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Pebble recently began sending very happy emails: It was telling backers of its Kickstarter campaign for the new Pebble Time smartwatch that their watches are on the way. But then Pebble dropped a bomb: The iOS software necessary to set up and use the Pebble Time watch with an iPhone is “still in review” at Apple. And it’s been “in review” for 43 days, says Pebble.

Dang it. (Email from Pebble)

This is not the first software hiccup that Pebble has faced. In 2013, when the first Pebble watch began shipping, the company had a similar message to backers: The iOS app that gave the Pebble watch full functionality wasn’t going to be available by the time backers got their watches. (Some functions did work, but full customization required the app.)

More recently, Pebble users got a scare when Apple removed some apps that worked with Pebble. That was a “mistake,” according to Apple, but it rattled Pebble owners and potential future customers.

As far as we know, Pebble’s compatibility with Android phones has never been threatened, and the new Pebble Time app that works with the Pebble smartwatches is currently available in the Google Play app store.

Read more:

Why I Preordered a Pebble Time Right Before the Apple Watch Announcement

Pebble Time Smartwatch Hauls in Record-Breaking $20 Million on Kickstarter

The Sensational Pebble Time Smartwatch: Too Bad About Its Lousy Screen

Here is the complete email from Pebble:

Hi everyone,

We’ve got key details to share about the Pebble Time app for iPhone. Here’s the TL;DR:

Pebble Time iPhone App Still In Review

Timeline, Current Status, Next Steps

Hang in there. We’re close and you can help.

Pebble Time iPhone App Still In Review

The Pebble Time iPhone app, as we’ve all noticed, is not yet live on the iTunes AppStore. It remains “in review.” This unexpected circumstance pains us as much it does backers with watches ready to set up. We’re doing all we can to mitigate the delay and make Pebble Time Watch for iPhone available for download.

We appreciate you hanging in there with us while we navigate this obstacle.

Timeline, Current Status, and Next Steps

Making sure you get everything you need to enjoy your Pebble Time reward remains our top priority. In the lead-up to shipments on May 27, we completed the following iOS-related preparations:

(Status history of Pebble Time watch for iPhone, pending approval. Status history of Pebble Time watch for iPhone, pending approval.)

May 18: Apple approved our new app, Pebble Time Watch.

May 22: We submitted an updated version of the same iPhone app—only adding minor bug fixes—for approval. We requested an expedited review of this submission.

We unfortunately cannot simply publish the original submission approved on May 18 due to quirks in the AppStore submission process and rules. We considered adding Pebble Time support to the existing Pebble iPhone app. Sadly, that app also has a pending update—containing one bug fix—in Apple’s review process. Version 2.6.6 remains “in review” now for 43 days and counting.

(Status history of Pebble Smartwatch v2.6.6, in review since April 22, 2015.)

Past Experience with “Expedited” AppStore Reviews

Developers may occasionally request that Apple grant “fast-track approval” for app updates they would quickly like reviewed, approved, and published to the iTunes AppStore.

Last year was the first and only other time Pebble requested expedited review for an app update. That update was approved and published on the AppStore within 24 hours.

Hang in there—we’re close and you can help.

We are proud of and grateful for the hard work, long hours, and sacrificed weekends our iOS team devoted to building the Pebble Time iPhone app. It’s only right that users get a fair shot at enjoying the fruit of that labor without further delay.

We’re sure Apple, like Pebble, loves its fans and is responsive to feedback. Together, we can kindly express our desire to see the AppStore #FreeOurPebbleTime with a speedy approval of Pebble Time Watch for iPhone.

You can make your voice heard by reaching out to Apple directly, on Twitter, and on Facebook. Since the beginning, you’ve proven time and again that the Pebble community knows how to come together and accomplish amazing things.

While waiting for the iPhone app, iOS backers may borrow an Android device from friends or family to perform initial setup, add cool watchfaces, or install standalone apps that don’t require a paired smartphone.

The sooner we clear this obstruction, the sooner we can get back to updates about reward shipments (moving along great), pre-order news (June 22), and Pebble Time Steel (shiny new samples are in).

Thanks for having our backs every step of the way. <3, Team Pebble

Google Improves the World?s Cheapest Virtual Reality Headset

Google is continuing its push into the virtual world with a second version of Cardboard, its smartphone holder that converts any phone into a display for a virtual reality headset. The company also announced a new rig to hold cameras for creating surround video, software to stitch the images together into a cohesive VR scene, and a program to bring virtual reality ?field trips? to schools.

At last year?s Google I/O conference, the company announced its clever Google Cardboard virtual reality smartphone holder. Essentially a fold-up box with two lenses in it to make looking at a phone inches from your eyes possible, it made a lowest-common-denominator version of virtual reality available for those who didn?t have or didn?t want to pay for a dedicated VR rig like an Oculus Rift.

Related: ?Other Space? Director Paul Feig: Virtual Reality Is No Joke

This year?s version of Cardboard has a few improvements, including a much easier assembly process (see the video) and a better button, for apps that require it.

Google?s Clay Bavor introduces the new Cardboard at Google I/O. (Photo: Rafe Needleman/Yahoo)

Cardboard still relies on a smartphone with specialized software to generate images, as well as a phone?s orientation sensors to move the image to match your head movements. With the right software, the effect is convincing, and frankly remarkable given the minimal price of the additional hardware required.

There are several companies making Cardboard headsets. Google has a list of them.

Who?s It for?

Holding a cardboard phone holder up to your noggin for VR hijinks is a great science experiment. But does it have any real-world use other than as a developer?s playground? Google thinks so: It has created a kit for schools that lets classrooms take VR field trips to anyplace you can show on a smartphone.

The previous version of Cardboard. It does the same thing as the new one, but it was harder to fold together. (Photo: Google)

The ?Expeditions? kit for schools is, we?re told, a big box that contains a bunch of Cardboards, some smartphones, and an Android tablet for the teacher, who can drive his or her students? Carboard headsets to anywhere that there?s a surround image to be seen.

I?m not sure if parents will like the idea of a classroom of kids with their eyes pressed up to smartphone screens (although I?m sure the kids will love it), but it actually is a clever way to get kids to interact with an on-screen presentation and increase their engagement with a lesson.

Making Virtual Reality

Finally, Google addressed the challenge of creating VR content. The company announced the Jump, a rig that holds 16 cameras (most notably those from its new partner, GoPro) in the right orientation to create surround scenes. Google also talked up its service to take the video from these 16 cameras and stitch them together into seamless virtual worlds.

Google will first make the stitching service, which it says ?takes thousands of computers? available to select content creators this summer.

Your First VR Views Will Be on Your Computer

In advance of all of us having VR headsets (it will be a while), Google still wants you to be able to see the immersive worlds being created and recorded for VR gear. So Google said this summer YouTube will get support for the videos created with Jump rigs and assembled with its new software.

To check out one possible future of video entertainment, I recently took a trip to the headquarters of the virtual reality content company, Jaunt VR, in Palo Alto, California. Then I talked with one man who is using VR and other new forms of video to tell stories: the writer, director, and actor Paul Feig.

Feig recently launched his new series, Other Space, here on Yahoo. While the show is filmed for your standard, pedestrian flat screen TV (or computer or smartphone), Feig also created an immersive, 360-degree virtual reality promotional video for the show. 

You can see it on an Oculus Rift headset if you happen to have one, or more realistically, on an Android smartphone (download here). An iPhone version is coming soon. For viewing on a smartphone, you should really get one of the free-to-cheap virtual reality smartphone holders like Google Cardboard. And put in your earbuds. “The experience relies heavily on the ambisonic mix, using the directional audio to direct the viewer to the actor who is speaking,” a spokesperson wrote to me. 

You can experience a shortened version of the promo video in a Web viewer (go here). 

At some tech events, they give out Google Cardboard smartphone holders for free. (Photo: Google)

Other than Other Space, there are more VR demos available for Oculus, iOS, and Android on Jaunt’s content page.

Above: The flat, non-VR version of Other Space.

Will it play in Peoria?

Judging from the promo, and from my demos at Jaunt VR, today’s virtual reality is a spectacular gimmick. Over at Jaunt, Sitting in a chair in their specialized demo studio, with an Oculus Rift headset strapped on my face, I was immersed first in a Paul McCartney concert, then I became a bird flying over a cliff as BASE jumpers were leaping off, and finally I was transported into a horror flick… happening all around me. 

I did it for science.

These particular VR videos placed me in the middle of action I could not control or direct. In VR video, you can look in any direction, but you can’t influence where the camera is moving in space. It’s still engrossing. But when people talk about VR today, they’re often referring to game experiences, in which you can control your movement in a computer-generated virtual world. 

While smartphone holders that can make your phone into the screen in a VR headset are quite inexpensive, they’re not in wide distribution yet. However, toy companies like Mattel are getting onboard: The re-launched View-Master will let you watch VR using your smartphone as the screen.  

The new View-Master (Photo: Mattel)

Working under the assumption that people will soon be able to pick up, for cheap, the hardware to make a smartphone into a VR rig, I wanted to talk with Paul Feig about his own immersive video experiment, as well as other technologies that might change the way people create and watch video entertainment.

Feig: VR is serious

Paul Feig is serious about new media tools, including VR. As he sees it, “It allows us to make something physically interactive,” referring to the very physical activity of watching a VR scene with a headset on: You’re constantly in motion, trying to track the action as it happens around you. “We can make people spin around in a circle if we want,” he said with evil glee.

And that’s gold for comedy. “Anything that gets people to engage in an interactive way is great,” he said.

However, shooting for VR presents new challenges. “The hard thing is editing,” he said. In standard video, “we can create jokes in the editing room.” But when everything is happening all at once in a set built around a camera in the middle of it, he says he loses that ability. “I’m providing a form of editing by placing things around you,” he said.  But it’s tough on the director, in part because he can’t be on the set when there’s a camera there that sees every single thing. “We just had to put up a security camera,” he said, and then he’d direct the actors from a different room, to the extent it was possible to direct at all.

Jaunt VR’s surround camera. I’m told there is a GoPro behind each lens. (Photo: Rafe Needleman)

“It’s not the way I normally work,” Feig said, “but it’s worth it to go for it.” Referring to his Other Space promo, he said, “I hope people watch it four times in a row and spin around differently each time.”

The comic’s best friend

Feig has produced for network TV (Freaks and Geeks; The Office) but he’s doing his new show for Yahoo (obvious disclosure: Yahoo publishes Yahoo Tech). Does he miss the old model? Apparently not: “The Internet is the greatest thing to ever happen to people that do what I do, ever,” Feig said, as we talked about the real problem for content creators: distribution. “With film and TV,” he said, “the problem is that I can’t get things to anybody. Hollywood holds distribution over everybody’s head. But the Internet changed that. If something is good, it’s going to find people. New media provides all these extra portals.”

So the distribution problem is fixed by the Internet, even though there is one downside: “The people who get bummed are film-makers,” Feig said, referring to the loss of the big screen for movies. Feig says he tries to walk the line, “We made sure Other Space would look good on a big screen, but everything I did, I have to make sure you can see it on an iPhone, too.”

The fact that people can grab content off the Internet and see it in the homes, at their desks, or on their pocket devices also make Feig a fan of binge watching. He said he made sure the Other Space was released all at once, like House of Cards. (Yahoo’s other marquee comedy, Community, is being released episodically, like traditional TV.)

“Binge watching is the biggest thing for me,” Feig said. “I think it’s the only way to launch a show these days. Otherwise, you have to hope people will come back every week. But people forget to come back.”

Since Feig is a comic artist, I thought he’d want more control of the large-scale timing of his work, but he said, “I control the timing I care about within my shows. And I don’t worry about overload. Even if people love a show, they reach a saturation point. But then they come back. And if they get really fatigued, there’s a problem with the show.”

From the Other Space VR promo

Other Tech

Feig seems eager to experiment with new media types. He’s done some 3D filming for the Ghostbusters reboot he’s working on. But he was much more enthusiastic about using drones for cinematography.

For his movie, Spy (coming in June), he said used camera drones for action sequences. “It’s the greatest tool in the world,” he said. “The shots look like helicopter shots, but not as dangerous and you can get in closer.”  There is a downside, though: “Drones are insanely loud,” he said, so they only work for big action shots. At least so far.

Keep reading:

I Try Microsoft’s Crazy HoloLens

This VR Demo Let Me Soar Over San Francisco Like a Bird

FeelReal Virtual-Reality Mask Gives You a Whiff of the Game

The Cure for VR Sickness? A Virtual Nose

Amazon?s Fire Phone: 5 Key Features

Amazon?s first smartphone, the Fire phone, has a few key features that set it apart from its Apple, Google, and Microsoft competitors. None are enough to necessarily sway a committed user to move his phone plan to the Fire, but new or dissatisfied buyers might want to give the phone a look. And anybody deeply committed to Amazon might just love this thing.

Here?s why.

1. It?s 3D!  The Fire phone has a feature called ?Dynamic Perspective? that gives the interface layers and depth. The phone has four little cameras to track your head and eyes, and it works very well to provide a convincing illusion of dimensionality.

Read more:  * Amazon Launches the Fire Phone, Its First Smartphone * Analysis: Amazon?s Phone isn?t for Everyone. Is it for Anyone?

The feature is great for games, useful for maps, and just kind of fun in the general user interface. We expect to see more applications for this technology soon.

In use, it is surprisingly unobtrusive and engaging. It?s not the kind of thing that anyone should give up her current phone for, but it?s a nice parlor trick that probably won?t grow old fast. Gamers will love it.

The phone also scrolls books and webpages when you tilt it forward and backward. That?s useful.

2. It makes the world your mall. The ?Firefly? feature uses the camera and the microphone to recognize real-world objects. Point it at a book or a boxed consumer good, and it will identify it and let you (surprise) buy it on Amazon. It also works to identify phone numbers and Web addresses on signs, and it will link you to Wikipedia if you point it at a work of art it knows about.

Firefly also recognizes songs and audio from TV shows, and will let you buy or stream media from Amazon ? or third parties ? when it makes an identification.

Amazon has made this functionality available before in standalone apps, but it?s important enough to Amazon that it gave Firefly a dedicated button on the Fire phone (hold down the camera button). The feature worked well in our brief demo, identifying boxes, LPs, books, and the phone numbers on fliers and posters.

Independent physical retailers will hate this feature, because it makes price-shopping against their goods ridiculously easy. However, Amazon is making the Firefly data available to third-party app developers, so one way retail can fight back is with its own apps.

3. Good camera; great storage. The back camera has decent resolution, 13 megapixels. More importantly, it has optical image stabilization, so it can take longer exposures without blurring.

All photos taken with the phone are stored for free and forever in the Amazon Cloud Drive. That?s a nice bonus. Videos are stored, too, but there?s a cap of 5 GB for free video storage. More space can be purchased.

4. Clever headphones. The Fire phone comes with tangle-resistant earbuds. They have a flat cable, and the buds snap together magnetically when you?re not using them. We didn?t test the ?phones for audio quality, though.

5. It?s a sweet system for Amazon nuts. Nice price, too. When you get a Fire phone from Amazon, it?ll come pre-connected to your account, and you?ll have instant access to all your media: videos, books, music, and apps. You also get a year of Amazon Prime with this phone. If you?re going to get Prime anyway, that?s a $99 benefit, and the 32 GB version of the phone is priced fairly at $199 (on a two-year contract with AT&T).

What?s not to like? Well, a few things.

The phone, like Amazon?s tablets, runs a highly custom version of Android, so it won?t work with standard Android apps or connect to the Google Play store. Amazon has its own library of 240,000 apps, we?re told, but to date most of those are tablet apps. We will see if the phone gets developers excited enough to adapt their apps to this platform.

Second, if you don?t like AT&T, you won?t like this phone. It?s just not available on other carriers. To be fair, the first iPhone was AT&T-only as well. Amazon is giving absolutely no indication that it is considering putting the phone on any other network, but the phone hasn?t even shipped yet. It?s early days.

Finally, if you?re not an Amazon aficionado, what you?re really getting here is an Android-like phone with a smaller app library and a really cool 3D user interface. That won?t be enough to sway most people.

The Fire phone is set to ship on July 25. It will be $199 for the 32 GB version, or $299 for the 64 GB model. It?s on the AT&T network only.

Smartphone navigation? Solved. Modern apps will even route you around traffic, automatically picking the most efficient way to get where you’re going.

That’s the VoicePark sensor embedded in a sample slab of street pavement. (Photo: Rafe Needleman/Yahoo)

What we don’t have yet is an app that will reliably tell us where to park once we get where we’re going. One startup in the “Internet of Things for Cities” exhibits (co-located with the Wearable World Congress show in San Francisco this week) is trying to solve this issue: VoicePark.

VoicePark wants to install parking-space sensors in every potential on-street spot in a city. The combined visible-light and infrared sensors are, I was told, extremely accurate at determining if a car is overhead. They’re supposed to be far more reliable than magnetic sensors. They communicate wirelessly, presumably over a lower-power mesh network, and run on batteries that are supposed to last four years or more.

Combine a city full of VoicePark sensors with a navigation app that knows where you’re going (because you tell it), and the idea is that as you approach your destination, it will tell you, with perfect accuracy, where there is an open spot — even if it’s a block or two before your destination.

If there isn’t an open spot, the data from the VoicePark sensor network provides enough information for the system to know how long cars have been parked and how the flow of parking-space usage works in an area, so that it can more accurately predict where you can head for the best chance of nabbing a spot from somebody who’s leaving.

This is a hugely ambitious project. Getting a city to adopt an infrastructure play like this, one that requires installing hundreds of thousands of devices in city streets — and then replacing each one’s batteries every four to five years — is not an undertaking for the weak or impatient. 

The difficulty isn’t just getting cities to try out, approve, and then fund an installation that doesn’t generate revenue. There’s also a high level of technological risk for this idea: It’s quite possible that within a few years, we won’t need dedicated sensors to read parking spaces. No, I don’t know what will replace them. Maybe cars themselves will report on open spots (Ford is experimenting with this); maybe utility-pole-mounted cameras will. Maybe drones. Maybe the car of the future won’t need to park near your destination at all: It will just drop you at the door and then skulk off to park itself at a remote location until you’re ready to be picked up. In other words, I wouldn’t bet on street-embedded sensors being needed forever to perform this function.

But for the time being, drivers need this, and cities do, too. An immense amount of gasoline is wasted by people orbiting for spots, and these people lose time and cause traffic congestion and pollution.

Currently, VoicePark is running a  few trials. One is on a tiny number of spots at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco (where the Wearable World Congress event is taking place). I hope it eventually works. I tried the app that’s supposed to show me which of the 30 monitored spots are free, but I couldn’t get it to function.

Here I am at Wearable World Congress in San Francisco, trying out the CreoPop 3D pen. It might be the gateway drug to 3D printing.

The CreoPop is a 3D pen, like the 3Doodler you may have seen before. It does the same thing. But, technically, it’s a very different device.

The 3Doodler uses heat to melt its building material, like a 3D printer. As it cools, it hardens. The second version of the 3Doodler is due out in June, for $100.

The CreoPop (photo above), which won’t be available for a few months, uses visible light to harden a highly proprietary gel “ink” that it extrudes. That means two things:

First, you can draw in the palm of your hand (if you can hold still). I drew a little 3D sketch on top of my thumbnail. As I slowly moved the pen through space, the strand of material first adhered to my thumbnail, then hardened as I moved the pen. Like an ordinary pen, the ink came out when I moved the pen, and stopped when I held still. There weren’t any buttons to press when the pen was on (you have to hold down a button on the 3Doodler to heat the ink). And the sketch I made just popped off my thumb when wanted to be done with it.

Second, the special 3D ink is where this company will really make its money. The “pen” will ship at first for $119. Inks will start at $20 for a three-pack of cartridges, which CreoPop CEO Andreas Birnik says are good for about 45 feet of drawing each.

A diversion for math: Creo “ink,” at the above price, is about 15 cents a foot. That’s not a lot, if you ask me, but 3Doodler ink packs are available for as little as $10 for a 25-pack of 10-inch strands, each of which is said to be able to print 100 inches. That means its ink costs less than 5 cents a foot. If you want to do a lot of 3D free-hand drawing, the 3Doodler will save you money.

While I don’t think the Creo charges a bad price for its magic, if you get this pen you will be at the mercy of the company to get the ink, since it’s very clear the there are no plans to open up the chemistry for making it. (I’m told that while the ink is nontoxic when you get it, the manufacturing process is quite tricky and perhaps not so friendly.)

Creo can also blend interesting materials into its ink. The thumb cube I drew smelled like watermelon, because I was using one of their scented inks. I also saw magnetic ink, glow-in-the-dark ink, and mood ink (it changes color when warmed up). “We use nano-particles,” Birnik told me.

The most interesting idea for a special ink isn’t available yet, though: Conductive ink. So you could 3D-draw a wire between two components. For fun, or maybe even for quick repairs of electronics.

Power From the Air and Robot Bartenders: Cool Tech From TechCrunch Disrupt

If you know Silicon Valley (the place), then you know that Silicon Valley (the TV show) is, amazingly, an accurate representation of life in startup land. Nerdy companies like the fictional Pied Piper do present at startup conferences like TechCrunch Disrupt. And TechCrunch Disrupt itself is very real.

At the Disrupt conference in New York this week, dozens of companies pitched to the attendees — funders, press, and potential partners. There was a company that could 3D-print noses out of cartilage, not plastic. There were bitcoin companies. And there were these five cool companies I saw when walking around the show’s demo floor:

Nikola Labs has technology that can extract electrical energy from radio waves. (After all, radio signals start with electricity, right?) Not much energy, but the company says it’s enough that in its prototype iPhone case, it can extend the battery life of a phone significantly, by grabbing energy the phone is sending out that’s otherwise wasted.

The demo of the raw technology (a naked energy-harvesting antenna connected to a volt meter, near a Wi-Fi router) showed electricity generated only when the router’s antenna was practically touching the Nikola receiver. We’re going to have to wait to see if this tech can work over real-world distances.

Quip is a subscription service for dental care. You buy the company’s electric toothbrush holder (for $25 or $40, in plastic or metal), and then every three months the company sends you a new toothbrush head ($5) and, optionally (another $5), a tube of toothpaste.

I’m a big fan of the Dollar Shave Club model for predictably recurring consumables like this. And who remembers to replace their toothbrush when they should?

Nexpaq makes a very cool modular smartphone case (iPhone 6 or some Galaxy models) that can accept six slide-in modules at a time that do cool things: There’s a multicolor LED, a laser pointer, a temperature sensor, extended battery packs, and more.

I’m not sure we really need this type of gizmo, but it is supercool. If you think your smartphone doesn’t already do enough, get Nexpaq.

Visual Vertigo has software that lets you create 3D stereograms from your iPhone’s single camera. If you want to make your own ViewMaster slides, this is the software for you.

Finally, there’s Somabar. It’s an automatic bartender for the home. A $429 appliance, it will mix drinks from any of the six liquids you put in its special bottles. It’s smartphone-controlled, of course, and based on my demo, I can confirm it makes a tasty drink.

Plenty of Web services try to save you money before you buy something. There are coupon sites (I use RetailMeNot) and even browser plug-ins that make sure you’re buying from the lowest-price site you can (like Invisible Hand). And now there’s a service that can get you money back — automatically — even after you’ve made a purchase.

At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, I saw a new service called Paribus. It’s based on a policy many retailers have: If you buy something and the company then lowers the price on the item, it will refund the difference to you. All you have to do is ask. And know that the price has gone down.

Of course, neither knowing nor asking is easy. How do you know the price has gone down? Are you going to keep going back to the website to check? And where do you go for your refund? Paribus will take over both steps for you. It’s damned ingenious, and I hope it works. (I just signed up; I’ll report on my Twitter feed if it does or doesn’t.)

Paribus attaches itself to your email account and scans for receipts that are sent to you. When it sees a receipt, it analyzes the content, then adds the items you bought and how much you paid to its database. Then it constantly checks for price drops from the store.

Phase 3: Profit

If the price does drop in the refund time period (typically 14 days after purchase), Paribus submits a refund request for you and charges you 25 percent of the money recovered. Yes, that 25 percent commission is substantial, but a refund is found money. I’ll take it.

For comparison’s sake, some credit cards will also refund you price-change differences, but you have to find and document a change yourself and submit a claim through your credit card issuer. 

The Paribus refund processing service is more relevant today than ever. Stores are aggressively using dynamic pricing now, adjusting prices algorithmically based on demand and other factors. Amazon, in particular, adjusts prices constantly. No consumer can possibly track all the price changes relevant to them; the time-spent-to-money-saved equation would never work. Furthermore, applying for a refund is also time-consuming.

But if online prices are being changed by software, it’s only fair that we put more software on the job of getting the price-back refunds. Right?

Buyer beware

Airlines have been using dynamic pricing for longer than retail stores. Unfortunately, Paribus doesn’t work with travel purchases. “Those prices tend to go up,” the founder told me.

And there’s another thing to look out for before you sign up: You have to give Paribus a lot of access to your personal accounts for this to work. Paribus needs full access to your email account and a credit card number (so it can charge you for the refunds it finds), and if you want it to track Amazon prices, you also have to provide your Amazon login. That’s a lot of trust to put into a Web startup, and were it not for Google and Amazon and my credit card having very strong security and anti-fraud mechanisms in place even for password-authorized access, I would not be willing to test this service.

The Ford GT. I’ll drive this car any day. (Photo: Rafe Needleman/Yahoo)

Mark Fields, the new CEO of Ford, paid a visit to the nerd journalist corps last week. He visited Ford’s Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto, Calif. While his people were showing off the new Ford GT (quick review: holy wow) and weird plastic springs the company will be using soon to save weight in its cars, I got a chance to spend a few minutes with him one-on-one. 

From my perspective, one interesting threat to the status quo of car companies is autonomous vehicles. Self-driving technologies could rewrite the car business.  

Fields, of course, says he sees new technology as an opportunity.

For people who want self-driving cars, Ford will eventually offer them. For those who like to drive, that’ll stay an option. “We will offer a full line of autonomy levels,” he told me. He emphasized that, at least in our lifetimes, Ford cars will always offer their owners the capability to drive. If they want it.

Ford CEO Mark Fields at the Ford Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto, Calif. (Photo: Rafe Needleman/Yahoo Tech)

“We don’t see a disconnect,” he said. “We don’t see driving and autonomy as exclusive.” He said Ford will continue to work on making cars that are “both fun to drive and fun to ride,” and that “there will always be a spectrum of autonomy in our lifetime.” (To calibrate that statement: Fields is 54.)

However, during an earlier presentation at the Research Center that day, Ford execs discussed the challenges of building cars that are safe to drive in spite of the advancements in self-driving technology. The problem isn’t just that technology can distract drivers from operating their cars safely. There’s also the reverse problem: If cars are too autonomous and thus too boring to pay attention to while they are driving, the human “driver” might not be paying attention when he or she needs to take over.

For this reason, Google has proposed taking the driver out of the loop completely in its prototype self-driving pod cars. There’s a big red emergency stop button, but no steering wheel or pedals. There’s no way the driver/passenger can make a bad decision and screw things up, and the car’s programmers don’t have to account for unpredictable humans trying to take control.

Fields also sees electric propulsion gathering steam, as it were. While he wouldn’t predict when (or if) electric cars will become mainstream, he did say that Ford will continue to offer more options. “Our approach is to offer choice,” he said.

The Uberization

Another fundamental threat to the future of the car business is the changing nature of car ownership. Fields sees this. “A certain population wants access more than ownership,” he said. And Ford, ultimately, is not a car company per se. “We’re a mobility company,” said Fields.

Ford is running 25 experiments around the globe, he said, working on things like “usership” instead of ownership, and using social collaboration tools to help people find cars to get them where they are going. “We are trying to solve big societal issues,” he said.

(One cool technology Ford is working on, that sounds like a Silicon Valley fantasy: The ability for cars to recognize open parking spaces they pass by, and then transmit this data to a service that tells other cars, whose drivers are looking for spots, where one is near them.)

Too much tech?

My big fear, when it comes to automotive technology, especially from a company that’s newly trying to recast itself as a service company, is that its services will know a bit too much about their customers: Where they are, who they may be with, and what they are doing in their mobility devices.

Fields didn’t quite have an answer for this, but he did have a line at the ready. “We are committed to being trusted stewards of customer data,” he told me. “We have to ask the customer whether they want to opt it.”

He told me the customer has to see a benefit of sharing data. For example, a car that knows it needs an oil change could help its owner schedule the service.

But what about insurance companies who give you better rates when you opt in? Won’t they eventually make keeping your driving data private unaffordable? Or overeager courts, or police, who absorb data under arguably legal, but questionable pretense?

Just as it is for online companies and mobile phone companies, stewarding customer data is tricky. Especially when customers seem to be so eager to expose so much data in return for, usually, incremental value.

(Thinkstock)

The impending de-criminalization of cannabis means money. And where there’s money, there’s venture capital: private funds that invest in startups, hoping to magnify their investments many times over when their companies “exit” (go public or get acquired). And at the TechCrunch Disrupt startup conference in New York this week, two VCs took the stage to somberly discuss the opportunities in this emerging market.

The funders: Brendan Kennedy, from Privateer Holdings, a private equity firm focused on the emerging cannabis market. Privateer is backed by the famous New York venture firm, Founders Fund, represented by Geoff Lewis at the conference.

The two pot-friendly funders are clear that the tide is turning for the legalization of cannabis. Kennedy quoted the figure that more than 50% of Americans think it should be legal for all adults, while 84% think it should be legal for medical applications. As Kennedy said, “The war has already been lost by the government. It’s just a matter of when it ends.“

Pot-friendly investors Geoff Lewis (left) and Brendan Kennedy (center), interviewed by TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler (right). (Photo: Rafe Needleman/Yahoo)

At the moment, Privateer has three investments in the cannabis market:

Leafly. This is a four-year-old startup that helps consumers and patients learn about individual strains of marijuana. From people looking for a nice clean high on a Friday night, to medical patients looking for pain relief, the database has about 1,200 strains of cannabis and can point its customers to 2,400 dispensaries. “It’s a search engine for pot,” Kennedy admitted.

Tilray is an actual cannabis grower. It’s Canadian, though, and can’t dispense outside Canada. Kennedy said the company ships directly from its own 60,000 square-foot facility, which he called, “mind-blowing” for its sophistication.

Marley Natural is gearing up to sell cannabis products (the herb itself as well as lotions) when doing so becomes legal. It will also sell accessories. And yes, Privateer has been dealing with Bob Marley’s family in getting this company running.

The venture community tends to move in a herd: Where one VC gets traction, others follow. There’s not a flood yet of VC funding in cannabis, but as the regulations lift around the country, expect to see more private money come to give this industry a push. As if it needs it. 

Previously:

Marijuana Delivery Startups Are Ready. The U.S. Government Is Not.

On Thursday night, Tesla announced that it will begin selling a home battery, the Powerwall, to store and distribute electricity in consumer homes.

The Tesla Energy Powerwall

The Powerwall Home Battery line is made by Tesla’s new division, Tesla Energy (see the press kit). When the products ship, late in the summer, there will be two versions: A 7 kilowatt-hour model for $3,000, and a 10kWh model for $3,500. (Prices don’t include installation.) There will also be versions scaled for businesses.

The home Powerwall products are wall-mountable, about the size of an on-demand water heater (about 3 by 4 feet), but thinner (7 inches). They are available in different colors.

At the announcement, Tesla CEO Elon Musk explained that the Powerwall products can be used to take power generated by the “handy fusion reactor in the sky,” and then store that power for when said reactor isn’t over the consumer’s house and powering their roof-mounted solar panels.

Elon Musk announcing Powerwall (Photo: Tesla video stream)

He also pointed out that the Powerwall is useful for people who don’t have reliable power, or who want to live off the power grid entirely.

Driving while goggled. (Photo: Dan Tynan/Yahoo)

I would never wear Google Glass out in public. Nor would I wear the pair of augmented reality goggles I tried on at San Francisco’s Mini showroom last night, the Mini Augmented Vision glasses.

But I would for sure wear them while driving.

Photo: Mini

I’ve long believed that augmented reality glasses — glasses that project information onto the world as you see it, through very nerdy headgear — could be great for people doing very specific tasks: Surgery. Engine repair. Flying jets (this already happens). And maybe even driving a car. Just not walking around. We’re not ready for that.

Mini (technically, BMW, which owns Mini) worked with tech companies  Qualcomm and ODG to develop these prototype driving glasses, and it hosted a little demo event this week. I got to try on the glasses and take them for a virtual spin in a car facing a big projection screen.

Into the Mini holodeck

Photo: Rafe Needleman/Yahoo

The glasses show navigational info in your field of view. Hovering over the hood of your car are your speed and the speed limit. These numbers stay out of your way, stuck in space, more or less, no matter where your head is pointing. There is a little bit of positional jitter. It wasn’t too terrible, but the Microsoft HoloLens and the Oculus Rift, both of which I have tried, do a better job of registering your head’s position and making sure that virtual images stay locked into position.

Related: I Try Microsoft’s Crazy HoloLens

Current car head-up displays, the kind that project info onto your windshield, can display speed, navigation, and car status. But the Mini glasses do a lot more. When used for navigation, for example, as you approach a turn, a very cool animation projects onto the lane in front of you and shows how to make the turn into the new road.

Driver’s-eye view. (Photo: Mini)

The glasses also let you see through your car, sort of. When you’re parking, you can look to where your wheels meet the curb, and you’ll see a little inset video of your tire overlaid on your car interior. Three cameras on the right side of the car feed the image to the glasses.

The car has sensors that can detect other hazards, and it will put an alert in your display to turn your head to see them through the car, even if the car itself would block your view: A low-riding skateboarder and an errant basketball were demo cases for this.

There’s a camera to the right of the “S” badge. (Photo: Rafe Needleman/Yahoo)

The software can also attach information to real-world objects, such as buildings, as you look at them. For example, as you approach a parking structure, the glasses could display pricing or parking availability.

Mini glasses are integrated into the Mini car’s electronics, so you don’t ever need to fiddle with the glasses when they’re on your head, even though the glasses do have buttons on them. To respond to an alert on your display, you press the OK button on your car’s steering wheel.

Captain Tomorrow

Mini has tried to make the goggles, which are based on a model by ODG called the R-6, look Mini-like. The frame over the AR glasses is available in several jaunty colors. I wore the brass-and-brownish pair, which has a vaguely steampunk look. Still, they make you look like a dork, and the glasses are heavy and large. They are not, as I’ve said, something I would be caught out in the world wearing. In the car, though, why not? Especially if they feed me useful information or help me keep my eyes on the road.

But Mini also sees these glasses as a brand extension, so it’s added out-of-the-car features too. In a video, we’re shown how the glasses will guide their owner from an enormous, beautifully decorated apartment to where the owner’s Mini is parked on the street, miraculously without any broken windows. And in my hands-on demo, after I got out of the car, the glasses showed arrows to where I was to walk to give them back to the demo minders.

Even a Qualcomm rep I spoke with at the event seemed to agree that these features were unnecessary. Furthermore, they add complexity to the software and hardware and affect battery-life requirements. With any luck, Mini will prioritize simplicity and cost over its desire to make its buyers look like comic book heroes, and will focus on making the glasses the best possible in-car product. Only.

Mini doesn’t expect to bring this particular model to market. Instead, in a press release, Mini says, “In the future, augmented reality glasses will supplement this technology with an alternative solution.”

Facebook is experimenting with a new feature that lets you tell the world how to pronounce your name.

(Image: Yahoo Tech)

In a small number of profiles so far, Facebook is showing how the user’s name is pronounced. It will also play an audio clip of the name. We’ve only seen one profile so far with this feature: MIT Technology Review publisher and editor in chief Jason Pontin’s.

When asked, Facebook had this to say about the profile addition: “We’ve begun a small test of a feature that lets you indicate how your name is pronounced. The pronunciation will be displayed on your Profile along with an option for people to click to hear an audio playback. For now, we’re focusing this test on English speakers in the U.S.”

If you want to check whether you’ve got the new feature, Facebook says to go to Facebook on your computer’s Web browser, visit your Profile, and select the About tab. From there, you can click “Details About You” and then “How do you say your name?” Here, you can preview and select from Facebook’s guesses about the pronunciation, or write your own.

Pontin says that while editing his profile, he saw “three options, all wrong.” Then, he said, “They offered the opportunity to suggest something better. Then, ignored it.” (Since this story originally ran, Facebook has reached out to me to say they have improved the suggestion process.)

And that’s why features like this are tested in small batches before they are rolled out to the world. 

Facebook provided these images of the feature for a name that — at least for me — might need more pronunciation guidance than Mr. Pontin’s:

Well, that helps. (Image: Facebook)

You just bought yourself some fancy new electronic gadget, and you think you can do whatever you want with it. You might be surprised by laws that say, no, sorry, there are some things you may not do. And you might only find out about these laws when your device steps in to prevent you from breaking them.

Here’s a rundown of a few devices that enforce the law so you just don’t have to worry your pretty little head about it. Don’t you feel better?

Your car

People have been tinkering with cars since there were cars to be tinkered with. But today’s cars are as much technological as mechanical, and their software runs under the laws that govern computer code.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) restricts consumers from inspecting or modifying software in many instances, and some car manufacturers claim this applies to their automobiles.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation is beginning a campaign to amend the DMCA to guarantee car owners access to their cars’ systems (with exceptions for things like safety and copyright infringement). The EFF says that if they are not successful, automakers may invoke the DMCA to make accessing the software in the cars we own illegal. 

So far, at least, the laws on tinkering with your car’s software are not black-and-white, but that doesn’t prevent at least one technology-centered auto manufacturer from reminding you that getting into their code is a form of tampering tantamount to breaking your warranty. That company, of course, is Tesla. One year ago, an owner tried to tap into his car’s built-in network. His car sensed the probe, ratted him out to the manufacturer over its built-in wireless data connection, and he got a note from Tesla telling him to get his hands off the network in the car he bought.

Your drone

You really should not fly your drone everywhere. And in some instances you simply cannot.

Drone exclusion zones in and around Washington, D.C.

It’s illegal to fly remotely-piloted hobby aircraft near airports or anywhere near Washington, D.C. (after one drone crashed on the White House lawn). These rules are now built into the software of the popular DJI Phantom drones. If you try to pre-plan a course for a drone near an airport or into D.C., you won’t be able to. If you try to manually fly in one of these zones, you won’t be able to take off. If you do fly into one, your drone will land itself.

More: New Website Lets You Create a ‘No-Fly Zone’ Over Your Property

Your multifunction printer

You already know it’s illegal to print your own copies of currency: It’s called counterfeiting. But you might not know that tech companies help to make sure that you never do. When current color scanner/printers or image editing apps like Photoshop see a paper bill, they’ll disable their capability to render it accurately.

Photoshop has had this capability since 2004, and almost all color copiers have it today. One way imaging software is able to enforce this rule is that most banknotes incorporate in their design a repeating pattern called the EURion constellation. If a printer or image app sees this particular pattern of rings, it will trigger the anti-counterfeiting software.

As an experiment, I tried to copy a bill on a color copier at work and a multifunction scanner/printer at home, and I could not. However, a friend with an older color printer was able to make a “very nice looking” print of a $20 bill.  

Your 3D printer

Just as your printer won’t print money, it’s possible that your 3D printer won’t print a key part of a firearm you’re trying to create. At least one 3D printer company, Create it Real, says it has an algorithm to block the printing of firearm parts.

Since guns come in many shapes and sizes, it’s unlikely that perfectly reliable gun-blocking algorithms will work, but as Create it Real says, “The goal is that the average user won’t be able to by mistake print a gun.”

Your phone

With all the magical capabilities built into a smartphone, you would think that recording a conversation would be simple. But it’s not. That’s probably due to the fact that recording a phone conversation is not always legal. It’s perfectly fine if both parties agree to be recorded, but absent that, laws vary, so it’s not surprising that call-recording features aren’t built into any modern smartphone.

Our friends at Digital Trends know of a few workarounds that do let you make call recordings. You’ll need them if you want your phone to save your legal — or illegal — conversations.

The laws to come

It’s easy to make arguments for having technology that’s aware of laws: Think about how much safer the roads would be if cars could not go faster than the speed limit or run red lights. Or how much safer we’d be if terrorists couldn’t take pictures in target zones like airports or near military bases. And don’t you want robots that can never be made to harm people?

But now think about how dangerous technology can be if it can only blindly follow legal programming. No software developer can ever plan for all contingencies; nor can a device tell the difference between fine points of law, or the difference between what’s right and what’s legal. Software can’t necessarily identify emergencies that a human would be aware of. Think of the driver speeding to a hospital with a bleeding passenger. Of a threat over the phone that can’t be recorded. Or of a drone rushing emergency medical supplies to a person in a flight-restricted area.

Running low on Izze sodas? Tide detergent? Olay lotion? A new Amazon product, the Dash Button, will give you a one-click way to get a fresh shipment of what you need, stat.

Press here for diapers. (Photo: Amazon)

The Dash Button is a physical button: a highly branded device about the size of your car’s wireless key fob. It orders what’s printed on it. If you have the Gillette button, for example, it will order razor blades for you.

What if you lose the button in your junk drawer? Amazon doesn’t want you to do that, so the buttons have adhesive on them, and hanging hooks. You stick the Gillette button inside your medicine chest; the Tide button on the side of your washer; the Huggies button on your diaper pail. When you’re running low, hit the button. A white light illuminates, then turns green to indicate that your order has been placed.

If you press the button while an order is already in transit to you, Amazon does a smart thing: It does not place a duplicate order. It sends a note to your phone saying that the extra order was not processed.

Who gets the Button?

Amazon’s Dash Buttons will be free to Amazon Prime members. If you have an order history that includes a product for which there is a button (there are 17 brands represented at launch), Amazon will ask if you want to apply to get a button. When you order one, you can also order two additional buttons for other brands.

Unlike the Amazon Dash, a product-ordering gadget for groceries that is available only to Amazon Fresh customers (Fresh is Amazon’s grocery delivery service), the Dash Button is being tested with the larger universe of Amazon Prime customers.

Read more:

Amazon Testing Home Barcode Scanner to Make Ordering Groceries Lightning Fast

Click’N’Pizza Is a Magic Button That Delivers Pizza to Your House in One Click

But the rollout at first will be “relatively slow,” an Amazon rep told me. You “might” get an invite to try a button, depending on your ordering history. Over time, of course, Amazon hopes to roll out the Button to everybody.

The guts of the Button

The Button is battery-powered and is supposed to work for “years.” When it dies, you get a new one.

The device connects to your home Wi-Fi to communicate to Amazon. To set it up, you use the Amazon Shopping app on your phone. On an iPhone, the app uses ultrasonic tones to configure the Button for your WiFi network. Android phones use a different method. In either case, once your device is set up, it no longer needs your phone to operate.

The Dash Buttons are branded with specific companies, but they are customizable to an extent. You use your phone’s app to tell the Button what particular product you want to order. For example, the Huggies button can be configured with the type and size of diaper you want to order. You can, of course, change the order as your child grows. But the buttons are locked to a brand: You can’t use your Tide button to order another kind of detergent. Nor can you set up a button to order a product not already on the program. 

(The brands onboard at launch are: Bounty, Tide, Gillette, Olay, Glad, Clorox wipes, Cottonelle, Huggies, Gerber Formula, Lärabar, Kraft Mac & Cheese, Maxwell House coffee, Gatorade, Izze, Smartwater, L’Oréal Paris, and WellPet pet food.)

Beyond the Button: Devices that order for you

Amazon’s Dash Button is built on a new Amazon cloud service called the Dash Replenishment Service (DRS). It allows manufacturers to build automatic reordering into their devices. At launch, four companies are announcing they’ll work with this:

Brother, which will make printers that can reorder ink when they run low.

Brita, which will come out with a water carafe that reorders filters after they’ve been used a certain number of times.

Whirlpool, which will upgrade some of its connected washers and dryers so they can reorder detergent or dryer sheets. (Presumably, you have to tell the machines when to reorder, although I suppose they could also be configured to order after a given number of cycles.)

And Quirky, which is releasing three products in its “Poppy” line, with auto-replenishment built in: a baby formula dispenser, an automatic pet-food dispenser, and a fancy pour-over coffeemaker (it will reorder beans, coffee filters, and its own water filter).

Amazon is making the DRS widely available and hopes that other manufacturers get onboard. A rep told me that by the fall, manufacturers will be able to put DRS in in products with only “10 lines of code” and pretty simple hardware.

This new Quirky coffeemaker will order beans and filters for you. (Photo: Rafe Needleman/Yahoo)

And, yes, you’ll be able to turn off auto-ordering. Every DRS product has to connect to an Amazon account, and you can turn off auto-replenishment from your Amazon smartphone app. You can also cancel an automatic shipment as soon as you see the alert on your phone that an order has been placed on your behalf.

Insanely convenient helpmate? Or Evil capitalistic overlord?

Many years ago, I had a car that displayed an alert on my dashboard when it was time to replace the windshield wipers. I remember writing in a column at the time something like, “So why isn’t there an ‘Order wipers’ button on my dash?”

This is that. This is the convenience that we want: a simple way to take a chore off our hands. It’s handy, it’s easy, and repeat costumers of consumable products will probably love it.

On the other hand, it’s also a terribly efficient way for big brands, and for Amazon, to lock customers in to their products and services, and lock out competition. If I have a Tide Button, it becomes much more unlikely that I’ll ever buy Wisk, or ever get my detergent from anywhere but Amazon. 

The Button makes it that much harder for new brands to challenge old ones, at least using old rules. What are the new rules? Maybe the new coupon you get in the mail will be a Dash Button for a product you’ve never tried: First press is free, you know. The next will cost you.

Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Service, likewise, will help change the relationship that product manufacturers have with their customers. Having an ordering system built in changes hardware from a thing you buy (and then feed) to a manifestation of an ongoing delivery you’re essentially subscribing to. Like a Keurig or other “pod” coffee machine. Or a smartphone.

Will DRS lead to cheaper up-front costs as manufacturers shift their profits to repeat purchases of consumables? That could well happen. Will this lead to customers saving money over the long run? That I doubt. The more customers are locked in, even a little, to consumable purchases, and the more businesses are able to stretch out and mask the total costs of their products, the more likely it is, I believe, that consumer prices will rise.

Dash Button looks extremely convenient. But I believe this convenience will come at a price.