Amazon’s new Echo Look has a built-in camera for style selfies

With the addition of a camera, Amazon’s new Echo Look device can now see and hear all. The device is a sort of standalone selfie machine so users can take full-length photos and videos of themselves specifically for the sake of checking their fashion choices in the morning.

The new home assistant answers to commands like “Alexa, take a picture” and “Alexa, take a video” – for the latter, users spin around accordingly to get shot from all side, taking selfies while keeping their hands free. Videos shot with the hands-free selfie stick can be recorded or viewed in real time. At the very least, it’ll let you make sure no one’s adhered a Kick Me sign to your back before leaving the house.

It’s an interesting and unexpected addition to the company’s wildly successful product line. There’s no built-in display here, but users can see what it sees on their handset. The device also works with the company’s Style Check, a feature of the Echo Look app, which uses machine learning to compare different outfit choices, awarding them an overall style rating.

The app uses a combination of machine learning and advice from experts in the style space. Letting AI pick out your clothing in the morning should be a pretty interesting experiment.

The app will also recommend styles to users, which presents a pretty clear revenue stream for the company after the hardware has been sold. That, after all, has alway been Amazon’s M.O. when it comes to releasing hardware — sell it cheap and hook people in to buy more stuff through your service. The company has clearly been taking steps to increase style sales through its AmazonFashion vertical, and for those who are interested in such things, this is a pretty decent hardware hook.

The device looks a fair bit like one of the latest generation of smart home security cameras, with an oblong shape and a camera, mic and LED array at the bottom. The camera has a built-in depth sensor to blur out everything in the photo, save for the subject.

There’s also, thankfully, a large microphone and camera off button on the side of the device, so it’s not recording your every waking moment, a big concern with mounting security questions surrounding these ever more popular device. But now that video is being added to this category of always-on devices, a new set of worries is likely to increase among those who were already wary.

Of course, the thing’s also got the standard base of Alexa function on board, so users can also check the weather to make sure they’re properly dressed for the occasion. The style functionality feels a bit nichey, but then, I recognize that the product is for people like me who more or less wear the same clothes from day to day.

Given the fact that Echo is constantly updating, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot more camera specific functionality in the months and weeks ahead. For now, it can be purchased for $200, a $20 premium over the standard Echo.

Juicero may be the absurd avatar of Silicon Valley hubris, but boy is it well-engineered

The Juicero story is a funny one in some ways and a sad one in others, so let’s just assume they cancel each other out and admire the machine itself in a nice judgment-free moral vacuum.

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Or rather, let’s let someone qualified do it for us. Ben Einstein, general partner at Bolt, served up this excellent teardown of the Juicero on the company blog. If you were wondering how a juice press could possibly cost $400… well, this is how.

Without getting into the nitty-gritty (Einstein does it far better than I would, anyway), the gist is that this thing is extremely overengineered in the most fabulous possible way. Everything is custom, using the best processes and materials, and lots of ingenuity and care is on display at every level.

Unfortunately, the entire idea of the product is risible.

As Einstein puts it:

Our usual advice to hardware founders is to focus on getting a product to market to test the core assumptions on actual target customers, and then iterate. Instead, Juicero spent $120M over two years to build a complex supply chain and perfectly engineered product that is too expensive for their target demographic.

It’s a beautiful disaster of a product, and with any luck the engineers responsible for the former will get credit for it. Because those responsible for the latter already took off with the juice, leaving nothing but a flaccid sack of pulp behind.

Featured Image: Ben Einstein

This might be your last chance to buy the NES Classic

Nintendo is discontinuing the NES Classic Edition. While this decision is still puzzling, you might still be looking to buy one before it disappears into the ether forever. Best Buy stores have some of the last units starting today.

If you plan on buying one, I’d head to the closest Best Buy store right now as these units won’t be available on Best Buy’s website.

Nintendo has already stopped manufacturing the NES Classic Edition. Demand has been very strong and has largely outpaced production. But Nintendo doesn’t want to sell the NES Classic Edition forever.

The company probably wants to focus on the Nintendo Switch, saying that you should buy Nintendo’s latest console if you want to play Nintendo games. Rumor has it that Nintendo is also working on an SNES Classic Edition for the end of the year.

And if you don’t live in the U.S. and still want to play some good old NES games on your TV, you can still buy a Raspberry Pi and install some emulators on it. That could be a nice DIY weekend project.

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GoPro to release prosumer spherical camera in fall 2017

GoPro today announced the Fusion, a camera capable of capturing spherical video for use in VR and standard video formats through a software solution. The camera will be released this fall. GoPro has yet to name the price. If nothing else GoPro is becoming a camera company again.

The Fusion shows that GoPro is going back to its core competency in creating hardware. Action cameras existed before GoPro. But GoPro provided a better complete solution and the market responded by making the company top-selling vendor. GoPro likely hopes the same thing will happen with the Fusion and the rest of the spherical camera market.

Specific details are still a bit light since the camera will not be released until the fall. Even the images released by GoPro are clearly carefully composed to reveal more about the camera’s intended use rather than specifics about the camera. We even boosted the levels of the photo above to reveal a bit more.

The company says in a press release that the Fusion records 360-degree video at 5.2K30 and features a mode called OverCapture that lets users go back and carve out a standard video file from the spherical footage. Essentially, GoPro is building a camera that lets users record literally everything and then select the best framing later.

GoPro has built similar solutions in the past that involved mounting several GoPros into a rig that positioned the cameras to capture every angle and software then stitched the footage together. But with GoPro cameras costing hundreds of dollars each, these rigs are expensive. The Fusion will likely be less expensive than these rigs.

There are several other spherical cameras on the market though none have made a big splash. They range in price from a few hundred dollars to a couple thousand. GoPro’s advantage could be the software that lets users produce a standard POV-looking video from the captured footage. Traditionally videos captured by spherical cameras have a fish-eye look, which can be off-putting and distracting.

GoPro is opening a beta program this summer to get the Fusion in the hands of creative users. The company hopes this program will help further refine the user experience prior to releasing the camera on the general market. This is a smart move. The expectations are different and could help reduce negative reactions once the camera hits stores.

Shopify launches a free, in-house-designed card reader

Shopify has designed its own hardware for the first time, building out a design team and coming up with a unique approach to the simple card reader, that most basic tool in the real-world merchant’s arsenal. The new chip and swipe card reader makes its official debut at Shopify’s Unite developer conference in San Francisco today, and it’s a device with a superficial simplicity that only hints at how much care went into the design process.

From around 2013 onwards, Shopify began paying close attention to how much of its online-seller customer base began selling in person, via pop-up shops and also via small shops set up in their home towns. That year, it released Shopify POS for the first time, and the key difference in that was the hardware component. Shopify was happy to rely on partners for that hardware piece of the picture, as it wasn’t within its core set of skills.

“We’ve learned a ton over that period of time, in bringing people hardware and scaling point of sale to many tens of thousands of merchants,” explained Shopify VP of Product Satish Kanwar in an interview. “What we’ve seen is the evolution of the retail store as a place that was primarily a first channel for someone, to being a great experiential marketing strategy for people, and just a necessary part of the growth and evolution of any retail brand, whether you started online first or not.”

Retail is changing as a result, and that means merchants need a more seamless solution across both online and offline parts of their businesses, Kanwar says. That led them to set up creating their dedicated hardware unit within the company around one year ago, with the aim of taking all the lessons they’ve learned from their merchants’ collective experience with in-person sales.

“What people forget is that it’s not just the merchant that’s touching the hardware, like a cash register,” Kanwar said. “When it comes to a card reader, it’s the shopper that’s interacting with the device and inputting their card as well. What we realized is that it’s really hard to get a good balance of good quality, versatility and something that provides that delightful experience in something that’s also affordable.”

Shopify’s reader is a device designed to cover all those bases, with a detachable reader that you can use one-handed and can handle both swipes and chip-based “dips.” A subtle groove offers a solid thumb rest and Kanwar showed me how a merchant can even use it stacked with their phone with one hand thanks to the groove, paired with a textured surface that won’t slide off the back of your smartphone or tablet too easily.

The reader plugs into a base via micro USB, which is also the connector used to plug the base into a power source for charging. The battery in the reader should easily handle a full week’s worth of transactions even if left unplugged, and the modular design is intentionally made to fit with multiple different mounting options to come in the future, in addition to the current weighted base.

All of Shopify’s careful design work will likely remain mostly invisible to both merchants and shoppers, however, if they’ve done what they set out to do; Kanwar notes that the minimalist branding and largely white device is meant to help foreground the in-person shopping experience, rather than the tech that enables it.

Shopify’s card reader will be free, which for merchants might be the most important aspect of its design; that’s if you’re a Shopify merchant without a current Shopify POS solution — others can also buy them for $29 via the Shopify Hardware Store. The accessory supports both iOS and Android, and processes payments with rates starting at 2.4 percent per swipe. It connects to your phone via Bluetooth LE, too, meaning if you happen to be without a headphone jack you’re in luck.

Shopify is offering these for pre-order to its U.S.-based merchants now, and shipping should start in June. Now that the company has a dedicated team working on hardware, it’s likely this isn’t the end of their in-house device design efforts, but Kanwar only hinted at what might be possible in terms of different docking attachments for the reader when asked about the future.

Steve Jobs’ custom Apple I and other historic machines are on display at Seattle museum

Long before the iPhone or even the Mac, Apple was a handful of people working in an industry that was only just beginning to take the idea of personal computing seriously. In the earliest days of those early days, Steves Wozniak and Jobs made their first device together: the Apple I. Few of these were sold, and fewer still survive — but the Living Computers museum in Seattle managed to get three. And one of them was Jobs’ personal machine.

Paul Allen, the museum’s founder and patron, has caused to be assembled quite an impressive collection of devices from Apple’s history, many of which have been restored to working condition. The public will be able to tinker with a NeXT Cube as well as early Macs, but the pride and joy of the collection must be the Apple Is.

The new exhibit, which highlights the collaboration and competition between Apple and Microsoft over the years as the companies grew, is open today.

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The Apple I, you may or may not remember, wasn’t much of a hit. Only 200 were made — by hand — and it wasn’t long before the company put its hopes in the Apple II, which would go on to be more popular by far. One of the Is, however, Jobs kept in his office as a demo machine for industry people.

When Jobs left in 1985 he left in a hurry, and this I was left behind on a shelf. Don Hutmacher, one of the company’s first employees, grabbed it and it stayed in his possession until he passed away last year. His wife generously allowed the museum to take care of it, and you can imagine their gratitude.

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The team had their suspicious, but a tag inside the metal chassis — and the fact that it had a chassis at all, since Apple Is came just as boards — suggested it was more than a rare Apple I; it was the rarest. It’s signed “BF,” which would have been employee number one, Bill Fernandez. This was definitely, the team decided, Jobs’ custom machine.

Because the Apple I didn’t have a ROM, and Jobs didn’t want to have to program it from scratch any time someone wanted to see it in action, he had a custom EPROM attached to it that initialized the computer with BASIC when it started up. Its RAM, the engineering team suspects, was also augmented so it didn’t run out and crash during the demo.

The team at the museum read the contents of this EPROM and used it to set up a second, less historic Apple I. That one, which has had its power components modified to be a little less prone to catching fire or warping the circuit board, will now be available in this primed state for anyone to play with. Yes, anyone — the only operational Apple I on the planet right now, and your kid can type “butts” on it with fingers still greasy from the sandwich they got across the street.

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That’s the mission of the museum, though: the Apple I, along with dozens of other ancient computers, from Altairs to mainframes from the 60’s, are deliberately there to be touched and, if not truly understood (few kids know BASIC these days), at least experienced.

Ahead of the exhibit’s opening, a small reunion was held for a handful of people who had a hand in the early days of Apple, Microsoft, and the home computer industry. Steve Wozniak and Paul Allen met — for the first time, amazingly — and chatted over an Apple II. And it wasn’t until someone took stock of the situation that they realized that the entire original team that built the Apple I in Steve Jobs’ garage — minus the departed Steve — were together again for the first time in decades:

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The museum has also been working with the University of Washington to compile an oral history of this era of computing, and many of the people who figured in the creation of the Apple I.

Now that the exhibit is open, feel free to drop by the museum and touch a few pieces of computing history — though you may need to brush up on your BASIC.

Facebook will license its new 360 cameras that capture in six degrees of freedom

On day two of Facebook’s F8 conference, Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer showed off designs for two new 360 cameras that the company is going to help push to market. The x24, with 24 cameras, and its little brother the x6, with six cameras, can each capture in six degrees of freedom for more immersive 360 content. Facebook plans to license the designs of the two cameras to select commercial partners to get each to market later this year.

Prototyped in Facebook’s Area 404, the x24 combines the FLIR camera system with Facebook’s proprietary architecture. Being able to shoot in six degrees of freedom (6DoF) cuts out a lot of the work that would traditionally be required to create 360 videos where the watcher can tilt their head in all directions without sacrificing the believability of a given shot.

The conceptual idea, sometimes referred to as volumetric capture, has been heralded for some time as a major milestone for VR. Startups like Lytro have been betting on light fields to get the job done, while 8i has taken a software approach. Instead, Facebook is taking a sparse lens orientation approach that avoids the complex rigs all-together.

“Unfortunately, capturing full 6-DoF 360 videos requires more complex hardware setups like camera arrays or light-field cameras that are not affordable and easy to use for novice users,” a team of Adobe researchers said in a recent paper on the subject.

The benefit of capturing depth information at the pixel level is that it enables fun post-production video masking where a creator could swap out mountains in the background of a video for a beach instead.

These new cameras, building on the original Surround 360, also look fantastic. The old Surround seemed to draw inspiration from the spinning top at the end of Inception, but the x24 and x6’s smaller, simple spherical design is exactly the familiar and welcoming look you want from futuristic technology.

“Part of what we are doing with the ecosystem, and the camera itself, is giving these tools to content creators so they can start to develop this artistic language,” explained Brian Cabral, Facebook’s director of engineering.

Bootstrapping a community is hard work, but Facebook realizes that the success of everything, from News Feed 360 videos to the Oculus itself, depends on an ecosystem of content creators. To this avail, Facebook is partnering with post-production companies and VFX houses, including Adobe, Otoy, Foundry, Mettle, DXO, Here Be Dragons, Framestore, Magnopus and The Mill.

Facebook's New VR Experience Looks Like Hell on Earth

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At its annual developer conference in San Jose today, Facebook unveiled some of its latest tech projects, assuring investors that it's catching up to competitors like Snapchat . Mark Zuckerberg himself took the stage to make painful jokes about Fast and Furious and opine on how Facebook wants to dominate what he sees as the next major platform: augmented reality. Being able to have animated sharks swimming around your cereal bowl is apparently the future of tech-according to Zuck, at least.

The company also introduced Facebook Spaces , which is essentially just Second Life integrated with Facebook and powered by virtual reality headsets. If I spent a week imagining a future designed to simulate damnation, it still wouldn't be as painful as watching Facebook's awkward announcement video.

Sure, the technology is cool, I guess, but who actually wants something like this? Would anyone besides people who describe themselves as "virtual reality enthusiasts" really want to strap on a bulky, expensive headset so they can have interactions that are both more awkward and less personal than real life?

Facebook's pitch is essentially, "Why take a picture with your friends when you can do the same thing but in virtual reality with the International Space Station in the background?" It appears Facebook Spaces will also include games, which is probably a far more appealing feature. It's a just toy! This might be fun to try out a few times, but Facebook is selling it as some kind of socialization supplement to replace actual human interaction.

Even on a big stage at a flashy developer conference, this stuff comes across as absurd , but in practice it seems like a very lonely and, honestly, pathetic experience.

Facebook F8 Conference starts tonight: Here’s what to expect

Rule the Playground With a Chainsaw-Powered Tricycle

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As a kid, you probably came up with a lot of terrible ideas your parents wisely stopped you from carrying out; that's why you're alive today. But once grownup, you're free to try anything that pops into your mind, like upgrading a toddler-sized tricycle so that it's powered by an old chainsaw .

YouTube channel ThisDustIn is responsible for this monstrous upgrade, which swaps the pedals on a classic kid's trike with a gas-powered chainsaw-minus the blade, which they're perhaps saving for a future video. Almost everything on the tricycle had to be reinforced and upgraded to survive the speeds it was suddenly being subjected too, including the welds holding it all together, and the addition of extra-strength supports for the back wheels so an adult-sized rider wouldn't crush them, although it doesn't seem like these geniuses bothered installing a brake. I guess that's what shoes are for.

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Snapchat embraces AR with New World lenses

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As Facebook goes after Snapchat with slowly adopting Snapchat features into its bouquet of apps, the popular image messaging app has rolled out New World lenses as part of its augmented reality (AR) drive.

"While Snapping with the rear-facing camera, simply tap the camera screen to find new Lenses that can paint the world around you with new 3D experiences," Snapchat said in a post late on Tuesday.

Snapchat launched Lenses over a year ago as a whole new way to help users express themselves on the platform.

Now, tapping the camera screen while using the rear-facing camera will bring up new 3D lenses.

You can create a cloud, a rainbow, flowers and a floating "OMG" among others.

Facebook has recently added Snapchat-style Stories and camera special effects to Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Facebook on Tuesday launched a platform for developers to encourage augmented reality (AR) camera effects -- another move to take on Snapchat.