Apple buys an AI company, Facebook Messenger can not be stopped, human sized drones show
up at CES and more...
It's Thursday January 7th and this is Crunch Report.
Apple's making more moves in the artificial intelligence space and has acquired Emotient,
an AI startup based on San Diego California. Emotient, which calls itself the leader in
emotion detection and sentiment analysis based on facial expressions, has been around since
2012 and has raised $8M to experiment with products like Google Glass and other wearables.
In its report about the sale the Wall Street Journal says Emotient was recently working
with advertisers to bake in reaction analysis into their advertising. Apple confirmed the
acquisition but gave TechCrunch its usual boilerplate response: "Apple buys smaller
technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or
plans."
Facebook Messenger now has 800 million monthly active users, up from 700 million in June,
600 Million in March, and 500 million in November 2014. You know what that makes Messenger?
The fastest growing app of 2015, according to Nielsen, and the second most popular iOS
app behind Facebook itself. Messenger is also now transmitting 10 billion photos per month,
and the team is pretty pleased with themselves. In a blog post today, head of Messenger David
Marcus laid out the app's 2016 strategy, including replacing the phone number, increasing video
messaging, getting people used to texting customer service, and of course the chat bot
platform we told you about yesterday.
I've now been at CES long enough to get pretty burned out on drones, however, I can't help
myself with E-Hang's 184 drone, which is unique because it's a a human-sized drone! It fits
an actual human inside! EHang, which is a Chinese company founded in 2014, has raised
about $50M in venture funding, and is confident that the 184 is the future of personal transport.
The drone is about four-and-a-half feet tall, weighs 440 pounds, and will be able to carry
a single passenger for 23 minutes at a speed of 60 MPH, if it actually comes to market,
which is iffy, like a lot of cool things at CES. The 184 also has gull-wing doors and
arms that fold up, and EHang says flight will be totally automated, meaning passengers input
a destination and then have no control during the flight. If that sounds terrifying to you,
the company says fail-safe systems include multiple backups for each flight system, and
a feature where the drone will immediately land if a passenger’s life is at risk. Uh,
let's hope.
Samsung is the world’s biggest maker of Android devices. However here at CES today,
the company announced it will be working with Microsoft to develop Internet of Things, or
IoT, devices based on Windows 10. The two says they'll work together to develop products
that will run on the platform, and integrate with other companies developing hardware and
services on Windows 10. Samsung and Microsoft do have a history of working together, 30
years on Windows devices, in fact. But when it comes to mobile, Google’s Android and
Apple's iOS have run away with the market, although TechCrunch has been hearing of tensions
between Samsung and Google over Android for some time. We don't really have a lot of details
about this Microsoft partnership, but Microsoft does want to develop more universal windows
apps that work across different devices and with a single unified security system in place
across them, and in the announcement pointed to Samsung's TabPro S as a shining example.
Do you like to grill things on a grill? If you're a human, probably. But do you also
like to clean that grill? Probably not, because cleaning grills sucks. That's why you may
love Grillbot, the robot that cleans your grill for you. That's it. It's a Roomba for
grills. It costs $129 and has three replaceable metal bristles that help the robot clean and
also move around. It also has a rechargeable battery, three electric motors, and a LCD
alarm and timer so you don't have to babysit the process. However, your grill has to hit
a temperature of about 200 degrees before you can start the cleaner, so you can't do
it immediately after making dinner.. needs to cool down. And it's also probably not quite
as efficient as rolling up your sleeves and just doing it yourself, but you don't like
doing that anyway, remember? Help the grillbot help you.
That’s the report for today. I’m Sarah Lane.
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