Pebble was making smartwatches long before it was cool. While Apple and Google played to their strengths (luxury design and open platforms, respectively), the Kickstarter-company-that-could never wavered in its commitment to building a reasonably priced smartwatch. Following the release of its first smartwatch in 2012, the company followed up with the Pebble Time in May of 2015. Shortly after, in August of the same year, the company released the Pebble Time Steel. Now, the company's newest device, the Pebble Time Round, builds on the success of its older devices. With a razor-thin circular screen and great battery life, the Time Round proves that Pebble has staying power despite competing against tech's biggest companies. Here's what it's like to use it as a primary wearable for a month:
Robots will be the farmers of the future. A company in Japan is building an indoor lettuce farm that will be completely tended by robots and computers. The company, named Spread, expects the factory to open in 2017, and the fully automated farming process could make the lettuce cheaper and better for the environment.
Personal jetpacks are almost here, if the market can support the company long enough for them to ship. New Zealand's Martin Aircraft has a jetpack ready to go, if a pair of ducted fans worn as a gigantic backpack counts as a “jetpack”. In development for years, the company became the first publicly traded jetpack company last year, with a public offering on the Australian Stock Exchange. Their first year in operation, they posted a loss of $5 million.
There's nothing worse than getting hacked. Ask anyone at Sony, which lost an estimated $100 million in the malicious hacks committed against the company last year. Silent Circle, a company founded by Internet security legend Phil Zimmerman, wants to bring those type of hacks to a halt. The company's solution: An end-to-end service that starts with an ultra secure smartphone called the Blackphone 2.
NoFlyZone is a company with a strange mission: restrict where drones can fly. People who don't want drones over their houses can go to the company's website and register their address. NoFlyZone will add geographic coordinates and the corners of the property to their database. Once a month, NoFlyZone sends out updated information of these addresses to partner companies in the drone industry, so they can hard-code privacy protections into their product. Launched Tuesday, the database is an attempt to proactively self-regulate drones.
One of our favorite booths at CES was by Ecovacs Robotics, a company known for their innovative cleaning robots. The company won a CES Innovation Award for RAYBOT, an automated bot that cleans solar panels, and Winbot, their famous window-cleaning robot, also impressed us. But it was the cute little Benebot that won our hearts.
Virgin Galactic is in the clear, so to speak. The commercial spaceflight company has signed an agreement with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that lays out how the company will work with federal officials and New Mexico’s air traffic control to clear airspace for its launches. The company hopes to send its first customers to suborbital space by the end of this year, Space.com reports.
