Each summer, some of the most exciting tech startups make their way to New York City for CE Week. For its twelfth anniversary, CE Week is moving uptown to the Javits Center for its biggest show yet. In between listening to fascinating discussions from tech leaders, we walked the halls of CE Week to take a look at the exciting products making their way to store shelves. Here are a few of our favorites.
If you’ve ever wanted to get a group selfie but realized your arms aren’t quite long enough, then AirSelfie 2 may be the perfect alternative. It’s a tiny selfie drone you control with your smartphone that’s packing a 12 megapixel camera. Photos are sent directly to the Airselfie app, where you have option of sharing them on social media or saving them to your phones photo gallery.
AirSelfie 2 is available online and select retailers. Pricing starts at $200 for the drone and you can purchase it with an optional powerbank for $250.
While we’re seeing tons of new safety wearables in 2018, very few are as gorgeous and versatile as the Lotus by Seam. In addition to providing location data to friends and loved ones, Lotus also provides an audio recording when activated. For emergency situations, Lotus can automatically dial your primary contact and allows you to communicate using its built-in speaker. And in addition to all its safety features, Lotus also offers Google Assistant integration.
Lotus is expected to go on sale later this summer for $130. The wearable is available in two gender-neutral colors and clips directly onto clothing. An optional watch and necklace accessory will also be available from the Seam website.
Launched from a massively successful Kickstarter campaign in 2013, 3Doodler is an interactive 3D pen. Sort of like a glue gun on steroids, the 3Doodler allows users to create three-dimensional objects using heated plastic tubes.
There are currently three different versions of the 3Doodler available online: The 3Doodler Start has no hot parts and is meant primarily for children, while the 3Doodler Create Plus uses more versatile plastic tubing and is deaigned for older children and adults. Finally, the 3Doodler Pro is targeted toward creative professionals and can use speciality materials like wood, bronze, and copper to create 3D objects and renderings.
While there are dozens of car cams on the market, the Owl Car Cam is one of our favorites. It’s a gorgeous, always-on car cam with a few tricks up its sleeve. In addition to filming both the inside and outside of your vehicle, the camera also offers awesome theft deterrent and social sharing features.
The Owl Car Cam sells online for $350. If you want to learn all about its awesome features, check out our full review.
Last but not least is Somnox, our favorite sleep robot. Somnox uses relaxing melodies and simulated breathing to help you get a better night’s sleep. The peanut-shaped robot is controlled entirely from your smartphone and you can adjust the breathing settings as well as turn off the melodies completely.
Somnex is available for pre-order starting at around $550.
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.