Three annoying things: your phone battery dies; your selfie app is finicky so you give up and your arm is always in your pictures; your hot coffee cools to lukewarm before you even get halfway through it. These may be first-world problems, but Yecup solves them. It’s a smart travel mug, and the dream of all obsessive tea and coffee drinkers.
First, it keeps your drink warm with more than just insulation. From the outside, it looks like your average dual-layered stainless steel travel mug, but it’s got a lot going on under the hood. Yecup connects to your Android or iPhone via Bluetooth 4.0, and with the help of the Yecup smart mug app, you can control the temperature of your drink — even re-boil it if you need to. You can also check the temp, or have the app notify you when your drink is hot or reaches a particular temperature.
Second, the Yecup itself can also act as a wireless selfie controller, so you can take pictures without having to hold your phone. And don’t be afraid of going selfie-crazy and killing your phone battery — the smart mug comes with a built in USB port so you can charge it back up. Yecup has a built in 6000mAh lithium polymer battery that can last anywhere from 3 to 8 hours depending on how much you use it. You can charge the cup itself with the USB port or the fast charger that comes with it. The accompanying smartphone app allows you to check up on battery life, and an app for the Apple Watch is currently in the works.
The Yecup team, a group of young entrepreneurs from Armenia, already has the protoyping and basic mobile software work done, and has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to jumpstart production. If successful, the funding will go toward final testing, polishing the app, and manufacturing. Early Bird specials go for $80 ($77 on their website), with shipping included. It comes in three colors, black, blue, and orange, so far, with a holder and lid coming as a stretch goal. Look for them around November of December, just around the time we really need hot beverages and a smart mug to keep them hot.
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.