TechCrooks™

Garmin ‘s new Varia Vision device could either be a dream come true for cyclists or a work in progress, but this is definitely an interesting accessory. The Varia Vision is an augmented reality display that you mount to your sunglasses. And it’s not just about displaying how well you’re doing, it can alert you about traffic and directions. Many cyclists already have tiny computing devices on their handlebars. But it can be dangerous and cumbersome to look down when you’re riding in traffic. You might also miss some key information, such as directions. With the Varia Vision, your information is directly in your line of sight. You get data, turn-by-turn directions, notifications from your phone and more. If you also put a rearview radar, you’ll also get alerts about cars approaching your from behind. When it comes to the user interface, it works like the Google Glass. There’s a tiny touchpad on the side so that you can scroll through menus. It has an integrated ambient light sensor ...

Human has been quite popular on iOS, and Android users can now rejoice as the app is now available on the Play Store. As a reminder, Human is a passive app designed to help you stay healthy with a simple goal. Every day, you need to move for 30 minutes or more, and keep up with this simple habit. The company calls this the ‘Daily 30′ and will gently nudge you when you hit your goal for example. Also new today, the company just added a new feature called Human Pulse. Like in many other fitness tracking apps, you can now compete with your friends on a real-time leaderboard. Unlike other fitness tracking apps, Human is all about just moving around the city, so it’s not just about exercising more than your friends. The leaderboard compares how many minutes you’ve moved today with your friends and people living in the same city as you. It’s another great way to push you to walk, run or bike more. If you don’t like competing and just want to make sure you aren’t spending too much time...

Dr. Beth Seidenberg Crunch Network Contributor Dr. Beth Seidenberg, a general partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers , focuses on life science investing in digital health and biotech. How to join the network The topic of women in science and tech is inevitably personal. Author Eileen Pollack was one of the first women to get a physics degree from Yale at a time when women in science was incredibly rare. Recently, entrepreneur Angie Chang paved her own way in Silicon Valley by creating a powerful network of women. While Pollack encountered isolation, cultural biases and challenges, Chang found ways to learn and engage with a supportive community of women developers and entrepreneurs. While we know that gender diversity only addresses a small part of the overall opportunity around inclusion, we had a chance to interview Pollack, the author of The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is Still a Boy’s Club and Chang of Women 2.0 and Hackbright...

Grofers , the Indian on-demand delivery service startup backed by top investors, confirmed today that it has stopped operating in nine cities as first reported in Inc42 . The decision to pull out of Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Kochi, Ludhiana, Mysuru, Nashik, Rajkot, and Visakhapatnam, all major cities in their respective states, “was just a regular decision to not focus on areas where we were not seeing a significant number of transactions happening,” Grofers co-founder Albinder Dhindsa told TechCrunch. He added that the news was not related to the departure of Varun Khurana last week after serving as Grofer’s chief technology officer for less than a year. Khurana joined Grofers after it acquired his startup, grocery delivery app My Green Box . “We have shut down cities and categories in the past as well and will continue to do it if it makes sense for the business,” Dhindsa said. Grofers still operates in 17 cities throughout India. According to Crunchbase , Grofers h...

Snapcart , an Indonesia-based startup that runs a service offering consumers rewards in exchange for scans of their shopping receipts, has closed $1.675 million in funding just four months after launch . The round — which is described as “pre-Series A” — is led by new investors  Wavemaker Partners and Singapore Press Holding’s SPH Media Fund , with participation from existing backers SMDV ( Sinar Mas Digital Ventures ) and Ardent Capital . The raise comes as the startup begins to explore at overseas expansion options in Southeast Asia, a region of more than 600 million people. As we wrote back in September when Snapcart opened its doors to the public, the startup’s concept is interesting. Its business is two-fold. On one side, it allows consumers to scan their store receipts in exchange for cashback and rewards… because everyone likes free stuff. On the other side of the business, information from receipts is funneled back into Snapcart’s data troves...

If we had to gamble on it, we’d bet the IPO market will be far more brisk this year than last year, which was the worst year for tech IPOs in particular since 2009. Even still, it came as a bit of a surprise today when not one or three but five biotech startups revealed plans to go public. (If you recall, biotech IPOs, which ticked along nicely for a couple of years, practically came to a standstill in the second half of last year.) If you happened to miss the steady string of announcements — which, as Bloomberg notes , comes one week before JPMorgan Chase & Co’s big annual health care conference in San Francisco — the below filed today: 1.)  Audentes Therapeutics . It’s a three-year-old, San Francisco-based  biotechnology company focused on developing and commercializing gene therapy products for patients suffering from serious, life-threatening rare diseases caused by single gene defects. One of those diseases...

Electric car company Faraday Future unveiled its first concept car, the FFZero1, at CES 2016 this evening in Las Vegas, Nevada. And true to an earlier leaked image, it looks a lot like the Batmobile. However, Faraday sees this vehicle as more of a “car of concepts” than just a singular concept car. Along with the FFZero1, the company revealed a variable platform architecture (VPA) will allow various parts and feature swaps to create a customizable car akin to personalized Nike shoes. The car comes with some pretty odd features, along with the swapping capabilities. The seating is made for zero gravity situations and comes out of NASA tech, and the car will channel oxygen and water through a helmet. You can also stick your iPhone right on the steering wheel for navigation and other data and the car will act as a “digital copilot” by projecting augmented reality visuals on the road ahead. The car is something “not of this world,” said Faraday’s head of global design Richard...

LEGO Education is launching a new version of its WeDo robotics kit for elementary school students at CES today. Just like its predecessor , WeDo 2.0 is meant to introduce students to robotics, engineering and programming, but it’s also meant as a tool for teaching STEM in general. The set will come with a number of Lego bricks, but most importantly, it includes a Bluetooth Low Energy-based hub that connects to a motor, as well as motion and tilt sensors that are all part of the basic package. On the software side, WeGo uses a drag-and-drop interface for writing basic applications that can connect to the hub and its sensors. The hardware itself is only part of the solution, though. LEGO also offers schools a curriculum with more than 40 hours of lessons that are built on the key science standards typically taught in second to fourth grade. Some of these are basic engineering projects like building a small truck for a lesson on recycling, while use the LEGO bricks to teach ...

Following last year’s Drive CX , Nvidia just announced an updated version of its computing platform for self-driving cars, the Drive PX 2 . Compared to last year’s model, this is a much more powerful beast, able to process data from 12 video cameras and other sensors in real time to make educated driving decisions. The company calls it a supercomputer, and it’s the size of a lunchbox. Behind the scene, the Drive PX 2 features 12 different cores representing 8 teraflops of calculation power, 24 deep learning tera operations per second. The company is using a 16nm architecture, and it’s a hungry beast as it requires 250W of power. Finally, Nvidia is using a liquid-cooling system. Because the PX 2 will be used in cars, that’s not too much of a problem and Nvidia argues that car manufacturers will just plug the device into their existing cooling solutions. Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that the PX 2 was as powerful as 150 MacBook Pros. The company is certainly comparing...

Record 360 Video In 4K With 360fly The 360fly camera , a small, sturdy ball with panoramic views we first discovered at CES 2014 , is back again and buddying up with sports brand BRG to bring us live or recorded, 360-degree, stitchless,  4k video for sports enthusiasts – and with all that, a plan to push into virtual reality. GoPro has its own spherical solution, with 4k recording capabilities for those live-action shots and Kodak’s PixPro aims to do the same. GoPro’s device sticks up on helmets and has the potential to catch on twigs and leaves during the shot. However, Giro and Bell – both BRG brands – will embed these “all seeing” 360fly cameras into their sports helmets to capture live or playback 360-degree video for use with Google Cardboard or an interactive app on an iPad or smartphone. Imagine getting panoramic video from a snowboarder rolling down the alpine wilderness, taking a leap off a high ledge and into the fresh snow below, and bringing that con...

Ephemerality be damned. Some art deserves to live longer than 24 hours. So rather than just squirrel away your saved Snapchat Stories, you can upload them to Slinger. It’s a new app aiming to be the permanent home for vertical videos. And thanks to its Popular page and the ability to Like videos, it can help you discover content creators to follow in ways Snapchat lacks. You could write off Slinger as just a dinky YouTube for vertical videos. But that ignores what’s fundamentally unique about this new medium propelled by Snapchat, Periscope, Hyperlapse, and other apps. Because they’re shaped tall and slim like humans, vertical videos can capture more emotional, personality-driven content than the horizontal format. Combined with their easy-to-make, point-of-view, off-the-cuff nature, vertical videos are better consumed by following lots of creators in a fast-moving feed than through more cautious channel subscriptions like on YouTube. Plus, no one likes constantly flipping th...

What if your drone could talk to your car? That’s probably not a question you’ve asked yourself all that often, but what if you are the United Nations or a search-and-rescue organization that wants to launch drones from the bed of their pickup trucks? Ford and DJI today announced a new developer challenge that asks developers to create drone-to-vehicle communications using Ford’s AppLink or OpenXC technologies. The winner of this challenge will receive $100,000. “At Ford, we are driving innovation in every part of our business to help make people’s lives better,” said Ken Washington, Ford vice president, Research and Advanced Engineering, in a statement today. “Working with DJI and the United Nations, there is an opportunity to make a big difference with vehicles and drones working together for a common good.” Developers will have to create a system that will allow a driver to launch a drone from the bed of a Ford F-150 from the touchscreen inside the car (which itself is linked ...