Las Vegas, NV | January 8 - 11, 2013
Shenzen New Degree Technology was one of the companies showing its stuff in the Eureka Park portion of CES 2013, and this China-based hardware startup had some impressive tech to show off related to touch input. Combining capacitive and resistive touch-based input with a means to make it work even on solid stainless steel surfaces, Shenzen New Degree hopes to pave the way for a wide range of new… → Read More
Here’s a novel way to keep track of your wallet, your cat, or, yes, your keys.
Jimmy Buchheim stopped by the the TechCrunch booth at the Consumer Electronics Show to demo StickNFind, a bluetooth sticker technology that you can use to track almost anything. Once you’ve attached the sticker to an object of your choice, you can track it down again using the StickNFind iOS and Android apps, which… → Read More
CES has come and gone, but the memory of this year’s show will live on forever. Not necessarily because the 15-20 TechCrunch staffers who attended will remember it — chances are the night-time debauchery has wiped away all recollection of the past week — but because this post exists.
We met a bunch of celebrities. We discovered a phone with an e-ink display on the back, a giant… → Read More
The Playsurface, a spin-off project from Templeman Automation that aims to provide a low-cost alternative to interactive touch table devices like Microsoft’s PixelSense (formerly known as the surface), was at CES showing off their functioning units in action, which the company will be shipping out to 40 or so Kickstarter backers this month. The Playsurface made headlines when it launched on… → Read More
Contrary to the oft-repeated marketing slogan, sometimes, what happens in Vegas is videotaped for posterity and posted to the Internet for all to see. I’m talking of course about this latest edition of CrunchWeek, the weekly TechCrunch TV show wherein a few of us writers discuss the most interesting stories from the past seven days in tech.
This past week the TechCrunch TV crew was in Las Vegas… → Read More
This actually works. I touched it. I played with it. And I fantasized about a bubble wrap app.
Tactus Technology stopped by our CES booth for a short demo of its crazy touch screen technology. Using microfluid technology (and a bit of magic), Tactus’s solution produces honest-to-goodness buttons that raise out of the touchscreen. And then, just as quickly as they appear, they disappear when… → Read More
There’s been no shortage of jokes lobbed at the HAPIfork, as you’ve seen from the Colbert video above. The overwhelming consensus seems to be that the technology in the fork is solving a first-world problem, and that, people who really want to lose weight by eating more slowly should just, uh, eat more slowly. So why do I love it? → Read More
Lazy-Hands is the epitome of one of those self-made, little-guy CES gems that we love so much. Armed with little more than velcro, a humble booth, and a dash of ingenuity, they managed to catch our eye amongst thousands of competitors who were twice their size and nth as loud. → Read More
The Almond, a router with a small touch screen that achieved significant success on Amazon thanks to a decent price point and excellent reviews, has a successor from parent company Securifi hitting Kickstarter soon. The Almond+ comes with 802.11ac support, boasts a 2.8-inch touchscreen, and can be set up without even connecting to a PC. It’s the perfect router for a mobile-first generation, and… → Read More
The Swivl is an odd duck. When you first look at it you wonder what it’s for. But anyone who has given a speech or performed onstage will immediately appreciate this clever little device. The Swivl essentially follows you around the room as you speak, allowing you to record your video without a separate camera operator. → Read More
Sony Mobile’s top-tier Xperia Z may have been one of CES’s most pleasant non-surprises (seriously, is there anyone Sony didn’t brief about that thing?), and it turns out that the company’s future efforts may be more of the same. According to a recent CNET interview with Xperia Product Manager Stephen Sneeden, Sony is contemplating leaving the entry-level smartphone market to other companies. → Read More
Fleksy, the new mobile keyboard that debuted on iOS back in August, was showing its stuff at CES this year. The trick of automatically predicting what you’re typing without requiring much more than your relative tap position and word length is no less impressive than it has been in the past, but Fleksy now has a new trick up its sleeve, too: an Android version that can actually replace your stock… → Read More
You may or may not have noticed, so I’ll provide a quick fashion world dispatch: Headbands have been gracing the foreheads of many a stylish person over the past few years.
If a Toronto-based startup called InteraXon has its way, that trend will become even more pervasive for years to come as people buy its own Muse headband → Read More
It’s easy to hate CES. It’s a vapid, broken wunderkammer filled with booze, waste, and gadgets no one will buy for months if not years if ever at all. The show floor is a crass place where marketers try out ways to get into our wallets and manufacturers, caught in a spiral of “design-build-trash” have to pump out new hardware just because they have to pump out new hardware – like a toothless… → Read More
At Eureka Park at CES in the Venetian, we saw a ton of cool startups. But some of them really stood out. Like this guy. He was very excited about giving us a demo of his company’s technology for letting you do amazingly horrible things to your mobile electronics. The company is called Integrated Surface Technologies, and it coats your phone with stuff that protects it from being destroyed. → Read More
Eureka Park played home to a whole host of interesting companies and projects (some of which were arguably more interesting than the stuff you’d find on the actual CES show floor) and our first stop was clearly a winner. Meet California-based Sensory Acumen, the creators of curious a scent-generating device called the GameSkunk. → Read More
Lots of companies here this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas have built products that are centered on dramatic, splashy, or new ideas. Phone Halo is not one of them.
Instead, Phone Halo is focused on a decidedly everyday, mundane thing… → Read More
The Philips uWand is no stranger to CES. It’s been at the show in the past, and as a prototype it has been around for even longer, but this time around it got an updated look and feel, along with refined control that now puts it pretty much at one-to-one sensitivity, and makes for a satisfying experience when playing games on the motion-enabled set top box it’s paired with. → Read More
SmartThings doesn’t just come to Vegas and set up a boring old booth. These guys rented out a palatial villa just outside of downtown, both for the practical purposes of giving themselves a place to crash, and also to give them an easy way to show off their product and platform for building a whole home “open physical graph.” Home automation and mobile remote control were a tent pole theme of this… → Read More
With their new Crusher headphones, Skullcandy promises something that many a headphone company has promised to do before: to physically rattle your head as a subwoofer might. Unlike the past attempts we’ve seen, these ones actually seem to do it. We sat down with Skullcandy Acoustics Engineer Sam Noertker at our big ol’ CES broadcast booth to chat about how it all works. → Read More
BMW has rolled out a new feature that will let riders stay connected, by adding 4G LTE WiFi connectivity to its cars. BMW owners will be able to buy an optional hotspot that connects with the car and can use its antenna to provide blazing-fast wireless Internet speeds. → Read More
When peak performance is your goal, every second counts. I guess milliseconds count too. Product development consultancy Cambridge Consultants had this in mind when they developed their new automatic gear-shifting system for performance bicycles called The Connected Bike. The idea is to shave off those precious seconds of time you use both considering and shifting gears while riding. We took an… → Read More
Lockitron’s Cameron Robertson stopped by our CES booth for a little demo. It doesn’t take much to demo the Lockitron. It’s a little wireless device that slips onto a deadbolt and can be controlled by a smartphone. Put it on your house. Put it on a rental property. Put it on your cat.
To be honest, the story of Lockitron is much more interesting than the Lockitron itself. → Read More
The CES show floor was packed with tons of companies that you’ve probably heard plenty about this week, such as Panasonic, Sony, LG, etc. But the hidden gems and oddballs among the consumer electronic giants were the real treat for world-weary attendees who felt it was hard not to stifle a yawn at yet another 4K TV. Bad Dog Tools, a company demonstrating its super-hard drill bits, is one of… → Read More
Sphero had a big 2012, but it’s clear that 2013 will be even bigger for the company. This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the makers of a phone-friendly robotic ball launched a handful of augmented reality games, expanding the breadth of the little sphere’s functionality.
The first game is inspired by possibly the best meme of 2011, Nyan Cat. Nyan Cat Space Party lets you… → Read More
You might remember Maluuba from TechCrunch Disrupt, where the company launched its Personal Assistant app for Android last year, combining voice recognition and natural language processing with search to create a really smart way to easily find the things you want quickly. If you’ve already forgotten: It’s kind of like Siri, except it works. → Read More
As geeks, it’s hard for us to carry all of our geek accoutrements to our various geek events. That’s why I, for one, love ScottEVest: they’re durable, fun, and pocket-ful pieces of clothing for the nerd on the go. → Read More
LG and CES are made for each other. The company may not make the best smartphones (with the exception of Google’s Nexus 4), or get the most attention all year round, but when they whip out the big screen TVs at their massive CES booth, it’s easy to get on the “Life’s Good” bandwagon.
Unfortunately, TechCrunch is one of the few attendees at the show that isn’t all that interested in television… → Read More
Withings was one of a pretty busy section of the CES 2013 show floor demoing health, fitness and lifestyle monitoring apps, and it had a couple of new things to add to its line of Wi-Fi scales and monitoring devices. One was the new Withings Smart Body Analyzer, which is a version of its Wi-Fi scale that, for the first time, measures heart rate. The other was the Smart Activity Tracker, a… → Read More
Okay, hear me out. The duel-sided YotaPhone is not a gimmick. It makes sense. On the back of the YotaPhone is an e-ink display that can mirror anything displayed on the main screen. And because e-ink screens do not require battery life, these images are available even if the phone battery dies. Get it? Probably not yet. → Read More
