Have you ever looked at your phone charger and thought “Surely, there must be more?” The folks at Saforian think so, and they are out to change the way you power up your mobile device. Boogli is a cute little monster that plays the role of charging dock and interactive pal.
Boogli founder Todd Rice has 20 years of experience in the digital space. Along with user interface designer Greg Bosque, he set out to explore the possibilities of melding digital design with hardware products like this one.
Beyond its charging capabilities, Boogli can function as a night light and alarm clock. The accompanying app can also function as a music player. If you dock your phone into the monster’s outstretched arms, its animated mouth will appear on your screen and lip sync along with your music.
“Creating something simple is never easy. There were so many directions that we could go in (and will), but we had to narrow it down to what this system would really be,” the company wrote on the Boogli homepage.
Bluetooth functionality enables your monster to light up when it senses your phone in its presence, which can be helpful. For example, if you walk into a dark room with your phone in your pocket, it will light up.
Boogli can repeat what you say and react to movement. The alarm clock, sounds, and other functions are customizable.
A variety of monsters will be available, each with its own sounds and personalities. To give the monsters a voice, sound designer Steve Bissinger Googled a list of emotions, then had a vocal actor record them with improvised monster sounds. Different sounds for the alarm, powering up, and powering down were also recorded.
Partnered with a team that includes Frédérick Alves-Cunha, an artist who worked on Despicable Me, Saforian has created a functioning prototype. As preproduction kicks into gear, the company is preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.