Dec 20
The reality star is again facing claims of cultural appropriation.
Dec 20
Coral is a company that wants to “simplify the personal care space through smart automation,” and they’ve raised $4.3 million to get it done. Their first goal? An at-home, fully automated machine for painting your nails. Stick a finger in, press down, wait a few seconds and you’ve got a fully painted and dried nail. More than once in our conversations, the team referred to the idea as a “Keurig coffee machine, but for nails.”
It’s still early days for the company. While they’ve got a functional machine (pictured above), they’re quite clear about it being a prototype.
As such, they’re still staying pretty hush hush about the details, declining to say much about how it actually works. They did tell me that it paints one finger at a time, taking about 10 minutes to go from bare nails to all fingers painted and dried. To speed up drying time while ensuring a durable paint job, it’ll require Coral’s proprietary nail polish — so don’t expect to be able to pop open a bottle of nail polish and pour it in. Coral’s polish will come in pods (so the Keurig comparison is particularly fitting), which the user will be able to buy individually or get via subscription. Under the hood is a camera and some proprietary computer vision algorithms, allowing the machine to paint the nail accurately without requiring manual nail cleanup from the user after the fact.
Also still under wraps — or, more accurately, not determined yet — is the price. While Coral co-founder Ramya Venkateswaran tells me that she expects it to be a “premium device,” they haven’t nailed down an exact price just yet.
While we’ve seen all sorts of nail painting machines over the years (including ones that can do all kinds of wild art, like this one we saw at CES earlier this year), Coral says its system is the only one that works without requiring the user to first prime their nails with a base coat or clear coat it after. All you need here is a bare fingernail.
Coral’s team is currently made up of eight people — mostly mechanical, chemical and software engineers. Both co-founders, meanwhile, have backgrounds in hardware; Venkateswaran previously worked as a product strategy manager at Dolby, where she helped launch the Dolby Conference Phone. Her co-founder, Bradley Leong, raised around $800,000 on Kickstarter to ship Brydge (one of the earliest takes on a laptop-style iPad keyboard) back in 2012 before becoming a partner at the seed-stage venture fund Tandem Capital. It was during some industrial hardware research there, he tells me, when he found “the innovation that this machine is based off of.”
Vankateswaran tells me the team has raised $4.3 million to date from CrossLink Capital, Root Ventures, Tandem Capital and Y Combinator . The company is part of Y Combinator’s ongoing Winter 2020 class, so I’d expect to hear more about them as this batch’s demo day approaches in March of next year.
So what’s next? They’ll be working on turning the prototype into a consumer-ready device, and plan to spend the next few months running a small beta program (which you can sign up for here.)
Dec 20
As per the recent Bloomberg report, it looks like Apple has a secret team working to launch satellites to beam data to its devices.
In a nutshell, it is safe to assume that Apple is considering to improve the wireless network connectivity features on its devices while going up a notch from its competitors.
Of course, nothing’s certain for now – but if the report is to be believed, Apple is exploring ways with which they can beam data (like Internet connectivity) to its devices.
It is still unclear what exactly are the devices they are working on it for.
The project is a solid work in progress with goals for results within the next five years. However, the project can be abandoned as well – as Bloomberg reports.
Reportedly, the work could be a preparation phase for its next-gen wireless technology. Even though we do not have an idea of its usefulness – it will be definitely something interesting to keep an eye out for.
Recently, the company has also hired additional employees from aerospace and wireless data delivery fields. So, that definitely hints that they could have a secret dedicated team for the reported project.
For now, we should take the report with a pinch of salt while waiting for some official information in the coming years.
Apple Has A Secret Team Working To Launch Satellites Within 5 Years , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Dec 20
Dec 20
Dec 20
Mapping specialist HERE has found itself two new investors, with current investors including Audi, BMW, and Mercedes shuffling to accommodate Mitsubishi and NTT. Formerly known as Navteq, HERE was acquired from Nokia back in 2015 and has been working on not only digital mapping but services for future autonomous vehicles. In 2015, it was Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler … Continue reading
Dec 20
This week the folks at Google released a version of Google Calendar which flips the switch for integration with Google Tasks. This is not the first we’ve heard of said integration – in fact it’s a long time coming. This is the first time the system integration has been made available in live code – you might even be able … Continue reading
Dec 20
Throughout this console generation, Microsoft has put a heavy focus on backwards compatibility. These days, the Xbox One can play a lot of games from the Xbox 360 and even some from the original Xbox. All of that work into building out backwards compatibility won’t be lost in the jump to the next generation, which is good news for those … Continue reading
Dec 20
The new Motorola Razr, rebooting the iconic flip phone as a modern smartphone with a foldable display, is being delayed, the company has confirmed today. Revealed in November, the Android clamshell was originally intended to go up for preorder on December 26, and then ship early in the new year. Now, however, Motorola is changing all that. In a statement … Continue reading
Dec 20
We might be just over a month away from Star Trek: Picard, but now we can while away the wait with a short, but oh so sweet new look at the series—one that gives us tiny new hits at the familiar threats Jean-Luc Picard faces in his latest mission, as well as a reminder of the past that haunts him.
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