The Weirdest Shit to Come Out of Silicon Valley
Weirdest Shit Out of Silicon Valley is a series from The Bold Italic documenting the bizarre news, gadgets, and developments in the tech world.
January is always a slow, cold month. Gyms are full of people pretending they work out, there are a zillion emails to catch up on, and meetings feel more painful than usual. But in techlandia, January heralds the start of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a four-day extravaganza in Las Vegas, filled with the most wonderful and weird gadgets from across the globe. Basically, it’s an adult Disneyland for nerds.
For this column, it’s the pinnacle of weird shit.
Resuming our usual party game, here’s the January edition of “Two Truths and a Lie: The Silicon Valley Startup Edition.” This month, there’s a CES twist, of course.
Out of the following three startups showcased at CES 2020, which is fake?
- A company that makes moody cat robot waiters for restaurants.
- A company that designs humanoid robots to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
- A company that designs mini-Jacuzzis for arthritic dogs?
(Scroll to the bottom for the answers.)
Know of some ridic stuff happening in tech? Email, DM, or tweet me to include it in next month’s edition.
The Invisible Keyboard
Video: Samsung Newsroom/YouTube
Ever found yourself needing to send a long email or work on an important document from your cellphone and getting really annoyed at that challenge? I can’t type fast or productively on a screen that small (and I’m a millennial).
That’s the problem explored by the people behind SelfieType, created within Samsung’s in-house program designed to help employees develop promising ideas. Using the phone’s forward-facing camera, SelfieType’s artificial intelligence engine analyzes your finger movements to create a message. All you need is a flat surface and the confidence to drum your fingers on a table. No extra hardware needed.
This sounds pretty genius, but I imagine punching your fingers in the exact right spot to result in the right letter could be tricky. Samsung debuted this technology at CES, but it’s unclear if the company plans to develop it further or launch it for consumer use.
The Contested Scooter Map
Scootergate was one of the definitive watchwords for 2019, thanks to the vast array of electric startups that corralled sidewalks across the United States. With the increase in easy, low-energy commuting came one pesky problem. Okay, there were a lot of problems, but one in particular that bugged users: having to open each scooter app, one at a time, to find the nearest scooter. It’s super annoying to open six or seven apps just to find one scooter.
Enter Scooter Map, the brainchild of Victor Pontis, a Castro-based developer. He aggregated all available scooter data into one simple (and free to use) app.
But this January, Lime Scooters served Pontis with a cease-and-desist letter and petitioned Apple to remove Scooter Map from the App Store. His impression: Lime wants to be the scooter map and doesn’t like that Pontis made it easier for people to find its competitors.
But under current San Francisco regulations, Lime is permitted to operate only 750 scooters in the city. Jump gets 750, Uber gets 750, and Bird’s Scoot gets 1,000. (Newly approved companies get 750 to 1,000.) Clearly there’s a real need for an app to aggregate them all.
The A.I. Kitty Litter Box
One of the worst things about having pets (according to my pet-owning mates) is cleaning up their shit. Well, now you can add “fear for their lives” to that list every time kitty drops a dookie.
Launched at CES, the LuluPet A.I. Smart Cat Litter Box—yes, you heard that right— uses “built-in stool and urine image recognition” alongside a built-in camera to “monitor and analyze the cat’s health data through cat’s stool image, weight change, and excretory behaviors and notifies the owner for any abnormal activities.”
Priced at $149, the LuluPet will be available in March 2020 on Amazon.
The Unemployed Service Bots
It’s not looking good for the robot service industry, apparently. Over the years, several restaurants have popped up in San Francisco using robots as their main lure. That includes Zume, a pizza bot delivery service that launched to much fanfare in 2016, and Cafe X, whose robot baristas served espresso and lattes — up to 100 per hour — to caffeine-starved techies.
I loved Cafe X’s oat milk lattes so much that I’d go out of my way to get one. But it seems that I’m in the minority; it turns out people missed the human touch. Cafe X’s robotic arms just didn’t provide them with that dismissive barista sneer, which makes people feel like their $7 coffee is worth it. So, bye-bye bots.
This January, CafeX shuttered all three of its San Francisco locations, and Zume canceled its delivery service and cut approximately 400 real-people jobs, along with all its robot workers. Le sigh. So long, little robots — time you got a union, no?
The Companion Robot for Lonely Millennials
Millennials are the loneliest generation, reports YouGov: 30% of those surveyed said they’re always or often lonely, and nearly half reported having zero close friends. That sucks. And loneliness has been proven to affect our long-term health. Enter PiBo, the robot that wants to be your new best friend, showcased at CES 2020 by Korean developer Circulus.
At first glance, the cutesy knee-high PiBo doesn’t look like it offers a huge amount of social benefits. Sure, it can tell you the weather, read you the latest news headlines, and set alarms for you, but so can Siri. But this robot can easily walk around your apartment, thanks to the camera embedded in its mouth that gives it obstacle detection. Still, there’s more.
PiBo’s speech and facial recognition software means it’ll recognize you and will respond only to your face or voice commands. I can see how hearing it chirp, “Hey Zara! I love you,” when I get home would be cheery.It’s nice to be welcomed, even if it’s just by a robot.PiBo can also sing and dance and is programmed to want companionship — the marketing materials state how PiBo “hates being alone” and that it “will always be friends with you.” It’s already available in South Korea, and the company is working on an English-language version to debut here soon.
The $420 Matcha Machine
Unless you’ve been living in Antarctica, you already know that people really, really like matcha. Matcha tea, matcha cake, matcha Halloween costumes. It makes sense that matcha addicts might want to make their green brew at home, and a matcha-making machine would help a lot, given how making matcha the proper way with your hands is a little complicated.
Enter the Cuzen Matcha Maker, launched at CES 2020, a clever little gadget that whisks, grinds, and brews the perfect cold-brew matcha cup in 60 seconds or less. The machine’s brew has been described as “smooth and rich, with absolutely no bitter aftertaste.”
“It certainly tasted fresher from the times I’ve made drinks from matcha powder at home,” wrote reporter Michael Wolf in The Spoon.
However, the Cuzen machine uses matcha leaves to make its magic matcha, and while matcha leaves do grow on plants, not many suppliers sell the required loose leaves. That means you’re locked into the Cuzen ecosystem and have to pay approximately $20 a packet. (Each packet equates to around 20 shots.) Add that to the initial purchase price of $420 (no green jokes necessary) and that’s quite a chunk of cash. So matcha better? Your call.
The $1,400 Doggy Dryer
A picture of the doggy dryer by BunnBunnHere on Instagram.
My boyfriend’s last apartment was pretty pungent. His roommate’s basset hound was a big (cute) slobbery mess, and the smell of damp corn chips and dirty laundry permeated their place. He’d been living there so long that he was desensitized to the stink, but every time I came over, I had to brace myself before going in and wash my clothes that night.
Thankfully, now there are ways around this—but it will cost you. Meet the doggy dry room by Homhompet, showcased at CES 2020. It’s basically a dog-sized sauna styled like a UFO, with a round chamber to circulate warm air and glowing blue lights to soothe your pup when you lock it inside.It takes around five minutes for the dog to dry and, potentially, be traumatized for life.(Side note: If you know more about this company, please message me.)
Answers to “Two Truths and a Lie”: The dog Jacuzzi startup is the fake one. Chinese startup PuduTech makes BellaBot, the crotchety cat robot, and Russian startup Promobot makes the Arnold Schwarzenegger robots.
