Author: pekandesigns

After repeatedly missing self-imposed deadlines for progress on its wireless charging-at-a-distance phone case, uBeam’s CEO Meredith Perry has decided to shift out of the CEO position and into a board member and senior advisor role. She’d founded the company in 2011 from her dorm room and brought in over $40 million in funding by selling […]

One of the bigger surprises at today’s big Amazon event was something the company didn’t announce. After a couple of years of speculation that the company was working on its own version of the HomePod and Google Max, we still don’t have a truly premium Echo. That’s due, in part, to the fact that Amazon […]

Along with the launch of the all-new Echo Show, the Alexa-powered device with a screen, Amazon also introduced a new design language for developers who want to build voice skills that include multimedia experiences. Called Alexa Presentation Language, or APL, developers will be able to build voice-based apps that also include things like images, graphics, […]

Hidden among the 70 or so announcements Amazon made at today’s big Alexa event was one key hidden presence. Google’s offerings loomed large over much of the news flowing out from the big event. It’s easy to understand why, of course. Assistant and Home have steadily been making up ground on Amazon over the last […]

Everyone’s favorite trillion-dollar retailer hosted a private event today where they continued to exercise their highly strategic approach to hardware, which has them throwing everything at the wall and waiting to see what sticks. We got some new Amazon Echo devices, sure, but there was also an amp, a camera, a clock and a microwave…? […]

If the Echo Show was the Amazon device most desperately in need of a makeover (please and thank you), the Dot was certainly a close second. After all, while the cheapest (and best selling) Echo device has already been through a couple of iterations, the hardware wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d proudly display […]

The first big piece of hardware news news at today’s Amazon event is a long awaited refresh to the Echo Dot — what the company calls the “best selling speaker, ever.” The new product features a fully refreshed designed with a much nicer cloth covering — akin to the new Echo and Echo Plus, along […]

Amazon today announced it’s rolling out new features for its FreeTime service for parents and children, which recently started working with Alexa, allowing parents to control children’s experience with the personal assistant. Now, the FreeTime service for Alexa will also support routines – the combination of voice commands that can be kicked off with a single […]

Today’s big Amazon event was all about the hardware, but Amazon kicked things off with a few extra tricks. Among the cooler features rolling out for the smart assistant in the coming weeks is improved contextual understanding. One piece that’s coming in the next few weeks is the ability to understand when the user needs […]

Former Facebook executive turned venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya announced this morning that his firm, Social Capital, would no longer raise outside capital. The firm will transition into a technology holding company by the end of 2018 and will invest $50 million to $250 million off a “multi-billion dollar balance sheet of internal capital only.” “[We] will focus […]