If you’re looking for the best new interactive toy that is 1) actually fun 2) good for multiplayers 3) extremely portable, Sifteo Cubes are a match made in heaven. They are literally technology-infused building blocks for kids. Sifteo Cubes contain the specs that rival most budget tablets and smartphones. Each cube contain sensors on all four sides that recognize when the cubes neighbor and touch each other to extend the screen. This means infinite screen real estate, as long as you’re willing to rearrange and pair cubes to one another.
The cubes also feature touchscreens so you can play various types of games on the device. For example, we got to demo an RPG emulator that asked players to connect the cube to create pathways for the main character to walk around and collect items. To move from one cube’s screen to the other, the user just has to tap the connected cube’s screen. In another multiplayer game, users see balls in four different colors and are required to tilt the cube so balls would fall on one side, and connect it with another cube that has balls of the same color to make them disappear. It’s basically Bejeweled 3.0, and has a very small learning curve before you’re battling with four other players to get the new high score. Graphics are also quite impressive, outfitting pixels that remind us of the good old Nintendo DS while maintaining full color vibrancy.
The cubes all communicate with the main dock via a proprietary chip that’s similar to Bluetooth, and each run on AAA batteries that last approximately six hours in continuous play. You can also purchase more cubes and connect up to 12 per session. At launch, Sifteo offers a handful number of games available for the device but there is also an Open Source community for programmers to create their own gaming or educational apps. It’s a neat way to improve logic skills without jumping on Dance Dance Revolution pads to exercise hand-eye coordination.
Sifteo Cubes are available now online and in Barnes & Noble stores at $130 for a starter kit containing a dock and three cubes. Additional Sifteo cubes run for $30 apiece.
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.