If you love smart home devices and live or work in a place that is in dire need of an aromatic upgrade, your interest it probably heavily piqued by Indiegogo-funded smart smell device Moodo.
A small cube-shaped device produced by longtime fragrance company Agan Aroma, the Moodo allows you to use a smartphone or tablet to create your own special blend of smells. Buyers can browse through a growing list of over 30 scent compounds, four of which are added at a time to the device as modular plastic cups — much like Kuerig’s K-Cups. Once inserted into the Moodo, users then use an app on their device to control the level to which each smell is diffused into their environment.
“On our app, we automatically recognize what scents have been inserted into the machine,” said Agan Aroma CEO Yoav Avidor in an interview at this year’s CES conference in Las Vegas, “And then our perfumers created precurated combinations that always work together well based on which perfumes are inside the box.”
Each scent added to the Moodo will last for up to 60 hours at maximum volume of release, and can fragrance an area up to 600 square feet. Avidor says that for most users, each scent should last between one and two months before it needs replacing.
With an immense array of custom scent combinations and the ability to control them with an incredible amount of control on your smartphone or tablet, the Moodo is an interesting addition to the smart home marketplace, and one that many with dogs, kids, or other smell-inducing creatures in their lives will likely very much enjoy.
The device can be purchased on the company’s website, with starter kits running between $190 and $210, depending on the size of the battery that you choose to purchase with the new device.
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.