In this roundtable, cybersecurity experts — including two former CISA executives — weigh in on alternate sources for threat intel, incident response, and other essential cybersecurity services.
In a world where personal mobility devices are getting sleeker and more compact, Cocoa Motors has unveiled the WALKCAR 2, a device that might just make you question the need for walking altogether. Imagine a laptop-sized gadget that lets you glide through the streets or mall with zero effort. It sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, right?
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This isn’t your average turntable. In fact, it’s far from it.
Waiting For Ideas, a Paris-based design studio, has revealed its first turntable, the PP-1, which has a stunningly minimalist design crafted from a single block of aluminum.
However, just as interesting as its design is how it plays vinyl — it defines most conventional logic and I’d wager that you’ve never seen a turntable quite like it.
Waiting for Ideas Turntable PP-1
The minimalist turntable is sculpted out of a single block of aluminum. Waiting for Ideas
No tonearm, no problem
Aside from being sculpted out of a block of aluminum, the most striking thing about the PP-1 turntable is what it’s missing — there’s no tonearm. All the technology to actually play the vinyl is hidden from view inside the turntable.
The PP-1 stands for “Plug and Play 1” and just like its minimalist design, the turntable is designed to be easy to use. There aren’t any settings to adjust or intricate setup processes.
To play a vinyl record, you place it upside down on the turntable and press the play button. The PP-1 has a built-in sensor that automatically detects the record speed (it supports 33 or 45 RPM) and plays the record accordingly.
According to the brand, the PP-1 blends “digital ease with the depth of analog sound.”
Waiting For Ideas makes matching passive speakers for the PP-1 turntable.Waiting for Ideas
Minimalist speakers to match
If you’re interested in the PP-1, you’ll probably want speakers to match … and Waiting For Ideas has made just that.
The company’s Passive Speakers are a custom-made pair of passive speakers that, according to the brand, are “designed to match the turntable’s sonic precision.” They have a minimalist design made of wood and high-end fabric.
Interestingly, they can be stacked on top of each other with the PP-1 then positioned on top of them, so you can get a single tower-shaped hi-fi setup. If you’re not into that, you can position the speakers on either side of the turntable in a more traditional stereo setup.
The speakers have the same footprint as the PP-1 turntable and can be stacked on top of each other. Waiting for Ideas
External amplification required
The caveat is that you’ll still need an external amplifier to power the speakers. The brand says the amplifier should be able to deliver a minimum of 60-watts per channel (into 8ohms) to properly drive the speakers.
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to find a matching amplifier with the same design footprint, and thus, it will be a bit of an outlier in the so-called stack.
It appears that the PP-1 has a built-in phono preamp and headphone amplifier — there’s a 3.5mm jack for connecting headphones and having a private listening session.
To play vinyl, you place the record upside down on the PP-1 turntable. Waiting for Ideas
Price and availability
Waiting For Ideas will sell the Turntable PP-1 for €5,800 (approx. $6,050) and the Passive Speakers for €3,200 (approx. $3,450). You’ll be able to purchase the complete setup for €9,000 (approx. $9,350).
They’re available for order now. Each turntable and speaker pair is “made to order” and has an expected 12-week turn around time for shipping.
Pretty sure that some of these vowels are inherently impossible to scream in though. At least the mouth shape required for Å feels completely incompatible to me.
A new party concept in Montreal is reimagining nightlife by moving it to the morning hours, blending coffee culture with dance music. Croissound, launching this week, transforms local cafes into daytime dance venues where DJs spin tracks from 11 AM to 2 PM, taking inspiration from similar parties in Los Angeles and other cities.
The format represents a significant shift in how people engage with music and club culture. By hosting events in neighborhood cafes rather than traditional nightlife venues, Croissound wants to create an accessible and inclusive atmosphere while spotlighting local DJs and hidden-gem venues.
The concept taps into people's changing attitudes towards alcohol-centric socializing, driven by health consciousness, budgetary constraints and after-dark safety concerns. Habits are evolving, and more consumers — particularly Gen Z — are seeking alternatives to late-night partying. The first Croissound event will take place on 22 February 2025 at Cass Café, with its organizers using a pop-up model to explore cafe spaces across Montreal.
This week, the startup Humane—which raised $240 million to build an iPhone-killing Ai Pin—announced its sale to HP for $116 million. While far short of the company’s original $1 billion asking price, it’s astonishing that the brand scrapped for anything at all. A product that had promised to change the world instead became a worldwide laughingstock, indicative of the worst tendencies of Silicon Valley-founder hubris. Universally panned, Humane sold fewer than 10,000 units. Sometimes, its returns outpaced its sales. Units could catch fire.
“This investment will rapidly accelerate our ability to develop a new generation of devices that seamlessly orchestrate AI requests both locally and in the cloud,” said Tuan Tran, president of technology and innovation at HP, in a press statement. “Humane’s AI platform Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI.”
Heh. I can understand why the world was fooled by the Ai Pin when it launched in 2024. I have a little less sympathy now for HP execs, who have just completed one of the most tone-deaf acquisitions in corporate history.
The Ai Pin was flawed from the beginning
Mystique around Humane had been swirling for years by the time Chaudhri took the stage at TED in May 2023 to present the idea of “the disappearing computer.” After spending his career at Apple working on some of its most important launches such as the iPhone, he pitched a screenless AI interface that “allows us to get back to what really matters: a new ability to be present.”By simply asking his computer to “catch me up,” it was able to cut through endless notifications to tell him what was important. By Chaudhri holding up a candy bar, his computer could tell him if it jibed with his lactose intolerance condition. And when his wife (and company cofounder) called, well, her name “magically” appeared right on his hand.
Little did the audience realize: The computer had merely disappeared into Chaudhri’s jacket with a needle and thread.
Even a bad magic trick can fool people who want to be fooled. And Humane’s vision struck a chord with a society that felt guilty for using its phones all the time. Freeing our eyes and hands sounded like liberation, and the promise that an AI could do everything from translate languages in real time to examining the foods you’d eaten that the day to determine if you’re aligned with your diet seemed like the sort of just-out-of-reach magic that could finally be real. And, wait, was that a LASER BEAM THAT JUST SHOT ONTO HIS HAND?
The next time the Ai Pin arrived on stage, it (well, a prototype of it) would be worn on the lapel of Naomi Campbell—true supermodel royalty—at Paris Fashion week. The closest parallel I could remember was Beyoncé donning an Apple Watch around its announcement. The product was starting to feel too big to fail. Its investors—including Tiger Global Management, Microsoft, Qualcomm Ventures, and Softbank, alongside individuals including Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and OpenAI’s Sam Altman—fed an $840 million valuation. It felt like something that deserved to be taken seriously.
Naomi Campbell wore a prototype of Humane’s Ai Pin at the Coperni spring/summer 2024 show during Paris Fashion Week. [Photo: Francois Durand/Getty Images]
Still, the TED Talk had struck me as funny for reasons I couldn’t articulate. Later, Chaudhri canceled an on-stage interview with me where he’d promised to speak about the product for the first time. He also declined an interview after my in-person demo (I’ve experienced a hundred or more product walkthroughs in my career, and I’ve never been unable to ask a question of the company after any of them, except this time with Humane). What I generously interpreted as shyness—Chaudhri’s soft-spoken magnetism cannot be denied—seemed, increasingly, to be protecting a thin veneer.
Five months before Marques Brownlee nuked the Ai Pin into oblivion by calling it the worst product he’d ever reviewed, I’d been saying the same to friends in the industry who eagerly asked about my experience with the device. It was difficult to explain to people that this wasn’t hyperbole, that when I arrived in San Francisco in November 2023, the demo was really that bad. That every query took painfully long to answer, even inside a perfectly closed environment. That all the magical dietary foodstuff computations didn’t seem to work. That I was expected to ooh and ahh when the Pin told me the weather. That I wasn’t even allowed to use the device myself.
Still, Chaudhri and Bongiorno (who, note, always wore the Pin on a thick jacket lapel to support its weight) had already planned for countless special-edition releases, with the Pin in all sorts of limited-edition candy colors. It didn’t work, mind you. The Ai Pin was nothing more than a smartphone without a screen, stuck to your chest. Its limited capabilities somehow put technology in the way more. But the entire brand and packaging promised to usher us into a new era of computing, because Humane was focused more on optics than function.
The project didn’t seem salvageable, though I was actually surprised (impressed?) when the world oftech reviewersmirrored my initial take. These are people who review Android phones for a living! And they hated the thing.
Where this leaves HP
Humane was always going to sell as scrap. There was just too much invested in the company for there to be nothing to show. Its carefully engineered chipset (the Ai Pin used little off-the-shelf hardware) is unlikely to be worth much of anything outside the device itself, but perhaps HP has a purpose. Humane’s 300 patents around various AI/UX interactions likely have an appeal to any tech company, if only because AI isn’t going anywhere. And the purchase price isn’t beyond what companies will spend to acquire tough-to-recruit technologists.
I’m more surprised that HP has made such a public bet on the ashes of Humane, which has been immortalized in memes as a pile of bogusness. If this was some attempt at capturing whatever lingering spirit was left in the Humane brand, the two companies snuffed it out when bricking their devices.
HP says that Humane “will form HP IQ, HP’s new AI innovation lab focused on building an intelligent ecosystem across HP’s products and services for the future of work.” For a company that’s still making billions in profits annually from predatory printer ink subscriptions, perhaps it’s a fitting end. The worst AI company of the past decade will linger as some sort of “smart” notification that your magenta is low.
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