In 2019, Rivian showed up at the Overland Expo West in Flagstaff, Arizona with a prototype of what is now known as the Camp Kitchen. Now, with production ready 2022 Rivian R1T electric pickup trucks coming off the assembly line, the final version of the kitchen is ready for prime time. The automaker has made
Month: September 2021
No one knows exactly how drone delivery will fit into the future of logistics, but one thing is for sure: the aircraft aren’t going to drop off important payloads directly onto someone’s lawn. Matternet’s Station, an automated landing space and payload control tower, may be the solution, and the flower-like structure has finally made the
Dutch social enterprise Fairphone has announced its first 5G smartphone, the Fairphone 4. The ‘greentech’ mobile maker differentiates from almost the entire smartphone industry through a promise of sustainability via repairable modularity. It combines this with a big push around socially responsibility and ethical electronics — touting fairly sourced materials and better conditions for workers
One of the greatest challenges for farmers today is the increasing volatility in the climate, leading to unpredictable weather patterns, making growing conditions challenging. If farmers can’t grow crops, then our food security is as risk. Gradually, the field of agtech is attempting to address this issue. There are increasing numbers of FaaS (farming as
Energize Ventures, an early and growth-stage venture fund, has announced the closing of its second fund with total capital commitments of $330 million. Fund II will be used to help scale and commercialize software across renewable energy, mobility, cybersecurity, battery storage, critical infrastructure and climate resiliency. The fund, which is worth exactly double what Energize
DroneSeed started as a tech-powered alternative to the backbreaking work of large-scale tree-planting, but this important task is only one small part of forest restoration, the infrastructure for which is being pushed to the breaking point by wildfires. Armed with $36M in new funding, the company is reimagining reforestation from root to crown in a
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Amazon today announced a new subscription service called “Alexa Together,” designed for families with aging family members who are still living independently, but who may need extra support. The $19.99 per month subscription expands on Amazon’s existing product, Alexa Care Hub, an earlier investment in elder care, by taking many of Care Hub’s features and
Amazon is introducing two new services tied to user health and fitness, and its Halo personal health devices. They include Halo Fitness, a new service for interactive home video workouts that looks a lot like Apple Fitness+, and Halo Nutrition, a personalized, guided meal planner. Both of these services will be included as part of
Ring is just one part of Amazon’s annual devices and services event this year, but they’re bringing a lot of updates, including a new Pro Alarm suite that includes refreshed hardware and integrated Eero Wi-Fi 6 router capabilities. They also have a new service offering called ‘Virtual Security Guard’ that basically keeps an eye on
Last year, Ring announced a futuristic (slightly dystopian?) take on in-home security with its Always Home Cam, a drone equipped with sensors and a camera that can navigate the interior of your home along custom paths laid out by a user, in response to triggers, including Ring Alarm sensors, or a manual command from the
Amazon today introduced Amazon Glow, a new, interactive device aimed at families that allows kids to interact with family members and other remote loved ones over video calls. While something of a competitor to Facebook’s line of Portal devices, which are also largely aimed at connecting families over video, Amazon Glow differentiates itself by providing
The decarbonization of the planet will be the next major disruption of the 21st century, according to SOSV managing general partner Sean O’Sullivan and Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures. A disruption of such magnitude will bring about changes that will touch every industry and corner of daily life, and as a result, a complex
The FCC has sent out the first checks from its Emergency Connectivity Fund, an effort to help close the “homework gap” at schools by covering the cost of computers and internet services. Thousands of school districts, in every state plus D.C., Guam and Puerto Rico, will split this first $1.2 billion distribution, and there’s still
We started this competition with 20 impressive startups. After three days of fierce pitching in the virtual yet incredibly competitive Startup Battlefield arena, we have a winner. The startups taking part in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. Like last year, we reproduced the nail-biting excitement
Making smartphones more accessible is always a good idea, and Google’s latest features bring quick actions and navigation to people whose expressions are their primary means of interacting with the world. Project Activate and Camera Switches let users perform tasks like speaking a custom phrase, or navigating using a switch interface, through facial gestures alone.
Tesla broke ground on its “Megafactory,” a new production facility in California, so christened because it will produce the company’s large-scale battery system Megapack. News of the previously unannounced factory was confirmed by the Lathrop Mayor Sonny Dhaliwal in a Facebook post that was deleted and re-posted. “We are proud to be the home of
EU lawmakers are finally set to standardize charging ports for consumer electronics devices like smartphones and tablets — announcing a proposal today that, once adopted, will see the region settle on USB-C as a universal charging port for gadgets which will also include cameras, headphones, portable speakers and handheld videogames consoles. Some smaller consumer electronics
The ocean is important to countless industries, but we still only have a rough idea of what it’s like as a whole at any given time. To foster a new generation of ocean-monitoring floats and other devices, Sofar Ocean Technologies and DARPA are publishing an open hardware standard called Bristlemouth so that researchers will have
The amount of plastic pouring into our oceans is set to triple by 2040, and the bulk of the un-recycled plastic in the world is generated by an enormous industry: consumer packaged goods (CPG). The world is rife with waste from such goods, but as people become more aware and look to minimize the waste
There’s a lot of value in waste; just ask metals processing company Nth Cycle, which has developed a technology to help mining and recycling companies recover every bit of critical minerals from their operations. The company calls its technology “electro-extraction,” and Nth Cycle’s founder and CEO Megan O’Connor likened it to a water filter in
Pollutants pouring from smokestacks around the world may be bad news for the atmosphere, but if you catch them before they get out there, you could reduce emissions and collect some valuable materials at the same time. That’s what Carbix aims to do with its carbon-sequestering reactor, which would extract minerals from emissions while staying
Julio Vasconcellos Contributor Julio Vasconcellos is the managing partner of Atlantico, a venture capital fund focused on Latin America. He was previously the founder of Canary and Peixe Urbano, and was Facebook’s first employee in Brazil. More posts by this contributor Latin America’s digital transformation is making up for lost time Over the past year,
Weather forecasting is a notoriously challenging field, but it’s an endeavor that is becoming ever more vital to the daily functioning of our planet. Climate change is intensifying the scale and devastation of natural disasters, from wildfires and typhoons to floods and cyclones. Knowing precisely when and where a disaster strikes (or, even, just getting
Owners of Alexa devices will soon be able to use OnStar’s emergency services from their homes, under an expanded partnership between OnStar’s parent company General Motors and Amazon. OnStar already expanded OnStar Guardian earlier this year with the introduction of the Guardian app, which lets customers access the service via their mobile device. This latest
Our world is drowning in human-generated microplastics. And while these tiny fragments of non-biodegradable plastic — floating in the sea, embedded in the soil — are hard to see with the naked eye, they pose a gigantic threat to life. Inexorably, plastic pollution is finding its way into the human food chain, with unknown implications
Smart fitness gear is often limited by being static and non-portable. (And, well, eye-wateringly expensive.) Think Peloton‘s stationary bike for spin classes or wall-mounted strength training rig Tonal. Great if you’re at home and can afford to shell out thousands on a fancy home gym, but what if you want to take your workout with
Traditional meat production is about as far from a sustainable process as we’ve got, but our chances of getting everyone to give up “real” meat are lean. Animal Alternative is one of several companies looking to make meat indistinguishable from the animal-based kind using bioreactors and cultured cells, and it aims to empower local producers
Turns out COVID-19 lockdowns have been good for the indoor hobby of hardware hacking: The U.K.-based foundation behind the low-price microprocessor Raspberry Pi announced close of a $45 million funding round yesterday. The cash injection into the trading arm of the (nonprofit) Raspberry Pi Foundation values it at $500 million (pre-money), founder Eben Upton confirmed.
Quill Robinson Contributor President Joe Biden has pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. He intends to meet this ambitious target through a wave of new federal spending and government programs. But our best hope for reducing carbon emissions isn’t new government spending. It’s a technological sea change — one that