Author: pekandesigns

When Brazilian-born Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi met at 16 years old, they bonded over a love of coding and mutual frustrations with their strict mothers, who didn’t understand their Mark Zuckerberg-esque ambitions.  To be fair, their moms’ fear of their hacking habits only escalated after their pre-teen sons received legal notices of patent infringements in […]

Amazon has sold a lot of Echo Dots. Like a crazy, silly, unfathomable number of the things. Over the past two generations, it has arguably become the single-largest driver of the smart speaker craze. There’s nothing exceptional about the product, of course. It’s a simply designed hockey puck of a product, designed to mostly stay […]

After a few months of hype, version 9.0 of the software that runs on Teslas is rolling out starting today. There’s a bit of a catch, though: one of the bigger expected features — one that would let Tesla’s autopilot handle passing cars and automatically make highway interchanges — is being delayed for now. So […]

Facebook Messenger could soon let you use your voice to dictate and send messages, initiate voice calls and create reminders. Messenger for Android’s code reveals a new M assistant button atop the message thread screen that activates listening for voice commands for those functionalities. Voice control could make Messenger simpler to use hands-free or while […]

For a lot of consumers, Pokémon GO wasn’t their first exposure to augmented reality — it was the dog-selfie lens inside Snapchat. In the past few years, consumer use hasn’t evolved too heavily when it comes to what people are actually using AR for, even though technical capabilities have taken some giant leaps. Snap was an […]

Outside the crop of construction cranes that now dot Vancouver’s bright, downtown greenways, in a suburban business park that reminds you more of dentists and tax preparers, is a small office building belonging to D-Wave. This office — squat, angular and sun-dappled one recent cool Autumn morning — is unique in that it contains an […]

Reelgood, a startup aimed at helping cord cutters find their next binge, is out today with its biggest update yet. The company has been developing its streaming guide over the past year to solve the issues around discovery that exist when consumers drop traditional pay TV in favor of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, […]

Good news! California has passed a law banning default passwords like “admin,” “123456” and the old classic “password” in all new consumer electronics starting in 2020. Every new gadget built in the state from routers to smart home tech will have to come with “reasonable” security features out of the box. The law specifically calls […]

Longtime venture capitalist Shirish Sathaye has quietly joined early-stage investor Cervin Ventures as a general partner. Most recently, Sathaye was a general partner at Formation 8, the embattled venture firm co-founded by Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, Brian Koo (a scion of the Koo family, owners of the electronics giant LG) and former Khosla GP Jim Kim. Formation […]

For the 37.5 million adults who have trouble hearing without a hearing aid, Bose has a new product for you. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved audio technology company Bose to market a new hearing aid device. Dubbed the Bose Hearing Aid, it’s designed to let people with audio impairments fit, program and control the […]