Category: Tech news

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It was about this time last year that Tactus — the company behind the amazing disappearing touchscreen keyboard — really started making a name for itself. So what does a buzzy company do to top its previous showing at the world’s biggest consumer tech show? In Tactus’ case it quietly showed off yet another potential game-changer, so we met with Tactus CEO Craig Ciesla on the CES show floor to dig into what the team has been working on.

If you’ll recall, the past few months have been interesting ones for Tactus. The Fremont, Calif., company linked up with Synaptics to cobble together a reference Android tablet and it just recently locked up a hefty Series B round to help it flesh out its relationships with new and existing OEM partners working to embed Tactus tech into their wares.

As it turns out, they’ve been working on some kooky (not to mention awesome) hardware prototypes, too. Ciesla brought one such device for us to peek at, and should it reach production, it could potentially solve one of Tactus’ biggest hangups.

You see, Tactus’ big deal is all about licensing its disappearing keyboard tech to other device manufacturers, which means that all the tablets currently floating around on the market are tablets that Tactus can’t make money off of. In order to fix that, the team whipped up an impressive 3D-printed case prototype within the span of a month that adapts that screen keyboard tech to existing devices. When it’s lashed onto a device (in this case, an iPad mini) the Tactus case pushes fluid into a series of vessels nestled in a thin layer that sits atop the tablet’s screen. The end result? A keyboard that can appear and disappear at will and work on any device.

The case has the sort of rough edges you’d expect a prototype to have, but there’s no denying that seeing a fluid-filled keyboard up and running on an iPad is tremendously cool. Because of the aftermarket nature of the case, there’s no way to coax the keyboard into appearing through software, so a slider on the side controls how much fluid gets pushed into the screen.

Neat as this is, Ciesla was eager to remind me that Tactus has no desire to craft and sell these sorts of devices under its own name. He expects the first batch of Tactus-enabled gadgets to hit the market toward the middle of the year, and with any luck, some smart OEM will bite the licensing bullet and crank these cases out for the masses soon.

Bill Gates may be one of the world’s most famous philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and guest editors,  but could he be adding venture capitalist to the list? Over the past few years it seems that Gates has, in fact, been increasing his investment in startups.

Though not as active in venture capital as other, less-billionaire-y, technology billionaires, Gates is nonetheless putting together a growing stable of technology companies. And the pace of his investment is steadily increasing, according to the data in CrunchBase.

Last year, Gates was involved in at least six new and follow-on investments in venture-backed companies, including a commitment to the energy storage technology developer Aquion, in a financing which wrapped up earlier this year. That’s up from four new and follow-on commitments in 2012, and three in 2011, the CrunchBase data indicated.

In addition to Aquion, the Gates portfolio also includes other companies tackling the energy problem, like the compressed air energy storage company, LightSail Energy, and the battery technology developer Ambri. And those aren’t Gates’ only sustainable investments.

 Varentec, an electricity monitoring and management technology developer, is another cleantech pony in the Gates stable. Even more ambitiously, Gates is backing TerraPower, the nuclear reactor developer spun out from Intellectual Ventures, alongside former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer and Intellectual Ventures founder and chief executive, Nathan Myrhvold.

Intellectual Ventures is behind two other Gates investments. Both Evolv Technologies and Kymeta came from Myrhvold’s IP monetization factory.

Rounding out some of the newest investments in the portfolio of the man from Medina, Wash. are three healthcare investments focused on computational drug design and targeted cancer therapies: Nimbus Discovery and its development partner Schrodinger Inc. are both focused on computational drug design, while Foundation Medicine develops diagnostic tests based on gene sequencing to identify personalized cancer therapies for patients.

All of these investments hew pretty closely with some of Gates’ expressed goals of improving healthcare, or reducing carbon emissions in an effort to combat the effects of global warming, but he’s also an investor in NEOS GeoSolutions, a company which sells technology and services to improve the operations of oil and gas and mining companies.

Needless to say, Bill Gates did not respond to a request for comment for this post.

Photo via The Henry Ford and OnInnovation. 

One of the more interesting discoveries at this year’s CES was the Urb-E e-vehicle, a super compact electric scooter that folds right up in a jiffy.

We interviewed co-founder Grant Delgatti and learned that the little guy is meant for commuters who need a little extra push for the last leg of their journey, whether it be the mile from the train station to the house or from the cheap parking lot down the street to the office.

The Urb-E can go twenty miles on a single charge, and has a max speed of 15 mph. I rode one around for a bit after the interview and while it takes some getting used to, it’s a whole lot of fun once you get the hang of it.

Even better, the Urb-E folds up to be about the size of a small suitcase, and can be rolled around like one, too.

In the final version, Urb-E will have a dock for you to charge your smartphone, as well as an app that can plug into the scooter and give back information on how much battery is left.

Delgatti hasn’t made final decisions on price point, but that will be announced soon when the company launches its Kickstarter campaign. He estimates it will go for about $1,500.

For many of us, CES is a massive conference filled with the world’s most innovative technology. To Martha Stewart, the world’s largest Consumer Electronics Show represents a day of gadget shopping.

So what is Martha on the market for?

The lifestyle guru and DIYer had a few specific products in mind when she joined TechCrunch for CES 2014, including a 3D printer, a new set of headphones, a new television for her home theater, and perhaps some updated appliances.

That said, Stewart and I took a stroll through the 3D printing area, checking out FormLabs and MakerBot.

In fact, she and Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis forged a few deals on the fly to license Martha Stewart designs as 3D printable objects. She also asked to be bumped to the front of the line to get Makerbot’s Z18 industrial printer.

Then, we spent a little time at the Parrot booth discussing the benefits of drone ownership. Drownership, if you will. Martha already owns the AR.Drone 2.0, but seemed equally interested in Parrot’s new Sumo rover and Mini Drone quad-copter.

After playing around with those highly expensive toys, Stewart and I visited the Monster booth in search of some nice, lightweight headphones. She has very specific tastes: something light, unobtrusive, stylish, and canceling. Luckily, Tyson Beckford was there to help us out, showing off his Inspiration line of Monster headphones.

Seems Stewart wants the Inspiration Light in rose gold, with black leather and a black ballistic material headband. Tough.

To finish off a long day of shopping, Stewart and I ventured into the biggest booth at all of CES, Samsung. We checked out curved display UHD tvs, smart fridges and washers, and even the new 12.2-inch Samsung tablets.

Samsung debuted a couple brand new Android tablets at CES this year, both of which are being positioned as “Pro” versions of its existing Note and Tab line of devices. The slates do indeed offer some features aimed more at enterprise users, but they also feature a UI that’s dramatically different from a stock Android experience.

The Galaxy NotePRO is a 12.2-inch tablet with Samsung’s S Pen and 2560×1600 screen resolution, and the TabPRO comes in 12.2, 10.1 and 8.4-inch sizes, and also offers a 2560×1600 screen on the top-end model, as well as on both of the smaller screen devices, which is amazing considering you’re cramming more pixels into a smaller space. Each runs Android 4.4. The NotePRO and TabPRO models are powered by an Exynos 5 Octa processor for Wi-Fi and 3G versions, and the Snapdragon 800 2.3GHz processor for the LTE editions.

But the really impressive thing about these new tablets aren’t found on a specs sheet; instead, it’s the new Magazine UX, which reimagines the basic home screen of an Android tablet with a design that has more in common with Windows Phone or even individual apps like Flipboard. There’s also a Multi Window mode that allows users to play with up to four different windows of separate active content on the same screen. In practice, it results in an experience that feels very unlike using any previous Android tablet, and while I didn’t spend quite enough time with it to make any final judgement, I did enjoy the cursory experience I did manage to get with the gadgets.

Samsung is going to bring the NotePRO and TabPRO devices to market sometime in Q1, 2014, and there’s no official word on pricing yet, though SamMobile has pegged them ranging between $389 and just under $900 depending on spec loadout. These are a curious breed of devices, and ones that could potentially take on Microsoft’s Surface and Windows 8 tablet offerings, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of impact they make once they do launch.

If your Spotify friends have terrible taste in music, newly launched iPhone app LuckyPennie may be for you. This L.A.-based startup is hoping to re-imagine the way people discover music, including not only new songs available for streaming or download on iTunes, but those performed by local bands, too.

The company was founded by a trio who have backgrounds in music, including Dr. John Wolanin, a Ph.D whose passion for music saw him writing his dissertation on using music as a therapeutic tool, and connecting with clients through music to get them back on the road to recovery. And on the side, Dr. Wolanin was in a band of his own.

Meanwhile, co-founder and CTO Joe Ladon (previously director of mobile development at Break.com) also has a background in music technology and theory, while LuckyPennie’s third co-founder Jonathan Lane (who co-founded NextSpace in L.A.) is a musician, too, and ran a music distribution business in the past.

Says Dr. Wolanin, “we’re actually toying with the idea of forming a band together.”

(He’s not really kidding.)

With LuckyPennie, the idea is to build a mobile music community where you can share and discover songs, concerts, photos and notes with others, and be able to connect with those who have similar musical tastes. You can add users to your “crew” or chat with them in the app itself.

The app’s main screen is meant to serve as something of a community bulletin board of things happening around you which you can filter by distance and content type. (Right now, this seems biased to the West Coast scene, it appears. It could use a bigger feed of concerts across the U.S. to get things going.)

More broadly, the app also lets you see what’s new and what’s trending, and soon, the app will introduce more social features, as well as a framework for building up your “cred”.

The idea, the co-founder explains, is that you’ll be able to establish yourself as influential about your local scene, and one day other users will be able to easily follow those who are knowledgable about a given city’s music scene.

Today, however, the app is focused on more general music and concert discovery, where you can buy concert tickets, and either preview tracks or play them full-length if you’re a premium Rdio or Spotify subscriber. This is available in the app’s “Radio” section, available from the side menu.

LuckyPennie launched just yesterday in the iTunes App Store, and is a free download. The company is basically bootstrapped with a little bit of friends and family funding to help them get off the ground.

It’s worth noting too that the app is beautifully designed, with screens and menus that move around fluidly in ways I wish other startups would consider copying. However, the main feed is also a bit busy for newcomers as it lacks separations between posts, the filtering tools and navigational elements. It can be a lot to take in at first.

But given that LuckyPennie is only a day old, it’s worth giving the company a chance to figure things out. After all, if your Facebook/Spotify friends are listening to awful stuff, you could use the help.

Gillmor Gang – Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today.

Stormtrooper: Let me see your headphones.
Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don’t need to see his headphones.
Stormtrooper: We don’t need to see his headphones.
Obi-Wan: These aren’t the headphones you’re looking for.
Stormtrooper: These aren’t the headphones we’re looking for.
Obi-Wan: 50 Cent can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: 50 Cent can go about his business.
Obi-Wan: Move along.
Stormtrooper: Move along… move along.

50 Cent’s SMS audio business is expanding into nerd territory with these so very Rebel headphones specially designed to match your golden slave Leia bikini and utility belt. Priced at about $200 and available in the spring you and band of interstellar adventurers can pick up deep space transmissions (and maybe ponder the fate of Fiddy’s musical career) while wearing the latest in Endorian tech.

Many companies are betting that people want some kind of Android-based gaming solution in their living room, from Ouya to GameStick to Nvidia. One new initiative along those lines debuted at CES 2014 called the Snakebyte Vyper. The Vyper is from a German startup, and the company is bringing the product the U.S. in the coming months.

It’s one device that has a number of different faces, including a standalone 7-inch tablet that’s powered by Android, packing a quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM, along with 8GB of storage (and expandable Micro SD-based storage). There are two USB ports, a front-facing 2 megapixel and rear-facing 5 megapixel camera and HDMI out for plugging into your TV.

There’s a docking base that you plug it into when you want to play games from your home theatre setup, or any television anywhere. It provides power and transmits video to your screen, and automatically puts the tablet into television mode. There’s a controller that acts as an air mouse and has a full QWERTY keyboard on the back for input, as well as a Bluetooth game controller with a fairly standard layout compatible with many Android games.

The advantage of its platform over others, according to the company, is that it doesn’t focus on either gaming or media to the exclusion of the other. Instead it’s designed to do both equally well, as well as to be a standard, full-featured Android tablet in its own right, too. It’ll retail for $199 when it goes on sale later this month, which is a surprisingly good deal, provided it works well and offers at least a decent user experience.

The buzz around drones is undeniable these days — as it turns out, even Martha Stewart uses one to survey her farm — but there still hasn’t been a runaway drone hit that has captured that imaginations of the masses. That’s exactly what a hardware startup called AirDroids is trying to accomplish with the Pocket Drone, a (relatively) inexpensive flying machine that’s meant to give people of all stripes a different perspective.

They’re serious about that “perspective” bit too. The original vision was simple enough: co-founders Tim Reuter, TJ Johnson, and Chance Roth really just wanted to create a cheap way to tote a camera through the sky. Those ambitions evolved slightly though, and now they’re looking at the Pocket Drone as the ideal air machine to kick off a widespread drone revolution.

“We’re a mission-driven company,” Reuter said. “Our goal is to put flying robots in the hands of as many people as possible. We think it’s empowering to democratize the sky.”

Plenty of rapid iteration formalized the Pocket Drone’s shape — by which I mean marathon 3D printing sessions in Johnson’s basement — and the process seems to have been fruitful. In its current form, the Pocket Drone can tote around a GoPro (or something of similar weight) for up to 20 minutes, and support for GPS navigation and tablet controls means that you don’t have to be an RC fanatic (like some of the co-founders) to maneuver of these things through the air.

And, as the name suggests, the drone is just slight enough to fit into a pocket (albeit a pretty large one). It’s not going to fit in your jeans, but it does slide in and out of a windbreaker pocket without too much hassle. That’s mostly thanks to the drone’s folding design — the three rotors’ arms can fold back and telescope for easy storage. The inclusion of easily replaceable carbon fiber chassis components also simplifies the process of swapping out damaged bits — after all, no matter how skilled a pilot you are you’re probably still going to crash every once in a while.

In the event that you’re itching to take to the skies with a Pocket Drone, the team just recently launched a Kickstarter campaign where you can lay claim to your own unit for as low as $415 if you bring your own remote control equipment. Production is going to take a bit of time though — AirDroids is linking up with a Taiwanese manufacturing concern with operations in Mexico to bring the Pocket Drone to market and they hope to get units on peoples’ doorsteps and in the air by June of this year.

Commerzpoint Networks, an Indian startup that owns healthcare marketplace Medypal, has raised around $400,000 in seed funding from Unitus Seed Fund.

With this funding, Medypal will help patients find trustworthy service providers who will bid against each other for their spend on medical procedures. Medypal will use a “reverse auction” method to ensure that the services are competitively priced and patients are able to pick the service provider they want. The Medypal service will go live February 1.

Healthcare is a booming industry in India and is expected to reach $100 billion by 2016. The challenge, though, is to provide affordable services to millions, many of whom are not even covered under any medical insurance. Moreover, a majority of healthcare consumers in India rely on friends and family to select a service provider. By offering information on-the-go, and getting online quotes from service providers in real time, Medypal wants to change that.

Commerzpoint founders P Rammohan and Brahmesh Jain are no strangers to finding opportunities in India’s healthcare sector. They founded the country’s first and the largest health insurance exchange, Healthsprint, in 2006.

The startup plans to make money on leads generated and passed on to healthcare service providers.

“We are in the final process of signing up with 300 health care providers in Bangalore ranging from large hospitals, diagnostic centre chains to dental clinics and cosmetic surgical centres,” said Rammohan.

“There is no easy way to get objective information on service provider availability, quality and pricing,” Commerzpoint said in a statement announcing the funding. ”This is especially challenging for low-income families who have even less information, education, connections and financial reserves.”

With more than half of India’s 160 million users accessing Internet on their mobiles, there is an opportunity to be tapped in delivering healthcare services. Medypal will be offering a free mobile app to healthcare consumers.

“Using the app, patients can search for healthcare procedures, go through the list of hospitals offering those procedures, browse through the profiles of the doctors, and check the facilities offered by hospitals before finally shortlisting the hospitals,” said Rammohan. ”The app will also allow patients to ask for proposals from the hospitals and book appointments while on the move.”

As we reported last month, Unitus raised its second fund of $3.3 million to help people at the bottom of the economic pyramid access basic necessities in India. The new fund invests in for-profit startups in India. ”We are investing in a team, which has demonstrated success in scaling healthcare services to the masses in India,” said Dave Richards, managing partner of Unitus Seed Fund.

Buoyed by a stronger economy, angel investors companies worldwide poured a record amount of cash into early stage technology and life sciences companies, according to data from CrunchBase.

Angel investments have been climbing steadily since 2008, CrunchBase data shows, but 2013 represents a new high, with investors crossing the billion dollar threshold, committing $1.1 billion to entrepreneurs launching new tech companies, up from $929 million in 2012.

In the first half of 2013, angel investors invested $461 million in a total of 379 deals, according to the Halo Report, a survey of angel investments published by Silicon Valley Bank, Angel Resource Institute, CB Insights.

Angels committed more capital in each quarter of 2013 than in the previous year, according to CrunchBase data. And U.S.-based startups raised the bulk of that cash, attracting $687.9 million in 2013, up from $646.9 million in 2012, the CrunchBase data shows.

“I think it’s about the economy and the economy continued to improve,” said Marianne Hudson, Executive Director of the Angel Capital Association, a trade group for early stage investors. “The economy felt better from all stages in 2013 than in 2012 and that also meant that angels had more money to spend and invest. “

Meanwhile, Michael Cain, a member-manager of the Wilmington Investor Network, an angel investment group based in Wilmington, NC. , said collaboration and the continuing professionalization of the industry were also factors in the growth, and growing clout, of angels.

“You get more minds around the table, [and] you get better due diligence because you have more people who know the space.”

Angels are also seeing their investments pay out, and that also encourages more activity, investors said.

“We strive to do two rounds of angel [financing] and get out,” Mr. Cain said. “ [We’re] looking at pre-monies of under $3 million and exits in the $20 million to $40 million range.”

Acquirers snatched up 48 companies that had raised just one round of capital in 2013, including home improvement site, BrightNest, which was bought by  Angie’s List only two years after raising its seed funding.

Among the biggest winners were the backers of Medafor, a Minneapolis-based life sciences company which raised $15,000 in angel funding in 2012 and was acquired by the medical technology company C.R. Bard for $200 million.

“There were a lot of companies that may not be that recognizable across the country that did deliver between 3x and 15x returns,” Hudson said.

Image via Flickr user Randy Robertson. 

Smart glasses! Smart watches! Smart… rings?

While many in the tech world would agree that wearable devices are the natural next stage of computing, no one has really cracked the code. As much as we geeks love to chat about Google Glass and Pebble watches, no wearable has breached the mainstream and achieved any degree of ubiquity just yet.

RHL Vision, a competitor in the TechCrunch CES Hardware Battlefield today, thinks they have the answer: Bluetooth rings that turn your fingers into buttons.

Here’s how it works: by tucking an optical sensor into a small ring placed around your thumb, the Fin is able to detect swipes and taps across your hand. When it detects a gesture, it sends that command off to your connected device — be it a smartphone, TV, or another wearable device.

Swiping your thumb down your index finger, for example, could turn your phone’s volume down. Want to turn it back up? Just swipe back up across the same finger. Want to skip the current track? Swipe your thumb across the palm of the opposite hand.

In future iterations, they hope to use biometrics to distinguish each segment of each finger. This would allow them to assign each segment a different behavior, essentially turning each section of your hand into a different button.

While the team has renders (shown below) showing the ring as they hope it will look once they reach the early stages of actual production, the current prototype shown on stage (and pictured above) is a bit more… extensive. Whereas they plan to use flexible circuitry (think Jawbone Up) to shrink the design and allow it to wrap around your thumb, the current prototype relies on more traditional PCBs and off-the-shelf sensors to get the job done. It’s not as small and not as pretty, but it does do a good job of proving the concept.

The team plans to launch an indiegogo campaign later this evening.

The DIY revolution means that people can now print their own 3D models, build their own websites and apps, and even build their own mobile devices and custom computers using things like Raspberry Pi. The Modbot team taking part in this year’s TechCrunch Battlefield at CES 2014 wants to do the same for robotics – not hobby robotics, but serious, full-fledged industrial and commercial robot building.

Modbot founders Adam Ellison and Daniel Pizzata identified a problem in prototyping and building robots for use in manufacturing, research and basically any other application: parts were unnecessarily complicated and expensive, when in reality they could be much more affordable and much simpler, too.

Ellison and Pizzata have created a simple system consisting of a servo, a link and a joint component, along with a base upon which to build your projects. The Modbot vision is one where people can combine pre-assembled parts that cost significantly less than their professional industrial counterparts in order to build a wide range of robots for any number of purposes, including small scale production. Imagine, then a future where entrepreneurs could not only create a concept for a hardware device and send that away to a production partner, but also build the thing themselves in-house.

Honda’s Asimo costs roughly $1 million just to make, according to Modbot’s founders, and most of that cost comes from actuators and hardware. By dramatically decreasing the price of this part of the process, Modbot is hoping to encourage innovation and make it possible for even the smallest companies to build anything from a giant robot death spider to a fully functional prosthetic arm.

Modbot is launching its Indiegogo campaign today, to produce its hardware and to develop its app, which is a rapid prototyping campaign that lets you design your robot in virtual space with just a few clicks, and then instantly click a button and order everything you need to build that design right from the prototyper and have it shipped to you directly.

Raspberry Pi has helped pave the way for a future where you could easily see kids coming to school with coding and electronics experience in hand. Modbot could offer the same sort of thing for robotics, albeit with pricing that while affordable, still reflects a target market of small business users and entrepreneurs rather than kids and hobbyists. But it could still be sort of equivalent to the 3D printing revolution, putting manufacturing capabilities once relegated to multi-billion dollar companies in the hands of five-person shops and startups.

Apigee has disclosed a $20.5 million stock transaction as part of its previously announced acquisition of InsightsOne, according to a filing with the SEC. Terms of the deal were not previously disclosed.

In its Registration D filing today, the company acknowledged the $20.5 million equity transaction was made in connection with the acquisition. In a statement, Apigee stated it did not close a new round of financing for this SEC filing. Instead, the registration is related to the acquisition of InsightsOne, but it does not represent the purchase price. The filing was required as part of the stock transaction between the two companies.

Since 2005, Apigee has raised $107.5 million, not including the $20.5 million equity  transaction. Originally Sonoa Systems, the company had developed a cloud gateway that it leveraged to become an API management company. In July, the company raised $35 million from a fund managed by BlackRock, Inc. and Accenture, the global consulting company.

With InsightsOne, Apigee will have a platform that helps companies find patterns in multiple data sources to, for instance, tell healthcare providers in advance about an unsatisfied customer. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded three years ago, InsightsOne, has $4.3 million in funding it received in 2012 from NorWest Venture Partners and several angel investors.

For Apigee, it’s a sign that the next year will be pivotal for the company. It’s either get acquired and collect a big check, or pursue an IPO. The bet on analytics seems right, but it’s a matter of market adoption more than anything else.

(Feature image via Flickr)