New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
The cutting edge, on display
Dog communication, calming pillow among tech wonders at this year’s CES
Tech companies are showing off their latest products this week at CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics show.
The show officially opened Thursday, with crowds of investors, media and tech workers streaming into cavernous Las Vegas venues to see the latest tech from big companies and startups alike.
Here are some highlights:
‘Talking’ pets
Have you ever wondered what your dog would say if it could speak to you?
FluentPet promises the next best thing — buttons the company says you can train your pet to push if it’s hungry, needs to go outside or wants to play.
The buttons come in a hexagonshaped plastic mat called a hextile. Hextiles can be connected to each other to form a bigger collection of buttons.
“We find that actually when dogs kind of know that they’re being understood because they have the precision and specificity of the buttons, then they complain less because they’re no longer wondering whether they actually communicated what they wanted to,” said Leo Trottier, FluentPet CEO.
At CES, the company announced FluentPet Connect, a new app that notifies owners when their dog presses a button and collects data on how the buttons are used.
Fluent Pet’s starter kit comes with hextiles, a speaker and six buttons for $159.95. The app does not require a subscription.
A high-tech stroller
Canadian startup Gluxkind’s smart stroller is designed to make life easier for parents on the go.
The AI-powered stroller has a sensor that can tell when you’ve picked up a fussy baby, at which point it will roll in front of you while you walk without you having
to touch it.
When the baby is in the stroller, you need to keep your hands on it, but the battery will help propel it, making it easier to push uphill. It stops automatically if it gets too far away from whoever is pushing it. It
can also rock a baby back and forth.
The battery lasts for about eight hours and takes two to four hours to charge.
“I looked into the stroller market
aluminum boat used to fish on the lake. They’ve been described as Teslas of the sea, with hopes that what starts off as a luxury vehicle could eventually help transform the marine industry.
“They tend to be entrepreneurs,” Hasselskog said of Candela’s first customers. “They tend to be tech enthusiasts, if you like, with an optimistic view about the future and the ability of technology to solve all kinds of societal challenges.”
Navier’s investment backers include Google co-founder Sergey Brin, which means he’s probably getting one, too.
Are boaters ready for this?
Probably not. These early electric boat models are expensive,
heavy and could instill more serious “range anxiety” than what drivers have felt about electric cars, said Truist Securities analyst Michael Swartz, who follows the leisure boat industry.
“How safe is it for me to go out in the middle of the week with no one around, miles from shore, in an electric outboard engine?” Swartz said.
Swartz said they might make more sense to use electric motors — such as a new CES offering from Brunswick-owned Mercury Marine — to power a fleet of small rental boats, perhaps at the widely-used boating clubs also run by Brunswick.
“You’re not anywhere near the type of electric boat where you can go 50 miles offshore and go fishing for a couple of hours and come back,” Swartz said. “There’s no technology that can enable you to replicate that experience outside of an
internal combustion engine.”
Bring on the water taxis?
Both Candela and Navier are planning for a secondary market of electric ferries that could compete with the gas-powered vehicles that now carry commuters around populated regions such as the Stockholm archipelago or along San Francisco Bay.
Hasselskog said the same technology powering Candela’s new leisure boat will also be used to power a 30-passenger catamaran prototype that could operate in Sweden by summer.
For a city like Stockholm, which has already electrified most of its public ground transportation, its dozens of large ferry boats are an outlier in producing carbon emissions.
“They need something like 220 of these (electric) vessels to replace the current fleet,” Hasselskog said. And instead of
running on fixed schedules with empty seats, the smaller electric vehicles might be able to be summoned on demand such as how Uber or Lyft work on land.
Automatic docking
Many of the companies developing electric boat propulsion also have teams working on making these vehicles more autonomous. But since most recreational boaters like piloting their own boats — and most ferry passengers likely prefer a human captain at the helm — the self-driving innovation is focused on what happens at the marina.
“There’s an intimidation factor with boating and a lot of the intimidation factor you hear from consumers is with docking,” said Swartz, the Truist analyst. “So if that can be made seamless and automated, it’s a huge deal.”