Tech Blog - Page 569 of 2385 - 1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support1010Computers

Razer shows off Sila, the first 5G router built for gaming

Published January 7, 2020

Gaming — with its huge demands on bandwidth, graphics and overall processing power — is likely to be one of the big use cases for 5G networking in the future, and today one of the big players in consumer gaming hardware showed off a 5G router that underscores that trend. Razer, the consumer electronics upstart that has long billed itself as “for gamers, by gamers,” today at CES showed off a new product called the Razer Sila 5G Home Router — a high-speed networking device that both automatically prioritizes bandwidth for gaming and streaming, and also lets users choose which devices on the network get more or less juice.

Alongside that, it also unveiled a new universal mobile gaming controller — Razer Kishi; a new gaming desktop Razer Tomahawk Gaming Desktop, and a new Razer e-racing simulator created in collaboration with game publishers and vendors (we’ve put this as the main picture because — let’s face it — routers are not nearly as cool-looking even if they are more likely to have legs).

The Sila and e-racing simulator are both concept pieces at this point, while the Android- and iOS-compatible controller will be on the market in early 2020. (No date given for the Tomahawk.)

Razer — which went public in 2017 (market cap currently around $1.5 billion) — has faced recent controversy from a number of former employees coming out to criticize its figurehead and CEO, Min-Liang Tan, and how he runs the company, alleging a culture of fear with violent threats and more.

Tan at the time of the reports brushed off the remarks claiming they were in jest, but it’s notable that he doesn’t seem to be making himself particularly visible or available this year at the show — a contrast from years before.

Instead, we are presented with the fruits of the company’s labor over the past year, a time where it has continued to produce hardware — computers, peripherals like controllers, mainly — but has made a number of moves to figure out the best way ahead with software and services, where it says it is increasing its share of revenue, but has also shut down its digital game store, as well as its Ouya and Forge TV services.

Although it’s only still a concept, the Sila 5G Home Router is perhaps the most exciting of the pack of announcements this year, as it is tapping into a bigger wave of interest in 5G by giving it a more relevant feel to the consumer market; and represents a notable new area for Razer itself (in routers).

The Sila is described as a “high-speed networking device tailored for gamers” and notable features include ultra-low latency during both stationary and mobile gameplay, built on Razer’s FasTrack engine — which allows a user to play a game with no pings or interruptions from other services or network glitches. The router has a built-in rechargeable battery so you can travel with it and use it outside the home.

It is built using a Qualcomm SDX55 + Hawkeye IPQ8072A chipset, and is also usable with 4G LTE over a 802.11ax 4×4 WiFi connection, with one 2.5Gbps WAN, 4 x 1Gbps LAN and 1 x USB 3.0 ports, along with a SIM slot to link up to the cellular network. All of it can be controlled through Android or iOS apps.

Razer’s presence at CES where it shows off its latest ideas has become a regular fixture at the annual event for good reason.

As gaming has expanded beyond traditional consoles and into the cloud and across the web to PCs and phones, it has become one of the most demanding uses of computer processing power, putting machines through their paces not just in graphics, but audio and overall responsiveness when it comes to gameplay.

At CES, if you go to any of the big product launches for the computing giants (Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm), or visit any number of stands showing off the latest in computing tech, gaming is the most common demo you will see as a “proof point” — not just because it’s eye-catching, but because it genuinely is a test of how well something works.

So it’s no surprise that Razer, a company building hardware specifically for the gaming market, has a regular, big presence at CES, where it shows off both products that it plans to launch as well as those that are still in concept, in order to test market interest and have some fun with what could be in the future.

(It’s also a very obvious reason why Intel became an investor in the company many years ago when it was still in startup mode. It was a strategic move that helped ensure both that Intel could collaborate with Razer to have a closer idea of what is needed and should be built, but also to make sure that its chipsets are at the core of those new gaming-focused machines).

PopSockets launches a $60 wireless charger that works with its PopGrips

Published January 7, 2020

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, PopSockets is launching a new must-have item to its lineup of smartphone accessories — and one that solves a significant problem for PopGrip users. The company today is unveiling the PopPower Home wireless charger that allows you to wirelessly charge your supported Apple or Android smartphone by making room for the PopGrip on the back of your phone by way of a hole in the middle of the charging pad.

This design allows the mobile device to sit flush with the charging pad so it can wirelessly charge — something that hasn’t been possible with standard wireless chargers. Instead, PopGrips users would either have to remove their phone case (or swappable PopGrip) to take advantage of wireless charging, or they’d have to forgo it altogether and instead opt to charge their phone with a power cord, as usual.

The new PopPower Home charger solves this problem. It will also work through phone cases up to 5 mm thick and can charge devices that don’t have a PopGrip on the back, like other phones or the AirPods with Apple’s Wireless Charging Case — even if it’s protected by one of the AirPods case covers that PopSockets sells.

The new charger, powered by Nucurrent, features Qi certification with Extended Power Profile (EPP) to deliver up to 15 watts of wireless power for fast-charging wireless mobile devices. (Many other chargers are 5 to 10 watts, for comparison’s sake.) The phone’s brand/model, case thickness and battery depletion will affect the charge times, PopSockets says.

At launch, the PopPower Home supports both Apple and Samsung’s Fast Wireless charging modes. (PopSockets tells us Pixel phones that support wireless charging will also be supported.)

Using the case is as simple as plugging it in, then placing your phone or another device on top — making sure any attached PopGrip slides down into the hole in the middle. An LED indicator on the side will subtly alert you that the case is charging.

Like PopGrips themselves, the case comes in an array of designs, including Night Bloom, Mountainscape, Matte White, Cosmic Cloud and Carbonate Gray.

Unfortunately, the case only works with standard PopGrips, and excludes metal grips, PopGrip Mirror and PopGrip Lips.

PopPower Home is available today exclusively on Popsockets.com for $60. That’s pricier than many of today’s wireless chargers, which tend to be $20 or less. But for dedicated PopGrips users, it’s worth it for the convenience of just being able to lay your phone down to charge.

At launch, only three styles are available, but the others will arrive in late January.

It’s not currently being sold as a bundle, but will arrive on Amazon later this year — possibly as soon as February.

Despite the price, the new product will likely do well because of PopSockets’ large, existing customer base. To date, the company has sold 165 million PopSockets, it says.

Perch, now called Orchard, raises $36M to simplify home buying and selling

Published January 7, 2020

Perch, the vertically integrated platform for buying and selling homes, has today announced the close of a $36 million equity round led by Navitas, with participation from existing investor FirstMark Capital, Juxtapose and Accomplice. The company is also announcing that it is rebranding from Perch to Orchard.

Orchard launched in September of 2017 with a plan to bring the full home selling and buying experience under one roof. Most home buyers are what the industry calls “dual trackers,” which means they are in the process of selling their house and buying a new one at the same time.

This usually forces those buyers to either take on a huge financial risk by buying a new home before they’ve sold their last home, or to place an offer on their new home contingent on the sale of their old home, which is unattractive to most sellers.

Orchard solves this by making an offer on buyers’ old houses that is guaranteed for 90 days. Orchard co-founder Court Cunningham says that more than 85% of those homes sell at a market price before the 90-day period.

Cunningham believes that Orchard’s advantage comes not only in the fact that it has products to serve each part of the process — search, title and mortgage — but that it’s iterated on each of those pieces of the puzzle.

For example, Orchard has improved its search functionality to allow users to choose which photo they’re searching for. Let’s say the master bathroom or the kitchen is the most important room in the home to you. Orchard lets you search by pictures of that room as you browse homes. Orchard is also working on a new machine learning-powered search system that would allow users to select five homes they love to help the search algorithm find homes similar to them.

With a team of data scientists, Orchard works to price homes as “close to the pin as possible,” according to Cunningham. It’s also worth noting that Orchard compensates its realtors via salary and benefits as opposed to the usual commission framework most real estate agents live off.

Cunningham believes this is what makes Orchard a more human tech real estate platform, fully aligning the interests of the real estate agent with the buyer/seller.

When a home doesn’t sell before the 90-day period, Orchard buys the home a few points below market value through that guaranteed offer, and then makes small improvements to the home to help it sell. Orchard underwrites the home again and puts it back on the market in a process Cunningham describes as “much more capital efficient than you think.”

This is thanks in large part to the $200 million+ debt financing Orchard secured alongside its Series A funding round, and the fact that Orchard’s data scientists can help recycle those homes (and with it, the capital) relatively quickly on the market. Cunningham says the company is only using a fraction of its debt financing.

Orchard also offers a title business, letting buyers close the transaction via their phone from the comfort of their home. And Orchard shows no signs of slowing. The company currently has a mortgage product in beta.

On the heels of this new funding round, Orchard wants to double the size of its team from 150 people to 300 by the end of 2020. Cunningham also expects to see more than 100% revenue growth over the next year.

“The greatest challenge is to grow rapidly and build the tech around this that allows us to deliver in a repeatable way,” said Cunningham. “Buying a home is the biggest financial transaction of someone’s life and the human element is really important. So we need to grow quickly but in a way that is highly human and highly consistent.”

Quantum Machines launches its Quantum Orchestration Platform

Published January 7, 2020

Quantum computers are, by default, hybrid machines that combine the exotic properties of the quantum world with a classical computer that, essentially, manages it. A lot of the focus in the industry has gone into the actual quantum processors, but as those machines get more powerful, the classical part — and the process of converting those digital commands for use in the analog world of quantum computing — is becoming a bottleneck. That’s what Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup that’s coming out of stealth today, is tackling.

The company’s Quantum Orchestration Platform is a full hardware and software solution for controlling quantum systems. The company built its own custom pulse processor that can handle multi-qubit manipulation while being independent of the quantum processor with which it interacts (assuming it’s supported, of course).

“The classical layers of the quantum computer are the real unmet need. They are the bottleneck,” Quantum Machines co-founder Itamar Sivan told me. “We were really looking into what is holding the industry back. What are the things that we can do today to drive this industry forward, but that will also enable faster progress in the future. Since most of the focus in the last years has been devoted to quantum processors, it was only natural that you know we take on this challenge.”

The problem, he explained, is that in order to run complex algorithms on quantum processors, you also need extremely powerful classical computers. But with Moore’s Law at its end, it takes specialized hardware to do that effectively. And Quantum Machines’ hardware also offers very fast calibration, which in turn yields better, more precise results from the quantum processors it controls. What the company isn’t sharing, of course, is how exactly it is solving this problem. That is, after all, the secret sauce the team developed.

Sivan co-founded the company with Yonatan Cohen and Nissim Ofek; all three have doctorates from top universities with a lot of experience working on quantum computing problems. “We have an unfair advantage in this, given our experience,” Sivan quipped.

Cloudflare acquires stealthy startup S2 Systems, announces Cloudflare for Teams

Published January 7, 2020

Cloudflare announced that it has acquired S2 Systems, a browser isolation startup founded by former Microsoft execs. The two companies did not reveal the acquisition price.

Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO at Cloudflare, says that this acquisition is part of a new suite of products called Cloudflare for Teams, which has been designed to protect an organization from threats on the internet. S2 developed a solution specifically to help prevent browser-based code attacks.

Prince said the company had been thinking for some time about how to incorporate this kind of technology into the Cloudflare family of products. As with many companies, it had to decide if it should partner, build or acquire a company. Prince says that when he met the founding team from S2 and tested its technology, he was impressed with the speed and execution.

The team felt like a good fit, so Cloudflare made an offer. It had to bid against some other companies (which he did not name), but in the end S2 chose Cloudflare. He sees technology like this helping to even the playing field for internet users around the world.

“We’re super excited to have them on board, and we think that combining their better browser isolation technology with our ubiquitous network, we can really redefine how enterprises protect their employees, and over the long term how people generally browse the internet, where we can make it so that a low-end phone can have a similar experience as a brand new modern iPhone,” Prince said. He says that’s due to the tremendous processing power that can take place on its network across 200 cities worldwide, taking that processing burden off of the phone or other device.

The acquisition does not stand in isolation though. It’s part of a broader announcement around a new product category called Cloudflare for Teams. This is designed to provide a set of protections that includes S2 browser isolation as well as VPN and identity protection.

There are two main pieces to Cloudflare for Teams: Cloudflare Access and Cloudflare Gateway. Access is a Zero Trust identity and access management tool designed to help companies ensure their employees are using the most up-to-date software on their devices.

Gateway is designed to protect companies and individuals from threats on the internet, which is where S2 fits in. The company offers three versions: Gateway, which includes DNS-based filtering and audit logging; Gateway Pro, which secures all internet-bound traffic; and Gateway Enterprise, which helps prevent data loss and includes the browser isolation tech from S2.

The S2 acquisition closed on December 31st. S2’s 10 employees are now part of the Cloudflare team, and will remain in Kirkland, Wash. to establish a Cloudflare office there. The company was in stealth prior to the acquisition.

Cloudflare files for initial public offering

Union Square Ventures leads legal tech startup Juro’s $5M Series A

Published January 7, 2020

Juro, a UK startup that’s using machine learning tech and user-centric design to do for contracts what Typeform does for online forms, has caught the eye of Union Square Ventures. The New York-based fund leads a $5 million Series A investment that’s being announced this morning.

Also participating in the Series A are existing investors Point Nine Capital, Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise) and Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed). The round takes Juro’s total raised to-date to $8M, including a $2M seed which we covered back in 2018.

London is turning into a bit of a hub for legal tech, per Juro CEO and co-founder Richard Mabey — who cites “strong legal services industry” and “strong engineering talent” as explainers for that.

It was also, he reckons, “a bit of a draw” for Union Square Ventures — making what Juro couches as a “rare” US-to-Europe investment in legal tech in the city via the startup.

“Having brand name customers in the US certainly helped. But ultimately, they look for product-led companies with strong cross-functional teams wherever they find them,” he adds.

Juro’s business is focused on taking the tedium out of negotiating and drawing up contracts by making contract-building more interactive and trackable. It also handles e-signing, and follows on with contract management services, using machine learning tech to power features such as automatic contract tagging and for flagging up unusual language.

All of that sums to being a “contract collaboration platform”, as Juro’s marketing puts it. Think of it like Google Docs but with baked in legal smarts. There’s also support for visual garnish like animated GIFs to spice up offer letters and engage new hires.

“We have a data model underlying our editor that transforms every contract into actionable data,” says Mabey. “Juro contracts look like contracts, smell like contracts but ultimately they are written in code. And that code structures the data within them. This makes a contract manager’s life 10x easier than using an unstructured format like Word/pdf.”

“Still our main competitor is MS Word,” he adds. “Our challenge is to bring lawyers (and other users of contracts) out of Word, which is a significant task. Fortunately, Word was never designed for legal workflows, so we can add lots of value through our custom-built editor.”

Part of Juro’s Series A funds will be put towards beefing up its machine learning/data science capabilities, per Mabey — who says the overall plan at this point is to “double down on product”, including by tripling the size of the product team.

“That means hiring more designers, data scientists and engineers — building our engineering team in the Baltics,” he tells us. “There’s so much more we are excited to do, especially on the ML/data side and the funding unlocks our ability to do this. We will also be building our commercial team (marketing, sales, cs) in London to serve the EU market and expand further into the US, where we already have some customers on the ground.”

The 2016-founded startup still isn’t breaking out customer numbers but says it’s processed more than 50,000 contracts for its clients so far, noting too that those contracts have been agreed in 50+ countries. (“Everywhere from Estonia to Japan to Kazakhstan,” as Mabey puts it.)

In terms of who Juro users are, it’s still mostly “mid-market tech companies” — with Mabey citing the likes of marketplaces (Deliveroo), SaaS (Envoy) and fintechs (Luno), saying it’s especially companies processing “high volumes of contracts”.

Another vertical it’s recently expanded into is media, he notes.

“E-signature giants have grown massively in the last few years, and some are gradually encroaching into the contract lifecycle — but again, they deal with files (pdfs mostly) rather than dynamic, browser-based documentation,” he argues, adding: “In terms of new legal tech entrants — I’m excited by Kira Systems especially, who are working on unpicking pdf contracts post-signature.”

As part of the Series A, Union Square Ventures parter, John Buttrick, is joining Juro’s board.

Commenting in a supporting statement, Buttrick said: “We look for founders with products equipped to change an industry. While contract management might not be new, Juro’s transformative vision for it certainly is. There’s no greater proof of the product’s ease of use than the fact that we negotiated and closed the funding round in it. We’re delighted to support Juro’s team in making their vision a reality.”

Juro’s contract management platform — dashboard view

PlayStation 5 announced for holidays 2020

Published January 7, 2020

Turns out Sony is still able to pack a surprise or two into its CES press conference. The company just kicked off its event by announcing that the PlayStation 5 will be arriving — this holiday season.

Not a lot was revealed about the next-gen console, beyond a few basic features, including 3D audio (because Sony), haptic/adaptive triggers, ultra-high speed ssd, hardware based ray tracing and Blu-Ray (so, yeah, physical media).

The announcement comes just under a month after the PS5’s chief competitor, the Xbox Series X. Microsoft is set to offer up that system at roughly the same timeframe, meaning that we’re powering head first into another explosive console war at the end of the year.

Study associates frequency, quality of monthly reports with startup success

Published January 7, 2020

“Despite a lot of publicity and social media, number of sign-ups were modest,” reads one of the last monthly reports I sent to my VCs before my startup ceased to exist. “After the initial wave, sign-ups have slowed right down to near pre-launch levels. User acquisition is our number-one priority and my biggest headache.”

Like, I suspect, many other early-stage founders, I hated the monthly chore of writing a short report for investors. We used the PPP format (progress, problems and plans) for these regular missives, but progress was almost always slow and most of the time, problems far outstripped plans.

On good months, I was far more motivated to file our monthly report — it is a very human thing to want to deliver good news — and on bad months I had a million other more important things I thought a CEO should be spending their time on.

However, according to a research conducted by Jan Luca Ernst, a masters student at The University of St. Gallen, I may have been misguided. In his thesis, supported by Prof. Dr. Elgar Fleisch (Professor of Technology Management at University of St. Gallen) and Florian Schweitzer (a partner at VC firm btov), he writes “startups that submit regular, high-quality reports are shown by the statistics to be better investments than other startups.”

The research was based on analysis of hundreds of monthly startup reports submitted to btov Partners by portfolio companies out of its first two funds, which ran between 2006 to 2014. Specifically, researchers looked at 64 startups, covering the performance of startups during the first two years after initial investment from the first fund, and the performance during a single year, 2015, for the second fund.

“Hypotheses on the positive effects of monthly startup reports were tested, using several multivariate regressions,” write the paper’s authors. “As a result, several initial assumptions were discarded.”

For example, the punctuality of startup reports did not appear to indicate whether a startup would be more successful. In contrast, the frequency of reporting (at a confidence level of 95%), as well as the quality of the reporting (at a confidence level of 99%), were identified as contributors to success.

“Overall, the findings emphasize the importance of the post-investment phase and the value added by venture capitalists beyond financial support,” say Ernst, Fleisch and Schweitzer. “One main implication of the findings has an impact on subsequent investment rounds. Startups that submit regular, high-quality reports are shown by the statistics to be better investments than other startups. This may be an indicator that justifies further investment, that, in turn, leads to better performance.”

The authors also suggest that, in the future, investors may ask for “full, unfiltered access” to all past reporting of a startup, including evidence on the quality of reports and regularity of submission. “This would increase transparency and therefore eventually lead to better investment decision making,” they write.

With that said, during a call with btov’s Florian Schweitzer, he conceded that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean cause, but argued that there are many softer, and sometimes hidden, positive outcomes from monthly reports — especially when a founder does them honestly and whole heartedly.

Extra Crunch: What should a monthly report contain?

Florian Schweitzer: We always define what we would like or what we think would be sensible, because for each startup, of course, it is different. In general, the idea is that the founders can do the report in half an hour. Usually, it contains something like eight KPIs, and then some bullet points reflecting on what went well, and what are the challenges right now. And those challenges are a superb opportunity to understand where the founder is struggling, and where we can support them. So it can be a very, very productive agenda for a discussion, which we usually have regularity.

I think it is very good that founders sit back and think for half an hour: what happened during the last 30 days? What did I want to achieve? What did I not achieve? And to be honest about the progress and challenges.

The Guild, which turns apartments into short-term rentals, has nabbed $25 million in Series B funding

Published January 6, 2020

The Guild, a nearly four-year-old, Austin, Texas-based startup that turns apartments into comfortable short-term accommodations for business and other travelers, has landed $25 million in Series B funding from some of its earlier investors, including Maveron and Convivialite, along with real estate companies like the Nicol Investment Company, which owns some of the buildings in which The Guild has units.

The 171-person company — started by two University of Texas grads who met in 2015 through their overlapping interests (one worked in boutique hotel development and the other is a co-founder of the apartment marketplace Apartment List) — has plenty of competition. Lyric, Domio and Sonder are but three of the many other well-funded companies now in the business of gussying up apartments and renting them out like hotel rooms.

The competition is so stiff, in fact, that all are fast adding other services to their offerings. All promise around-the-clock support, for example, so if the Wi-Fi goes down, there’s someone to scream at, no matter the hour. Lyric also offers its customers “curated in-suite art, music and coffee programs.” The Guild touts its personal approach, like adding a Christmas tree to a room for a family that is temporarily displaced during the holidays. Meanwhile, among its offerings, Sonder offers “pre-stay cleaning.”

The last seems less like a perk than a necessity, but in the race to capture mindshare, no detail is too small to promote, apparently.

As for its part, The Guild is now operating 565 units, with another 235 units in the “final stages of development,” the company tells us. It’s also operating in six cities currently — Austin, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Miami and Nashville — but it plans to land in six more in the next 12 to 24 months. (If you’re curious about how long it takes for a unit to become profitable, the company says the investment payback is traditionally within 12 months.)

As for how it’s breaking through the noise of its competitors, the company has a corporate sales team that works with companies like McKinsey, Google and Whole Foods, and it partners with travel companies, including Concur, Airbnb and Expedia.

Certainly, investors see promise in its strategy — and its momentum.

The Guild, which says it generated $10 million in revenue in 2018, tells us it generated more than $20 million in 2019 and that it expects to maintain 100% growth in 2020, thanks in part to its new round of funding.

Royole looks to move flexible displays beyond the foldable phone

Published January 6, 2020

If nothing else, Royole grabbed our attention a couple of years back by bringing the first foldable smartphone to market. There’s something to be said for being first, I suppose. It raised the profile of a largely unknown name in amongst the tech press, even if it didn’t exactly kickstart a form-factor revolution. Among other things, the FlexPai seemed firmly stuck in the prototype stage, to be perfectly honest.

RoTree, manufactured by Royole, consists of 500 units of fully flexible screens. As light and thin as real tree leaves, RoTree offers more than that – people can change images or videos on the leaves! The tree is “planted” at Shenzhen Bao’An Int’l Airport as new airport landmark! pic.twitter.com/8J7HNH9ONF

— Royole Corporation (@RoyoleOfficial) June 28, 2019

But, okay, fine. Royole, you’ve got our attention. I’ve seen your foldable phone tree firsthand at the Shenzhen airport. So, what do have for us now? More interesting stuff, surely. The company was showcasing a pair of new devices at CES this week, all seemingly filling a similar function as the FlexPai: demonstrating the potential for flexible display technology. That, in fact, seems to be Royole’s primary M.O.

A closer look at Royole’s foldable display

Leading the bunch is the Mirage Smart Speaker. It’s basically an Amazon echo with an eight-inch flexible AMOLED wrapped around the body. So, a flexible display that can’t be actively flexed by the user — though honestly, the act of flexing it tends to be where we start running into trouble. Instead, it offers a wraparound visual, so, like a built-in Winamp visualizer on your device. Kind of fun.

There’s also a camera built-in, which, I don’t know. Maybe smart speakers don’t need cameras? Maybe that’s just me?

There’s a new version of the company’s RoWrite, which is basically a standard pad of paper with sensors embedded that let you digitize your writing and drawing. The idea is to give the feel of paper with the benefits of digital. The new RoWrite is significantly smaller and lighter, with better battery.