Brian Heater
Hardware Editor
The Latest from Brian Heater
Airrow is automating battery and payload swapping for drones
Any given year, the real unsung highlight of re:Mars are the dozen or so startups and researchers who show off their wares on the show floor. There are always a couple of cool projects that have someh
Alexa goes down the conversational rabbit hole
Onstage at re:Mars this week, Amazon showcased a developing Alexa feature meant to mimic the flow of natural language. Conversation between two humans rarely follows some predefined structure. It goes
A quick trip to MARS
Greetings from Las Vegas, where it’s 105 degrees outside, but it mostly doesn’t matter because you can’t figure out how to get outside. I’m here this week for my first-ever re:Mars. It’s wil
OSOM’s OV1 is now Solana’s web3 Android handset, Saga
OSOM and Nothing have quickly become two of the most fascinating companies operating the smartphone space in recent years. Nothing is the latest project from OnePlus co-founder, Carl Pei, while OSOM i
Amazon debuts a fully autonomous warehouse robot
You can’t discuss fulfillment robots without mentioning Amazon. Over the past decade, the retail juggernaut has become the 800-pound gorilla in the category, courtesy of several key acquisitions and
Alexa will soon be able to read stories as your dead grandma
At its annual re:Mars conference today in Las Vegas, Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, announced a spate of new and upcoming features for the company’s sma
Liteboxer goes portable
I’m confident I’m not alone when I say that space has been a major barrier of entry between me and fully embracing home fitness. I live in New York City, and things are already tight without havin
Glowforge raises another $43M
Seattle-based laser-cutting hardware startup Glowforge announced this morning that it has raised another healthy round. The $43 million Series E joins the roughly $70 million the company has raised si
Apple MacBook Pro M2 13-inch review
I’m writing this atop a tray table on my fifth flight in 3 weeks. It’s a lot of cross-country travel after 2 years of largely not leaving my one-bedroom apartment. When it rains, it pours, I guess
Wingcopter raises another $42M ahead of ambitious Africa deployment
In mid-May, Wingcopter announced an extremely ambitious plan to deploy some 12,000 of its fixed-wing UAVs in Sub-Saharan Africa over the next half decade. As far as drone delivery markets go, it certa
Impossible Mining is combing the seafloor for battery metals
Impossible Mining CEO Oliver Gunasekara pulled me aside at last week’s TechCrunch Climate event with a fascinating pitch. Turns out there are a lot of valuable metals on the ocean floor — material
Planning for the Impossible
Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown sees biodiversity as an even more pressing concern than climate change (though, obviously, one can’t entirely uncouple one from the other).
Senators call for US to adopt common charger
A little over a week ago, the European Union reached an agreement that will require hardware manufactures to adopt a common charger — specifically the USB-C standard — by 2024. Yesterday,
Funding the robot revolution
Greetings from Berkeley, California, where we’ve just wrapped up our first-ever Climate-focused event. It was slightly surreal being back on stage at Zellerbach Hall, given the last time I stepped f
Corvus is using drones to track warehouse inventory
Way back in August of last year, we highlighted the launch of Corvus Robotics in the Actuator newsletter. The Boston-based firm is one of a handful of startups looking to leverage indoor drones to hel
Former Amazon Robotics VP Brad Porter goes Collaborative
The pandemic was a moment of truth for Amazon Robotics. After years of work, numerous acquisitions and millions spent, could the retail giant’s massive investment in automation help keep things runn
Amazon starting drone deliveries in California town later this year
Amazon today announced that Lockeford, California will be “among the first” locations in the U.S. getting access to the company’s burgeoning drone delivery, Prime Air. Lockeford is a small, cens
Workforce quit
Yesterday, we officially announced one more big name for TC Sessions: Robotics. I’ll be speaking with Marty Walsh, the U.S. secretary of labor, at the July 21 event. It’s a bit of a curveball duri
Lenovo invests in trackpad startup Sensel
Sensel’s journey has been an interesting one to watch from afar. The firm crossed our radar several years back, courtesy of its Morph device, a colorful and clever piece of hardware that uses differ
Arduino sets its sights on enterprise applications with new funding round
Best known for its open source microcontrollers that have been wildly embraced by the developer community, Arduino now has its sights firmly set on the enterprise world. Specifically, the company beli