Category: Gadgets

EU lawmakers are finally set to standardize charging ports for consumer electronics devices like smartphones and tablets — announcing a proposal today that, once adopted, will see the region settle on USB-C as a universal charging port for gadgets which will also include cameras, headphones, portable speakers and handheld videogames consoles.

Some smaller consumer electronics devices — like smart watches and fitness bands — are being excluded owing to factors like their size and conditions of use.

The Commission plan will also see regional lawmakers unbundle the sale of chargers from mobiles so they are not automatically included in the box.

Fast charging standards will also be harmonized under the proposal — while device makers will have requirements to provide users with “relevant information about charging performance”, including info on the power required and if a device supports fast charging.

“This will make it easier for consumers to see if their existing chargers meet the requirements of their new device or help them to select a compatible charger,” the Commission notes, going on to suggest that the full package of measures will help consumers limit the number of new chargers they buy and help them save €250 million a year on unnecessary charger purchases.

In its announcement of the proposal, the Commission acknowledges that the “voluntary approach” it has pursued for over a decade — attempting to nudge the electronics industry toward a common standard through mechanisms like a Memorandum of Understanding — has failed to deliver the sought-for standard, with still three different types of mobile phone chargers in play for instance.

The wider aim here is to make a meaningful dent in the global e-waste mountain by reducing a portion generated by the consumer electronics sector — with the Commission noting, for example, that consumers already own around three mobile phone chargers on average, of which they use two on a regular basis. Ergo, there’s simply no call for device makers to put a new charger in the box every time.

Disposed of unused chargers are estimated to represent some 11,000 tonnes of e-waste annually, the Commission adds.

One of the non-standard chargers still on the mobile market belongs to the iPhone maker Apple, of course — which has resisted pressure to put a standard port in its devices — so a pan-EU law to enforce a universal charger could force the tech giant to finally abandon its proprietary Lightning port.

For years, Apple has presided over a sprawling and doubtless highly lucrative accessories business rather than switch to more standard ports on its devices. Indeed, sometimes it has even removed standard ports — deleting the 3.5mm headphone jack off of the iPhone, for instance. It means that users of Apple’s devices typically have to purchase dongles if they wish to gain access to more standard ports — generating yet more future e-waste.

Whether the EU’s legislative proposal will actually outlaw Apple’s dongle-based workaround to embedded universality remains to be seen. (We’ve put the question to the Commission.)

Commenting on the Commission proposal in a statement, Margrethe Vestager, its EVP for digital strategy, said: “European consumers were frustrated long enough about incompatible chargers piling up in their drawers. We gave industry plenty of time to come up with their own solutions, now time is ripe for legislative action for a common charger. This is an important win for our consumers and environment and in line with our green and digital ambitions.”

In a mirror statement, Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for internal market, added: “Chargers power all our most essential electronic devices. With more and more devices, more and more chargers are sold that are not interchangeable or not necessary. We are putting an end to that. With our proposal, European consumers will be able to use a single charger for all their portable electronics – an important step to increase convenience and reduce waste.”

The EU’s other institutions — the European Parliament and Council — will still need to back the proposal in order for it to become law. Although the European Parliament has long expressed frustration with the Commission’s failure to deliver a common charging standard — and voted overwhelmingly for tougher action on the issue last year — so MEPs will likely be keen to make a pan-EU law on this happen.

Even so, there won’t be a radical change overnight. The Commission has suggested a transition period of 24 months from the data of adoption of the legislative — so even if the Parliament and Council quickly agree to the plan it will still be years, plural, before device makers have to comply.

The Commission’s PR notes that it wants to give industry “ample time” to adapt to the planned law change, even though the sector has had over a decade of pressure on exactly this issue.

A further step will be needed for Europe to get the common charger solution the Commission wants — with more harmonization required to ensure interoperability of the external power supply. Legislators say that piece will be dealt with by the review of the Ecodesign Regulation — slated to be launched later this year with the aim of it also entering into force at the same time as the common charger port requirement.

In an FAQ on the latter proposal, the Commission answers its own question on why it’s taken it so long to grasp the legislative nettle with this issue, writing that it had initially sought to continue with a more “ambitious” voluntary approach in the hopes that the sector would engage. However, it said proposals put forward by the industry “fell short” — and would not have delivered a common charging solution.

Legislators learning that they do actually need to legislate looks like an important lesson as the world gears up to tackle other existential environmental challenges — like climate change and microplastics pollution.

The ocean is important to countless industries, but we still only have a rough idea of what it’s like as a whole at any given time. To foster a new generation of ocean-monitoring floats and other devices, Sofar Ocean Technologies and DARPA are publishing an open hardware standard called Bristlemouth so that researchers will have an off-the-shelf option rather than wasting their precious grant dollars solving the same engineering problems from scratch.

Sofar calls itself a “real-time ocean intelligence platform,” which you might think of as a sort of weather service for the seven seas. Unlike the atmosphere, however, the ocean is not easy to remotely observe with satellites and radar — you need to have hundreds, perhaps thousands of devices actually out there bobbing on the waves to understand its motions, salinity, pollutant levels, temperature and so on.

While the company has its own line of business maintaining a network of its own floats, which produce valuable data it can sell to a variety of interested parties, it also wants to advance the ocean-sensing industry in general, and CTO Evan Shapiro suggests that one of the best ways to do so is to create an open hardware and software standard.

The lack of a hardware connectivity standard is a huge hindrance to development and innovation. Today, a large portion of budgets allocated to development of new ocean technologies are spent toward resolving fundamental technical bottlenecks — power, data and communications connectivity — rather than on actual ocean innovation,” Shapiro told TechCrunch.

It’s very similar to the way space companies have begun to coalesce around the idea of a few standard buses and spacecraft. If you want to observe space dust or measure radiation outside the atmosphere or some other research goal, you want to spend your time and money on those instruments, not on building a spacecraft. Just as Rocket Lab and others are betting people would rather buy and customize a standard spacecraft than reinvent the wheel, Sofar thinks researchers focusing on the ocean would prefer to focus on their key technologies.

“People rarely want to build a float with power systems, satellite telemetry, GPS and a dolphin-detecting hydrophone. They primarily want to build the dolphin-detecting hydrophone, but in today’s environment (given the lack of hardware standards) they end up having to build the rest from scratch too. Sofar’s commercial adoption and support of Bristlemouth is vital to kick-starting value in the ecosystem,” Shapiro said, though he noted that others have attempted this before. “We’re not the first to recognize the need for standardization, nor the first to take a credible go at it. We are the first to do so as a large-scale commercial platform provider (there’s a reason USB came from Intel, IBM and Microsoft and not a white paper out of Berkeley), and we’re doing so in partnership with some of the most influential movers in the domain.”

Among those movers are DARPA, the Office of Naval Research and conservation organization Oceankind. All involved agree that more data coming from ocean sensing can only be a good thing for science and industry.

As for the standard itself, the details aren’t particularly exciting in consumer tech terms — it’s not a kit or reference model (the image at top is one of Sofar’s own smart buoys, though there is overlap) but mainly a hardware-software suite focusing on modularity and interoperability. The idea isn’t that you buy a Bristlemouth Basic and upgrade it, but rather that many in the industry design to a shared standard that covers basic steps like power management, communication and so on, and ensures resulting devices can work together easily. There’s more information available at the official Bristlemouth site.

Ocean intelligence will be a major part of any industry touching the sea, from kelp farming to roboshipping to climate change monitoring. If something like Bristlemouth can mitigate the data scarcity that limits these domains, the “blue economy” will be able to take off earlier and more safely.

Pollutants pouring from smokestacks around the world may be bad news for the atmosphere, but if you catch them before they get out there, you could reduce emissions and collect some valuable materials at the same time. That’s what Carbix aims to do with its carbon-sequestering reactor, which would extract minerals from emissions while staying carbon negative.

Carbix, which presented today at the Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is capitalizing on the pressure being placed on industries to decarbonize or face fines and high taxes. Cement manufacturing alone accounts for some 8%  of carbon emissions, and executives are scrambling to go green.

It turns out that minerals needed for cement and many other industries are being literally thrown away — puffed out of flues and allowed to settle wherever they drift. In fact, these minerals are valuable enough that Carbix can afford to pay factories for the privilege of siphoning them off and reselling them.

“We’re essentially paying emitters for stock they would normally dump into the wind — they have no incentive not to do this,” said Carbix founder Quincy Sammy.

The process is an accelerated version of what happens in nature: atmospheric carbon dioxide interacting with certain abundant minerals and slowly forming other ones — like calcium carbonate, limestone. Turning CO2 into stone is the basis of several startups in what we might call the permanent carbon sequestering market; Heimdal does it using seawater and 44.01 is injecting high-carbon water into fields of reactive minerals. Carbix, of course, is going to artificial sources.

It works like this: Carbix goes to a big emitter of CO2 and particulates and analyzes the stream being blown out. From that they can predict what carbonate minerals they can isolate and what they’ll need to do it. Then the output of the facility will be routed through one of Carbix’s reactors, in which the various effluvia are combined with raw reactive minerals — gypsum, lime kiln dust and others sourced from nearby to lower the logistics impact — and out come useful substances like ingredients for making cement, glass and other things. They cart those off and sell the raw materials that would have otherwise disappeared into the atmosphere (and eventually landed on a glacier somewhere).

The reactor, currently in a scale prototype called X1, is the most obviously defensible IP here, and Sammy said that the bulk of the seed round they’re putting together will go toward building the production-scale X2, which will have several hundred times the reactor space. Each X2 should be able to handle about 16,000 tons of carbonates per year per reactor, which corresponds to about 8,000 tons of CO2. They can operate in parallel, and Sammy estimated that a good size emitter might use 10 at a single facility.

The simplest arrangement would be for the emitter to pay for the upfront costs of the installation, with the understanding of mutual benefits to come. Carbix would then regularly pay for the materials it extracts — a double benefit since the emitter would normally not earn any money on them but the emissions would count toward caps. Sammy didn’t rule out profit sharing or other agreements but this would be the preferred setup.

“We’re breaking new ground with these companies, so reciprocity is key,” Sammy said. And while cement manufacturing is the first vertical they’re targeting, the Carbix process can be adapted to plenty of other industries.

“We don’t want to be tied to any specific sector — flue gas is flue gas. That’s why the project is end to end; we guide people through it. We’re demonstrating that we can work in any industry,” he explained.

As with any hardware company working at industrial scales, there are a lot of upfront costs. Carbix is working on a seed round to cover the expense of building and certifying the X2 reactor so it can be insured and financed through ordinary channels. After that comes the reciprocal back-scratching arrangements that benefit everyone involved.

Owners of Alexa devices will soon be able to use OnStar’s emergency services from their homes, under an expanded partnership between OnStar’s parent company General Motors and Amazon.

OnStar already expanded OnStar Guardian earlier this year with the introduction of the Guardian app, which lets customers access the service via their mobile device. This latest expansion will now bring customers’ voice-enabled home devices into that ecosystem.

While a customer could theoretically use the Guardian app inside their home today, GM’s head of Product Jeff Wajer told TechCrunch in a recent interview that there are many instances where people don’t have their phones on them but nevertheless may need to access emergency help. He noted that people with different accessibility levels, who may be unable to use a phone, could nevertheless shout for help using the OnStar-Alexa integration.

The integration will be rolled out gradually, first to an initial cohort of existing OnStar customers and then more broadly in 2022. Compatible Alexa devices include the Echo, Echo Dot or Echo Show. GM declined to provide further details on how many customers will have initial access to the service, or how much it might cost, but Wajer did say there would be an initial free trial for OnStar customers in the first cohort.

OnStar Guardian is available to customers regardless of whether they drive a GM vehicle. However, this is not GM’s first collaboration with Amazon. The company has already introduced Amazon Alexa to the infotainment systems of select vehicles, and this newest partnership marks a strengthening of the ties between the two companies.

It’s also an indication that the automaker is seeking to strengthen its software and subscription businesses beyond the vehicle itself. The new offering “demonstrates GM’s commitment to its growth strategy and innovating its software enabled services,” the automaker’s VP of global innovation, Pam Fletcher, said in a statement.

Smart fitness gear is often limited by being static and non-portable. (And, well, eye-wateringly expensive.) Think Peloton‘s stationary bike for spin classes or wall-mounted strength training rig Tonal. Great if you’re at home and can afford to shell out thousands on a fancy home gym, but what if you want to take your workout with you wherever you go?

Meet Straffr, a German startup that’s exhibiting at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley this week. The company sells a smart fitness band that you can just pop in your backpack and take with you when you hit the road.

Originally opting for a crowdfunding route via Kickstarter last year, the hardware startup has gone on to sell “a few thousand” bands since getting the product to market in March this year. They’ve also bagged backing from business angels and have just closed a second seed round with an international investor as they gear up to expand their fledgling fitness business.

Straffr’s smart resistance band, which comes in either medium or strong strength grades, connects to the companion app using Bluetooth and starts tracking soon as you start stretching and flexing — providing feedback on your training session, not just on reps but on “quality” of exercise, per CEO Stefan Weiss.

The whole band is actually a sensor — made of an expandable rubber that’s electrically conductive. Straffr’s team developed the material and has some patents on it.

“It’s really hard to find and develop a material that stretches over 200% or 300% … and not break and not measure anything,” Weiss tells TechCrunch. “When you stretch [the Straffr fitness band] the electrical resistance changes and therefore we can say how much you’ve stretched the band for a specific exercise.”

Anyone who’s tried to do strength training using a (non-smart) resistance band knows it can be pretty tricky to keep focused and engaged without professional guidance. Basically it’s hard to know if you’re performing the movements in an optimal way or just mindlessly twanging a piece of rubber. So a sensing element looks like it could add a lot of value to this particular bit of fitness kit.

Straffr’s smart band clocks your reps, power and velocity as you pull, with the app providing real-time feedback through the workout — offering verbal cues if you’re pulling “too fast” or nudges to keep things “slow and even.” It’ll also show you overall results of the workout if you’re a fan of fitness stats.

The app features a selection of workout videos which let you follow along to pre-recorded fitness band sessions, such as HIIT-focused workouts, total body strength training or quick home-office exercises.

Weiss says the startup is building a premium on-demand offer, too — and has recently onboarded five personal trainers so it can offer one-to-one training sessions. That will be for a future Pro feature. The basic app is free, as the startup is charging for the hardware.

Straffr’s band costs just over $100 (€99.99), which is very pricey if you’re comparing it to a non-smart alternative (a basic resistance band can cost just a few dollars). But that’s a fairly poor comparison, because here you’re getting a whole fitness package versus just a piece of elastic. So those extra dollars are for relevant exercise content and in-app personalization along with workout quantification and the added motivation of live feedback.

It’s also worth noting that Straffr’s smart band is considerably cheaper than shelling out for a Peloton or other high-end connected home-gym kit, which is now aiming to lighten people’s wallets by targeting their workouts.

So, seen from that perspective, Straffr’s spin on smart fitness kinda looks like a bargain.

Typical buyers so far tend to be either fitness-focused men who are very into the “quantified self” trend, per Weiss, or middle-aged women wanting an alternative to fitness classes at the gym. But a humble (but smart) fitness band really could offer something for everyone.

“Where really we see a future of training with resistance bands is with personal trainers directly,” Weiss adds. “One-on-one digital training, on-demand, with personal trainers, with pro athletes, with Olympians that talk you through the whole workout routine, what it does, they’re training with you, it’s sweaty training, it’s motivating for people.”

Still, if resistance band workouts really aren’t your jam, Straffr does have plans to develop additional bits of a smart fitness kit. Although Weiss won’t be drawn on exactly what other connected hardware they’re cooking up.

“We do have a product in the pipeline now that we’re developing internally right now — and we’re really excited about it,” he says, adding: “I can say it’s not going to be just a jumping rope which counts.

“For us it’s always the combination of functional, really portable training with the component of tracking quality — the quality of your training. Like how good are you? Are you actually effective? Because if you’re just counting reps and steps and stuff there’s obviously a good motivational aspect to it … but we want to also see are these reps really good, are they good quality, are you doing the best you can for the condition you’re in right now?”