Gadgets

Every year, Consumer Electronics Show attendees receive a branded backpack, but this year’s edition was special; made out of transparent plastic, the bag’s contents were visible without the wearer needing to unzip. It isn’t just a fashion decision. Over the years, security has become more intense and cumbersome, but attendees with transparent backpacks didn’t have

Assa Abloy, the world’s largest lock maker and the parent company of August Home and Yale, announced some new products at CES this week. The company didn’t talk about doorbell cameras at all — it could be related to recent Ring’s controversies. As a well-known brand when it comes to smart lock in the U.S.,

Cherry has long been the de facto standard for mechanical keyboard switches. Since mechanical keyboards are, almost by default, significantly more expensive than membrane or dome-switch keyboards, that has kept the company out a large part of the market. Now, on the last day of CES 2020, the company is launching its new Viola switch,

OrCam is expanding its product lineup with new devices that tackle new use cases. OrCam’s best-known device is the OrCam MyEye 2 — a tiny device for people with visual impairment that you clip on your glasses to help you navigate the world around you. At CES, OrCam announced that the MyEye 2 is getting

Ring is now a major player when it comes to consumer video doorbells, security cameras — and privacy protection. Amazon acquired the company and promotes its devices heavily on its e-commerce websites. Ring has even become a cultural phenomenon with viral videos being shared on social networks and the RingTV section on the company’s website.

As renewable energy and energy efficiency continue to make gains among cost-conscious consumers, more companies are looking at ways to give customers better ways to manage the electricity coming into their homes. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Schneider Electric unveiled its pitch to homeowners looking for a better power management system with

Weber is deepening its partnership with smart cooking startup June, with a new product debuting at CES 2020 today that can turn any grill into a smart grill — and providing expert guidance and grilling advice to even novice home cooks. The new Weber Connect Smart Grilling Hub includes a small device with ports for

One of the new products unveiled at CES this year is a new kind of home security system – one that includes drones to patrol your property, along with sensors designed to mimic garden light and a central processor to bring it all together. Sunflower Labs debuted their new Sunflower Home Awareness System, which includes

Delta is keynoting CES today and launching a slew of updates to its digital services. Its competitors don’t want to be left behind, of course, so it’s probably no surprise that American Airlines also made a small but nifty tech announcement today. In partnership with Google, American will start trialing Google Nest Hubs and the

Until now, Brilliant only offered its relatively high-end smart switches with a touchscreen, but at CES this week, the company is expanding its product lineup with a new dimmer switch and smart plug. Both require that you already own at least one Brilliant Control, so these aren’t standalone devices but instead expansions to the Brilliant

Echodyne set the radar industry on its ear when it debuted its pocket-sized yet hyper-capable radar unit for drones and aircraft. But these days all the action is in autonomous vehicles — so they reinvented their technology to make a unique sensor that doesn’t just see things but can communicate intelligently with the AI behind

[embedded content] AMD is holding its CES press conference today at 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern. Expect some news when it comes to consumer CPUs (Ryzen), enterprise CPUs (Epyc) as well as ray tracing-enabled GPUs. It should give us some hints about what to expect from the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, as

Intel is holding its CES press conference today at 4 PM Pacific, 7 PM Eastern. The company will talk about what to expect when it comes to CPU innovation. We could also get an early look at the company’s first standalone GPUs. We’ll have a team on the ground, so you should also check out

Intel, the chip-making giant, has been on the road of refocusing its strategy in recent months. While it has sold its mobile chip operation to Apple and is reportedly looking for a buyer for its connected home division, it’s also been going through the difficult task of rethinking how best to tackle the longtime bread and

Gaming — with its huge demands on bandwidth, graphics and overall processing power — is likely to be one of the big use cases for 5G networking in the future, and today one of the big players in consumer gaming hardware showed off a 5G router that underscores that trend. Razer, the consumer electronics upstart

3D printing has proven itself useful in so many industries that it’s no longer necessary to show off, but some people just can’t help themselves. Case in point: this millimeter-tall rendition of Michaelangelo’s famous “David” printed with copper using a newly developed technique. The aptly named “Tiny David” was created by Exaddon, a spin-off company

Modern agriculture involves fields of mind-boggling size, and spraying them efficiently is a serious operational challenge. Pyka is taking on the largely human-powered spray business with an autonomous winged craft and, crucially, regulatory approval. Just as we’ve seen with DroneSeed, this type of flying is risky for pilots, who must fly very close to the

DJI is easily the leading brand when it comes to camera drones, but few companies have even attempted a ground-based mobile camera platform. The company may be moving in that direction, though, if this patent for a small off-road vehicle with a stabilized camera is any indication. The Chinese patent, first noted by DroneDJ, shows

Even when Apple telegraphs its hardware strategy, it’s proving to be nearly impossible for startups to beat them. The company’s executives have been motioning interest in following their runaway success on mobile with hefty investments in augmented reality, something that has led to the rise of dozens of venture-backed startups hoping to beat Apple to

The CDC has issued a set of reports showing that the lung disease associated with vaping seems to be declining from peak rates, and that Vitamin E acetate seems — as speculated early on — to be the prime suspect for the epidemic. The affliction has cost at least 54 lives and affected 2,506 people

Coral is a company that wants to “simplify the personal care space through smart automation,” and they’ve raised $4.3 million to get it done. Their first goal? An at-home, fully automated machine for painting your nails. Stick a finger in, press down, wait a few seconds and you’ve got a fully painted and dried nail.

Apple is said to be working on satellite technology, having hired a number of aerospace engineers to form team along with satellite and antenna designers, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report notes that this is an early-stage secret project that could still be scrapped, but that the purpose of the team and

Apple has released an open-source version of the HomeKit Accessory Development Kit. You can now fork it on Github and play around with it to integrate smart home devices in the Home app and beyond. Today’s news is related to the Connected Home over IP effort, an industry-wide effort to build an open-source standard for

Parents buy their children GPS-enabled smartwatches to keep track of them, but security flaws mean they’re not the only ones who can. This year alone, researchers have found several vulnerabilities in a number of child-tracking smartwatches. But new findings out today show that nearly all were harboring a far greater, more damaging flaw in a

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2019 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’re here to help! We’ll be rolling out gift guides from now through the end of December. You can find our other guides right here. When it comes to smart home stuff, once you start, it’s hard to stop. As soon as you’ve got

Nature is a good source of inspiration for roboticists, but it’s rare that nature’s elegance and genius can be replicated in any real way. Still, we’re getting closer. This tiny insect-like robot is made of soft materials and weighs less than a gram, yet can move quickly and with some intelligence — and is robust

When you play games on your PS4, it’s fair to say that your thumbs and index fingers are generally doing most of the work. Why not put the rest of your lazy digits to work with this accessory that puts two programmable buttons on the rear of the DualShock 4 controller? Called, imaginatively, the Back

London-based STEM device maker Kano has confirmed it’s cutting a number of jobs which it claims is part of a restructuring effort to shift focus to “educational computing”. The job cuts — from 65 to 50 staff — were reported earlier by The Telegraph. Kano founder Alex Stein confirmed in a call with TechCrunch that

Buildings under construction are a maze of half-completed structures, gantries, stacked materials, and busy workers — tracking what’s going on can be a nightmare. Scaled Robotics has designed a robot that can navigate this chaos and produce 3D progress maps in minutes, precise enough to detect that a beam is just a centimeter or two

A year ago, we asked some of the most prominent smart home device makers if they have given customer data to governments. The results were mixed. The big three smart home device makers — Amazon, Facebook and Google (which includes Nest) — all disclosed in their transparency reports if and when governments demand customer data.