Tag: business brokerages

The principal value of a business broker is to act as a buffer between the buyer and the seller

Apple finally announces its AirTags thing-finding device

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At its “Spring Loaded” event on Tuesday morning, Apple finally unveiled its AirTags gizmos for locating the stuff in your life that always gets lost. Things such as your keys or your suitcase. AirTags use Bluetooth Low Energy and Ultra Wideband technology to connect back to Apple’s Find My service. You can assign an AirTag to an item and give it a default name such as “Keys” or “Jacket” or make up your own name. Then you can use the Find My app to find that item—anything that you can attach the quarter-sized tag to. For an item that’s nearby, a feature called “Precision Finding” will tell you how far away it is, and in what direction Read More …

Roku’s new Voice Remote Pro might have just outsmarted smart speakers

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More than six years after Amazon introduced its first Echo speaker, Roku is finally releasing its own entertainment product with hands-free voice controls. But instead of building a smart speaker, Roku is adding “Hey Roku” voice commands to one of its remotes. With the Roku Voice Remote Pro, users can ask to launch apps, play specific videos, listen to music, control playback, or turn off the TV. The remote costs $30 on its own, and Roku hasn’t announced any plans to bundle it with its current line of streaming players. The announcement—one of several that the company is making today—is vintage Roku. The giant of streaming video believes devoutly in incrementalism, so while Amazon and Google have been selling millions of smart speakers that integrate with their respective Fire TV and Chromecast streaming platforms, Roku has hung back and waited for its own voice technology to improve. Read More …

You can talk to this new digital re-creation of Albert Einstein

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A maker of “digital humans” for customer service and chat applications has developed a digital version of Albert Einstein that you can talk to, either by speaking or typing. The company, New Zealand- and Austin-based UneeQ, worked with Hebrew University to get the Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s look, voice, and mannerisms right, Daryl Reva, its senior VP of marketing, told me. Wolfram Research, the creator of the WolframAlpha “computational intelligence” tool, contributed the natural language engine and knowledge base that acts as the digital human’s brain, Reva says. If you’d like to ask Albert some questions, click here . Since the Einstein character wasn’t designed for open-ended chats (UneeQ has another digital human called Sophie for that), he won’t answer just any question, but seems to respond best to questions on a finite set of subjects. You can ask digital Einstein questions about the theory of relativity and about his early life, for example. I asked him how he does his hair, and he was ready for me Read More …

Why some developers are avoiding app store headaches by going web-only

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Earlier this month, the indie developers Feross Aboukhadijeh and John Hiesey launched a new app called Wormhole , which lets users quickly share large, encrypted files with just a link. But unlike most new mobile apps, Wormhole doesn’t show up in Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store. Instead, Aboukhadijeh and Hiesey released their app exclusively on the web. You can run Wormhole in any browser, and if you use the “Add to Home Screen” function in Safari for iOS or Chrome for Android, the site becomes indistinguishable from a native app. Aboukhadijeh says that Wormhole has a long list of reasons for skipping mobile app stores, including the ease of developing for the web and the lack of platform gatekeepers to worry about. But for him, targeting the web is also just a matter of principle Read More …

Elon Musk just shared a video of a monkey controlling Pong with his brain

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For the first time, Elon Musk has shared video footage of his brain-chip technology Neuralink. The implantable chip allows the brain to communicate with computers. In a video released late Thursday, a macaque monkey implanted with Neuralink’s technology appears to play a Pong-style tennis video game without using a controller of any kind. In the video, a narrator explains that the macaque, named Pager, has two Neuralink chips implanted in his brain. These chips pull and record information from more than 2,000 electrodes that have been placed in Pager’s motor cortex in order to register his desired hand and arm movements. First, Pager plays a computer game using a joystick. Read More …