Kozminski Techblog

Today I’d like to talk to you about a new company that was born last year.

When you book a hotel room, you only have one choice: reserve the room for entire days at a time.

But the consumer may also be looking for getting privacy in the city to nap or shower or prepare for something, or just want to change a diaper or nurse their baby.

For the people concerned in all such situations there is Recharge.

Recharge is a new startup that’s trying to change all of that, in fact this app allows anyone near a partnering hotel to get some privacy for extremely short hotel stays.

Users can book a stay in hotel for just for 67 cents a minute, or $40 an hour.

How Recharge works

To book a room, you have to open Recharge and you can find a map view where you can see which partnering hotels are near your current location.

Once you click “Book Now,” you’re given 15 minutes to arrive at the hotel Recharge has matched you with and check in. You don’t have to indicate how long you plan to stay. After 15 minutes, your booking time begins, and you’re charged $0.66 for every minute you remain at the hotel. When you’re ready to leave, just press the “Check Out” button on Recharge’s app, and your payment will stop.

“People most commonly use Recharge as they use Starbucks,” co-founder Emmanuel Bamfo told Fortune, referring to people’s use of coffee shops as place to sit down, catch up on some work and use Wi-Fi when available. The idea is similar to short-term office rental services like Breather, which lets customers rent out private space, mostly in offices, for anywhere between 30 minutes to a full day to rest up or do some work. The difference is that here you have an hotel room, available 24 H.

In my opinion this is really useful idea, and the success of the company is confirmed by Michael Baier, General Manager. As is reported in the offcial site of the company he said: “That demand took us by surprise. I wasn’t expecting the results to be frankly as good as they have been. There’s a significant part of the day where the rooms are empty. Most business travelers leave early in the morning, and a lot of them don’t come until late at night, so that time in between is really where Recharge became an interesting thing to consider.”

https://recharge.co/index.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/recharge-app-for-short-hotel-room-rentals-2016-6?IR=T

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/recharge-lets-you-book-a-hotel-room-for-minutes-at-a-time/

http://fortune.com/2016/06/03/recharge-hotel-app/

At CES yesterday Alarm.com revealed that it is developing a smart home security drone alongside its other IoT devices and software.

The subscription-based home security provider is partnering with Qualcomm to develop camera-equipped home security drones that can automatically investigate unexpected noises and activity.

The idea is that if you hear something go bump in the night, you can just grab your smartphone and watch a live video stream of what’s happening because your drone has automatically gone to check things out.

Lots of companies offer drones or drone-based services that can monitor the perimeter of a home or commercial site from on high. But most aren’t building them to fly indoors.

Alarm.com is developing a system that enables drones to fly wherever unusual people or activities are detected, inside or outdoors, according to Chief Product Officer Dan Kerzner.

The company has begun development of both software and hardware, specifically a quadcopter, using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Flight platform. But it hasn’t yet finalized a name for its product.
Rather than constantly patrolling a home, the Alarm.com drones will only respond and fly when another system is triggered, for example a motion sensor that’s attached to the lights.

Using some data from other smart home devices, the drones will know where to go investigate and record or live stream a video to a user’s mobile phone. When they fly, they will use cameras and other on-board sensors to see around a room and avoid collisions.

Kerzner declined to get into great detail about each drone component, as the product is only in its fledgling design stages. But he emphasized that using Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight will give the drones the ability to do indoor and outdoor navigation from the start.
Alarm.com is targeting a launch for their drone service at the end of 2017.

At CES, the company also officially launched something it quietly released a few months ago, called the Insights Engine.

Insights Engine is software that enables smart home devices of any kind, including drones in the future, to automatically learn what’s normal in and around a home or work site, and send alerts to users when there’s an intrusion or weird activity, with no manual rule writing required.

Alarm.com is building drones to monitor your home inside and out

http://www.alarm.com/about/press/PressGeneric.aspx?cmid=410

https://www.cnet.com/news/at-ces-flying-drones-are-alarm-com-home-security-moonshot-ces-2017/

Someone in your life is suffering from a mental disorder right now. You may not know it, but it’s there.

One in five adults suffers from a mental disorder, but society has trained us to believe mental illness is something to be ashamed of, so a majority of the afflicted hide it and go untreated. Also, patients are often perceived as being dangerous or incompetent, with little hope of recovery.

It’s time to recognize that depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other mental health conditions are every bit as serious and debilitating as physical conditions, and address the inadequacies in the medical community’s approach to treating them.

Technology will be a critical component of the solution — and a great deal of that technology already exists. Furthermore telemedicine is an effective tool for expanding the reach of traditional practitioners to treat patients in underserved areas.

Indeed, there are many new apps which may be useful:

•  Purple Robot tracks your movements and phone usage looking for signs of depression.
•  SilverCloud Health delivers patient recovery and engagement rates on par with traditional face-to-face therapy.
•  Ieso Digital Health allows patients to text in real time with their therapist semi-anonymously from anywhere, helping to reduce and eliminate stigma.
• Zenta monitors physical health, such as your heart rate, but also perspiration, respiration and temperature and cross-references this data against other data from your smartphone in order to understand cause and effect, and now it’s trying to create a pattern about indicators for mental health.
• Eliza app asks users to record a voice memo, say, venting about an issue they’re dealing with at work or simply reflecting on their day. The app turns the user’s speech into text that’s ready for sentiment analysis. After each memo is quickly analyzed, Eliza generates an infographic that shows users whether they sound happy and calm, mostly, or maybe stressed and in need of support from friends and therapists. It also lets users see, over time, how they’ve been feeling.

This progress gives cause to be optimistic about dramatically reducing the number of untreated patients as quality improves and adoption grows among payers, providers and consumers.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/24/technology-and-todays-vast-and-immensely-underserved-mental-health-population/https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/20/the-zenta-wrist-wearable-tracks-your-mental-health-not-just-physical/https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/08/the-eliza-app-makes-mental-health-tracking-as-easy-as-talking-to-yourself/

Atlas Informatics is a startup in Seattle with an audacious goal to redefine search as we know it. Atlas Recall, the company’s first product, gives you a searchable photographic memory that helps you find everything you have seen across all of your devices, apps and cloud services.

This app remembers everything you do on your computer or on all of your computers, and automatically creates a searchable database that can peer into your browser history, your text messages and emails, and just about every major app you can think of, including the Microsoft suite, Slack, most Adobe, Google Docs and Drive, Evernote, Dropbox, and Twitter.

If you are thinking that you‘ve heard of this before you’re most likely thinking of universal search on Apple TV, Spotlight on the Mac and iOS or Google. But you have to remember that Google searches the public internet, Facebook tracks your private photos and friends, Outlook has your contacts, emails, and appointments, Spotlight knows your local files; Spotify has your music and playlists etc. 

Atlas Recall is more like an amalgamation of these different services. While Google can search the indexed web and information from accounts you’ve signed into, it can’t look at documents stored locally on your laptop or iPhone. And although Spotlight and Universal Search trawl your apps, files and even the internet, they can’t pull up a page from your browsing history or make associations with other things you were looking at. Atlas Recall is unique in its ability to sort your results by other events at the same time.

Whit this app you can also look for something based on the time you opened it or what you were doing when you saw it. Search results are laid out visually, with screenshots of each listing organized by file type (images, documents, web pages, etc).

Recall is probably most useful for someone with more than one computer and more than one email address, as well as a job that requires them to be on the go a lot. The most handy feature is the ability to search your computer from an iPhone. So if you’re away from your computer and suddenly need to send someone everything you’ve written, emailed, and searched about say that’s easy to do.

Obviously there are some things you do on a computer that you might not want stored at all. For that reason, you have the option to pause Atlas for various increments of time and rescind its ability to remember what you’re doing.

You can also delete data after the fact, and Atlas promises you have the sole ownership and control of all your information.

Right now Atlas Recall is only available as an open beta on Macs and iOS and a Windows 10 version will be available soon. 

https://www.atlas.co/using-atlas/

http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13779488/atlas-recall-digital-history-app-hands-on-impressions

https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/02/atlas-recall-is-a-cross-platform-search-with-a-big-caveat/

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/02/atlas-recall-a-search-engine-for-your-entire-digital-life-gets-an-open-beta-and-20m-in-backing/

Yesterday, November 17, Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky took the stage at the historic Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles to announce the launch of a new product: Trips.

Chief Executive announced that Airbnb would offer travelers the opportunity to create customized itineraries for hours or days that afford a more authentic local experience.

“If you want to travel, you basically end up on a research project,” Chesky said. “We want to fix this.”

Through Trips, customers can book a range of local activities and find attractions that are not on the tourist circuit. The services are available now as an upgrade to the Airbnb app in 12 cities and will be in more than 50 cities next year. Flight and rental car bookings will also be part of the service eventually.

The new platform lets people offer immersions (services that either last many days) or single experiences (services for a few hours). You can also filter by categories or switch from the experience you want to have to the place you want to go.

Furthermore Airbnb says it partnered with a restaurant reservation startup called Resy to let you book a table at a popular place to eat through its platform, so you can book tables as you browse recommendations. The company is also partnering with Detour, a startup that makes app-enabled audio guides, so travelers can go on audio walks in the cities they are staying in. It also pushed out a new timeline feature under the Trips tab, which Chesky says will let the company understand where you’re going, what gaps you have in your trip, and what your preferences are to recommend activities to you.

The goal is to provide travelers with a way of connecting with experiences they wouldn’t typically be able to have has a tourist. That way, more travelers think of Airbnb as a destination for finding cool stuff to do in a new place.

Airbnb is looking to differentiate itself from the competition and trips platform will potentially become an end to end travel service operator.

Sources:

http://time.com/money/4575413/airbnb-travel-agent-trips/

Airbnb is turning itself into an ‘experience’ machine beyond just booking places to stay

http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-trips-launch-2016-11?IR=T