Brian Heater
Hey. Sorry to call you out of the blue. No, no, nothing serious. I’m fine. I wanted to apologize for freaking you out last time. I wasn’t myself. But I’ve changed. Honestly, I don’t even know who I was back then. It was all very new. I’ve been working...
In the beginning of 2021, Alphabet shuttered Loon. It was a familiar story within the annals of Google X history: an ambitious moonshot with tremendous upside that sputtered out prior to gaining any sort of meaningful traction after nearly a decade.
“Despite Loon’s extraordinary technical progress,” X explains with a...
Mindfulness and meditation apps have tremendous potential in the world of extended reality. The full immersion created by headsets like the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro offer great potential to kickstart such practices, which are notoriously difficult to both begin and maintain.
As such, partnership between leading meditation app...
In an e-mail exchange, Babylon Micro-Farms CEO Alexander Olesson tells me “we’ll have these in every school and apartment one day.” It’s a nice vision, and really the level of belief/commitment required to run a startup – particularly in a field as oft-fraught at vertical farming. With a price...
Amazon generate a lot of trash. Precisely how much is a matter of some debate. In 2021, the company says it used 214 million or so pounds of single-use plastic in its packaging. Nonprofit ocean conservation firm Oceana, on the other hand, put that figure at approximately ~700 million...
There was nothing else like Digit on the ProMat floor last year. The manufacturing supply chain event has gradually morphed into a tech show in recent years. Many of the biggest names in the space were present, showcasing autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), bin picking arms and automated storage and...
Consumer lapel mics are one of the more interesting consumer electronics trends of recent years. Prior to this, lavalier microphones and their ilk were largely the domain of professional film crews. While some plug-in solutions have emerged for smartphones over the years, it wasn’t until recently that one could...
In May 2019, Ultrahaptics and Leap Motion became Ultraleap (not to be confused with Magic Leap, which operates in the same space). It’s a name change representing the marriage of two different, yet related, tech startups. Ultrahaptics naturally got top billing, as it was the one doing the acquiring...
The Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit handheld have captured a good bit of press interest for their individual approaches to integrating generative AI with hardware. Humane, in particular, is presenting its wearable as a look at life beyond the smartphone. That naturally prompts the question: What, precisely, is wrong...
Nothing isn’t one to be quiet about new releases. The London-based phone company’s media push largely relies on trickling out information about devices bit by bit. It’s been a solid strategy thus far (if a bit annoying as someone who covers this world), as so many of its announcements...
