Yale’s Nest-controlled smart lock arrives in early 2018

Yale, the lock company that recently purchased August, recently joined forces with Nest on a new smart lock, and we now know more about the product and when it will arrive. The Nest x Yale lock gives you a key-free, touchscreen deadbolt with a lot of options for remote unlocking and granting access to family or guests. For one, you can unlock it by entering a passcode (it holds up to 250), which can be limited to specific times of day for cleaners or others who need limited access.

At the same time, it works with the Nest app, giving you a host of remote and security features. For instance, you can use it with the Nest Secure so that when you unlock the door, it also deactivates the alarm. You can also marry it with the Nest Hello video doorbell to see when people arrive and then let them in remotely.

Yale points out that the lock is protected on the outside by reinforced hardware, and there’s no keyhole cylinder to pick. As for as the other type of security, it uses “multiple layers of bank-level encryption tech” to protect it from hacking, the company notes.

The Nest x Yale can be opened via the touchscreen even if the power or WiFi fail. It will warn you well before the battery dies, but should that happen, you can enter a code by touching a nine-volt battery to the terminals at the bottom of the lock.

The Next x Yale smart lock will go on pre-order in February, with deliveries slated for March. Unfortunately, we don’t know the price yet, but as a frame of reference, August’s least costly Smart Lock runs $149 while its Smart Lock Pro sells for $279.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Aptiv’s self-driving Lyfts took erratic Las Vegas traffic in stride

One of the reasons that automakers are pursuing self-driving cars is that, while they’ll initially be too expensive to put up for sale to individuals, ride-hailing services (aka mobility) offer the technology the chance to mature in a way that’s financially viable. Aptiv, a tier-one supplier of autonomous technology, is working hard to make sure its system is in a lot of those vehicles, and at CES this year, it showed off how that system might actually work in conjunction with Lyft.

The cars (modified BMWs) were hailed by the Lyft app. Not the one on my phone, but one used by the team showing off the vehicles. Once it arrived in the staging area near the Las Vegas Convention Center, our driver drove it out of the parking lot on to the street and put it into autonomous mode with Caesars Palace as our destination.

During the trip, our car was cut up by two buses, a few cars and had to handle the sometimes erratic behavior of tourists mindlessly crossing the street in the City of Sin. It did all of this in a surprisingly calm fashion. There were no sudden and unnecessary brake maneuvers. Everything was as smooth as a seasoned driver. It was an improvement over Aptiv’s autonomous demo last year when the company was still called Delphi.

The specially equipped BMWs accomplished this by being outfitted with a ton of sensors. They each had nine LiDARs, 10 radars, a trifocal camera, vehicle-to-infrastructure data about stop lights, and differential GPS (higher quality GPS with increased location precision). Plus Aptiv mapped the roads around the destinations it was offering to riders.

The result of all that tech is that while there were set destinations, the cars didn’t have to stay on a set route. As long as a road had been mapped, the car should have no problem getting somewhere and back autonomously (not counting parking lots).

Even with multiple potentials for collision, the robot Lyft performed as well as a human driver in an environment that can be less than ideal. But it’s still just another step towards autonomous ride-hailing services becoming widespread. Aptiv expects its level four driving suite to be available to OEMs and other partners in 2019 and believes that at least one of its customers will have it on the road in 2020. Even then the rollout will be slow as regulations are adopted that work with self-driving taxis that’ll be taking us to casinos.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

LG’s 2018 4K TVs include AI and smarter HDR

After a fair amount of teasing, LG is ready to take the wraps off of its 2018 4K TV lineup — and in many ways, it’s an evolution of what you saw last year. Its flagship OLED lines (the Signature-badged W8 and more-conventional E8) and the LCD-based SK9500 have designs that are largely familiar to their predecessors but carry some significant upgrades under the hood. The centerpiece, as LG mentioned earlier, is AI: All three lines support deep learning and Google Assistant control to allow for natural language voice control over everything from the TV itself to smart home devices. They also bring active HDR that improves the image quality of HDR10 and Hybrid Log Gamma content by analyzing individual images.

The headliner, as with last year, is the Signature-badged wallpaper OLED model — in this case, the W8. The new version is still designed to cling to your wall and stuffs most of its hardware into the soundbar below. It packs LG’s fastest chip, the Alpha 9, which drives AI, picture quality and “ultra-fast” response times. LG had already teased support for 120FPS high frame rate video.

The E8 is a direct parallel to the E7 and brings the W8’s technology to a more conventional TV. It too has the Alpha 9, but it integrates a 60W 4.2-channel soundbar (complete with Dolby Atmos). The G8, C8 and B8 are straightforward evolutions of last year’s models as well. And if you’d rather stick to LCD, the SK9500 goes with the Alpha 7 processor while bringing display upgrades that include an IPS panel (for better color at wide viewing angles), upgraded Nano Cell display tech and denser LED local dimming. The upgrades promise more accurate colors, deeper blacks and higher peak brightness.

LG still hasn’t outlined the pricing or release dates for these sets, but it’s safe to presume the W8 and E8 will cost a pretty penny while the SK9500 will be (relatively) affordable. All told, there’s no rush to upgrade if you scored one of LG’s higher-end TVs in the past year or two. If you’re new to the 4K game and have money to spend, though, these might be worth a glimpse.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Source: LG Newsroom

Ring adds more camera and light options to its home security line

Ring’s evolution from a smart doorbell to the biggest name in home security has reached a new milestone today. The company has announced a pair of new indoor/outdoor video cameras to better compete with its rivals, as well as a series of outdoor security lights.

Much as Ring’s policy of splitting its product lines into “pro” and “regular” editions, the Ring Stick Up Cam is now available as the Cam Elite or the “new” regular Cam. Whereas the first generation of the product was simply a button-free version of the OG Ring doorbell, the new editions are far sleeker and smaller.

You’ll struggle to spot many differences between the two, both of which pack 1080p HD video and two-way audio, letting you shout at would-be intruders. The Elite, however, requires a wall outlet or Power over Ethernet rather than batteries, since it’s also packing advanced motion sensors than its sibling.

The other announcement is Ring’s attempt to make garden lighting a little more security-focused, thanks to the recent purchase of company Mr. Beams. Ring is now offering motion-activated outdoor security lights to line your pathway, as well as step lights and spotlights for the exterior of your home.

At a glance, these initial offerings look like very slightly re-designed versions of the Mr. Beams NetBright Path Lights. We’ve already asked if people’s existing Mr. Beams hardware will work with the new Ring systems and will update this when we hear back.

Finally, Ring has revealed that its DIY home security system, which was announced back in October, will begin shipping in Spring 2018. Pricing and availability for the other devices are yet to be announced, but we’ll add the deets here when we have them.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Google Wallet and Android Pay are finally united under one brand

Google’s payment strategy has been more than a little confusing. It originally offered tap-to-pay under the Google Wallet badge, but it moved that functionality to Android Pay while turning Google Wallet into a money transfer service. Thankfully, Google knows it’s a mess and is cleaning things up. The search giant is uniting all its payment efforts under a singular Google Pay brand. Whether you’re tapping your phone at the cashier, buying a gift on the web or paying a friend for last night’s pizza, you’ll see the same name.

You’ll already see the new branding through Airbnb, Dice, Fandango, HungryHouse, Instacart and other services. Don’t be surprised if other services quickly follow suit.

In many ways, not much has changed. For now, at least, this isn’t a functional change. However, it was arguably due for a while. Whether or not you minded the Google Wallet/Android Pay split, it created an arbitrary division. In contrast, Apple Pay and Apple Pay Cash are treated as two sides of the same coin — they might work differently, but they share something in common. Google Pay may help by giving people an easier-to-understand concept.

Source: Google

Toyota introduces e-Palette, its mobile retail space

The news of CES is mobility and Japanese automaker Toyota isn’t about to be left out. At the annual consumer electronics conference the company that brought us the Prius announced its mobile marketplace, e-Palette meant to open up opportunities for businesses to create on-demand services and to “blur the lines between brick and mortar and online commerce.”

It’ll be fully electric and support autonomous driving technologies either from Toyota or from the companies that use it. It’s an open platform for ride-sharing, retail, delivery, or really anything a business can think of.

“Just think how great e-Palette will be at Burning Man,” Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor Corporation said during the press event.

Toyoda started off the press event announcing, “It’s my goal to transition Toyota from an automobile company to a mobility company.” He announced the automaker’s latest competitors, Google Apple and Facebook.

The automaker already has partners for its new mobility platform. The e-Palette Alliance includes Pizza Hut, Uber, Mazda, Amazon and Didi. It’s not too difficult to imagine an Amazon locker on wheels rolling into your neighborhood.

While this isn’t a consumer product, it does show that Toyota is thinking about how it’ll transition to a world with fewer people buying cars. Toyoda said he’s “Less concerned with getting there first, than getting it right. For me, e-Palette is one such example.”

Facebook strikes music licensing deal with Sony

Facebook has signed a deal with Sony that will let you upload videos containing its music without worrying about them being taken down, Variety reports. Users will be able to upload and share videos on Facebook, Oculus and Instagram that with music licensed from Sony/ATV Music Publishing’s vast catalog. Copyright infringement has become a big problem on the social network, and Facebook has been working hard to strike deals with music labels to avoid takedowns and fines.

Facebook recently inked a similar deal with Universal Music, but Sony is the largest music publisher in the world. With two of the three biggest services signed, it’s expected that Zuckerberg & Co. will ink a deal with the last holdout, Warner Music, soon.

“We are thrilled that in signing this agreement Facebook recognizes the value that music brings to their service and that our songwriters will now benefit from the use of their music on Facebook,” said Sony/ATV Chairman Martin Bandier. “We are looking forward to a long and prosperous relationship.”

It seemed inevitable that Facebook would seek to license music like Google’s YouTube has. In 2016, it had supposedly begun work on a tool to hunt infringing videos similar to YouTube’s Content ID system. And Bloomberg reported in September of last year that Facebook was offering publishers and labels “hundreds of millions of dollars” to okay songs for video uploads. In any case, given the size of Sony’s catalog (3 million songs), it’s now far less likely that your beach music-infused vacation video will be yanked from the site.

Source: Variety

A portrait of Earth and the Moon from 3 million miles away

Sometimes you need to step back to see the big picture, and if your subjects are 249,000 miles apart, you need to step waaay back. Luckily, the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is moving rapidly away from us and was recently just in the right position, around 3.1 million miles away, so it trained its MapCam instrument towards its former home and captured this poignant portrait of the Earth and the Moon.

NASA/Goddard and the University of Arizona also released an image (below) showing the MapCam’s field of view when it snapped the shot. OSIRIS-REx had recently received a big gravity boost from Earth, sending it on its way to the asteroid Bennu, where it will arrive later this year. On October 2nd, it was in the perfect position — about 13 times the separation between the Earth and Moon — to capture both our home planet and its orbiting pal.

OSIRIS-REx will perform several high-degree-of-difficulty feats. First it will try to scoop up organic materials from Bennu that might be precursors to life, by bouncing gently off it and firing a nitrogen burst to loosen the materials. It then must return to Earth and deliver those samples to scientists, dropping them by parachute onto the Utah desert.

It might be a good idea to get a spacecraft close to Bennu for another reason. “It is also an asteroid that could someday make a close pass or even a collision with Earth, though not for several centuries,” NASA notes. Since it’s around 492 meters (1,614 feet) across — not big enough to destroy the Earth, but big enough to cause a lot of damage — future civilizations might decide to send a rocket to either blow it up or deflect it.

As for the photo, both the Earth and Moon were captured together in three separate image taken in different color wavelengths. Those were combined and color-corrected to make the final composite, “and the moon was ‘stretched’ (brightened) to make it more easily visible,” NASA notes.

The image shows how missions like OSIRIS-REx provide multiple benefits. There are very few photos of both the Earth and Moon together, and like other shots taken of our planet from distant places, it helps us forget our hubris and remember that our planet is both tiny, unique and fragile.

“From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty,” astronaut Edgar Mitchell said shortly after his Apollo 14 mission. “You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

Source: NASA

Microsoft’s Xbox was the last great CES reveal

CES was a different show 17 years ago. In 2001, the Best of Show award went to the DataPlay disc, a postage-stamp-size memory card that held up to 500MB of data. If you can’t remember it, don’t worry — the company went out of business shortly thereafter as SD became the de facto standard. Microsoft was still the biggest tech company on the planet at that point — Apple wouldn’t release the original iPod for another nine months — and each CES began with a keynote hosted by Bill Gates.

The first 80 minutes of its 2001 keynote consisted of clunky tech that now, in some form or another, lives in Google Home or your smartphone. But then came the reveal of the original Xbox. It arrived with none of the fanfare we expect from modern tech presentations, but, unlike the Pocket PC voice-to-text demo that preceded it, the Xbox debut changed the company’s future.

For once, Microsoft was an underdog, going head-to-head against Sony, Nintendo and Sega for control of the living room. To help sell its vision, the company enlisted a veteran game developer with a penchant for flashy footwear and, of course, a pro wrestler. This is the story of that presentation, from the people who were there.

Bill Gates has become a lot of things — genius, billionaire, philanthropist, malaria’s worst enemy — but back in 2001, he was not an engaging public speaker. “For the first time, let me now unveil Xbox,” he said from the Hilton Theater’s stage. Gates then pulled a black-satin drape off a shoulder-height pedestal and there sat a big, black, vaguely X-shaped box, with a monstrously large gamepad encased in plexiglass below it.

At that point, Microsoft was more or less known for three things: the Office productivity suite, its Windows operating system and a massive antitrust lawsuit. The former pair were things you used every day, but they had as much personality as you could fit into an anthropomorphic paperclip. The latter painted the company as a mustache-twirling villain.

For the next 13 seconds, Gates stood idle with a vacant half-smile on his face, arms glued to the sides of his frumpy blue button-up, shoulders rounded over as he tried desperately to look approachable. According to people in the know, he had a bad habit of putting his hands in front of his face and tenting his fingers — “doing the ‘Mr. Burns’ thing” — which the various PR people around him had warned against doing on camera.

The audience didn’t yet know what this gargantuan new machine was capable of or how it would intrinsically change the company, but they clapped anyway for the console that would eventually cost Microsoft over $4 billion.

The original Xbox was a perfect microcosm of the CES of yore: a massively ambitious piece of tech, but no one knew how it would work or fit into their lives. At the turn of the century, the biggest TV in most houses was a 27-inch standard definition CRT display with a bubble screen, not the $4,000 rear-projection HDTV units or flatscreens we have now. Broadband wasn’t commonplace. We were used to saving game progress to memory cards or game cartridges themselves.

In that context, the Xbox felt like it came from the future. It supported 720p HDTV over component cables. It had a built-in Ethernet jack and four controller ports. It had an 8GB hard drive not only for storing game data but for playing in-game music ripped from your CD collection, too. It would hit retail 10 months later for $300, around two years after Sony’s PlayStation 2 was available. Over time, Sony added these features to the PS2 with sold-separately accessories and baked them into the PlayStation 3 five years later.

“They needed to show people that this was either worth waiting for or that [Microsoft] understood where gaming was going to go,” VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi said, “and you wanted to bet on them because you could get all this cool stuff.” Prior to VentureBeat, Takahashi chronicled the Xbox and its successor’s inceptions in his books Opening the Xbox and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked.

Enter Seamus Blackley, taking the stage to a low-rent Atari Teenage Riot ripoff song in jeans and a tailored, untucked black oxford. The mood shifted. Gates’ “geek’s geek” persona took a backseat to Blackley’s punk-rock attitude and self-deprecating humor. Suddenly, the keynote went from yawn-inducing to intensely watchable.

Blackley was part of the “rebel force” inside Microsoft that was desperately trying to overturn all the things people didn’t like about the company and make something cool. The Xbox was his and co-creator Kevin Bachus’ baby. Onstage, Blackley’s goal was to convince developers that Microsoft was listening to him and that the console would be easy to make games for.

Before becoming what he calls an “inadvertent, unwilling” spokesman for the console, Blackley was a game developer at Looking Glass Studios where he worked on System Shock and Ultima Underworld. He also was the driving force behind one of PC gaming’s biggest flops, Jurassic Park: Trespasser, essentially a broken tech demo from Dreamworks Interactive.

Despite that failure, he’d built a reputation in the game industry for his aptitude at programming game physics and working with 3D graphics. Fast forward a few years and he was helping comb Gates’ hair in the green room before the pair revealed the console.

Blackley said every disaster scenario was running through his mind; you could see it racing across his face as he anxiously stalked the stage. There was a chance the demos would break or, worse, that the prototype console wouldn’t even turn on.

“At that point, I’m feeling unbelievably tense because I’m looking at Bill as the guy who had potentially just spent several billion dollars on an idea that … I thought of on an airplane and told my friends about. And that if it doesn’t work, this man’s going to kill me,” he recalled. “I’d gone from being nervous and awestruck by the man to being genuinely fearful of having led the company down a multibillion-dollar rabbit hole.”

To reassure the developers in the audience that he and his team knew what they were doing, he donned a pair of bright red shoes. Using the specific hue in games was off-limits at the time because it and a few others would overdrive the color circuit on NTSC TVs. Wearing them onstage was a subtle indicator to the audience of 100 or so “super-important” people who he needed to make titles that his team knew the subtleties of game development, he said.

“That was really a thing I did for game developers because the idea of Microsoft doing a game console was incredibly unpopular still,” he said. “The disdain and hate for Microsoft products, being the evil empire and all, the antitrust [lawsuit], were big things I had to contend with to get people to make games for the console. So I wore ‘illegal red’ shoes and told people I intentionally did that.”

Did it work?

“I don’t know that anybody who is skeptical ever has that moment and says it, right?” he posited. “But what happens is people will show up and make jokes about it and you can talk to them. And then they’ll take a look [at your project].”

To show his success at convincing developers up to that point, Blackley rolled a sizzle reel of game designers breathlessly talking about how the Xbox would unlock gaming’s true potential. “The constraints normally that we have to put up with with consoles, we’ve been freed from, really,” Herman Serano from the Malice team gushed.

“The life that’s in Oddworld is going to manifest itself more clearly,” series creator Lorne Lanning said over a cheesy techno beat while a neon-green X traced behind him.

“You’re gonna see musculature bulging like you’ve never seen before,” Mike Rubinelli of WWF Raw is War boasted. “You’ll probably be able to see veins pulsating if you want. You might even see somebody get goosebumps if the game calls for it. It really does represent the next generation of gaming.”

Not all of these pie-in-the-sky pronouncements came to pass, of course. The Xbox might have been the most powerful, but by the time it was in stores, Sony had an insurmountable 25-million-unit lead. Third-party developers created games for the most popular console’s specifications, and as such many of the advanced hardware features Blackley worked so hard to include were unseen outside of internally-developed games like the ones he was about to demo.

Blackley picked two titles to demonstrate the Xbox’s power: Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee and Malice. Both showed off just how advanced the Xbox was compared to the PlayStation 2 in terms of graphical prowess and fidelity. They’re hard to watch now, mainly because of the low-res video capture that was available at the time. But in person, the lighting, real-time shadows and sheer amount of creatures onscreen got people excited.

“Even though the [hardware] announcements were expected, the demos were so impressive that they got everybody really riled up,” Takahashi said.

The demos were only using about a fifth of the console’s total power, according to Blackley.

One of CES’s time-honored traditions is tech companies rolling out the biggest celebrity possible to show how cool their brand is by association. Microsoft’s keynote in 2001 was no different.

Pro wrestling’s popularity was at a fever pitch. Commercial breaks during weekly Monday night broadcasts from the World Wrestling Federation (neé World Wrestling Entertainment) and World Championship Wrestling were dominated by video-game ads. Blackley forged a partnership with the now-defunct THQ to produce an exclusive WWF game for the Xbox.

“I really wanted to demo this title very badly, but I didn’t want to do it just on the fifth-powered system,” Blackley said before walking offstage. “So I arranged to bring a 100 percent power Xbox demo system. I want to show you that now.”

Cut to Rocky “The Rock” Maivia’s WWF entrance video and theme song playing in the same venue where Elvis Presley performed 636 consecutive soldout shows. The actor we now know as Dwayne Johnson makes his way from crowd to stage bathed in a sea of colored lights.

Johnson never left character. He was a hulking superhero-size human in a designer suit and shades who was used to arenas full of wrestling fans hanging off his every syllable when he took the mic in his underwear. The self-described “most electrifying man in sports entertainment” spouted signature catchphrases, spoke about himself in third-person and never took his sunglasses off as he bantered with Gates onstage.

If Blackley sounded excited during his intro, though, it was a ruse. The marketing team apparently came up with the idea and told him about it afterward. “I may have actually been super-irritated by it and written nasty emails,” he said. “I actually don’t remember. But it occurs to me that I feel like I may have done that.”

There’s another wrinkle: THQ provided Johnson as a favor to Microsoft, and in those last five minutes of the keynote, Gates never thanked the publisher for that onstage. According to Takahashi, THQ CEO Brian Farrell said, “I scratched their back, and mine is still itching.”

The reveal transcended CES. Microsoft used its position as a broad tech company to compete on a playing field where, at the time, Sony and Nintendo couldn’t. That keynote was a “bully pulpit,” in Blackley’s words. While the Xbox only occupied a fraction of Redmond’s stage time, it signaled that the company knew how to talk to gamers and finally made Microsoft’s ambitions to take over your living room real. Like so many CES reveals, though, it was ahead of its time.

The Xbox went on sale November 15th, 2001. It went on to sell 24 million units to the PS2’s estimated 150 million. Facing mounting losses on the hardware (mostly due to the cost of hard drives), Microsoft effectively killed the console four years later when it released the Xbox 360. That console beat the PS3 to market by a year, giving Microsoft an advantage it hadn’t enjoyed previously. The Xbox 360 would go on to sell 84 million units, leading sales for most of that console generation.

“It isn’t uncommon to see something released at CES that, at that time, doesn’t make sense, but then four or five years later comes to market and it’s a huge hit,” Consumer Technology Association Vice President Karen Chupka said.

Gaming took a backseat at CES when Microsoft bowed out of the trade show in 2012, and while Sony has hosted a few keynotes, the PlayStation has never been the focus. Maybe that’s why the 2001 address was so special.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Our first look at Samsung’s massive 146-inch 4K MicroLED TV

Last night, Samsung unveiled its vision for the future of the living room: The Wall, a 146-inch 4K TV made up of MicroLED panels. Yes, Samsung is skipping OLED entirely as it moves beyond its “QLED” LCD technology. The company claims The Wall has all of the benefits of OLED, without any of the downsides, like the potential for burn-in and worries about shortened lifespans. Since each pixel is self-emitting, there’s no backlight like there is with LCDs, and that means it can deliver brighter whites and pure blacks like OLED.

In person, The Wall doesn’t look much different than a very large OLED set. It’s astoundingly bright, colors are rich and vibrant, and the black levels are indeed inky dark. Samsung describes the TV as a scalable product, which can fit almost any size you can imagine (its technology comes from Samsung’s 34-foot cinema display). It’s not just a single screen, it’s actually made up a series of square MicroLED panels. That allows for the size flexibility, but I also noticed that you can easily make out those panels when you’re looking at The Wall up close. When it’s off, it almost looks like a checkerboard. In the image below, you can see that pattern where the flash bounces off the screen.

Devindra Hardawar/AOL

Samsung isn’t commenting on if that checkerboard issue will apply to the final product. In fact, it’s saving most details for a press event this March. There’s no doubt MicroLED is impressive, especially as consumers demand ever-larger sets. But I also can’t imagine that The Wall will be something most people can actually afford over the next few years.