David Barret

Amazon today announced a new subscription service called “Alexa Together,” designed for families with aging family members who are still living independently, but who may need extra support. The $19.99 per month subscription expands on Amazon’s existing product, Alexa Care Hub, an earlier investment in elder care, by taking many of Care Hub’s features and […]

iRobot’s CEO once told me, with a wink, that he didn’t become a truly successful roboticist until he became a vacuum salesman. It’s a good line, and one that betrays some fundamental truths about the industry. Robots are hard, and in a lot of ways home robots are doubly so. That no one has managed […]

Amazon is introducing two new services tied to user health and fitness, and its Halo personal health devices. They include Halo Fitness, a new service for interactive home video workouts that looks a lot like Apple Fitness+, and Halo Nutrition, a personalized, guided meal planner. Both of these services will be included as part of […]

On its first try, Rivian produced the Goldilocks of pickup trucks. The Rivian R1T electric truck is neither too big nor small. It handles rock crawling and off-camber trails with ease, can zip from zero to 60 miles per hour on a dirt road in just a few seconds without the typical back-end slippage — […]

Ring is just one part of Amazon’s annual devices and services event this year, but they’re bringing a lot of updates, including a new Pro Alarm suite that includes refreshed hardware and integrated Eero Wi-Fi 6 router capabilities. They also have a new service offering called ‘Virtual Security Guard’ that basically keeps an eye on […]

Last year, Ring announced at futuristic (slightly dystopian?) take on in-home security with its Always Home Cam, a drone equipped with sensors and a camera that can navigate the interior of your home along custom paths laid out by a user, in response to triggers including Ring Alarm sensors, or a manual command from the […]

Heydoc, a system for managing the medical data and admin tasks in medical practitioners, has closed a $8.3m Series A round led by Smedvig Capital with existing investors Hambro Perks, Triple Point Ventures and InHealth Ventures also participating. This brings the total amount raised to date by Heydoc to $12m.    Heydoc mainly operates in the UK but plans to expand internationally. It competes mostly with […]

A year after launching its original exercise band, Halo, Amazon just dropped the follow up, Halo View. The company’s not quite ready to go full bore into the smartwatch category just yet, but it clearly has the Google-owned Fitbit brand directly in its sights with the newly announced Halo View. The device doesn’t quite challenge […]

When you speak to an Amazon Echo device, so far in its history, Alexa would connect to the internet to process requests and deliver a response. Of course, this has sparked concerns among some consumers, since it might feel worrisome to have a Wi-Fi-connected smart device listening for you to say a wake word at […]

September 28, 2021 By Sruthi Shankar and Shreyashi Sanyal (Reuters) -European stocks sank to their lowest in a week on Tuesday as a surge in government bond yields knocked high-growth technology shares, with fresh signs of a slowdown in China’s economy weighing on investor sentiment. The pan-European STOXX 600 index was down 2.2%, its biggest […]

September 28, 2021 By Gilles Guillaume PARIS (Reuters) – Two leading trade unions at Stellantis on Tuesday criticised the way the carmaker is implementing a furlough scheme aimed at mitigating the impact of a fall in output brought on by a global chip shortage. Stellantis and other carmakers have been hit by a series of […]

September 28, 2021 (Reuters) – Netflix on Tuesday rolled out five mobile gaming titles to its subscribers in select European markets, as part of its efforts to diversify revenue sources amid intensifying competition in the booming video-streaming space. The company has introduced “Stranger Things: 1984”, “Stranger Things 3: The Game”, “Card Blast”, “Teeter Up” and “Shooting […]

September 28, 2021 WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz vowed on Tuesday to block Democrats from obtaining consent to suspend the federal debt ceiling through a simple majority vote. (Reporting by David Morgan, Editing by Franklin Paul) Source Link U.S. Senator Cruz vows to block new Democratic debt ceiling ploy David Barret

September 28, 2021 By Suleiman Al-Khalidi AMMAN (Reuters) -Jordan’s state carrier, Royal Jordanian, will soon resume direct flights to Damascus for the first time in nearly a decade, in the latest step to restore extensive business ties with Syria hurt by conflict in the latter, government officials said on Tuesday. Flights have been suspended since […]

September 28, 2021 By Phil Stewart and Patricia Zengerle WASHINGTON (Reuters) -General Mark Milley, the top U.S. military officer, on Tuesday defended calls with China that have raised Republican demands for his resignation, saying he had been aiming to ease tension with Beijing and not to “usurp authority.” The remarks were Milley’s first detailed defense […]

September 28, 2021 LONDON (Reuters) – Opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer accused the government on Tuesday of leading Britain “from crisis to crisis”, saying it should offer key workers priority at the petrol pumps to ease a fuel crisis ministers had failed to plan for. At his party’s annual conference in the southern English seaside […]

September 28, 2021 PRAGUE (Reuters) – The ECB will not automatically expand it Asset Purchase Programme when its 1.85 trillion euro pandemic emergency stimulus scheme ends, ECB policymaker Peter Kazimir told Bloomberg on Tuesday. The ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme is expected to end next March and investors expect the ECB to ramp up other […]

Amazon today introduced Amazon Glow, a new, interactive device aimed at families that allows kids to interact with family members and other remote loved ones over video calls. While something of a competitor to Facebook’s line of Portal devices, which are also largely aimed at connecting families over video, Amazon Glow differentiates itself by providing […]

Amazon, for the first time, is making another voice assistant available on Echo devices. The company at its fall event today announced a new voice assistant, “Hey, Disney,” developed by Disney and built on top of Alexa technology. The assistant will have its own unique voice and over 1,000 custom interactions for fans to explore, […]

September 28, 2021 By Alexander Hübner MUNICH (Reuters) – German industrial inspector TÜV Süd was on Tuesday accused of evading its responsibilities over its alleged role in the 2019 deadly collapse of a dam in Brazil, as Brazilian claimants kicked off the first civil lawsuit in Germany over the disaster. The municipality of Brumadinho and […]