Gadgets

Candela makes an unusual style of watercraft called a hydrofoiling boat, which glides above the sea on fins for a smoother, more efficient ride — doubly unusual, in fact, in that it is electrically propelled. The company has raised $24M to accelerate production of its existing small craft and a larger commercial one, in pursuit

Berlin-based smartphone-as-a-service provider, Everphone, has topped up with $65 million in a Series C equity raise in addition to taking $135M in debt financing — for a total raise of $200M. The latest tranche of funding is led by German private equity investor, Cadence Growth Capital (CGC), which is now Everphone’s biggest shareholder. Deutsche Telekom,

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. Looking for our other guides? Find them here! As we wade into the second pandemic-era holiday season, there’s no better time to throw yourself headlong into a new hobby. Or that’s what you should tell your loved ones

Francois Nguyen Contributor Francois Nguyen, executive design director of product design at frog, is responsible for ensuring high standards of design excellence. With hybrid models taking off across many aspects of society, it’s clear that though they offer incredible flexibility, the boundary lines between work and personal life are becoming increasingly blurred and emotionally draining. Ritual has always been

Snapdragon’s G3x is Qualcomm’s fantastically exciting bid to embrace the gaming market — a brand new reach for the manufacturer, which introduces powerful GPUs, 5G-enabled connectivity, the ability to power external screens, immersive audio capabilities, haptic feedback and a slew of other features that handheld gaming manufacturers have had to cobble together from other sources.

Architecture and construction have always been, rather quietly, at the bleeding edge of tech and materials trends. It’s no surprise, then, especially at a renowned technical university like ETH Zurich, to find a project utilizing AI and robotics in a new approach to these arts. The automated design and construction they are experimenting with show

If you had “my shower head needs a small turbine, a Bluetooth connection, an app and a fine-spray mist” on your 2021 bingo card, congratulations, you win the prize. The prize is knowing that Hai exists — and this fine news story, which will tell you all about how the company raised $6 million to

Belkin has a new 3-in-1 wireless charger that’s tailor made for iPhone and Apple Watch owners, and that also provides MagSafe 15W charging speeds for iPhone 12 and 13, along with fast charging for the latest Apple Watch 7 series. Belikin also introduce a new standalone portable fast charger for Apple Watch that includes an

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. We’re just starting to roll out this year’s gift guides, so check back from now until the end of December for more!  For this year’s STEM toy gift guide we’ve split out our recommendations by age for easier

Cognixion, a startup designing an intuitive brain-monitoring headset and interface for people with physical disabilities, has raised a $12M A round to pursue its accessibility ambitions. Armed with this funding, it should be able to complete the long list of requirements necessary for any medical or assistive device to be made widely available. The company,

Audio processing startup Mimi promises to make a personalized hearing profile for you, meaning that you can hear well without having to crank the volume up too loudly. This both helps prevent hearing loss, and it helps people who’ve already suffered some hearing loss to be able to hear their content better without having to

Tobii is bringing its eye-tracking tech to the iPad with TD Pilot, a case meant to turn Apple’s tablet into a powerful all-in-one tool for people with physical impairments. Equipped with TD Pilot, users can launch and use apps, type quickly, and speak with a synthetic voice using nothing but their gaze. iPadOS 15 brought

The latest pair of e-readers from Kobo provide a modest but noticeable upgrade to the display, stylus support, and Bluetooth for listening to audiobooks, but take a step down in build quality from the admirable Forma. But the new capabilities may be worth the upgrade, and the Libra 2 especially makes for an attractive little

I have in my hands the Legend of Zelda Game & Watch, the second in Nintendo’s line of whimsical throwback handhelds clearly meant as stocking stuffers for those who already have (or can’t find) a Switch. It does a fine job, and the three old-school Zelda games included are great options for Nintendo-hard adventure that

When Panic first launched pre-orders of its adorable little retro-inspired handheld gaming device, Playdate, it expected the first 20,000 units to ship by the end of 2021 — just in time, they hoped, for the holidays. That first batch sold out in under 20 minutes. Sadly, due to last-minute battery component issues, even those first

Microsoft is making its play for the new shape of classrooms with a pared-down version of Windows 11 and a set of inexpensive laptops from the Surface brand and several other manufacturers. It’s clear they’ve got Google’s popular Chromebooks in their sights, and their partners seem to be hedging their bets as well. Before all

There are dozens of devices out there that are eager to beat your muscles to within an inch of their tense little lives. They all have one thing in common: They’re a lot more powerful and have more endurance than the nimble fingers of a massage therapist. A trained and skilled therapist still has the

The Mevo Start 3-pack with the Mevo Multicam App three-camera kit costs $999. Add some good lights and a half-decent microphone, and you have a full multi-cam streaming setup for less than $2,000. That would have been completely unthinkable just a few years ago, and let’s just take a minute to consider how absolutely astonishing

When Apple launched the Apple Watch, they made a big hoopla out of teaching its consumers how excited it was about having a “digital crown” and “complications”. To the watch lovers among us, that was a head-scratcher — of course a watch has all of those things. At the time, Apple was falling victim to

Aimed at construction sites, vacation homes or for other hard-to-reach locations, Arlo‘s new Arlo Go 2 LTE/Wi-Fi Security Camera is at your beck and call to keep an eye out for thieves, sneaks and other scoundrels. The company is also peddling its Arlo Secure subscription service, which gives users access to a rolling 30-day library

The ocean is vast and mysterious … but rather less so when you have thousands of little autonomous buoys reporting back interesting info to you every day. That’s just what Sofar Ocean has, and it just raised $39 million to scale up its vision of real-time understanding of the seven seas. The company operates what

Catherine D. Henry Contributor There is a heated debate on the state of the race between the United States and China to dominate in AI. But perhaps the more strategic question is whether China is building the metaverse. Built upon infrastructural technologies like AI, the metaverse refers to the vast array of digital experiences and

Switzerland-based Mictic has created a pair of wearables that turns thin air into your concert hall. Imagine a theremin without the theremin, hooked up to a clever loop station, and you’ve got the right idea. Just from the demos and descriptions, it’s the kind of startup you’d scratch your head over and talk about in

According to Facebook AI Research, the next generation of robots should be much better at feeling — not emotions, of course, but using the sense of touch. And to advance the ball in this relatively new area of AI and robotics research, the company and its partners have built a new kind of electronic skin

Zeit Medical, which makes an early warning system for strokes during sleep, has raised $2 million in a seed round just after leaving Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort. The company’s work suggests the brain-monitoring headband could save lives by alerting people to possible strokes hours before they might otherwise be noticed, and the new funding

Google and top Indian telecom network Jio Platforms said on Friday that their much-anticipated budget smartphone, JioPhone Next, will go on sale in the world’s second largest smartphone market on November 4 (coinciding with the big Indian festival of Diwali.) The firms said the JioPhone Next will cost 6,499 Indian rupees ($87), and can also

Apple has unveiled some new MacBook Pro models at a virtual conference today. And the company is timing the release of the next major release of macOS with the new laptop. Mac users will be able to update to macOS Monterey on Monday, October 25. This new major release of macOS will be available for

Apple has backpedaled on years of questionable design choices with its MacBook Pros, unceremoniously retiring the universally disliked Touch Bar and adding back the ports and Magsafe users have missed. But in a show of perverse solidarity with the iPhone, the company has added a big, ugly notch front and center on the “best notebook

Google is set to announce new Pixel phones today. The company is holding an event at 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris). And you’ll be able to watch the event right here as the company is streaming it live. [embedded content] Google already said that

Google’s latest flagship phones have an impressive set of automated, AI-powered tools to help make your photos look better, with smart blurs, object removal, and skin tone exposure. While we’ll have to test them out to see if they work as advertised, they could be useful for everyone from pixel peepers to casual snapshot takers.