Crowdfunding site Kickstarter has been around for the better part of a decade, but you could argue that CES 2018 is its breakout year when it comes to lasting effects on the industry. No less than 250 of the companies exhibiting on the show floor began as Kickstarter projects, and 2018 marks the first year Kickstarter has an actual booth.
Julip Terra, director of technology and design for Kickstarter, stopped by the Digital Trends booth at CES in Las Vegas on Wednesday afternoon to provide some details on what Kickstarter is up to, as well as to explain why after nine years the company finally decided to have a physical presence at the show.
forTerra says that having the booth helps illustrate how his company is moving beyond just funding, and toward a comprehensive solution g bringing products from concept to prototype and then mass market release. At any given time, Kickstarter hosts nearly 1,000 design and tech gadgets looking for funding, he said, and all Kickstarter projects must have working prototypes.
This in theory should prevent the biggest potential problem with any crowdfunding effort: a project that’s funded and never makes it to market, leaving supporters high and dry. It still happens — DigitalTrends has covered quite a few of these fails in the past — but this at least gives backers some comfort in knowing that Kickstarter itself is working to keep scams and dubious projects off the service.
For those that pass muster, Kickstarter doesn’t merely help them raise money. One effort called Hardware Studio helps startups get products to market through education on the manufacturing process and connections to hardware providers.
Another effort — currently in “private beta” — is called Drip. You can think of the service as kind of a Patreon for tech innovators. Instead of supporting a particular Kickstarter, backers here would be able to “subscribe” to creators, and support their efforts through a monthly contribution.
Terra admitted that even Kickstarter isn’t exactly sure yet how Drip will actually work, but did point to it as an exciting new way to spur innovation in the technology sector. We’ll have to wait and see on that one.
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.