These companies had a very special CES experience as they all pitched in front of multiple groups of judges on stage at the Sands Expo. The startups were competing for $50,000 and being named the winner of the Hardware Battlefield. After many deliberations, our judges narrowed the list down to four finalists: wearable device for pregnant mothers Bloomlife, smart sensors for construction… Read More
http://ift.tt/2i58qGF And the winner of Hardware Battlefield 2017 is… Siren Care http://ift.tt/2i5dta0
Smartphones are able to shoot astonishingly high quality video these days, but ultimately, the lenses and sensors built into your phone are too small to get a decent shallow depth of field effect. Beastgrip is about to launch a Depth of Field adapter that makes it possible to use high-end SLR lenses with your smartphone — with impressive results. 
Hugh Behroozy is obsessed with symmetry — so much so that they wanted his company’s name is even symmetric. And that’s why the Aivia, a combo subwoofer/speaker, is slanted — so it will fit seamlessly against a wall and not jut out because of a charging cable. The speaker also has a screen built into it, which may seem like an odd decision to make for a startup. But… 
Checking your blood alcohol content with a breathalyzer while out with some friends might just be a party trick — but if you really wanted to know it to figure out whether or not you should have another drink, it might be awkward to pull one out. So that’s why Evan Strenk started Milo Sensors, a company built around wearable sensors that detects various chemicals in your body based… 
Crowdfunded on Kickstarter last year, Lofelt’s wrist-mountable subwoofer is shipping to its backers as we speak. Basslet will be available to order on February 7 for $199. I tried it out at CES and am eager to share some first impressions. 
Remember that plane that landed in the Hudson? The whole saga started with a bird strike. Birds at airports can be a terrifying ordeal, so you’d be unsurprised to hear that airports pay a pretty penny to keep the area around an airport clear. Clear Flight Solutions’ Robird is a drone that flaps its wings and scares the bejesus out of other birds to keep aviation safe. 
Over the past two days, 13 startups have taken the stage at TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield. Now our editorial team has finished deliberating with the expert judges (seriously, expert) and chosen four finalists who will be competing for the big prize of $50,000, as well as a trophy that we like to call the Metal Man. You can watch the presentations live on TechCrunch tomorrow… 
Meet Blitab, an Android tablet combined with a smart Braille surface. It’s one of the most affordable Braille devices out there and could change the way visually impaired people use computing devices. The company is participating in TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield at CES. The devices for this niche market are really disappointing. There are specialized devices called Braille… 
Very few people can move financial markets with their Tweets, but like it or not, President-elect Donald Trump is one of them. And while you can’t do anything to prevent the madness, you can keep up with it using a new tool from Trigger Finance. Originally a class project at Cornell Tech, Trigger makes it easy for users to set up real-time alerts when news drops about their stocks. 
Construction sites can be dangerous places. And while recent advancements in safety technology have done a lot to help protect workers, there hasn’t been as much focus on protecting the site itself from things like fire, water and mold damage. Any of these three risks can cost construction companies (or insurance companies) millions of dollars in damages, and are the biggest causes… 
Draw with your face? Conference call ping pong? Not any more. Google today quietly revealed that it will shut down the Hangouts API, preventing new apps from being built and shutting off existing apps on April 25th. There was no blog post about this, just an updated FAQ and email notification to developers active on the API, forwarded to us by one of these devs. Some examples of experiences… 
Some Sprig customers might be bitter about getting guilt tripped into tipping, but at least the startup is being sweet to its on-demand food servers. TechCrunch spotted that Sprig added a tipping feature to its freshly-made meal delivery app this week. Now Sprig has confirmed this is part of a wide-range of not-yet-announced perks for its servers, including a $1/hour wage increase to $14.50,… 
Instead of tracking your health with a little band that’s on your wrist, Ran Ma thinks that the future is keeping track of your health — or at least parts of it — with technology that’s woven into the fabric of your clothes. That’s the target of Siren Care, a wearable company that looks to weave electronic sensors into its clothing in order to track changes in… 
Say you want to create the next generation of voice recognition-enabled, AI-ensmartened, buzzword-laden gadget. The fist thing you need to do is pick a platform. Arduino isn’t powerful enough. The Raspberry Pi works great for prototyping, but going from Pi to production is a many-step process. Next Thing’s Chip Pro is stepping up to fill the gap with a smart development kit for… 
If these black marks on the industry are slowing down 31-year-old Vivek Ramaswamy in any way, you wouldn’t know it. He thinks his company, Roivant, will one day be a giant holding company for dozens of independent biopharmaceutical companies – both by developing drugs as well as focusing squarely on reducing the time and cost of the drug development process. It all sounds rather lofty. 
Was that space walk or climb of a massive antenna tower really shot on Facebook Live? No. Is the point of Facebook Live to show a virtual clock counting down to the New Year? No. Yet these are some of the videos that have crookedly taken advantage of the notifications and extra News Feed visibility of Facebook Live posts. Facebook’s fake news problem isn’t isolated to text articles. 
Boy, do we have a show for you today! We’ve got a fireside chat with FitBit’s James Park, as well as a fireside with the French conservative presidential candidate (who is leading in the polls) and former Prime Minister François Fillon. And if that’s not enough French for you, we’re also holding a panel on the resurgence of French startups — did you know… 
The rise of apps like Instagram and Snapchat has put photo effects front and center in the world of picture messaging, giving users not only the ability to send images to each other, but to personalise them with little doodles, lurid colors, bunny ears. Now, an app maker that has built a bunch of these is launching an SDK that will let any app add these kinds of effects to their… 
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