Indiegogo requires campaigns to disclose product status and risk

Crowdfunding has brought a lot of great projects to life, but fundraising on the frontier brings risk — like unexpected issues delaying product deliveries for years or cancelling campaigns outright. Indiegogo wants to shore up trust in its platform, so it’s requiring entrepreneurs to disclose more information up-front and update backers monthly.

Every campaign in the Tech and Innovation categories must disclose how far along it is, from concept planning to shipping finished goods, and clarify the risks at each stage. Entrepreneurs are now required to post updates for backers at least once a month, which isn’t just a responsible thing to do — checking in that frequently raises campaigns 286% more money than those that update irregularly, Indiegogo stated. While this won’t seriously improve the odds that any product you back will make it into your hands, at least you’ll be armed with more information to better choose which campaigns to back.

Source: Indiegogo

BMW is reportedly making an all-electric four-door sedan

Like most car companies, BMW has been dabbling in electric vehicles lately, with models like the all-electric Mini and a longer-ranged version of its electric i3 model. The car company has to keep up with its competitors, like Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz and Tesla, so it’s launching a low-slung, four-door sedan into to the BMW “i” series. According to Bloomberg, the four-door EV is planned for sale by 2021 and will take a spot in between the city-styled i3 and the i8 sports car. There are no details on a specific model name, as yet, however.

As reported by Bloomberg, BMW plans to offer 12 fully electric vehicles by 2025, including the X3 SUV and self-driving iNext. The auto company has hopes to see ranges of 700 kilometers/425 miles by that time, as well, making all-electric cars more attractive to consumers. We’ve reached out to BMW for comment on this matter and will update the post when we hear back.

Source: Bloomberg

The Wirecutter’s best deals: Save $20 on a Samsung Brightview baby monitor

This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best technology. When readers choose to buy The Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, they may earn affiliate commissions that support their work. Read their continuously updated list of deals here.

You may have already seen Engadget posting reviews from our friends at The Wirecutter. Now, from time to time, we’ll also be publishing their recommended deals on some of their top picks. Read on, and strike while the iron is hot — some of these sales could expire mighty soon.

Hamilton Beach 12-Cup Coffee Maker (46205)

Street price: $45; MSRP: $45; Deal price: $35

This is a solid deal and the lowest price we’ve seen this year on the Hamilton Beach 12-Cup Coffee Maker (46205). While we’ve posted lower, we haven’t seen better pricing since December 2016. As a result, this coffee maker, which typically hovers between $40 and $45, is a nice pickup at $35. Shipping is free.

The Hamilton Beach 12-Cup Coffee Maker is our pick in our guide to the best cheap coffee maker. Thais Wilson-Soler wrote, “The Hamilton Beach 12-Cup Coffee Maker (46205) made a good cup despite being the cheapest coffee maker we tested, although it bears mentioning that coffee from a budget coffee maker just won’t equal the taste of a cup from a higher-end machine or a single-cup brewing method. The Hamilton Beach also has a removable water reservoir for easy filling (and a rotating base to make it easy to access), a compact footprint, and a simple interface. Testers were initially torn between the Hamilton Beach and the Mr. Coffee Optimal Brew 10-Cup Thermal Coffee Maker (BVMC-PSTX95), but everyone said they’d buy the Hamilton Beach after we revealed that it costs half as much as the Mr. Coffee.”

ThermoWorks Dot Probe Thermometer

Street price: $43; MSRP: $43; Deal price: $31

This is a nice sale on all ThermoWorks Dot Probe Thermometers, but a particularly nice one on the white color, which at $31 (with $4 shipping included) is $12 off what you’d usually pay for it shipped. All other colors of the Dot are also discounted at $34 with shipping charges, still a solid discount from the usual $43 shipped. The ThermoWorks Dot probe thermometer is our top pick in our guide to the best probe thermometer. Michael Sullivan writes, “We recommend the affordably priced ThermoWorks Dot probe thermometer for its impressive accuracy and ability to read temperatures quickly. Compared with the others we tested, it was the easiest thermometer to use, thanks to its simple, intuitive design and large digital display. The Dot’s wide temperature range makes it ideal for both oven and grill use.”

Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote

Street price: $40; MSRP: $40; Deal price: $35

While this isn’t the lowest we’ve seen on our runner-up media streamer, this is still a solid price to pick up the Amazon Fire TV stick. We saw it once for $30 during last year’s Black Friday sales, but that was the only other sale we’ve seen so far. This year, it has been determined to stick to its $40 street price. So while this $5 drop isn’t much, it’s the best price we’ve seen in months.

The Amazon Fire TV Stick is our runner-up pick in our guide to the best media streamers. Chris Heinonen wrote, “Improved search features and an overhauled interface make the Amazon Fire TV Stick our new runner-up. You can’t customize the interface as much as you can with the Roku, and its app selection is more limited, but it includes Amazon’s Alexa voice-controlled assistant, letting you make queries far beyond just a movie’s title. It’s starting to offer direct access to titles inside your favorite streaming services without having to launch the corresponding app, but it still does push Amazon content over other companies’ offerings and it isn’t quite as fast as the Roku.”

Samsung SEW3043 Brightview HD Baby Monitor

Street price: $180; MSRP: $200; Deal price: $160

Here’s a good price on the runner-up pick from our recently added baby monitor guide. This cam had the best overall image quality of any of our picks, but was more expensive than our top pick. Now, with this deal dropping it below $160, it rivals our top pick in terms of value. This cam usually sees prices above $180, so grab it while you can. Shipping is free.

The Samsung SEW3043 BrightView HD is our runner-up pick in our guide to the best baby monitor. Harry Sawyers, Sarah Kovac, and Winnie Yang write, “The Samsung SEW3043 BrightView HD has the edge on our pick on video alone, with a 5-inch display screen that’s the largest you’ll find on a baby monitor, and a very crisp image quality that seemed a bit sharper than our pick in day and night views. But the disadvantages are major: a clunky, under-responsive touchscreen, weaker battery life, and a poorly designed charger connection that tends to get loose and sometimes fail. It’s also usually a bit more expensive than our pick, yet it’s missing some other minor features we preferred in our Infant Optics pick.”

Because great deals don’t just happen on Thursday, sign up for our daily deals email and we’ll send you the best deals we find every weekday. Also, deals change all the time, and some of these may have expired. To see an updated list of current deals, please go to The Wirecutter.com.

Squeezing your HTC U11 will do a lot more soon

One of my biggest gripes about HTC’s U11 is that its Edge Sense gimmick — which lets you squeeze the phone to activate shortcuts — didn’t actually let you do very much. Well, that’s about to change. The company is going to push a software update tonight that adds new default actions for Edge Sense and (more importantly) the ability to create your own shortcuts for any app installed on your phone.

The new default actions are pretty straightforward — squeezing the phone while in Google Maps or Google Photos, for instance, zooms into or out of whatever you’re looking at. We knew this was coming thanks to some teasing by HTC, but it all works well enough. Beyond that, you can also squeeze to snap a picture while using Instagram, or fire up the ol’ text-to-speech engine when the keyboard is on-screen.

Really though, the best part of this update is whipping up your own shortcuts on the fly. Let’s say you’re like me and prefer to use Astro, or Outlook, or whatever other email client over the Gmail app. To set up a shortcut, you hit a red button and choose a point on the screen that’ll be virtually tapped or or double-tapped when you squeeze the phone. In my case, the first thing I did was to set the feature to simulate a tap on Astro’s ‘Compose’ button. Voila: I’m now only a squeeze away from banging out an email I probably didn’t want to write in the first place. More immediately helpful was a shortcut I made to un-pause podcasts in Pocket Casts, saving me the trouble of stretching my thumb across the screen and hitting a button.

That’s really all we’re talking about here: you’re not radically redefining the way you use the phone, you’re just saving yourself a few taps. Sadly, there’s a limit to how complex these shortcuts can be: you can define more than one action for a squeeze in a specific app, but only one shortcut per app can be active at a time. There’s no way to stack multiple actions into a more complex sequence, either, but if you have Edge Sense’s Advanced mode enabled, you can at least set another shortcut for a squeeze-and-hold.

Still, considering this feature is still technically in beta, I’m impressed. While that might not be enough for power users who want to string together their own squeeze-macros, HTC’s approach and execution offer some hope that Edge Sense could become a truly indispensable feature over time. I just hope we don’t have to wait as long for new updates as we did for this first one.

This pen can determine whether tissue is cancerous in ten seconds

When surgeons are removing a tumor from a patient, determining whether they have taken out all of the cancerous cells or if they should extract more tissue is a problem they all face. Typically, the margins of a tumor are assessed after the surgery is completed and if it looks like some cancer was left behind, another surgery might be in order. So, developing a way to test tissue for cancerous cells in real-time would be incredibly useful for both surgeons and patients. In a study published this week in Science Translational Medicine, researchers present a device that does just that.

The MasSpec Pen, is, as its name suggests, a small, pen-like device that can determine whether tissue is cancerous in just 10 seconds. It works by delivering a droplet of water to the surface of the tissue in question. That droplet pulls in molecules from the tissue that are then analyzed by a mass spectrometer — a machine that can rapidly measure the mass of chemicals — and then the system reports whether the tissue is cancerous or normal. With that information, doctors can then decide whether they need to keep removing tissue or if they’ve already taken out all of the cancerous cells.

The researchers tested the MasSpec Pen on 253 human tissue samples and found that it was accurate over 96 percent of the time. They’re now working on pens that can analyze smaller sections of tissue. The team does acknowledge that mass spectrometers are rather large and expensive and to make the MasSpec Pen as useful as possible, smaller and less expensive versions will be needed.

Others have developed different methods for analyzing cancerous tissue in real-time including a scalpel that can differentiate between cancerous and normal brain tissue, fluorescence-assisted imaging systems and recently, a microscope. But there’s still a demand for these types of products in the surgery room and the MasSpec Pen is promising and very accurate. The researchers are working towards trialing the device during operations next year.

Via: BBC

Source: Science Translational Medicine

Porsche InnoDrive moves cruise control forward — and through the curves

By Jordan Golson

A few years ago, I tried adaptive cruise control for the first time — a week in Boston’s horrific commuting traffic, in a Volvo XC60. It was a revelation. Without the need to constantly brake and accelerate, stop-and-go traffic on the highway was significantly less stressful.

A number of Porsche vehicles have a similar adaptive cruise system, meant to alleviate frustration in stop-and-go traffic. But the company’s engineers have developed a new system that puts a Porsche-esque twist on the whole thing.

It’s called InnoDrive, and it’s very clever. Originally developed as a way to improve fuel efficiency, InnoDrive is kind of a sport-focused cruise control designed for twisty B-roads rather than highway backups.

In the same way that Volvo’s system relieved me of the need to operate the pedals, Porsche’s InnoDrive frees me from the same thing when driving spiritedly on backroads. It uses sensor data from the car to “determine the perfect, efficient longitudinal drive strategy,” Dr. Gernot Döllner, vice president in charge of Porsche’s Panamera product line, said in a press briefing. That’s a fancy way of saying that InnoDrive lets you focus on steering while the car optimizes your speed, taking into account speed limits and corners.

The Panamera is the first Porsche to offer InnoDrive, though it will also be available on the new 2019 Cayenne. The test drive was on the same lovely roads around Porsche’s Stuttgart headquarters that the InnoDrive team used to develop the system.

In a sense, InnoDrive is an innovation (hence the name) of the existing adaptive cruise control system that Porsche has offered for several years — only it uses curve angles and topographical information to determine the optimal speed for hustling through corners.

“It uses that information to adjust the vehicle to the perfect speed for the road,” Döllner said. It’s not a system for driving through the city. Instead, it’s “for country roads and relaxed traveling.”

Activate the system (and have a GPS destination set), and the car analyzes the onboard mapping data to determine the radius and topography of upcoming turns. Combine that with speed-limit info from the mapping data and the onboard camera (the camera gets priority, as the mapping data provided by HERE — a mapping company jointly owned by Volkswagen AG, BMW, Daimler and others — isn’t always accurate) and the car can determine how fast to take upcoming corners.

A status screen to the left of the giant tachometer on the dash shows the current speed limit and what InnoDrive is up to. The speed limit (or a manually adjustable offset) is the max that the car will go. But when the system decides a corner will be too sharp, it slows down to a dynamically determined speed (all illustrated in blue, to keep the driver appraised of what’s going on and why) and then speeds up again as it exits the corner. Standard adaptive cruise control rules apply as well, with the car slowing when it comes upon another vehicle.

Lateral acceleration is the name of the game here, and the car adjusts speed to keep things sporty but under control. Activate the Sport or Sport+ drive modes and the car allows for 20 percent more lateral acceleration than in the standard drive modes. It’s a noticable difference, but it still keeps the car far from its limits.

“We had a Sport+ version, and the system is able to do much more than we realized,” said Döllner. “Even experienced drivers could be scared of what the vehicle would allow so we had to take that off.”

It’s not meant to be faster than an racing driver, but instead to allow Porsche’s more suburban buyers to feel like a racer.

“It could be as fast as a human driver, but it’s not designed that way,” Döllner said. “It’s next-generation cruise control, but 10 percent more efficient, too.”

The sports-car purists are surely heading to the comment section now, ready to deliver a healthy dose of Sturm und Drang in Porsche’s direction. But that’s the same sort of thinking that says Ferrari should still offer manual transmissions, even though every technical and performance spec says automatics outperform them.

Though Porsche buyers surely consider themselves the next André Lotterer, the truth is that, for most, their car is considerably more capable than they are. InnoDrive, like anti-lock brakes and traction and stability control, increases enjoyment and safety. By freeing up the driver to focus on steering, it’s possible that driving enjoyment, safety and efficiency (the original intent of the system) are increased.

Sure, InnoDrive is perhaps a niche technology, but no one is forcing Panamera and Cayenne buyers to check the $4,000 option box to get it. It is, though, a clever repurposing of technology already installed on the car — InnoDrive adds an extra ECU on top of the adaptive cruise to manage things, but it uses the same sensors — to add new and useful functionality.

The team said that the greatest obstacle to further improvements and new features was the reliability and precision of the mapping data. The curve data Porsche receives from HERE is limited in detail, and the InnoDrive system uses a complicated algorithm to determine the correct speed — and it’s not always exactly correct.

If the driver inputs more steering than is expected, InnoDrive realizes it’s going too fast and slows down. But it happens in real time, and the system isn’t able to remember what happened on that corner for the next pass.

Naturally Porsche’s engineers wouldn’t give any hints as to what the next iteration of InnoDrive will include, but they were clear that this is just version ein.

Elevation Lab Debuts New ElevationDock 4 for iPhone and iPad

Elevation Lab made a name for itself with the ultra popular Elevation Dock, which was introduced in 2012 through a Kickstarter project that brought in over a million dollars.

Today, Elevation Lab is unveiling its newest dock, the ElevationDock 4, an amalgamation of everything the company has learned about docks over the course of the last five years.

ElevationDock 4 features a compact design that’s meant to take up minimal space on a desk. Adjustment knobs allow it to fit an iPhone and a case that’s up to 3.5mm thick, and it’s designed to work one-handed, a feature few other docks can offer.

It has an 18° back angle with a +/-4° adjustment so the tilt can be changed for an ideal setup on a desk or nightstand, and the Lightning connector is designed to flex only under high torque to keep the iPhone stable and upright.

The dock is Made for iPhone certified and comes with a built-in Lightning cable. Construction wise, it features stainless steel adjustment knobs and a medical grade silicone overmolded body. It’s available in Matte White with a 5-ft braided blue cord or Matte Black with a 5-ft dark braided cord.

Because of its study construction and stable base, the ElevationDock 4 is compatible with both the iPhone and the iPad. It will work with iPads as large as the 10.5-inch iPad Pro.

ElevationDock 4 can be purchased from the Elevation Lab website for $59. Orders will start shipping out in two weeks.

Tag: ElevationLab
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AirPods Shipping Estimates Improve to 1 to 2 Weeks

Apple is one step closer to achieving supply/demand balance for its AirPods, and the highly desired earphones are now shipping out from the online Apple Store in just one to two weeks in the United States, Canada, UK, Australia, and several other countries around the world.

According to Apple’s website in the United States, AirPods ordered today will be delivered between September 21 and September 28, the best estimates we’ve seen since the AirPods became available for purchase.

AirPods have been in short supply since launch. For many weeks, AirPods shipping estimates were at six weeks, but stock improved enough in early August that shipping estimates dropped to four weeks. Later in the month, estimates improved to two to three weeks before hitting one to two weeks today.

At this rate, Apple will be close to achieving an adequate supply later this month or at the beginning of October.

During Apple’s third quarter earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Apple had boosted AirPods production capacity and was “working very hard” to get AirPods to customers as quickly as possible.

Though AirPods have been hard to come by from the online Apple Store, Apple retail stores have occasionally received stock and third-party retailers like Best Buy and various carrier stores have been able to offer AirPods with faster shipping on a regular basis.

Priced at $159, Apple’s wire-free AirPods have been incredibly popular thanks to features like long battery life, a simple charge case, infrared sensors to detect when they’re in the ear, touch-based gestures, and the W1 chip that improves Bluetooth connection and facilitates quick transfers between different devices.

Tag: AirPods
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Apple’s Greg Joswiak: Siri Wasn’t Engineered to Be Trivial Pursuit

In iOS 11, Apple’s AI-based personal assistant Siri has a much more natural voice that goes a long way towards making Siri sound human like. Siri speaks with a faster, smoother cadence with elongated syllables and pitch variation, a noticeable departure from the more machine like sound in iOS 10.

The team behind Siri, including Siri senior director Alex Acero, has worked for years to improve the way Siri speaks, according to a new interview Acero did alongside Apple VP of marketing Greg Joswiak with Wired. While Siri’s voice recognition capabilities were powered by a third-party company early on in Siri’s life, Acero’s team took over Siri development a few years back, leading to several improvements to the personal assistant since then.

Siri is powered by deep learning and AI, technology that has much improved her speech recognition capabilities. According to Wired, Siri’s raw voice recognition capabilities are now able to correctly identify 95 percent of users’ speech, on par with rivals like Alexa and Cortana.

Apple is still working to overcome negative perceptions about Siri, and blames many of the early issues on the aforementioned third-party partnership.

“It was like running a race and, you know, somebody else was holding us back,” says Greg Joswiak, Apple’s VP of product marketing. Joswiak says Apple always had big plans for Siri, “this idea of an assistant you could talk to on your phone, and have it do these things for you in a more easy way,” but the tech just wasn’t good enough. “You know, garbage in, garbage out,” he says.

Joswiak says Apple’s aim from the beginning has been to make Siri a “get-s**t-done” machine. “We didn’t engineer this thing to be Trivial Pursuit!” he told Wired. Apple wants Siri to serve as an automated friend that can help people do more.

One unique Siri attribute is its ability to work in multiple languages. Siri supports English, French, Dutch, Mandarin, Cantonese, Finnish, Hebrew, Malay, Arabic, Italian, and Spanish, and more, including dialect variants (like English in the UK and Australia) and accents. The Siri team combines pre-existing databases of local speech with local voice talent and on-device dictation, transcribing and dissecting the content to find all of the individual sounds in a given language and all of the ways those sounds are pronounced.

In areas where Apple offers spoken dictation but no Siri support, it’s gathering data for future Siri support, and in places where Siri is already available, spoken interactions between user and device (gathered anonymously) are used to improve algorithms and train the company’s neural network.

Creating the right voice for Siri in a given language hinges on the proper voice talent, and Apple uses an “epic search” with hundreds of people to find someone who sounds helpful, friendly, spunky, and happy without overdoing it. Once the right person is found, Apple records them for weeks at a time to create the right sound. So far, Apple has repeated this process for all 21 languages Siri supports.

Ultimately, Acero and his Siri team are aiming to make Siri sound more like a trusted person than a robot, creating an attachment to the AI that will “make Siri great” even when Siri fails to answer a query properly. Apple also wants to make people more aware of what Siri can and can’t do and that it exists in the first place, which is why iOS 11 includes Siri-centric features like cross-device syncing and a better understanding of user interests and preferences.

Wired’s full piece, which goes into much more detail on how Siri recognizes various aspects of speech and how Apple chooses voice talent can be read over on the site.

Tag: Siri
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The EcoFlow River is the biggest baddest battery around and I love it

I keep waiting around for a massive jump in battery technology. One day we’ll all look back and remember that we had to charge our phones once a day and think “what the hell were we doing?” Alright, maybe it’s not as bad as I make it out to be, but I am still waiting for that next big leap in battery tech regardless. We hear stories all the time about the next big thing, but we’re still using the same battery technology we have been for a while now.

While the EcoFlow River doesn’t break the barrier between the current standard and a new one, it is a nice way to bridge the gap. The gigantic 11-pound charging station houses 11 ports and a ton (114,000mAh, 500 total watt output) of power for your devices. There are four USB type-A ports, two of which support Quick Charge 2.0, two USB type-C ports which support Quick Charge 3.0, two DC ports, two AC ports, and a 12-V car port. You can charge damn near anything with it.

A TYLT 7X (13,400mAh) next to the EcoFlow River. This thing is huge.

Normally, my mind would immediately go to using this for a camping trip. I’m the type of person who generally tolerates nature while my wife and daughter love it. I don’t want to be without my phone and my laptop so this keeps me charged up for the entire trip. In fact, EcoFlow says it’ll power a mini-fridge for upwards of 11 hours on a single charge, or you can hook up the solar charger (sold separately) and ride out the entire weekend. It’s a very expensive alternative to bringing a cooler, but hey, it is an alternative that you may want to look into.

While my mind would normally go to the campaign utilities, the recent disaster in Houston and surrounding areas has me thinking about other applications. A lot of people were trapped in their homes with no power while a hurricane tore down everything around them. Being able to keep on some lights or keep your cell phone charged can help a situation not seem so bad. I live in a valley so I’ll definitely be keeping the River upstairs in case the worst happens.

The ports on the back are perfect for camping purposes, but remember, you can only pump out 300w

I’d like to see the River’s IP rating increased in a hardware revision. It currently sits at IP63 which means it’s dustproof but its body is just splash proof, but I hope EcoFlow can do better down the line because I wouldn’t exactly feel comfortable taking this to the beach due to its somewhat weak water resistance. At $699, the River is too expensive to be destroyed because it got too much water on it.

You can charge up to 11 devices at the same time with a max draw of 500w. To recharge it, you can use wall power (6 hours), your car (9 hours) or the optional solar charger I mentioned earlier (10 – 15 hours depending on weather conditions). As someone who used to work in television, I could very easily see TV stations, production houses, and movie production crews making full use of the River to keep their gear charged on shoot days.

How many times can you (theoretically) charge your device?

All-in-all, I think EcoFlow has put out a really impressive battery. It’s compact and heavy, but the handle on top really makes it quite portable. You’re not going to throw this in your bag and forget it, but you can pack it for your next trip without taking up a bunch of space. The quick-charge ports are a nice attention to detail for Android device owners. Details like that often get forgotten and the max charge rate of an iPhone is all we get.

WHATEVER YOU DO, do not take off the sticker from the front if you want this thing to continue to look nice and clean

At $699, the EcoFlow River is expensive. There are others on the market that do offer DC or AC portable power stations, but their capacity is generally much much lower (as is their price). Its direct competitors, the Anker Powerhouse and Goal Zero Yeti 400 are both $100 cheaper but have smaller batteries so if you want the king of the mountain, the EcoFlow River is your huckleberry.