Author name: Rejus Almole

Want easy-to-set-up gadget security? It’s not going to be cheap

Office Tech / /

The proliferation of connected gadgets in the home means there’s a lot more for the average person to worry about.

It’s not just your phone and computer that need the latest security updates. You’ll have to stay on top of your connected television, your smart refrigerator, the security cameras mounted around your home, your voice assistant speakers, your smart mirrors, your talking toilet and whatever new gadget the tech overlords spew out.

Welcome to the unintended hassle of the internet of things.

“If you have a lot of IoT devices, you’re essentially an IT manager,” Gary Davis, McAfee’s vice president of global consumer marketing, said last month at CES 2018.

It’s telling that many security firms were at the massive gadget expo to hawk their services. CES is typically a place for companies to show off physical goods that people can buy in stores in the near future. The pitch for security as a product itself — like a new television or washing machine — underscores the growing interest and need for better protection, a notion reinforced by the wave of cyberattacks in 2017.

Keeping everything safe sounds like a hassle, but security companies are willing to make it easy — for a price.

Nearly every company I spoke with at the show boasted about how their products were the solution to looming IoT risks. But prices for that benefit ranged from $99 to $249, in some cases as an annual payment. While technically you can do it yourself, many consumers are willing to accept the premium for protection.

“It used to be hard selling security to the mass market,” said Sameer Nayar, the co-founder of Cujo Smart Firewall. “Not anymore. If it’s simple, it definitely helps sales.”

Cujo is one of the many “plug and play” security measures I spotted during CES — the sales pitch being that it’s simple enough that your grandparents or kids can figure it out. With Cujo, you don’t have to tweak your settings and manually run an antivirus scan. The firewall device plugs into your router and is supposed to protect everything that’s connected to the network. It warns you if any connected smart devices are outdated, and blocks out malicious traffic.

Like many security companies at CES, Cujo is selling itself on simplicity. The firewall costs $249 and has no subscription fees. It looks like an air freshener with LED eyes, almost as if it’s a cute assistant by your bedside table.

That’s part of Cujo’s sales approach too. Nayar said the company doesn’t want security to be this scary obstacle for people, so it gave its device a friendly robot look.

“The more barriers you can remove, the easier it becomes to sell,” he said.

Doomsday scenario

When you’re expecting 20.4 billion IoT devices on the market, you need to start dumbing down security for people to embrace it.

In 2016, the Mirai botnet, a massive network of hacked devices, caused a massive internet outage by using thousands of outdated cameras and DVRs. A year later, security experts raised concerns about the Reaper botnet, which had the potential to hijack up to 2 million IoT devices.

F-Secure, a security company based in Finland, warned that if IoT devices aren’t fixed now, we’ll be headed to a “dystopian future.”

Want easy-to-set-up gadget security? It’s not going to be cheap Read More »

HTC Vive Pro

Gaming/VR Tech / /

Status: Released and available

The Vive Pro was a VR system that needed a high-end PC and a cable attaching the two together. But as an update to 2016’s HTC Vive, the Pro had a sharper, more higher-resolution display, built-in headphones and a redesigned headstrap.

In March, HTC announced the Vive Pro would go on sale on April 5 for $799. But that price only included the headset, not the controllers or base stations. If you wanted those required accessories, a controller cost $130 separately, and each base station is $135.

HTC later offered a Vive Pro Starter Kit bundle that included the headset, two first-generation controllers and two first-gen base stations for $1,099. There was also a Vive Pro Full Kit with second-gen controllers that briefly went on sale during this year’s Black Friday.

HTC Vive Pro Read More »

Colorful Sounds from Razer

Office Tech / /

Also new from Razer is a trio of PC speaker sets, called the Nommo, Nommo Chroma and Nommo Pro. The first two are 2.0 PC speaker systems with three-inch drivers. The Chroma version adds, you guessed it, Razer’s Chroma lighting system. Those will be $99 and $149 in the US (converts to AU$60, £35 and AU$189, £109). 

More interesting is the Nommo Pro. This $499 system (roughly AU$635, £365) is THX certified (it helps that Razer owns THX), adds a separate tweeter on top of each driver and a standalone subwoofer. The Nommo and Nommo Chroma are available now, while the Pro version doesn’t have a set release date yet. 

Colorful Sounds from Razer Read More »

LG’s rollable OLED TV

Future Tech / /

Perhaps one of the most eye-catching demos on the show floor was an LG 4K TV. The 64-inch TV had a flexible, paper-thin display and it rolled into a tube that could fit inside a box the size of a sound bar. The TV was an iteration of a smaller, 18-inch TV that showed up at CES 2016.

The rollable TV was more of a “proof of concept” and LG didn’t offer any details about its pricing, availability or even product name. It seems as if not much has changed on the consumer end since then. As of December, LG stated that are “no updates at this point” about the TV. Bummer.

LG’s rollable OLED TV Read More »

How Intel creates its dazzling drone light shows

Gaming/VR Tech / /

After the lights went dark in the Monte Carlo resort’s Park Theater, a buzzing army of 110 small drones with flickering red lights started to float up to the ceiling from offstage.

While Kygo‘s dreamy pop song “Stargazing” played, the drones pulled together into pulsing, swirling clouds that reached into the audience, at times forming rotating stars or shimmering sheets of light.

That was the finale of Intel’s keynote event at the CES tech show last month in Las Vegas, where CEO Brian Krzanich introduced to the world these hand-sized Shooting Star Mini drones, the next generation of drones Intel’s made specifically for drone light shows.

The chipmaker made a splash with its bigger sister Shooting Star drones at last year’s Super Bowl, with an array of 300 drones turning themselves into an American flag in the sky behind Lady Gaga during a pretaped portion of the halftime show. The new younger sibling Mini drones were built to perform light shows indoors, part of Intel’s plans to bring this new form of entertainment to many more places this year.

“This is a new way to tell storytelling in the sky, where you have a blank canvas, like a night canvas in the sky,” Natalie Cheung, Intel’s general manager of drone light shows, told me a few hours before the keynote presentation. “It’s sort of like digital fireworks.”

Now playing: Intel’s drone show turns Las Vegas into a real bright-light… 2:32

Cheung said she sees the light-show drones as offering a lot more than some passing distraction at a football game or concert. Intel plans to apply what it’s learning from light shows to industrial uses for its other drones, like coordinated drone search parties and inspections of cell towers. More broadly, Cheung views the light shows as a way of introducing drones to the general public in a more positive way, as a balance against controversies like delivery drones potentially taking away people’s jobs.

“We’re able to change how people are looking at drones,” she said. “They see it as a fascination.”

Merging tech and art

Cheung joined Intel in 2011 after graduating that year from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science. After a rotational program for engineers, she landed an opportunity as a research analyst for the CEO.

That led to a chat in the hallway with Krzanich in 2015 about using 100 drones to create the Intel logo in front of a company building.

“We didn’t know the answer at that time, but said OK, I think we can do this. What do we need to do to make this possible,” she said.

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A close-up look at an Intel Shooting Star drone.Ben Fox Rubin/CNET

In November of that year, Cheung helped organize a team in Germany that flew 100 Hummingbird drones made by Ascending Technology, snagging a Guinness World Record for the most drones that were airborne simultaneously.

“I realized there that we were just scratching the surface and we had just gotten into something that was much bigger than I expected,” Cheung said with a Shooting Star drone sitting by her during our conversation.

After the Germany test run, Cheung took over the new light-show team and helped pulled off four international shows using 100 drones in 2016. That year, Intel also acquired Ascending Technologies and later introduced its own Shooting Star drone.

The hardware of a Shooting Star is fairly simple. The drone weighs about as much as a volleyball, is made of foam and plastic, and carries an LED payload that can flash red, green, blue or white. It doesn’t have cameras. The Shooting Star, flying outdoors, is guided by GPS, and the Mini drones use a similar tech called the Intel Indoor Location System. And, no, neither drone is available for sale to the public.

Intel built software to program groups of hundreds of these drones that can be operated by a single drone pilot, helping it create intricate moving shapes and logos for festivals, sporting events and movie premieres all over the world.

Each show can take months to plan, needing to coordinate the aerial animations, local permits and on-site preparation. To ensure safety, the drones are programmed with two geofences to protect the audience and with multiple emergency protocols, Cheung said.

How Intel creates its dazzling drone light shows Read More »

Ovie Smarterware lets Alexa manage your leftovers

Kitchen Tech / /

Ovie Smarterware will let you know if you need to hurry up and eat that spaghetti before it goes bad. Smarterware is basically a Bluetooth button you can stick on your container of leftovers. Using it is supposedly as simple as sticking it to your container when you scoop in your leftovers, and telling Alexa what they are. Ovie’s database will take care of the rest.

Ovie
Ovie Smarterware buttons can stick on your existing food containers or be used with Ovie’s own bag clips and plastic containers.Joshua Goldman/CNET

The Smarterware button made its debut at this year’s CES, and the Chicago-based startup is now launching a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of shipping it in February. 

There are also specialized containers and bag clips to go along with the button, but these are just holders for the tech. The button is the star.

Smarterware will work with both Amazon’s assistant Alexa and Google’s assistant (just called Google Assistant). If you have a smart speaker with either assistant (an Amazon Echo or a Google Home, for example), you can hit the button and tell your speaker what’s in your container. Alexa and Google will communicate with Ovie’s cloud, which has a database supposedly containing all common foods and how long they tend to last in the fridge.

Pressing the button sends a Bluetooth signal to your phone, and Alexa or Google will talk to Ovie to match that particular button with the food you just identified. If you don’t have a smart speaker, you can just hit the button, then use the Ovie app to identify your food.

Once you’ve matched your button to a container of leftovers, Ovie will track the elapsed time, and a light ring on the button will slowly change from green to yellow to red as it gets closer to when you need to throw it out.

Tracking your leftovers with Alexa or Google sounds cool, and I’d also imagine the colors of the button will help you prioritize at a glance when you look at the fridge. A yellow light means you better eat up soon — and you’ll get a phone alert so you don’t forget about it.

The functionality is similar to what we’ve seen on the Samsung Family Hub fridge, but instead of spending thousands for a new appliance, a three-pack of buttons will cost $90 when Smarterware hits the market. The price converts to roughly £67 and AU$119.

Ovie Smarterware lets Alexa manage your leftovers Read More »

Short Story Dispenser shows print is not dead

Future Tech / /

At any given moment our phones have access to nearly all of the world’s knowledge, literature, history and science. Despite such rich resources, many of us opt to kill time by scrolling through social media, messages or random videos. The French company Short Edition is out to change how we spend our time waiting with its Short Story Dispenser.

Inside a conference room at the Mandalay Bay hotel, I got to see the Short Story Dispenser in action as part of CES. It is a slender waist-high cylinder with an illuminated plexiglass sign on top that simply reads, “Select your reading time.” It would easily look at home in an interactive exhibit at a museum.

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The machine has three buttons that allow you to choose the length of the short story you want to read.Short Edition

The top of the dispenser is adorned with three shiny metallic buttons labeled “1 min.,” “3 min.” and “5 min.” You press the button for the length of story you want and within moments an original short story is printed on a piece of thick paper about the size of a long receipt. Best of all, the story is free.

The idea of a machine that serves up books or magazines is nothing new. But the appeal of the Short Story Dispenser is how its simple premise immediately captures your curiosity. There is an unexpected delight interacting with the dispenser. The real charm comes from the stories. After I read the story that was printed, I immediately handed it to a co-worker who in-turn read it and shared it with someone else.

The publisher Short Edition envisioned the machine as a way to share the work of its authors to a wider audience. It has been in use in France since 2016 where it can be found in train stations, airports and hospitals.

Watch this: Short Story Dispenser prints you a great read with a… 1:06

Loïc Giraut with Short Edition explained that the hope for the device was to save reading by bringing literature to unexpected places. It’s being sold to business owners and governments. The Short Story Dispenser accesses curated stories from Short Edition’s platform via the internet. In France, that platform includes over 85,000 short stories. It’s also worth noting that authors get paid every time one of their stories is printed.

Short Edition curates its stories for the audience where the dispenser is located. For example, the Columbus School District in Ohio bought dispensers for elementary schools and the stories it prints are from a catalog of children’s literature.

Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola was so impressed with the Short Story Dispenser that he ordered one for his Cafe Zoetrope in San Francisco. He has since become an investor in the company.

“A short story is a very good basis for a movie because a short story you read in one sitting and a movie you see in one sitting,” said Coppola.

The Short Story Dispenser is in the process of rolling out to the US this year. But until you encounter one in-person, you can check out some of the stories on Short Edition’s website.

Short Story Dispenser shows print is not dead Read More »

Workhorse W-15 electric pickup truck

Auto Tech / /

The pickup truck is the best-selling vehicle platform in America, but no EV options have existed, until now. At CES, the Workhorse Group showed off an almost-production version of the W-15, its electric pickup truck.

Watch this: Workhorse shows off W-15 electric pickup at CES 1:10

The W-15 can drive the first 80 miles just on electricity, but there is a gasoline generator to continuously charge the battery for an additional 310 miles of range. The W-15 should scoot to 60 miles per hour in 5.5 seconds, thanks to the 480 horsepower.

For now, it’s based off a Chevrolet Silverado, but the chassis is straight from Workhorse, featuring an independent rear suspension and all-wheel drive. There are a few driver’s aids like emergency braking and lane departure warning, but blind-spot monitoring and adaptive cruise control are not in the queue for the moment.

There is a 7.2-kilowatt power exporter that can power tools without the truck running. Payload is decent at 2,200 pounds and the W-15 can tow 5,000 pounds, the same as the Honda Ridgeline.

Workhorse CEO Steve Burns says the W-15 is “designed to do anything a Ford F-150 can do.” That’s quite a bold statement considering most F-150 models can tow more, many have more payload capacity and the F-150 is available with adaptive cruise control and a swanky trailer backup assist technology.

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Bulky from every angle.Workhorse Group

Workhorse will deliver a fleet order of 5,300 units at the end of 2018, with consumer orders coming in the first half of 2019. The W-15 will start at $52,500 but there’s a $7,500 tax credit as well as local incentives. 

Workhorse W-15 electric pickup truck Read More »

NeoFect’s NeoMano robotic glove

Gaming/VR Tech / /

Developed by a South Korean company, the NeoMano was a leather glove featuring titanium wires and a controller. It was designed for people with spinal cord injuries who experienced hand paralysis, and aimed to improve their flexibility and dexterity.

After CES, the glove went through another prototype iteration and further patient tests, until it landed on a final version model in August. By October, NeoFect launched an IndieGoGo campaign to raise money, reaching 100 percent of its goal on Dec. 10.

The glove will fully retail for $1,999, but interested buyers have until Dec. 28 to back the IndieGoGo project and receive a NeoMano glove at 80 percent off the price (that’s $399). Neofect reports that it will deliver the NeoMano by summer 2019.

NeoFect’s NeoMano robotic glove Read More »

Lovebox is a better gift than flowers

Office Tech / /

Valentine’s Day can be a divisive holiday: There are people who love to celebrate it and others who dread being alone for it. One gadget out to change that is an ingenious digital/analog wooden box called the Lovebox. It’s built for sharing love and positive thoughts whether it’s Valentine’s Day or not.

Of course you can always let someone know you love them by sending flowers or taking them out to dinner, but those ways aren’t that unique. There are also a number of ways to use our phones to sends texts, photos and videos expressing our feelings, but those messages can get lost in the flood of daily communication we send and receive. That’s why a French company at CES launched the Lovebox.

The idea is simple. The Lovebox sits in your home and connects to the internet via Wi-Fi. A loved one sends you a message with the Lovebox app available on iOSand Android. On the front of the box is an itsy-bitsy heart. When the box receives the message, the heart spins like a pinwheel.

There is something precious about a tiny little heart on a small wooden cube spinning in silence. It is such a simple hallmark to symbolize that someone is thinking of you.

The heart spins until you lift the lid to read the message.Lovebox

If you lift the lid, there’s a diminutive screen where you can read the message or see the drawing that your loved one sent. When you open the lid it feels like you discovered a secret message.

Everything about this box is endearing and unassuming: The size, the curved corners, the silent way the heart spins and the black-and-white display. It is refreshing to see how Lovebox integrates messaging into something so discreet. There’s no loud notifications or lights to get your attention — just a palm-sized spinning heart.

The Lovebox costs $99, which converts to £70 and AU$125, and can be purchased on the Lovebox website. If you are trying to buy one and have it shipped before Valentine’s Day, you need to place the order by 12 a.m. PT Sunday Feb. 11. If you’re in the US, it is recommended you order one by 12 a.m. PT Thursday Feb. 8.

What to expect from the big screens of 2018: From OLED to QLED to Micro LED, CES is the place where screen time is absolutely friggin’ huge. Here’s a peek.

CES 2018: CNET’s complete coverage of tech’s biggest show.

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The Zeus Arc Vaporizer

Future Tech / /

Today we take a first look at the new Zeus Arc vaporizer! Not the brands first release, they’ve also put out units like the Zeus Smite+ and neat gadgets like the Zeus Iceborn.

We do an in-depth analysis to really see what’s behind the automotive inspired design. With a gold heatsink and vapor path, haptic feedback, internal accelerometer and other neat features, it seems to be a pretty solid device on paper. Check out what we have to say about the Zeus Arc here in our review!

The Hardware


The Zeus Arc is engineered in Germany providing a robust yet sleek build which reminds us of many of the high-end cars that come out of Germany. The Arc is actually a bit smaller than we first expected! Fitting comfortably and snugly in the hand, the ergonomic lines make it nice to handle and hold. The hard-coat aluminum chassis feels sturdy though not too heavy either while giving it a clean and high-end feel to it.

The Zeus Arc Vaporizer Read More »

Beddit Sleep Monitor

Gaming/VR Tech / /

Get better insight into your sleep habits when you have the Beddit Sleep Monitor. Measuring just 2mm thick, this ultra-smart pad actually tracks the sleep for up to two people. Simply slide Beddit under your mattress and receive sleep analysis right on your iOS device. Beddit tracks everything from your sleep time to heart rate as well as your breathing and snoring.

[ Learn More About Beddit Sleep Monitor ]

Beddit Sleep Monitor Read More »