Hasta La Gadget!

You’ve been played before. You’re vulnerable and nervous about opening up again. It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve been lied to.

Back in 2011 we heard rumors that the iPad would be graced with Office’s presence in 2012, and shortly thereafter we saw an actual photo of Office on an iPad. But… nothing. And then some more nothing. Until today.

The company is finally letting Office 365 smooch up against the iPad. Steve Ballmer today revealed at a Gartner event in Florida that an iPad-friendly version of Office 365 is in the works. The iPad version will be released after a touch-first user interface is delivered to Windows-powered machines. According to the Verge, that special touch interface is “in progress.”

Microsoft has already let Office partially into the iOS ecosystem with the release of Office Mobile for Office 365 Subscribers (catchy name, huh?). This application is only available to iPhone owners who already have an expensive Office 365 subscription.

The Verge also claims that Microsoft COO Kevin Turner expressed the “need to own the productivity experience across all devices” in a recent company meeting, which makes sense considering Office is one of Microsoft’s best and most competitive products.

Expanding distribution of the software is smart, especially if it coaxes users to pay for the pricey Office 365 subscription in order to access it. Smarter still would be to offer a specially tailored version of Office 365 on iPad and iPhone for a hefty yearly price that isn’t quite as high as the full-on desktop subscription.

In either case, though, Microsoft runs the risk of slowing down its own lagging tablet sales. After all, the only slightly interesting advantage that Surface tablets have is Microsoft’s productivity suite. After Office is rolled out to all iOS devices, that advantage simply shrinks down to the fact that it’s free on a Surface.

Fitbits, FuelBands, and Jawbones don’t matter and neither does their data unless they make us healthier. That’s why Basis wants to build a platform that unites our fragmented quantified self data and mines it for healthy ways to improve our behaviors. So today Basis announced an $11.75 million extension of its Series B and the hire of Ethan Fassett, former head of platform at gaming giant GREE.

The idea of a health data hub isn’t new. The promise is that instead of having one piece of software for each of our devices, all our data flows into a central repository where insights can be gleamed that no single piece of hardware could provide. But all attempts have failed. Even Google couldn’t make it work. But Basis CEO Jef Holove thinks he knows why: They didn’t start with hardware people loved and needed.

Hardware, Software, Platform In One

That’s where Basis’ own multi-sensor wristwatch comes in. While Fitbit, the Nike FuelBand, and the Jawbone Up just use accelerometers to track your steps and overall physical activity, Basis also tracks your heart rate, perspiration level, skin temperature and more. It’s bigger and costs more, but does a lot more too.

Until now, the Basis has been back-ordered. But now the company has finally worked through its “high five-digits” waiting list and is starting to openly sell the Basis B1 watch to the public for $199.

The watch hooks into Basis’ software that collects all your data. But beyond the typical charts and graphs whose novelty wears off because they don’t really tell you much, Basis crunches its multi-sensor data to provide more serious health insights. It can give you actionable suggestions for how to modify your behavior, and encourage you to keep exercising, This combats the number one problem with fitness devices, which is that people stop wearing them because they don’t feel like they’re getting any real value out of it.

What could make those suggestions even better is data more other non-Basis devices and apps. So Basis plans to build a device-agnostic platform with Fassett’s experience and part of the $11.75 million it raised from Intel Capital (which will help it bolster its supply chain to crank out watches faster), iNovia Capital, Dolby Family Trust, Stanford University, and Peninsula-KCG, as well as previous investors Norwest Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, and DCM. The funding expands the $11.5 million Series B that Basis raised in March, bringing it to a total of $32.3 million in venture capital.

Holove explains that “The platform we’re building is intended to be open. There’s no reason we couldn‘t have complementary devices contribute data and make habits out of that data.”

Becoming the central quantified self hub brings all sorts of opportunities, both to make the human race healthier and to make a lot of money, so it’s no wonder Basis was able to raise again. With its platform pre-populated with data from its own watch, Basis may have the gravity to attract data from other devices. And there are plenty of other devices on the way.

Surviving The Smartwatches

Beyond helping the Basis watch distinguish itself from other health hardware, its extra sensors and software are critical to it surviving the coming onslaught of smartwatches from Pebble Samsung, LG, Sony…and likely Google and Apple. Most have or will have accelerometers and be able to serve as rudimentary fitness trackers. They could make Fitibit obsolete.

The question is whether smartwatches will give so many of us a compelling reason to buy them that the industry can support a half dozen manufacturers or more. I’m skeptical. Most smartwatches seem to just make what we already do with our phones a tiny bit easier. Gee thanks, it now takes two hands to answer a phone call? One with the watch strapped to it, and one to press the buttons? That doesn’t sound worth my dollars yet.

Basis’ Holove agrees, telling me “If we’re going to ask consumers to wear technology, it must do something magical because you’re wearing it, that’s fundamentally impossible if you’re not wearing it. And I think smartwatches miss this.”

Basis couldn’t be in your pocket like a phone with an accelerometer. It has to be on your wrist to get the rest of its readings. And since Basis doesn’t just collect data but uses it to enhance your lifestyle, Holove says “When they look at it, the value is very clear. People know why they’re buying us.”

Nest Labs, the home hardware maker co-founded by two ex-Apple luminaries, is today unveiling its second product, Nest Protect, a $129 smart device that hopes to do for the smoke and carbon monoxide detection market what Nest’s Learning Thermostat did for home temperature control. That is, it wants to turn what has become for many a mundane, malfunctioning domestic necessity into a reliable and stylish must-have. Artfully designed, connected up with your smartphone, and full of features that work better than what it wants to replace, Nest Protect is the startup’s biggest play yet to make a global name for itself and position itself as a serious player in the connected home.

Of all the many things to disrupt in the home, why smoke detection? A couple of reasons, one personal and the other strategic.

“It was when I looked at it on the ceiling when i was lying in bed. I thought, What does this thing do? Is it going to wake me up tonight? Is it actually going to alarm properly?” explains Tony Fadell, co-founder and CEO of Nest, in an interview (which you can watch in full below). “Every time I thought about it, I [realized I] didn’t know anything about it. It was this strange product on my ceiling that just annoyed me. It never really was there for safety.” Talking to more people like his co-founder Matt Rogers, others at the company, and his wife and friends, Fadell said that everyone had a story about smoke detectors, all with a common theme: “A product that is supposed to keep you safe, except that it is annoying. Annoying, annoying, annoying.”

And yet, 30-40 million of them are sold every year. “Why don’t we like or appreciate them? That was the genesis for the whole idea of doing the Nest Protect.”

But it’s not just the sales volumes and existing bad, old products that spoke of opportunity to Nest Labs. While a thermostat is at its heart a (very) nice-to-have device, Protect takes Nest into the world of essentials. Smoke detectors are mandated in new-home builds in many countries, and insurance companies and others require you to have them installed, too. While Nest’s thermostat has some scaling issues to it — for example in the UK people cannot simply plug and play, but have to get professionals to install the devices because of the difference in electrical voltage — the same is not true for the Protect, which comes in a battery-powered version that can work, and therefore be sold, worldwide.

Just as Apple has taken technology and managed to both make it slick/aspirational but at the same time human and personal, so too is Nest Labs hoping to do the same with the Nest Protect.

“We didn’t just want to make a better one,” Fadell says of the square-shaped device that comes in white and black (yes, even in aesthetics the Protect departs from the circular look of today’s detectors). “We wanted to create something really emotional. Something that people could really like and embrace in their home, not just buy because the government tells them they have to.”

Indeed, there are many things about the Protect that take the product from bureaucratically-ordered home essential into more personal territory. For starters, the device has a human voice, which currently can be set to English, Spanish or French. The voice is there to warn you in a calm way if, for example, its batteries are low, if it detects carbon monoxide, or if it’s about to make a very loud alarming noise. “Heads up,” is the common refrain of the female, American voice sounds rather a lot like the U.S. Siri — perhaps not a coincidence.

It speaks more urgently simultaneously when an alarm is going off — a feature Nest says it created after reading research that noted children often sleep through the ringing noise of an alarm but will wake up at the sound of a voice.

Nest then takes those signals of reassurance and runs with them, for example with a feature it calls “Nightly Promise.” This is a flash of green light that the device emits after you turn off the light, to let you know that it is working. If you walk under it in the dark, it detects your movement and lights your way.

The human touch continues from there. If the alarm is possibly overreacting, rather than pushing lots of buttons or angrily tearing out 9-volt batteries (both usually involving clambering on to chairs or ladders to do so), you simply wave your arms — a double hat-tip not just to the frantic air-batting you may have done with a dishtowel in the past to get a mis-fired alarm to stop screeching, but also to the very 21st century wave of gesture-controlled gadgets.

“Touch” is as much an operative word here as “human” is. While smoke alarms are usually completely out of reach on the ceiling, Nest has followed the route of many hardware makers and created smartphone and tablet apps that let you communicate with and control the detector. These apps — completely rewritten so that they also work with Nest’s Learning Thermostat for some ecosystem building — alert the user of low-battery alerts, alarm notifications, and one-touch access to emergency numbers. You can use the app to monitor several Protect detectors at once.

Those detectors also work together to alert you to problems in other rooms in the house. The apps, of course, work even when you are not at home, giving you a remote way of monitoring if there are any any smoke, fire, heat or carbon monoxide issues when you are not there.

The Nest Protect has not been a quick follow-up to the Nest Learning Thermostat, the company’s first product, which launched two years ago almost to the week. But it has been no less anticipated.

Nest Labs’ CEO Tony Fadell is commonly known as the “father of the iPod” (maybe we can call him co-parent). And that makes him and Nest Labs immediate magnets for attention, sometimes foiling the company’s best efforts to keep things like this launch under wraps until now.

Just as Nest has been iterating on its Learning Thermostat (most recently opening up its APIs) we can expect to see more to come coming from Nest Protect in the future.

Taking a leaf from the playbook used by sensor-filled smartphone app makers, you can also imagine that Nest will come up with further ways of using the many sensors built into the Protect to roll out further services. The sensors disclosed by Nest in the device include a photoelectric smoke sensor, a CO sensor, a heat sensor, a light sensor, ultrasonic sensors and activity sensors. “I don’t know what else we are going to do but it seems like there are many exciting things in the future,” Fadell says. This is also important considering that Nest is not the only one going after the smart smoke detector market (here and here are two other players).

Click to view slideshow.

Just as one example, you can imagine several of these working as a house alarm system (remember, it’s called “Protect”). No surprise, then, that Nest says that in 2014 the Nest Protect will integrate with wired security systems. This is not just a hardware play, though: this also sets up Nest as the single app that can act as a hub to run all your connected home devices.

We have a hands-on demo of how the device works — and how to install it — from co-founder and VP of engineering Matt Rogers, who boldly let us install the Nest Protect on one of his office’s walls to see how it works (this guy! amirite?). Stay on the stream directly following that to hear the one and only Tony Fadell talk about how he came up with the idea of the Nest Protect, defend against the idea of extra features as gimmicks, and much more.

Nest Protect’s two black and white models are going on sale in November via Amazon, Apple, Best Buy and Home Depot in wired (120V) and battery-powered versions, starting first in the U.S., UK and Canada.

The Raspberry Pi microcomputer, which costs as little as $25/$35 and has helped fledge many a DIY hardware project, has racked up worldwide sales of 1.75 million, its U.K.-based creator, The Raspberry Pi Foundation, said today. The first Pis went on sale in March 2012, with its U.K. makers imagining they might sell a thousand in the first year (in the event they sold circa one million — and are now well on their way to two million).

Another U.K.-specific milestone for the device is that one million Pis have been produced since the Foundation shifted the bulk of production to a factory based in the U.K. (Sony’s Pencoed, Wales facility). So that’s one million U.K.-made Pis.

Initially, as with scores of inexpensive electronic devices before it, Pi was made in China. But the Foundation, itself a U.K. startup, was keen to support a production facility closer to home — to make it easier to visit and oversee elements of Pi production, but also to support local manufacturing. And so Sony was brought on board and the Pencoed factory turned out its millionth Pi today.

The rest of the 1.75 million Pis produced to-date were built in China. The Foundation’s primary Pi distributor, Premier Farnell/element 14, shifted all its production to Wales back in March but a small portion of non-U.K. Pi production remains.

As well as keeping the maker community busy by powering DIY hardware projects like this solar-powered FTP server, the Pi has been helping schoolkids cut their teeth on coding projects. At the start of this year, Google put up $1 million to fund 15,000 Pis for U.K. schoolkids, for example. Further afield, Pi has been used as a low-cost component to kit out school computing labs in Africa.

Back in April, the Pi Foundation revealed details of the countries where the — at the time — 1.2 million Pis had been shipped to. The vast majority (98%) were being sold in Western nations such as the U.K. and the U.S. Helping Pi spread further around the world to reach more developing nations is one of the Foundation’s challenges this year, Pi founder Eben Upton said then.

Discussing what it’s been doing to improve Pi distribution globally since then, Upton said Pi distributor RS Components now stocks units locally in South Africa — and can then ship directly to a number of countries in Southern Africa. “This has important implications for delivered cost, and also for reliability of delivery — it can be challenging to ship stuff into Africa reliably from Europe,” he told TechCrunch.

“We’re continuing to work to understand how to get units into South American markets without incurring very import high tariffs. Nothing to announce yet, but it’s high on our radar,” he added.

Upton also revealed that Pi shipments are growing in Asian markets.  ”Looking at the per-country stats, while the U.S. remains our largest market, and the U.K. our largest per-capita market, what’s really striking is that Asian markets, notably Japan, Korea and the Philippines, are consistently up month on month,” he said.

Today’s millionth-made British Pi (rightly) isn’t going to stray far. “Sony have made us a gold-plated case to keep it in, and we’ll be displaying it proudly here at Pi Towers [in Cambridge, U.K.],” the Foundation said today.

Mobile payments company Square is announcing today the opening of a larger, expanded San Francisco-based headquarters. In addition, the company announced plans for new offices in both New York and Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada — a location that could help the company take advantage of recently laid off employees from beleaguered Waterloo-based company Blackberry which saw massive layoffs just last month.

Square moved into its new corporate headquarters at 1455 Market Street in San Francisco last week, it says, and as of today, the offices are open to visitors. The office is more than 150,000 square feet, which is three times the size of the company’s previous space in the San Francisco Chronicle building. Meanwhile, the number of worldwide employees have doubled year-over-year, going from approximately 300 in 2012 to nearly 600 at present, says Square.

The growth has led Square to seek out new office space outside the Bay Area, in locations that are both strategic for Square’s growth as well as areas where engineering talent can be found. In New York, where the expansion news had leaked out to Buzzfeed in August, the company has signed a lease for an office in the SoHo area, and plans to triple its engineering presence there within one year. The Canadian office – Square’s first permanent office in the country – will open in 2014.

Square also has offices in Atlanta and Tokyo, the company notes.

Square Wanted To Be A New York Company

A few weeks ago, Square CEO Jack Dorsey hosted a roundtable at Columbia University to weigh in on recent developments in smartphone tech, Square’s future, and specifically New York as a suitable spot for startup growth.

At the time, he noted that Square Wallet in particular would play a crucial role in the company’s growth. As with all new payment schemes, however, Dorsey said he believes that ushering in a new sort of consumer behavior will take a broad stretch of time.

“We believe we can shorten that time frame significantly with Square Wallet,” said Dorsey.

He also explained that the direction of Square Wallet is in line with the direction of all technology, in that technology is slowly fading to the background and pushing focus on the people using it. “With Square Wallet, you walk up to the counter and confirm your name and you’re done,” said Dorsey. “You’re paying with who you are, and all you need is you.”

Where outside innovations are concerned, Dorsey said he believes that Apple’s new fingerprint reader is a slight boon to the evolution of payments on mobile. “Anytime there is better protection on the forefront, to even enter the device — people have a lot of sensitive information on their phones — that will help with changing behavior towards payments,” he said.

However, Dorsey doesn’t believe that the implementation of finger-print-level security is squarely focused on payments. Rather, building security into the phone is there to protect the entire package, not just to facilitate or protect a single part of the phone.

Dorsey also pre-announced the NY expansions then, revealing that Square will be growing the New York offices by three times by the end of the year, a plan he calls “aggressive.” He noted also that he felt that Square belongs in New York for a number of reasons.

“We actually tried to start the company in New York almost five years ago, but we weren’t able to hire the engineers and designers we needed to at the time,” said Dorsey.

In his perspective, New York had more of a marketing problem than a talent shortage, as it seemed that engineers and designers weren’t meeting in a single place on a regular basis. In other words, there was a lack of community. Luckily for New York, Dorsey says that isn’t a problem anymore, which is a theme we’ve seen play out elsewhere.

For example, Bonobos moved its team to New York from San Francisco in March.

“This city has something very different from Silicon Valley,” said Dorsey. “New Yorkers are facing different issues, and the people in New York are actually living the problems we are trying to fix.”

Dorsey wasn’t entirely clear on the type of hires he’s looking for to fill out the rapidly expanding SoHo office in New York, but he did mention that the company will be “heavily investing” in bringing more women on board as they offer a “different perspective” for Square.