Author: Nicholas Echevarria

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Personal Transportation

The SnikkyBike is a motorized penny farthing for your thoughts

For many, the big city is no place to ride a bicycle. While there are daredevils that relish the danger of risky drivers, potholed streets, and oblivious pedestrians, there are many who just can’t deal all those obstacles. For them, there aren’t very many solutions outside of waiting for a city to implement more bike-friendly policies — something that can take a long time.

The Snikpatent-claimedkyBike positions itself as the perfect hybrid, offering the agility of a kick scooter with the sturdiness and stability of a bike. It’s vintage, penny farthing-like shape allows for these benefits: Its large front wheel offers durability and tight turning circles and its small, motorized rear wheel allows it to go 20mph for about 20-25 miles per charge efficient personal transportation. Adding to the SnikkyBike’s focus on safety is how it requires its riders to stand on foldable footboards, forcing them to stay alert to the environment and also giving them the ability to get off quickly and effortlessly should they need to.

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Categories
Cell Phone Accessories

The Glowme smartphone case makes every notification a light show

The rise of the smartphone has been accompanied by the many useful — and not so useful — accessories. Whatever their value, people still scoop them all up, prompting half-hearted inventors and passionate pursuers of innovation to create new add-ons in the chase for profits.

An accessory that lands itself firmly in the former category is the Glowme, a silicon smartphone case outfitted with an RGB LED strip housing 20 individual lights. Using the Glowme app, these lights can be customized to light up in whatever way a user wants, from an incoming call, an upcoming turn while driving, or even the music being played. It can also be used as an RGB flashlight or a multi-LED flash for photos, all while using “minimal” battery life. 

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Categories
Fitness Music Wearables

Turn your Motion to Music and break a real sweat

The reasons why games like Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Dance Revolution were so popular was because of how they rewarded real-life movement and coordination in a satisfying way. Ultimately, it made for an incredibly addicting gameplay experience. Unfortunately, being talented in these games doesn’t mean anything in the real world, the most common criticism they receive. And while these games are incredibly fun, that criticism is kind of valid.

Judging by his product, it seems like Matteo Ercolano was once bitten and burned by his love for these type of rhythmic gaming experiences. Instead of moving on, though, he sought to combine that gameplay with a real benefit. Settling on exercise, he created Motion to Music. Its Bluetooth-equipped wrist/arm/ankle band works together with a mobile iOS/Android app to match body gestures to the on-screen prompts given. And like the aforementioned rhythm games, the better someone does, the higher their score and happier their fans; poor performances garner jeers and boos instead.

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Categories
Connected Objects Input

Invisibly tread the internet with SilentKeys keyboard

Like it or not, this is the age of mass surveillance. While companies and governments love that the public’s most sensitive information is up for grabs, it makes for an increasingly compromised world, one in which beliefs and actions can be used against us. For those much malicious entities, that can mean social and financial ruin if not properly protected.

The revelations of the NSA’s mass surveillance program prompted many in the world to change the way they lived online. Preevio believes that having nothing to hide doesn’t mean having to show it all, and built the SilentKeys keyboard to help people secure their online actions no matter where they are. The all-in-one privacy keyboard connects to any PC or Mac and boots into a completely fresh, anonymous, and protected instance of the Satya desktop.

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Categories
Health and Wellness Wearables

WellBe bracelet detects your stress, helps all be well again

For many people, stress is a debilitating part of life, its negative impacts contributing to health problems as varied as headaches and fatigue to more serious ailments like heart disease and obesity. And since stress is everywhere, it’s difficult to address for many.

patent-claimedWith the WellBe digital stress therapy bracelet on the wrist, stress need not be this, well, stressful. WellBe helps using a combination of heart rate monitor and mobile app to determine a wearer’s stress levels over time based on three factors: time, location, and people. By constantly gathering this data, WellBe offers personalized playlists of exercises and classes guided by WellBe mentors to help control stress levels, displaying how each activity affects stress levels in the long-term. 

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Categories
Imaging Robots/Drones

ViewBot focuses on keeping homes safe, doesn’t smile much

The crowdfunding world is one where copycats thrive. Should one decent idea see success, a deluge of imitators quickly try to ride the wave. This is currently the case with remote controlled home surveillance bots: every other week, a brand new one pops up — just without much of the new part.

Add VewNet to the list. It’s an unremarkable looking treaded robot that serves as a set of eyes back at home for users who want to keep track of children while running an errand or want to make sure everything is safe during longer absences. To do so, it has all of the standard fare built-in: a 1080p HD camera for video, night vision capabilities, a microphone, motion detection and the requisite alert and notification system that comes along with it, a self-docking charging station, and the ability to manual control VewNet using a connected smart device. If backers act quickly enough, VewNet can be purchased for $99 and expect it to patrol their homes by November 2016. The VewNet flexible Indiegogo campaign is looking for $10,000 by mid-July 2016.

While VewNet isn’t technically a bad product, as it does contain everything needed to effectively surveil a home. Something like this sorely needs a personality, something Appbot Riley as in spades, making it a far better alternative to VewNet despite being pretty much the same product.

Categories
Imaging Smart Home

Patrolling your home is how the Orbii security camera rolls

The appeal of home security solutions stems from always being connected, allowing a user to always know what’s happening back at home. Most of these systems use video cameras to supplement alerts and other notifications with smart recognition technology to detect the source of a disturbance, for instance. Depending on the size of the home, this can require purchasing many cameras, making what should be economical systems far more expensive.

Orbii solves this little problem. Its spherical design lets it move by shifting its internal center of gravity, like a hamster in a hamster ball. Inside, a central sphere contains omni-directional drive motors that shift the sphere in any direction with control and agility, letting it freely roam (and map the environment over time) or be controlled by smartphone or tablet app. This makes it easy for users to take advantage of its 720p HD camera to get a clear picture whether it’s day or night due to built-in night vision, with eight hours of onboard storage or 30 days of cloud storage available for footage.

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Categories
Robots/Drones

AMY shows the way to the future of helpful home robots

A few years back, robots weren’t very much a part of the crowdfunding world. Those that were being pushed simply weren’t ready for what people expect of them. Fast forward to now, and there are still a set of companies trying to push that vision of an autonomous robot that can help around the house — a robot like AMY.

In many respects, AMY is set up as a standard home robot, capable of getting around by itself to offer news, calendar reminders, and alerts to the entire family. Its Wi-Fi connectivity lets it use a built-in HD video camera to facilitate video calls, lets users control connected devices in the home using voice control, and lets users ask it questions about the weather, for instance. (There’s no mention of the types of questions users can ask.)

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Categories
Video Games Virtual Reality

The VicoVR lets you step directly into virtual reality

The long-awaited era of virtual reality is finally here, with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive leading the charge alongside less powerful alternatives like Samsung’s Gear VR and Google’s recently announced Daydream. Despite the already crowded marketplace, companies are still developing alternative virtual experiences for a cut of that not-so-virtual pie.

One of the next big questions when it comes to VR technology is how to get the user’s body into the space. While most of the leading solutions offer controls, VicoVR combines standard VR googles with a Kinect-like interface for wireless body tracking of 19 body joints. This allows the one or two players to step right into a game rather than go through a more disconnected experience with a remote control.

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Categories
Personal Transportation

Hang out atop the Walkbot and float your way to work

That dreaded morning walk to the bus or train and unwelcome trudge through sidewalk foot traffic isn’t a big enough annoyance to warrant purchasing a car for. Biking helps by avoiding crowds and cutting down on commuting time, but adds an element of unease as the danger of theft is always around the corner. In comparison to, the Walkbot offers a lightweight alternative to tackle these commuting grievances.

The Walkbot is essentially a square platform on wheels, a bathroom scale-like design that’s immediately easy to understand. While the Walkbot itself only weighs seven pounds, it can support a person weighing up to 220 pounds and reach a top speed of about 7.5mph. Its claim as the lightest vehicle in the world has to be taken with a grain of sale, along with its claims of portability: Its large shape makes it awkward to find a suitable bag it fits neatly in.  $249 gets backers their very own Walkbot platform by August 2016. Its flexible Indiegogo campaign is looking for $50,000 by July 1st, 2016.

The Walkbot campaign video makes it abundantly clear that the device only really works on completely smooth surfaces, leaving a majority of a city inaccessible to it. This crucial limitation doesn’t bode well for its ride-anywhere ambitions, especially when other, non-electric alternatives like the Zar and Pigeon can get people through those last miles in a far more practical way.