How would you like to get your hands on a rechargeable insole that can be used to heat your feet and track your steps? You can link up to Digitsole via Bluetooth and use an Android or iOS app to adjust the temperature of your feet (separately if necessary). The insoles will also track your steps and tell you how many calories you’ve burned. This first caught our eye last year when there was a successful Kick starter campaign that brought in more than double the $40k of funding it requested. Clearly a lot of people think it’s a genius idea, but at $200 a pair we’re not so sure.
Wednesday, 18 March 2015
Sony Symphonic Light
Here’s a bedside lamp from Sony that’s designed to look like an old lantern. It doesn’t just contain an LED bulb inside, there’s also a speaker so you can stream music to it. Sound and light are remotely controlled through an app on your smartphone. Is this a clever design to help render our technology invisible, or a pointless union of lamp and speaker? If you don’t like the fixture there’s an LED bulb speaker, too. No word on pricing or availability just yet.
Belty(Smart belt loosens buckle when you've eaten too much)
Imagine a motorized belt that adjusts to your body when you sit down, or extends itself as your gut expands during a marathon eating session. French company Emiota has realized the dream, but it doesn’t end there because Belty can also track your waistline and measure your activity. Alongside the tiny motors there’s an accelerometer and a gyroscope. We’re told this will be a premium product, so expect a high price tag. But do we need one? You could argue that a standard belt is already pretty good at telling you when you’re getting fat via notch technology.
Fitness and activity trackers come in many shapes and sizes. Some you wear on your wrist; others you stick in your ears; and some you clip onto your belt. Emotia's prototype activity tracker actually is a belt; or more specifically, a belt buckle called Belty. As you'd expect, it measures steps like every other tracker, and connects to your phone via Bluetooth to feed this data into an app, which acts as a virtual fitness coach. You can also set it to vibrate when you've been sedentary for too long and, more importantly, it can keep tabs on your changing waist measurement, which can be a good indicator of your risk of developing weight-related conditions. What I've described so far is all well and good, but forget that, because this belt buckle is also motorized, and capable of tightening and loosening itself to keep you as comfortable as possible at all times.
After listening to a lengthy disclaimer from an Emotia rep, explaining this is very much an in-development product (and not to judge it too harshly because of that fact), I removed my belt and replaced it with Belty. Having adjusted it appropriately, I was instructed to double-tap the buckle to lock in the tightness setting, and because I didn't have any food to expand my stomach with, I did the next best thing: I sat down. As soon as the pressure on the buckle increased, as it naturally does when you compress into a chair, the motor kicked in and loosened it until the belt reached the same tightness level as it had been when I was standing up. Rising again, the whirring began, and it tightened itself up once more. The movement is slight, but it's easy to feel this "smart belt" at work, and I was suitably impressed, not to mention comfortable (and still wearing pants).
Belty is still at the early prototype stage, and needs significant shrinking before it can become a commercial product, but Emotia's confident it can build an inconspicuous and desirable buckle by the end of 2015. Eat your heart out McFly.
SleepIQ kids bed
This is a bed for your child that tracks their sleep, sports a remote control night light, and alerts you when they decide to get up. It could truly be genius. As any sleep-deprived parent will attempt to tell you, as their weary head slumps repeatedly into their coffee, getting your kids into a regular sleeping pattern can feel like endless torture. There’s a safety-conscious under bed light that comes on when they get up, a reward system for sleeping through, and even a monster detector. The whole thing syncs with an iOS app and it will cost you $1,000.
Bionic Bird
For just $120 you can have a small bionic bird of your own and control it from your smartphone. It has a foam body, and carbon fiber tail and wings, and it flies just like a real bird by flapping them really fast. It even comes with a Turbo-Charge egg. Apparently, real birds are attracted to it and there are plans for gesture control and cameras down the line. Right now it’s ideal for tormenting cats and mail carriers.
Petcube (Petcube Raises $1.1 Million to Let Owners Interact With Pets Remotely)
Do you miss your cat when you’re at work? For just $200 you can snag a Petcube. It’s a camera with two-way audio, and a built-in laser. It hooks up to your home Wi-Fi and works through an iOS or Android app. You can see and talk to your pet from anywhere, and play with them, sort of, by using the laser. If you’re too lazy to play with your pet manually, you can set a “play schedule” each day. Finally, you can also share access to your Petcube and play with other people’s pets, which is kind of creepy.
EDITED :-
Pets that stay home alone too much can get depressed or out of shape due to a lack of interaction with humans.
But a startup called Petcube Inc. has raised $1.1 million in seed funding to keep pets happy and healthy with hardware and apps, the company announced.
AVentures Capital and Almaz Capital co-led the seed investment in the San Francisco-based company, with participation from SOSVentures, Mint.com co-founder and CTO David Michaels and Nick Bilogorskiy, who was a former chief malware researcher for Facebook Inc.
Earlier, the company raised $250,000 in funding on Kickstarter, graduated from theHaxlr8r hardware startup accelerator and raised $70,000 from angel investors.
The company’s flagship product, the Petcube Camera, lets “pet parents” remotely watch over, talk to and even play with their animals. It is a Wi-Fi enabled, wide-angle camera controlled through Petcube’s iOS or Android mobile apps, which are free to download.
Unlike other connected cameras–such as Dropcam, Canary and the Motorola Scout pet monitor–the Petcube Camera contains a smartphone-controlled laser pointer. Pet owners can use it to send their cats or dogs running around a room.
Petcube also functions as a social network and media source. Users can give friends limited or permanent access to look in on and play with their pets. They can also submit and discover funny animal photos and videos, such as the company’s “pet of the day” content, on the app.
Investors expect Petcube to use its seed money for hiring, sales and marketing and distribution in the U.S., especially expanding online sales and forming strong relationships with brick-and-mortar retailers, says Daniil Stolyarov, investment director at Almaz Capital.
The startup’s co-founder and CEO Yaroslav Azhnyuk says eventually, he aims to have the Petcube to be on the shelves places people buy consumer electronics or pet products, including Apple , Best Buy , Petco and PetSmart stores. But his company will have to scale up strategically.
It is a challenge for any hardware startup to maintain price-competitiveness and quality, given that customers’ expectations are set by the likes of Apple Inc. and GoPro Inc., the CEO said.
SOSVentures Partner and early Petcube backer Cyril Ebersweiler said the company should be able to hit $3 million in annual sales before raising another round.
Petcube doesn’t need as much venture capital as other hardware startups in Silicon Valley, he said, because it maintains a strong technical team in Kiev and already has a solid product offering and sales.
AVentures’ Managing Partner Yevgen Sysoyev expects Petcube will raise a Series A round within a year. His firm specializes in backing tech startups that originated in Eastern Europe, but that are poised for globalization.
According to a Senior Analyst for Euromonitor International, Jared Koerten, the outlook for pet tech, an emerging category in the U.S., is strong even if these devices aren’t yet mainstream.
“Pet-related social media activity,” he said, is already booming, and although you “don’t see electronics besides automated feeders taking up a lot of shelf space in major pet retailers yet,” such products likely will grow popular among pet owners, following human “wearables and smart home device” trends.
The dog and cat population in the U.S. alone is expected to grow by 1% a year through 2019, and the U.S. market for pet products excluding food exceeds $22 billion annually, according to Euromonitor International estimates.
Budgee robot
The age of the robot servant starts now. Budgee is designed to carry your bags and follow you at a distance of your choosing. You can control it using your smartphone or tablet and there’s an off switch on its head, just in case. It’s also supposed to be able to avoid obstacles, and can carry up to 50lbs and move at four miles per hour. At $1,400 you can guess why the Kickstarter failed, but Budgee is pressing ahead regardless. You can also customize its eye color and voice tracks, though we have no idea how to handle his inevitable robotic rise to consciousness and subsequent existential crisis.
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