A year ago, at CES, I broke out the snark-hammer at 444, a startup that was trying to make a ‘smart’ pepper spray device.
To my surprise, it had landed a significant partnership, co-development, and co-branding deal with Mace, one of the biggest names in the sprayable self-defense sector.
“When you deploy the device, pepper spray comes out.
I often end up seeing startups at CES that seem completely pointless (this year, my eyes did backflips over Direction 9.
This serves as a great great reminder that, for true entrepreneurs, it takes more than a snarky post from an opinionated blogger to encourage them to throw in the towel.
Whispp is working to change the game for individuals with speech disorders and voice disabilities, bringing voice boxes into the current millennium with its groundbreaking AI-powered assistive speech and phone-calling app.
“Voice disabilities and speech disorders like stuttering significantly impact a person’s life and happiness,” said Whispp co-founder and CEO Joris Castermans.
Whispp is a game changer, accommodating a broad spectrum of voice types — from whispers to rough speech resulting from total laryngectomy after throat cancer.
Now, with its new product features, Whispp can accommodate an even more diverse range of voice types and conditions.
It is truly a beacon of hope for individuals with speech disorders and voice disabilities and a testament to the transformative power of technology.
To coincide with the National Retailer Association’s annual conference in NYC, Google Cloud today unveiled new gen AI products designed to help retailers personalize their online shopping experiences and streamline their back-office operations.
But the slew of announcements show, if nothing else, how aggressively Google is attempting to court gen AI customers.
(Google’s long offered Distributed Cloud Edge as a service, but it’s now targeting retailers more directly.)
My question after being pre-briefed on all this was, frankly, are retailers really clamoring for gen AI?
But considering some of the rocky rollouts of gen AI in retail recently (see: Amazon’s review summaries exaggerating negative feedback), I can’t say I’m convinced that the retail industry will rush to adopt gen AI en masse — from Google Cloud or any other provider.
Nwm (short for New Wave Maker and pronounced “noom,” a representative told me) makes headphones that use a similar technique to noise canceling, but kind of turned inside-out.
Instead of canceling out noise coming into your ear, the headphones cancel any noise they make that isn’t going towards you.
That’s usually not a problem with earbuds or closed-back headphones, which physically contain the sound they produce.
But nwm’s whole thing is that their headphones are more like a pair of small speakers right by your ears.
The chair is pretty normal looking for a gamer-type one, and you wouldn’t know it had speakers hidden in it.
Most notably, Walmart is launching a new generative AI search feature on iOS that will allow customers to search for products by use cases, instead of by product or brand names.
These enhanced search results will span categories, rivaling Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience), which can recommend products and show various factors to consider, along with reviews, prices, images, and more.
At the time, Walmart teased that a generative AI-powered search feature was also in the works.
In another area, Walmart’s generative AI tool for store associates, My Assistant, will be expanded to 11 countries outside the U.S. in 2024, where it will work in employees’ native languages.
Outside of AI, Walmart is looking to other new technology for faster deliveries.
This is a popular topic on TechCrunch+, where columnists spend considerable time discussing how startups can take advantage of OpenAI.
The following subscriber-only articles should serve as a foundation for founders building an AI startup on or off OpenAI’s platform.
Chris Ackerson, formerly on the IBM Watson team and now VP of Product at AlphaSense, explains the best ways for a startup to develop a generative AI copilot.
Read more here…Startups must add AI value beyond ChatGPT integrationThe AI hype train is going full swing.
From internal efficiency and productivity to external products and services, companies are racing to implement generative AI technologies across every sector of the economy.
Serenity, the result of a fruitful partnership with Alarm.com, is an innovative fall-detection system that does away with traditional wearables.
What sets Serenity apart is its ability to construct a 13-point skeleton model of individuals in near-real-time, using radar data processed by AI on the device.
This model helps distinguish between intentional lying down and falls, including slow falls that traditional accelerometers fail to detect.
from a distance, without any wearable device – a feature that has far-reaching implications for home healthcare.
“Serenity isn’t just a product; it’s a promise of independence, safety, and peace of mind for our aging population.”
Employee performance reviews take time and effort — and aren’t always conducted very efficiently.
Seeking to make the performance review process easier — or at least less of a headache than it has been historically — Ben Hastings and Jon Malpass founded PerformYard, a platform that provides a collection of software-based retention, staff management and upskilling tools.
“PerformYard has been cash-flow positive with attractive unit economics for the majority of our existence as a business.”Prior to launching PerformYard, Hastings spent the majority of his career in tech as a go-to-market sales leader.
“In early 2013, I decided to go all-in on building a software-as-a-service platform for employee performance management and personally funded the initial team.
“Our mission is to simply enable and facilitate any performance process that our customers are looking to automate and improve,” Hastings said.
Some of the most important channels for news traffic — Google Search, social platforms like Facebook — changed how they focus on and surface news links, and that’s had an overall hit on traffic and ad sales.
And consumer tastes have changed, too, and it appears that the app is also struggling to attract and retain users.
Given the decline in downloads, Apptopia said a figure of 10 million active users today would now be “a stretch.”Another firm, Sensor Tower, added more insight, noting that SmartNews had, on average, roughly 1.7 million worldwide daily active users between Q1 2023 and Q3 2023.
Sensor Tower’s estimates indicate the SmartNews app has roughly 5 million worldwide monthly active users from Q1–Q3 2023, down an average of 30% year-over-year, per quarter, it said.
Sensor Tower also suggested that lapsed product iterations and feature launches likely contributed to falling consumer interest and interaction with the SmartNews app.
After recently turning to generative AI to enhance its product reviews, e-commerce giant Amazon today shared how it’s now using AI technology to help customers shop for apparel online.
With the personalized size recommendations, Amazon Fashion used AI to develop a deep learning algorithm that will help customers find their best-fitting size across a variety of styles.
This system works by considering the size relationship between brands’ size systems, the product’s reviews, and the customer’s own fit preferences.
With a Fit Insights Tool from Amazon Fashion, sellers are provided with an understanding of customer’s fit needs so they can improve how they communicate sizing to customers — e.g.
Beyond the customer review highlights, Amazon also debuted generative AI tools to help sellers write their product descriptions and enhance their product images.
