested interest in keeping their hefty water bills low. That’s not to say that they’re giving up on the consumer market though, as there’s room for both approaches to exist. We’ll soon see if this new direction gets Driblet where it needs to be, but the combination of some truly smart hardware and a more refined focus on potential customers means that there’s plenty to like here.