Tag: small business for sale

The Hims of sleep? DTC brand reimagines snooze supplements

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It’s no secret that Americans don’t sleep enough, with n early a third of adults getting less than six hours of shut-eye per night. The CDC declared sleep a public health epidemic, spurring Silicon Valley to create a host of gadgets, robots , and even luxe homes to lull the restless back to bed. But many still rely on sleep aids such as Ambien or Xanax, which often have problematic side effects and result in dependence issues. The more health-conscious opt for more natural remedies like melatonin supplements, although it doesn’t work for everyone. To that end, newly launched Remrise hopes to embody a fully holistic sleep company that combines personalized supplements with tech. The company sells $55-per month subscriptions, which include plant-based sleep aids accompanied by a suite of digital tools: an online educational platform and a meditation app that connects to Fitbit, Oura, and other tracking devices. The startup secured over $8 million in funding led by Founders Fund and cofounding investor Atomic, the incubator behind millennial-friendly supplement unicorn Hims Read More …

Ford is betting its future on an electric Mustang SUV

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People want to drive gas-guzzling SUVs. The demand for them, along with trucks, is continuing to grow so much that it could even outweigh the carbon-emission benefit gains made by all electric vehicles . That is, unless the car industry builds electric SUVs. That’s what the Ford Motor Company is doing. Today, the company is unveiling an electric SUV called the Mustang Mach-E (though details were leaked earlier this week). Unlike many electric cars, which tend to be smaller sedans that car companies often release to keep regulators happy, this car was designed from the ground up to fit right in with the rest of Ford’s famed Mustang sports cars. Except, of course, that you can’t rev the engine since you don’t need any gas (though the car’s performance version can still go from zero to 60 in about three and a half seconds). [Photo: courtesy of Ford Motor Company] The electric SUV, which will be delivered to customers in late 2020, is the first vehicle that was shepherded from start to finish by Ford CEO Jim Hackett, who took the company’s top job in 2017 and previously helmed the furniture manufacturer Steelcase. While Hackett has announced a renewed emphasis on electric cars and hybrids, with an announcement in 2018 that Ford would release 40 nongas cars by 2022, this is the first tangible evidence of his strategy—and the first evidence of how his emphasis on the Ideo brand of design thinking might pay off for the 116-year-old automaker. The rationale for an electric SUV Hackett says that there were plans for a new Ford electric car already underway when he joined the company, but that he and his team decided to scrap it and start afresh. “I was imbuing this notion that design is going to rule here,” Hackett says. “[My team] said, this doesn’t meet the measure of any of that. So we said, we have to tear it up.” Instead of building yet another “science project,” as Hackett called previous electric cars in our conversation, Ford decided to focus instead on macro trends to find a form factor that might actually be profitable for the company ( like most manufacturers , Ford has never built a profitable electric car). The most important trend? If you take fuel efficiency off the table, people want larger cars. Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Hackett [Photo: courtesy of Ford Motor Company] “People have voiced that when fuel prices are low, they want larger silhouettes,” Hackett says. “That’s what customers are telling us Read More …

Andy Rubin should stop designing smartphones

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On Twitter yesterday, Android cofounder Andy Rubin began hyping a new smartphone his company Essential is working on. It’s a long, thin device with a long, thin user interface. For many of us, it was the first time we’d thought about Rubin since The Information reported in 2017 that he’d had an “inappropriate” relationship with a Google employee, before he controversially left the company with a very generous severance package. It may be too soon. It is difficult to disentangle the radically elongated smartphone from its creator’s reputation. If that’s not reason enough to skip supporting or buying a smartphone from Essential, the device itself seems like a throwback, a design that might have seemed like a promising departure in the smartphone’s earlier days. But now it just looks like a novelty—an idea in search of a use case. From the photos, the new phone appears to be very thin, not much wider than a smartwatch. It looks so long that the end of it would very likely stick up out of a pocket Read More …

Sober curious? There’s an app—in fact, a whole community—for that

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When serial entrepreneur MJ Gottlieb, 48, was trying to get sober years ago, he completely avoided drinking establishments. That proved no easy feat when there were at least 14 bars in a two-block radius around his home in New York City and so many friends and colleagues relied on the usual social outings. “There was like nothing else people would come [up with] than ‘let’s grab a drink’ or ‘let’s tailgate,’” says Gottlieb. “Everything seemed to be centered around alcohol.” [Image: Loosid] At the time, Gottlieb ran a strategic consulting firm which specialized in small brands. To unwind, he inevitably wound up in one of two places: coffee shops and diners. Those became his entire social scene. But it got old, quick. Read More …

This is the computer you’ll wear on your face in 10 years

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Snap’s new Spectacles 3 don’t look that different from their predecessors . They consist of a metal designer frame with a couple of HD cameras. In exchange for the embarrassment of wearing them, the Spectacles 3 offer the chance to shoot 3D video hands-free and then upload it to the Snapchat app, where it can be further affected. And that’s pretty much it. You can’t view the video, or anything else, in the lenses. There are no embedded displays. Still, the new Spectacles foreshadow a device that many of us may wear as our primary personal computing device in about 10 years. Based on what I’ve learned by talking AR with technologists in companies big and small, here is what such a device might look like and do.   Unlike Snap’s new goggles, future glasses will overlay digital content over the real-world imagery we see through the lenses. We might even wear mixed reality (MR) glasses that can realistically intersperse digital content within the layers of the real world in front of us. The addition of the second camera on the front of the new Spectacles is important because in order to locate digital imagery within reality, you need a 3D view of the world, a depth map. The Spectacles derive depth by combining the input of the two HD cameras on the front, similar to the way the human eye does it. The Spectacles use that depth mapping to shoot 3D video to be watched later, but that second camera is also a step toward supporting mixed reality experiences in real time. Future AR/MR glasses will look a little less conspicuous than the Spectacles. They’ll be lightweight and comfortable; the companies that make them will want users to wear them all day. They may look like regular plastic frames. Since they are a fashion accessory, they’ll come in many styles and color combinations. The glasses will have at least two cameras on the front—perhaps not quite so obvious as the ones on the Spectacles. They may also have an additional, dedicated depth camera, something like the TrueDepth camera on newer iPhones. Read More …