Affordable sous vide cooking has been around for awhile now, what with devices like the Nomiku, the Sansaire and the Anova One. Anova, in particular, recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign last year where they funded the Anova Precision Cooker, a handy wand-shaped immersion circulator that added Bluetooth into the mix. At CES 2015, the company is taking it one step further by announcing something called the Anova Touch, a sous vide cooker with WiFi as well.

Though it’s not the first sous vide cooker to add WiFi, Anova’s co-founder, Michael Tankenoff, says that the Touch will still be the “best sous vide cooker for the home cook.” Tankenoff showed us the Anova app at a Showstoppers event at CES, and demonstrated how he could remotely set the temperature of the Anova Precision Cooker via Bluetooth. With the WiFi version, Tankenoff hopes to do things like set a cook start and end time when you’re away from home, or perhaps adjust the temperature of your slow-cooked ribs while you’re in a meeting.

He wasn’t able to show us a working prototype of the Anova Touch, but he did show us the app with the Precision Cooker, and it appears to work pretty smoothly. You could either set your own temperature, or you could go to a pre-set recipe (which Tankenoff says he sourced from renown chefs like Ming Tsai) and simply select it in the app to have the cooker do all the timing and temperature-setting for you.

As for when the Anova Touch will come to market? Well, Tankenoff wouldn’t say — pricing is yet to be determined as well — but he did say it’ll likely be some time this year.

Filed under: Misc

Comments

http://ift.tt/1yyG9vl

The original 3Doodler was fun, but it was also a little unwieldy and had a darn steep learning curve. Today, we played with the sequel, and practically everything’s been substantially improved. It’s now much, much thinner and it’s made to a far higher standard than the slightly prototypey debut model. There’s two buttons to control speed, and while a double button press will “lock” the stream of molten plastic meaning you can take your finger off and focus on creating.

That being said, you’re going to melt through a whole lot of plastic rods before your creations start to represent what you, well, intended them to. (What you see is our attempts to draw a house and.. something approximating the Las Vegas sign. Neither of the two editors is known for their artistic talent.) The thinner shape helps, and should particularly benefit little ‘Doodlers, but the notable addition of a battery pack (the 3Doodler uses much less power) also frees your arm up to draw, and means you don’t need a plug socket.

The company behind 3Doodler is also introducing a new type of plastic. It’s calling it FLEXY — intentional full caps — that, as the name suggests, is a particularly bendable material. To demonstrate, we saw a wallet made of the stuff and even a jacket. The jacket’s not gonna win any fashion prizes (a picture is incoming, we promise), but it’s a good demo of the material, which will be sent out to 3Doodler’s early-adopter Kickstarter fan-base in the next few weeks before going into full production. The new pen will be priced at $99 although you’ll be able to get it ten bucks cheaper if you stump up the cash through Kickstarter ahead of the official launch.

Comments

http://ift.tt/1BFY2Wl

What’s more important than your health? Not much, we think you’ll agree. The team behind HealthPatch MD certainly knows our wellbeing is top of most of our lists — so it made the aforementioned product to help monitor it. HealthPatch isn’t a fitness tracking wrist-band or a home health accessory, it’s aimed at hospitals, doctors and medical services. What is it? It’s a small patch with a module that monitors heart activity (ECG), heart rate (and variability), respiratory rate, skin temperature, activity posture and even fall detection. What makes it interesting is that it’s also a connected device, so you no longer need to go to a medical facility to be monitored. You can just go about your normal life.

Perhaps HealthPatch’s most obvious benefit is it’s simplicity. Tear of the adhesive back, apply the patch, and just let the Doctors do the rest (it sends your data to them via the cloud). The battery last for just three days, but the device is relatively inexpensive for hospitals, so they can be administered as needed. More importantly they can have constant reliable data, helping them spot problems as they happen, and not just when symptoms occur. While the current version does all this in a very small patch, Vital Connect (the company behind it) has just developed a much smaller, far more powerful integrated circuit that will replace the existing technology in HealthPatch towards the end of the year (pending FDA approval etc.).

Filed under: Misc

Comments

http://ift.tt/1xQ1X5Z

The rivalry between Beats and its former ally Monster just got particularly bitter. Monster is suing Beats, its founders (Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine) and HTC for allegedly tricking it into giving up one of its best-known headphone lineups. According to the lawsuit, Beats committed fraud when it acquired the Dr. Dre audio range through HTC’s investment. It supposedly repurchased enough stock after the HTC deal that it could sever its ties with Monster due to an ownership clause, leaving the latter high and dry with no real warning. Monster also believes that its ex-partner was misleading when it claimed in September 2013 that there was no “liquidity event” (that is, a major transaction) coming within one to two years — Apple’s acquisition of Beats clearly involved a lot of money trading hands. If Monster chief Noel Lee had known that the Apple buyout was looming, the lawsuit reads, he wouldn’t have reduced his stake in Beats and missed out on the resulting windfall.

Apple isn’t commenting on the lawsuit. However, Monster could face an uphill battle in a case like this. It’s not apparent that Beats did anything illegal by buying back its own stock and exercising a right in a contract. Moreover, while there were murmurs of Apple and Beats speaking to each other as early as March 2013, talk of an acquisition didn’t percolate until May 2014. As such, it’s entirely possible that Beats was unaware of Apple’s takeover intentions several months earlier. Monster will have to show that there was malice involved if it wants to both triumph in court and avoid accusations that it’s trying to profit from others’ success — no mean feat for a company whose reputation was partly built on questionable lawsuits.

Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Portable Audio/Video, HD, Mobile, Apple, HTC

Comments

Source: Wall Street Journal

http://ift.tt/1HJxNm6

We just got a chance to see exactly what E Ink’s new Prism tech looks like in person. And? It’s pretty neat! As you might be able to tell from the admittedly sped-up GIF above, it’s a bit mesmerizing, but still manages to be subtle. The outfit’s Joseph Fillion describes it as “more than static, but not quite digital.” What he means by that is it isn’t the type of thing you’d likely see used on billboards or other advertisements, but more along the lines of navigational opportunities and branding. For example, you could carry an RFID chip in your pocket at a hotel and it’d change the color of the walls letting you know you were actually headed in your room’s direction, possibly with the place’s logo appearing once you’ve reached your destination. Or imagine your living room’s walls changing color in accordance to your thermostat’s temperature reading. It seems futuristic as hell, but it’s much more Her than Blade Runner.

Filed under: Household

Comments

http://ift.tt/1wn0myo

It’s not all chips and wearable sensors at Intel’s CES press conference. CEO Brian Krzanich just announced a far-reaching diversity initiative, promising to hire, promote and retain more women and underrepresented minorities. In particular, he said the company intends to invest $300 million in diversity initiatives, with the goal of reaching “full representation” at all levels of the company by 2020. It remains unclear how exactly Intel will determine what the appropriate ratio is, or what number of employees in a specific demographic might indicate success. Intel simply said in a statement that it “full representation” means “representative of the talent available in America.”

The news comes in the wake of bleak disclosures from other tech giants such as Google and Yahoo, most of which have workforces that are predominantly white and male. Indeed, Krzanich says he considers this an initiative not just for Intel, but for peer companies as well. “We’re calling on our industry to again make the seemingly impossible possible by making a commitment to real change and clarity in our goals,” he said in a statement. “Without a workforce that more closely mirrors the population, we are missing opportunities, including not understanding and designing for our own customers.”

Filed under: Misc, Intel

Comments

Source: Intel

http://ift.tt/1DhTA4D

Intel is going full throttle into wearables with the release of a button-sized hardware called Curie at CES 2015. The module is composed of several elements, the main one being the company’s minuscule system on a chip called Quark. It also comes equipped with a Bluetooth Low Energy radio, sensors with accelerometer and gyroscope, as well as 384kB flash memory. Intel says Curie hasn’t been authorized by the FCC yet, but if all goes well, it’s scheduled to ship out in the second half of 2015. As you can guess from its components, the module can help make it easier (and faster) for manufacturers to design and produce low-power wearables.

Developing…

Filed under: Wearables, Intel

Comments

Source: Intel, Curie (PDF)

http://ift.tt/1HJmLgu