disrupt
Latest
3D body scanner promises perfectly fitting clothes
Last year, we had a look at TG3D Studio's Scanatic 360 Body Scanner, which susses out your body's measurements so you know exactly what clothing size to get at the store. Now, the company has renamed it to the VTO (Virtual Try-On) by Scanatic for Fashion, and has upgraded it so it can capture higher density scans, making them much more accurate than before. This way, you can "see" just how the clothes will fit on your body, hopefully making it that much easier to get the right outfit for your body type.
Accudio's earbuds use an 'inner mic' to put phone calls first
True wireless earbuds are one of the hottest consumer electronics categories right now, what with big companies like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all jumping in on the wireless earbud trend. That hasn't stopped smaller startups from coming up with their own spin on it however. Orfeo Soundworks, a Korean company that's been making audio hardware since 2015, is planning on its own version called Accudio. But unlike other earbuds that focus more on listening to music, these have another focus: clearer phone calls.
Lilu is a pumping bra that promises more breast milk in less time
Breast pump technology have come a long way from the awkward manual tools of old. Now there are smart pumps that can pump out milk as nursing mothers carry on with their everyday lives; one even won our Best of CES award this year for its simple unobtrusive design. Yet, most breast pumps only do one thing: suction. Some doctors and lactation experts also advise to massage the breasts, pressing all around to get the milk out, which can be a tedious task. Lilu, however, is one company that aims to fix this. It's made what it calls the first-ever pumping bra with automated compression, that applies the pressure for you.
The super-secure 'Case' will fit bitcoins in your pocket this summer
There's no such thing as being too crazy about security, especially when it comes to hoarding mountains and mountains of invisible, digital, volatile money. If that description hits a little too close to home, you might just have a new friend in the $199 Case, a physical bitcoin wallet the size of a credit card that secures your nebulous funds and lets you sign off on transactions with just a touch of a finger. There's a good chance you've heard the name before -- the team behind it, led by Melanie Shapiro -- has been plugging away on the thing for over a year a now, but it's finally going to ship to bitcoin magnates this summer.
This butterfly keyboard can replace your mouse, sort of
Have you ever thought about how you might improve the standard QWERTY keyboard? Jesse Vincent has. He's a keyboard enthusiast, a rare breed of geek inexplicably obsessed with text entry devices. We found him showing of Keyboardio at TechCrunch Disrupt -- a butterfly-shaped keyboard designed to put more emphasis on the opposable thumb. In addition to general ergonomic tweaks, Vincent's design puts keys like ctrl, delete, shift and alt under the user's left and right thumbs, taking the load of peripheral toggling off of the pinky finger. There's also a new "function" button under the typist's palms, which can apply macros and modifiers to almost any key.
Equil's Smartpen 2 can transcribe your notes without your tablet's help
The Equil JOT smartpen was a nice evolution on digitally-enhanced writing implements. Much like Livescribe's digitizing pen, it copied all a writer's scribbles to a companion iPad app -- but the JOT didn't need a special notebook to do it. Rather than requiring writers to buy special smartpen-friendly paper, Equil created a sensor that could be attached to any notebook and synced wirelessly with iOS devices. Now that JOT's rebranded successor, the Smartpen 2, doesn't even need to do that.
An analog timepiece beats in the heart of this awkward smartwatch
Think you know what to expect in the emerging category of wrist-worn computing? Think again -- the thick, heavy device pictured above is the Halo: a smartwatch that almost has more in common with a traditional timepiece than it does with a smartphone. Lonshine technologies bills the Halo as "the world's first smart analogue watch," meaning that it still relies on the ticking of mechanical quartz movement to keep time. This is a smartwatch that has a real watch face and real hands nestled underneath a transparent touchscreen.
Overwatch: a smartphone app that makes airsoft more like a video game
Prefer the physical activity (and force feedback) airsoft, paintball and laser tag provide, but miss the peripheral luxuries of the virtual battlefield? Well, now you can have both -- we found a new app at TechCrunch Disrupt makes physical warfare games a lot more like video games. It's called Overwatch, and it gives any player with access to an Android or iOS device access to player stats, live voice-chat, in-game perks and controllable game modes. One feature stands out in particular, however: real-time GPS-radar mapping the locations of all players on the field.
Uber CEO claims his company creates 50,000 new jobs every month
How fast is Uber growing? Pretty darn fast -- CEO Travis Kalanick claims the company adds tens of thousands of new drivers every month. "There are hundreds of thousands of partners connected to our system," he said at TechCrunch Disrupt this morning. "We're in the neck of 50,000 new jobs every month that are being created." Kalanick admitted he didn't have the exact number, but that's a pretty massive increase. Back in May, the company said it was adding an average of 20,000 new drivers every month. You're not alone in thinking those numbers seem a little optimistic. By comparison, the entire US added 142,000 job in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest jobs report.
Mink will let you 3D print custom makeup at home
Here's a little secret that the cosmetics industry doesn't want you to know: the base materials for most makeup, from the cheapest lip gloss to the highest-end eye shadow, is basically the same. The markup comes from either the brand name or a lack of scale for a particular color. Larger outlets like CVS or Walmart buy only the hues that sell the best so they can order in bulk and score a discount. Mink hopes to bring the entire industry to its knees by eliminating all that nonsense. It's a 3D printer that mixes ink with powder, cream or whatever other raw material necessary to create an endless variety of cosmetics on your own desk. [Image courtesy of TechCrunch]
Standout iOS apps from TechCrunch Disrupt
TechCrunch Disrupt is all about startups, and one of the hottest areas of innovation is mobile apps. Not surprisingly, there were quite a few companies showcasing new and exciting titles on the conference floor. Thanks to the footwork of our own Mike Rose and Doc Rock at Disrupt, we were able to hand-pick several standout iOS apps that were on display. Keep an eye on these companies below -- they may be small now, but they could be the next Instapaper. Mapp2link Mapp2link combines location awareness with messaging to help you connect with nearby LinkedIn contacts. It's similar to Sonar, but focused exclusively on professional connections and simplicity. The app uses push notifications so you'll always know when a contact is in your vicinity. Mapp2link is available for free in the iOS App Store. Yopine Yopine is a group-mind polling app that lets you ask for opinions and get input from friends before you make an important (or trivial) decision. For example, rather than getting into a long email thread about where to eat or which ski resort to visit, Yopine lets you gather all the "votes" in one place and let everyone know what the final plan is. You can check out the free Yopine app in the iOS App Store. Quoter Quoter is the Instagram for your platitudes. The app places your favorite quotes into striking templates and allows you to share them with your friends and family. Quoter is available for free in the iOS App Store. Tweekaboo Tweekaboo is a private social network that lets you create a digital family scrapbook and share those precious moments with your close family members. The company plans to roll out a book printing option in the next few weeks. Tweekaboo is available for free from the iOS App Store. SaveTheMom Save The Mom takes all your family's communications and compiles them into one app so everyone (in the family) can see your lists, appointments, photos and more. Save The Mom is available for free from the iOS App Store. Purchext Purchext is an expense reporting tool for a child's allowance. It helps parents track their children's spending by requiring them to submit a receipt and get approval for a purchase. Money for the purchase is pulled from funds placed on a securely borrowed credit card. You can learn more about the service on Purchext's website and from this TechCrunch Disrupt article. Park Tag Park Tag wants to make parking easier by connecting a person who is vacating a parking spot with someone who is in the same vicinity looking for a space to park their car. It's an ambitious use of social networking. The Park Tag app is available for free from the iOS App Store. We'll have more coverage of some of our favorite featured products from TC Disrupt (including Crowdfynd and Skit!) in the next couple of days.
SharePractice wants your doctor to have the best advice on the iPhone
Among the startups competing for attention (and funding) at Monday's opening round of the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, one unusual social app for iPhone stood out. SharePractice, from physician Andrew Brandeis and his team, aims to connect physicians to each other and give them access to the best professional advice regarding conditions, treatments and symptoms. Although he's a full-time practitioner at San Francisco's Care Practice community clinic, this isn't Dr. Brandeis's first go-round with mobile technology; he worked with iHealth on the rollout of the company's iOS-powered blood pressure cuff in 2011. In his career, he's formed the opinion that the difference between a good doctor and a great one isn't access to medical information; it's access to experience, the implicit knowledge of thousands of patients and hours of work that helps inform better treatment decisions. Given that most doctors don't have quick, "send a text" or "catch up in the hallway" access to the top experts in every therapeutic area, the question is how to get the power of that experience out to a larger community of physicians? The SharePractice app is one approach to solving that problem. It allows Yelp-style commenting and voting, but instead of restaurants and retail establishments, the topic of conversation is drug dosage, standards of care and best practices when dealing with a specific symptom or disease. There's certainly no shortage of medical research and information out there, but SharePractice's premise is that much of that textbook-style data is out of date or poorly aligned with the actual standard of care in the field. With SharePractice, doctors who participate will be able to pose questions, vote up answers, comment and converse around the suggested approaches and more. The SharePractice app is in invite-only beta right now, and interested parties can sign up at the company's website. You can see Brandeis's presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt below.
Dreams, curiosity and a passion for what's next: picking the brain of Innovation Lab's Mads Thimmer
Innovation. According to one Mads Thimmer, it's a word that held a great deal of mystery some 10-plus years ago, but today, "it's thrown around as a cliché." When you really get down to it, though, the art of innovating is a hugely delicate and complex one, fraught with frustration and a curious passion for never settling on the here and now. In covering the world of consumer technology, I've come to form my own understanding of what innovation is, what it isn't and how companies are embracing (or outright shunning) the idea. After an evening with the cofounder of Innovation Lab, however, I was rightfully ready to toss my own preconceived notions aside.
Boosted Board electric longboard is lightweight enough to carry, powerful enough to haul riders uphill
Boosted Board isn't the first powered skateboard to grace these pages, but it is the lightest. In its current prototype form, it weighs just 12 pounds, thanks to a high-end Loaded Vanguard longboard, 2,000W brushless electric motor, 100W/h Lithium polymer battery pack and regenerative braking and drivetrain bits. That hardware will move you along at up to 20mph, provide about six miles of range and tackle up to a 15 percent grade. The company is also evaluating different battery chemistries and cell sizes for folks looking for longer range. We were told that the board is capable of much higher speeds, but it's been limited for safety reasons. However, that reservoir of power is put to good use when rolling uphill, as the Boosted Board's got some custom firmware that aims to make cruising up inclines feel the same as riding on flats. Adjusting the speed is accomplished through a custom handheld, thumb-operated throttle that's still in development.%Gallery-165177% We got to lay our hands (and feet) on one today in San Francisco, and we spoke with Boosted Board's builders, too. The board's lightweight design, with the battery pack and motor components nestled at either end, is quite different from other electric decks we've seen with a massive power pack centered underneath. This design is made possible by that power-dense brushless motor, and it allows the Boosted Board to maintain the flexible feel that regular longboarders know and love. For now, the drivetrain and components are left exposed (as you can see in our gallery) but a more integrated design will go to the Kickstarters who pledged the $1,200 needed to get one when they start shipping next May. Folks looking for more info can find it in the source below and the video after the break.
Shimi by Tovbot is a dancing robot iPod dock
As the world can't get enough robots to groove to music, Shimi Tovbot was demonstrated this week at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. Call me a purist, but I like my dancing robots to resemble soda cans, wear sunglasses and be completely clueless to my verbal commands. Of course, I'm kidding. Shimi is quite advanced, and won me over after watching the demo video. Shimi isn't just a dumb sound-activated automaton. Based on a lot of awesome research in conjunction with Georgia Tech and MIT, it's the first commercially available robot from startup Tovbot to distill the findings of this group. Well, it's still a Kickstarter project at this point, but I'm hopeful the tech community will see how great this is -- and the potential. Shimi "holds" your iPhone in its "hand" like a dock. It can move about, and wiggle its limited appendages and head. It also responds to voice commands, can detect the beat of a song by you clapping your hands (and finds songs that match) and somehow learns what you like. How the learning aspects of Shimi play out was never really explained in the video, alas. Still, if you've ever been a fan of WowWee's line of consumer robots (as I am), Tovbot is a good bet, and Shimi is available on Kickstarter.
Huawei throws R&D dollars at gesture control, cloud storage, being more 'disruptive'
Undeterred by the fact that even humans struggle to interpret certain gestures, Huawei says it's allocating a chunk of its growing R&D budget to new motion-sensing technology for smartphones and tablets. The company's North American research chief, John Roese, told Computerworld that he wants to allow "three-dimensional interaction" with devices using stereo front-facing cameras and a powerful GPU to make sense of the dual video feed. Separately, the Chinese telecoms company is also putting development cash into a cloud computing project that promises to "change the economics of storage by an order of magnitude." Roese provided scant few details on this particular ambition, but did mention that Huawei has teamed up with CERN to conduct research and has somehow accumulated over 15 petabytes of experimental physics data in the process. Whatever it's up to, Huawei had better get a move on -- others are snapping up gesture recognition and cloud patents faster than you can say fa te ne una bicicletta with your hands.
Bay Area transit operator cuts cell service to thwart protest, activists abandon cause for Angry Birds
It looks like not even good old civil disobedience can survive without decent reception these days. In a seemingly successful attempt to shut down a protest of BART -- the Bay Area's answer to a subway system -- operators pulled the plug on cell service to multiple train stations, leaving would-be activists without a major organizing tool. The demonstration would have been the second in as many months in response to the shooting of a man by transit police. Officials had this to say in defense of the disruption: A civil disturbance during commute times at busy downtown San Francisco stations could lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions for BART customers, employees and demonstrators. BART temporarily interrupted service at select BART stations as one of many tactics to ensure the safety of everyone on the platform. That didn't seem to sit well with some, as the cutoff has lead to a campaign by hackers, comparing the system to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who disconnected the country's internet during its recent revolution. It may have a ring to it, but muBARTek does seem a little much, don't you think?
Switched On: Devices designed to disrupt
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Industry conferences that include competitions among scores of startups generally don't look too kindly upon companies producing hardware. Nonetheless, there were quite a few physical products shown off this week at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. These were either the main offering of companies or complements to their service offering, and judging by their demo platform of choice, the iPhone appears to be a leading agent of disruption -- the companies introducing hardware used Apple's handset to do everything from avoiding stress to measuring its biological impact. Switched On will introduce four such products after the break.
As seen at TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2011, part one
I took a stroll down the startup and "battle" aisles at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. The startups were largely focused on social media plays, though not to exclusion, and surprisingly not all of the had associated apps for mobile devices. That said, there were definitely some to keep an eye on. The "battle" aisle was for companies involved in Disrupt's daily battles, where companies with somewhat similar services duked it out on stage in front of a panel of judges. In some cases we'll have deeper reviews of the apps described below, so stay tuned. Do@ - iOS app, free This oddly named app is an ingenious new mobile search engine that was highly regarded at Disrupt. By using your social graph to influence results and pulling results from a variety of sites pertinent to what you're looking for, I was impressed with the overall relevance of searches. For example, by searching "inception @movies" you are presented with web view pages around the movie inception. Pages from IMDB, Fandango, Wikipedia and more are shown clearly and you can swipe between them. If one of your friends happens to like Fandango, or if you happen to, it will show up before the others. A neat trick, although I'm anxious to see how it plays out in day to day use. SpotOn - iOS app, free Currently only available in New York, SpotOn is like FourSquare but influenced by your friends. It pulls in data from your social graph on Facebook and Foursquare and offers suggestions for things to do (places to see, where to eat and so on). Until it rolls out wider it'll be hard to gauge how useful this will be, but I do see the potential. Instead of having to go to Facebook and look at an event and scroll through attendees to see if your friends are attending, SpotOn saves time by showing you, say, an event going on nearby later that night that your friends are attending. It's everything Foursquare's guides could be, limited to your social circle and with a very direct purpose. Spenz - iOS app, free Similar to Mint, Spenz wants to show you what you've been spending your money on. Unlike Mint, the app doesn't pull info from a bunch of places, it asks you to input that data. Of course, there are bunches of apps like that in the store, but Spenz has some nice features built in that I've never seen before. For example, Spenz will note that you go to Starbucks in the morning and input an amount for coffee. When you go to input how much you spend in the morning, the "coffee" tag will be further up top than it will be in the evening. Makes sense, right? There are several little touches like that baked in to the app, making it easier to enter your data than most of the budgeting apps you'll see out there. Plus, Spenz has a website component, and every time you input your data it is pushed to the site where you can track your spending there. We'll have a deeper review later, as the Spenz founder let me in on some powerful features coming soon. GameBuilder Studio - Mac app, currently in limited beta I spoke to founder and CEO Lavon Woods about GameBuilder Studio as it reminded me of ColdStone, an abandoned Mac OS game-builder application from many years ago. GameBuilder, when publicly available, will produce games across a variety of platforms (yes, Mac and iOS) and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux machines. It isn't Unity, however. These games are two-dimensional, but I was impressed with the interface and workflow. GameBuilder will build side scrollers, isometric games and more, but again, in 2D. Woods told me the studio will be free to download, but there will be licensing for developers who wish to deploy their games, with the cost varying. We'll check in when this is publicly available and report back, but the game design geek in me liked what he saw. Tomorrow I'll have another roundup of startups seen at Disrupt.
HP's Bradley: HP isn't trying to be Apple, will sell 15 million webOS printers next year
It's no secret that HP's Todd Bradley is one of the leading candidates to succeed ousted CEO Mark Hurd, and it doesn't look like he was doing much to dissuade that notion at the now happening TechCrunch Disrupt conference. In addition to addressing a question about whether it's ethically wrong to charge so much for ink by responding "ask me next year, if I take the [CEO] position," Bradley also sounded more than a little like a CEO throughout, and made a fair bit of news in the process. That includes a confirmation that HP won't be licensing webOS to other companies, and the attention-grabber of a statement that "emulating Apple is not part of our strategy." As if that wasn't enough, Bradley also made the rather bold promise that HP will sell 15 million webOS-based printers next year alone, and he predicted that tablets will become a $40 billion market within the next few years -- a market that HP plans to enter in a "big way." Head on past the break for a video of the interview.