In the past several weeks we’ve seen refreshes and product expansions from about every facet of the smart home virtual assistant world. Apple launched the HomePod Mini, Google offered a long-overdue refresh of the Google Home and Amazon found even more speaker shapes to shove Alexa into. Today, we’re getting an addition from a startup competitor. Josh.ai has aimed to build out a niche in the space by building a smart assistant product that’s designed to be professionally installed alongside other smart home wares, and they announced a new product this afternoon. The device, Josh Nano, fully buys into a more luxury home-focused niche with a low-profile device that appears to be a little bit bigger than a half-dollar, though the bulk of the device is embedded into the wall itself and wired back to a central unit via power-over-ethernet. The device bundles a set of four microphones eschewing any onboard speaker, instead opting to integrate directly with a user’s at-home sound system....

Brynn Putnam has a lot to feel great about. A Harvard grad and former professional ballet dancer who opened the first of what have become three high-intensity fitness studios in New York, she then launched a second business in 2016 when — while pregnant with her son — she was exercising at home and couldn’t find a natural way watch a class on her laptop or phone. Her big idea: to install mirrored screens in users’ homes that are roughly eight square feet and through which they can exercise to all manner of streamed and on-demand exercise classes, paying a monthly subscription of just $39 per month. If you’ve followed the home fitness craze, you already know these Mirrors quickly took off with celebrities, who gushed about the product on social media. Putnam’s company also attracted roughly $75 million in venture funding across several fast rounds. Indeed, by the end of last year, people had bought  “tens of thousands” of Mirrors, according to Putnam, and she was beginning to env...

Bill Zhang lowered himself into lunges on a squishy mat as he explained to me the benefits of the full-body training suit he was wearing. We were in his small, modest office in Xili, a university area in Shenzhen that’s also home to many hardware makers. The connected muscle stimulator attached to the suit, called Balanx, is designed to bring so-called electronic muscle stimulation, which is said to help improve metabolism and burn fat. “We are not really aiming at Chinese consumers at this point,” said Zhang, who started Balanx in 2014. “The suit is for the more savvy consumers in the West.” Prospects for hardware makers were looking bright until two years ago when the Trump administration began setting trade barriers on China. Relations between the two countries have been deteriorating over a series of flashpoint events, from Beijing’s policy on Hong Kong to the coronavirus pandemic . Chinese entrepreneurs don’t expect relationships between the countries to warm up anytime so...

Sony has announced that it is entering the drone market with a new brand called Airpeak, though the specifics of the drone itself are left something of a mystery. It plans to launch the project next spring. The barebones announcement says only that Sony has been inspired by the “recent proliferation” of drones and the changes they have caused in both the industrial and creative sectors. Airpeak will focus on multiple industries as well, though it has its work cut out for it if it intends to go up against DJI, which has become the first choice in the consumer UAV sector. Sony describes the drone as being developed within “the field of AI robotics,” which, along with the aim to enable drone use where it was previously difficult to do so, suggests Sony plans to integrate a fair amount of intelligence into the drones’ systems. Small UAVs have gotten smarter and smarter, able now to avoid obstacles, recognize other flying objects, and navigate between buildings without any interventi...

We dug DJI’s Mavic Mini when the drone arrived last year. As Matt noted in his review, “It packs everything critical to be a quality drone. It has a good camera, good range and a good controller. It holds up well in the wind and is quick enough to be fun.” Today, DJI improves two of those things with the arrival of the Mini 2. The new version, which hits retail today, is more refinement than redefinition. This is one of those cases where that’s perfectly fine, as the first release was a solid one, owing to the learnings of several generations of DJI and Mavic drones. The size and weight are essentially the same here. The Mini 2 weighs 249 grams — which comes out to about 0.55 pounds. It folds up and can be stashed away in a bag. Image Credits: Gregory Manalo The camera is probably the biggest upgrade here. The system is now capable of shooting 4K videos at 30 FPS. Stills, meanwhile, are 12-megapixels, and there’s 4x digital zoom (which DJI says is capable of up to 2x and still...

This is the Atari 400 Raspberry Pi 400. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is launching a new product today — and it’s a brand new device. As you can see on the photo, the Raspberry Pi 400 is a computer integrated in a compact keyboard that costs $70. And it is the easiest way to get started with a Raspberry Pi. If you’re not familiar with the Raspberry Pi, it’s a single-board computer with a lot of connectors that is the size of a deck of cards. You can give it to a kid so that they can play around with a terminal, you can use it for your weekend projects as the computing brain or you can give it to your grandparents to replace their slow Windows XP computer that they use to receive emails. Last year, when the Raspberry Pi Foundation introduced the Raspberry Pi 4 , the foundation also used this opportunity to release a cute mouse and a keyboard. Of course, you could use these accessories with a Raspberry Pi. And your basic setup would look something like this: Image Credits: Romain...

It has always been considered a matter of if, and not when, Nintendo would begin capitalizing in earnest on content from beyond the SNES generation. The company is finally showing its intent to do so today — but with an uneven approach that leaves some fans worried about its intentions for other all-time gaming classics from the 64-bit era and beyond. In a celebratory video of 35 years of Super Mario Bros. history, Nintendo announced a litter of new and old games starring its iconic plumber protagonist. Some of its announcements were very Nintendo, in a good way. Making a Mario Kart that, like the Labo DIY projects, bridges the gap between reality and game is a brilliant idea and very unlike what others in console gaming are doing. And the retro-style “Game & Watch” handheld pre-loaded with Super Mario Bros. and the Lost Levels will no doubt be a popular gift this holiday season. Nintendo also demonstrated a willingness to experiment with its oldest and in some ways most con...

You could be excused for thinking that German robotics company Festo does nothing but put together fabulous prototype robots built to resemble kangaroos, jellyfish, and other living things. They do in fact actually make real industrial robots, but it’s hard not to marvel at their biomimetic experiments; Case in point, the feathered BionicSwift and absurd BionicMobileAssistant motile arm. Festo already has a flying bird robot — I wrote about it almost 10 years ago . They even made a flying bat as a follow-up. But the BionicSwift is more impressive than both because, in an effort to more closely resemble its avian inspiration, it flies using artificial feathers. Image Credits: Festo “The individual lamellae [i.e. feathers] are made of an ultralight, flexible but very robust foam and lie on top of each other like shingles. Connected to a carbon quill, they are attached to the actual hand and arm wings as in the natural model,” Festo writes in its description of the robot. The ar...

Apple is holding a keynote today on the first day of its developer conference, and the company is expected to talk about a ton of software updates. WWDC is a virtual event this year, but you can expect the same amount of news, in a different format. At 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris) , you’ll be able to watch the event as the company is streaming it live. Rumor has it that the company plans to unveil new versions of its operating systems. Get ready for iOS 14 and its sibling iPadOS 14, a new version of macOS, some updates for watchOS and tvOS as well. But the most interesting rumor of the year is that Apple could announce a major change for the Mac. The company could start using its own in-house ARM systems on a chip instead of Intel’s processors. It would have a ton of consequences for third-party apps running on your Mac as well as Mac hardware in general. Imagine a MacBook with a battery that lasts as long as what you get from an iPad. There could b...

The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a wave of Chinese companies with manufacturing operations to produce virus-fighting equipment: Shenzhen-based electric vehicle giant BYD quickly moved to launch what it claims to be the world’s largest mask plant ; Hangzhou-based voice intelligence startup Rokid is making thermal imaging glasses  targeted at the US market; and many more. The latest of such efforts comes from Huami, the NASDAQ-listed wearables startup that makes Xiaomi’s Mi Bands and sells its own fitness tracking watches under the Amazfit brand in more than 70 countries. In a phone interview with TechCrunch, the firm said it is developing a see-through plastic mask with built-in ultraviolet lights that can disinfect filters within 10 minutes when connected to a power supply through a USB port. The caveat is that the lights only sanitize the inside of the mask and users still have to clean the outer surface themselves. The Aeri concept comes with built-in ultraviolet lights ...

French startup Angell has signed a wide-ranging partnership with SEB , the French industrial company behind All-Clad, Krups, Moulinex, Rowenta, Tefal and others. As part of the deal, SEB will manufacture Angell’s electric bikes in a factory in Is-sur-Tille near Dijon, France. SEB’s investment arm, SEB Alliance, is also investing in Angell . The terms of the deal are undisclosed, but Angell says it plans to raise between $7.6 and $21.7 million (between €7 and €20 million) with a group of investors that include SEB. “We originally planned to manufacture 1,500 bikes in 2020,” Angell founder Marc Simoncini told me. “We realized that we were selling more bikes than expected. We now expect to sell 10,000 bikes.” Angell has accepted 2,000 pre-orders over the past six months — 75% in France and 25% from the rest of the world. But pre-orders accelerated drastically with the lockdown in France. During the month of May, Angell expects to sell three times more bikes than during an average mo...