Crunch Hype

Will LG’s over-the-top rollable TV ever be real? And at the end of the day does it really matter? The company offered another glimpse at the 65-inch LG Signature OLED TV R (model 65R9) during its CES press conference. It’s ever bit as big, brush and completely unnecessary as ever. Ultimately these kinds of devices are […]

Amazon today announced a significant partnership with Telenav, a connected car and location-based services provider. As part of the collaboration, Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, will now be part of Telenav’s in-car navigation systems. As it stands, Alexa lacks a lot of information that is pertinent to drivers. This collaboration should massively help to change that. […]

LG is opening the show with its CES press conference. Many consumer electronics companies are going to show us their new and shiny products all day long. And LG is starting at 8 AM Pacific, 11 AM Eastern, 2 PM in London. You can expect new TVs (4K? 8K? The sky is the limit), more […]

Spotify has begun testing a new type of ad in Discover Weekly, its personalized playlist of music that’s the streaming service’s flagship feature. The company says that, for the first time, it will allow a brand to “sponsor” this playlist as opposed to just running ads. It believes many advertisers will be interested in this […]

Meet KADRILJ and FYRTUR. They’re Ikea’s upcoming smart window blinds and they look great. The two product lines are battery-powered shades that can open and close through a dedicate app. They also interact with IKEA’s TRÅDFRI lighting gateway allowing homeowners to control the shades through Alexa, HomeKit and Google Assistant. Pricing is aggressive: 99 to […]

As with Android, Google’s goal with its voice-driven AI helper, Google Assistant, is to get it onto devices. Lots and lots of devices. And they’re making pretty damned good progress there. Ahead of CES this morning, Google dropped a little stat update: Google expects Assistant to be on 1 billion devices total by the end […]

Standard Cognition helps retail stores stand up to Jeff Bezos’ juggernaut. The $50 million-funded autonomous checkout startup is racing to equip bigger shops with scanless payment technology that lets customers walk out the door without ever stopping at a cashier. While Amazon Go opens its own 2,000 square foot boutiques, Standard Cognition is working on […]

Apple is reportedly gearing up for a new streaming TV service to rival Netflix, Amazon and Google this year, but in the meantime, it is also expanding interoperability with more third parties like smart TV makers to make what it already has available easier to use in the living room. In the latest development, smart TV […]

A pair of new devices from Huawei are making their debut on-stage at CES in Vegas this week. The more interesting of the two is the MateBook 13, a slim addition to the company’s line of premium Windows laptops. The 13-inch laptop is 0.59 inches thick and weighs 2.86 pounds, giving it a similar footprint […]

Petcube’s popular line of pet cameras let people monitor, talk to and interact with their dogs and cats while away – including by doing things like doling out treats or turning on a laser toy, for example. Today, the pet camera maker is upgrading its line with two new devices, the Petcube Bites 2 and […]

Tile, a company best known for its keychain-style lost item trackers aimed at consumers, is expanding its location-tracking technology to new devices besides its own. The company today announced it has partnered with a number of BLE chip companies to integrate its tracking technology directly onto their chips. Tile’s new partners on this front include Qualcomm, […]

Apple recently invited reporters to meet a handful of companies announcing new products at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. The common theme: All of these products connect to Apple’s HomeKit platform for smart home devices. By integrating with HomeKit, these companies make their products configurable and controllable via Apple devices, specifically through the Home app […]

The curse of open source software is that it is used in pretty much every application and device on the planet, and yet, has pretty much no business model. Sustaining open source is a critical problem for the future of software, because without a durable source of income, the developers behind these critical projects cannot […]

Garmin’s long been a sort of secret success story in the world of wearables. The company rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as Apple and Fitbit — or even Android Wear and Samsung — but it’s found a nice life beyond GPS systems. One thing the company’s products products have lacked until now is […]

It’s not really CES until Samsung has taken the stage. The company’s annual keynote is one of the tentpole events for the giant consumer electronics show. Sure, the company keeps its mobile powder dry until Mobile World Congress rolls around, but CES is the time when the rest of company’s businesses can shine. It’s hard […]

A little more than a year ago, autonomous trucking startup TuSimple —flush with a fresh round of venture capital — was preparing to scale up its testing to two full truck fleets in China and the U.S. TuSimple, a China-based company with an R&D facility in San Diego and test operations in Tucson, has put that […]

A Japanese billionaire who’s paying Elon Musk to fly him around the Moon, assuming all goes to plan with SpaceX’s giant metal phallus, has bought himself a rather different ride in the meanwhile. The BBC reports that Yusaku Maezawa has elbowed aside nugget-loving U.S. teen, Carter Wilkerson, to bag the title of most retweeted tweet […]

Pouch, the U.K.-based money-saving browser extension, has been acquired by German ‘publishing technology’ platform Global Savings Group. Exact financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand it to be a cash purchase and in the 7-figure U.S. dollar range, plus performance related bonuses. The entire Pouch team are joining Global Savings Group, and […]

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the company’s first overseas factory in Shanghai will focus on producing Model 3 vehicles for the Chinese market only. Musk is currently in China to break ground on the new factory today, which is being developed in partnership with the Shanghai government — an ally that is likely to […]

Sony is holding its CES press conference today at 5 PM Pacific, 8 PM Eastern. The company will talk about all of its new devices, from connected speakers to cameras, TVs and maybe even turntables. Sony’s press conference is usually packed with product announcements. We’ll have a team on the ground, so you should also […]

Samsung is holding its CES press conference today at 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern, 10 PM in London. The company will unveil its new lineup of consumer electronics devices. You should expect a wide range of new products, from smart watches to washing machines. We’ll have a team on the ground, so you should […]

Maybe you won’t need a glitter bomb to protect your Amazon packages from porch thieves after all. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Canadian appliance maker Danby is showing off its newly launched smart mailbox called Parcel Guard, which allows deliveries to be left securely at customers’ doorsteps. The box offers both a […]

Reviews of the Notebook Odyssey line have been…mixed. Hopefully the electronics giant can right the ship as it navigates the tricky waters of high-end gaming systems. At very least, the latest version of the line — unveiled tonight at CES in Vegas — certainly looks the part. The 15.6 inch laptop features an aluminum design […]

Acer today announced two new gaming laptops at CES, the 17-inch $4,000 Predator Triton 900 with a convertible 4K display and the somewhat more affordable all-metal 15-inch $1,800 Triton 500. What sets these laptops apart is, among a few other interesting features and some interesting design choices, support for Nvidia’s new(ish) RTX 2080 GPUs, the […]

A veteran TV maker just got a notable refresh as it enters the age of connected devices. Xiaomi, the Beijing-based firm best known for budget smartphones, has bought 65.2 million shares, or 0.48 percent, of Chinese home appliance maker TCL, said TCL in a statement to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on Sunday. Shares of TCL, the world’s third-largest […]

At its CES press conference today, Nvidia broke with tradition and put the focus on gaming, not self-driving cars and data center AI technologies, the typical topics of this event. After a (far too long) recap of everything Nvidia announced the RTX 2060, the low-end version of its new Turing-based desktop graphics cards. The new […]

It might be strange to imagine now, but it was only a few years ago when the presence of Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming platforms at major award shows was considered disruptive. Today’s Golden Globes showed how formidable streaming platforms have become, with Netflix’s “Roma” winning the awards for best foreign language film and best […]

Getting a good night’s sleep is a universal desire for the human race. At the Consumer Electronics Show today, UrgoNight showed off its non-invasive solution to train your brain to sleep better. It’s designed to teach your brain to sleep better using electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements and app-based brain exercises. UrgoNight requires you to wear the […]

It’s no pee-detecting wearable, but Ellcie’s glasses could be a life saver. The glasses feature 15 sensors designed to determine whether the wearer is falling asleep. I got a quick demo today and CES and was fairly impressed with the technology’s responsiveness. It detects a number of different factors, including head nods, eye blinks and […]

I really dug the Nuraphones. A lot. In fact, I was so impressed with the headphones’ adaptive noise technology I ended up putting them on my of the year list back in 2017. As such, I was pretty psyched to seen the Australian startup back at CES with a followup. The NuraLoop are the next […]

Nvidia is holding its CES press conference today at 8 PM Pacific, 11 PM Eastern. The company will talk about self-driving cars and all things GPUs. It’s a great way to see what’s ahead for Nvidia. We’ll have a team on the ground, so you should also check out our full CES coverage.

Just when you think you’ve seen every kind of wearable there is to see, the D Free comes along in all it its urinary glory. The little plastic sensor attaches to your belly, with a little gel and some medical tape. Once attached, the system uses ultrasound to determine how full your bladder is. It […]

French startup Ledger unveiled its new hardware wallet to manage your cryptocurrencies. The Ledger Nano X is a Bluetooth-enabled wallet, which means that you’ll be able to send and receive tokens from your phone. The previous version of the device required you to plug the key to your computer using a microUSB cable in order […]

Netatmo is announcing its first new product following its acquisition by Legrand — and it’s a connected doorbell. The company says that it is the first Apple HomeKit compatible doorbell but other companies could still beat Netatmo by releasing their product sooner. If you’ve been thinking about getting a connected doorbell, the main issue is […]

Over the summer, Sphero acquired Colorado-educational music startup, Specdrums. The news arrived at a transitional time for the company, which was undergoing substantial growing pains as its line of licensed Disney products failed to catch fire. Today at CES, the Boulder-based company is finally ready to share the first fruits of that acqusition. After debuting […]

Withings had a weird couple of years. The company was acquired by Nokia, only to be abandoned and launch again as its own brand late last year. It was a welcome return for a solid brand in the health space that was cut down too early. Until now, the reborn company’s releases have largely relegated […]

When Apple added EKG to the Apple Watch for the Series 4, you knew it was only a matter of time before the rest of the industry followed suit. This, however, is a bit of a surprise. The recently resurrected Withings just announced that it will be bringing the heart monitoring tech to its line […]

LG unveiled the LG HomeBrew a few weeks ahead of CES. I’ve seen the device today, and it looks like a gigantic, inconvenient machine. It’s hard to grasp the size of the device based on photos, but it’s as big as a full-size espresso machine. You’ll need a big counter in your kitchen. But that’s […]

ClassPass, the five-year-old fitness marketplace startup with $239 million in financing, is acquiring competitor GuavaPass, which was founded by Rob Pachter and Jeffrey Liu in 2015. ClassPass is in the midst of an expansion sprint, both domestically and internationally. The company is hyper-focused on Asian markets, where GuavaPass had carved out its own place with […]

ASUS just announced the first — but surely not the last — combination router/Alexa smart speaker of the show. The Lyra Voice is a pretty decent looking thing — covered in the sort of fabric design that’s become all rage with smart speakers like the Google Home and the latest iteration of the Echo. In […]

Byton, the China-based electric car startup that made its debut at CES last year, is back to show what the finalized interior of its upcoming M-Byte SUV will look like. The giant 48-inch wraparound digital dashboard screen that received so much attention is staying. And so is the touchscreen drive tablet located at the center […]

China-based electric vehicle startup Byton is on track to complete construction of its factory by May, company executives said Sunday at CES 2019 in Las Vegas. The plant is being constructed in Nanjing, China and will have a capacity to produce 300,000 vehicles per year. The main body of the factory, which includes the stamping, […]

I mean, this makes sense, I guess. The kitchen has long been a case use manufacturers have pointed for these kinds of smart screens. So why wouldn’t KitchenAid/Whirlpool want in on a little bit of that action? The simply-named KitchenAid Smart Display is looks like your standard smart screen — taking a few design cues […]

Yoav Leitersdorf Contributor Yoav Leitersdorf is a partner at YL Ventures. More posts by this contributor Trends in Israel’s cybersecurity investments The drone race is off and running, with Israel in the lead Ofer Schreiber Contributor Ofer Schreiber is a partner at YL Ventures. More posts by this contributor The state of Israel’s cybersecurity market […]

Ahead of Apple’s plans to introduce its own streaming service this year, the company has partnered with Samsung to allow iTunes content to be accessible on Samsung Smart TVs. Samsung announced this morning that it will offer access to iTunes Movies and TV shows through a new “iTunes Movies and TV” app on its Smart […]

Huawei, currently the world’s second-largest smartphone company by sales, has won over users partly by loading its devices with a ton of new features, from wireless charging to top-class cameras and catchy cosmetic features like the colorful gradients on their shiny backsides. Now, a leaked image of its next flagship Android phone appears to reveal a […]

Far from Apple’s troubles in emerging markets and China, the company is attracting the ire of what should really be a core supporter demographic naturally aligned with the pro-privacy stance CEO Tim Cook has made into his public soapbox in recent years — but which is instead crying foul over perceived hypocrisy. The problem for this subset […]

HP today announced the Pavilion 27 and it looks spectacular. This is the first display that offers a QLED screen — HP calls it by it’s official name Quantum Dot — that’s on glass instead of film. The differences should be clear. When offered on glass, the images are sharper and cleaner — though so […]

Good news: HP made an AMD Chromebook. Bad news: It uses an old chipset. Meet the new HP Chromebook 14. This is one of the first Chromebooks powered by an AMD processor. But don’t get too excited. This isn’t the AMD-powered Chromebook a lot of people were waiting for. This Chromebook is powered by a […]

The HP Omen X Emperium is not meant to watch reruns of The Office. Though it can. This display is one of the first in Nvidia’s family of Big Format Gaming Displays. Unlike traditional large displays, these are certified by Nvidia and are said to deliver the best gaming experience through the smoothest motion. This […]