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Apartment living can be a lonely life, but OneRoof is here to change that. The company offers a hyperlocal social network app meant to connect people in the same residential building around common interests like hobbies and to even organize again a common goal.

The pre-revenue company has grown up a lot since we profiled it in 2021 after OneRoof secured $1.25 million in funding. At the time, CEO Selin Sonmez told TechCrunch that the app was live in 400 buildings in New York City, and today that has increased to over 40,000 active neighbors across 1,300 buildings in New York and Miami. OneRoof has also done a soft launch in Dallas, she added.

If you are trying to picture how OneRoof works, Sonmez says the company is often compared to NextDoor. It helps people who live in the same apartment building to connect, network, exchange info, buy and sell items, help with pets, meet in real life and create a sense of community.

The free app relies on what Sonmez called “a community of champions” known as Super Neighbors — essentially the people in your apartment building who “act as a glue to their community,” she said. From that position, they are able to gain access to neighbor event sponsorships, join the exclusive Super Neighbor Club in their city and share feedback with OneRoof for future app development.

“‘Super Neighbors’ are a critical, yet neglected social circle,” she added. “Nobody knows who their neighbors are, so we are building an essential social tissue in society. Our long-term mission is to unify and empower neighbors under OneRoof and to create more resilient urban cities, both socially and economically.”

In 2021, OneRoof was just a chat room app where neighbors could talk to each other digitally. Since then it has morphed to include an in-person events feature, improved user profiles to highlight interests, a neighbor directory and a “grow” feature to help people create their own communities.

The concept seems to be appealing to apartment dwellers: In Super Neighbor buildings, OneRoof saw over 78% of users continue using the app after 12 weeks, and over 65% continue using after 24 weeks, Sonmez said. In addition, three times the in-person events, including happy hours and meeting someone for a workout, were created on OneRoof in the fourth quarter compared to the previous quarter.

The company has continued to grow, receiving between 30 and 40 Super Neighbor requests per day, and observing a 20% month over month increase in users. To be able to onboard them, Sonmez and co-founder Nikos Georgantas needed to grow their team so they made the decision to go after a new round of funding.

This was during the spring and summer, however, when the venture capital market was slowing down. As a result, Sonmez said she had to manage not only some difficult decisions, for example, slashing the marketing budget by 90% to keep OneRoof’s existing team in place. She had close to 80 investor meetings during this time and even had to field some unexpected questions.

“We were suddenly being asked questions around revenue which wouldn’t be the case for social startups our stage before the markets shifted, so it took us time to find the right partners,” she added. “There was also market ambiguity around pricing, so we didn’t price the round until there’s more clarity.”

Eventually, Sonmez found good investment partners and closed on $3.2 million in seed funding to give the company $4.45 million in total funding. Chamaeleon led the round and was joined by Dream Machine, Gaingels, General Catalyst, The Helm and a group of angel investors, including Margo Georgiadis at Synetro Group, former Andreessen Horowitz investor D’Arcy Coolican, Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen and Elomida Visviki.

The funding enabled OneRoof to add four new employees and is currently looking to fill two more roles. Sonmez also plans to invest in app development, software, sponsorships and marketing.

Regarding the company’s current big milestones around engagement and retention, OneRoof has gained a lot of ground, but Sonmez still has much she wants to accomplish.

“We want to do more,” she added. “There’s hundreds of millions of people living in this country, and we want to make sure that we can grow our products and put them in the hands of anyone who has a neighbor who thinks, ‘Oh, I wish I knew who they were.’”

OneRoof grabs funding to help apartment dwellers cozy up to their neighbors by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

This year, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) — the celebration of all things tech and then some — brought what it usually brings to the Vegas Strip: AI-powered gadgets. Of course, AI comes in many forms, and not all that’s advertised as AI is in fact true AI. But there’s always diamonds in the rough, like an AI-equipped oven from Samsung that automatically adjusts cooking settings for the perfect bake.

As my colleagues on the ground traverse the show floor (I’m covering CES remotely this year), they’re highlighting the most interesting AI-powered tech they come across. I’ve compiled each into a handy list, which is far from definitive, but which aims to give an idea of the top AI trends this year at CES.

AI-powered oven

Samsung kicked off CES 2023 with a new oven and fridge in its Bespoke Home smart appliances lineup.

Not just any oven, the Bespoke AI Oven features an internal camera and sensors that proactively recognize more than 80 dishes and ingredients to optimize cooking settings. It can send a warning notification if it detects food might be burning. And if you’re stumped on what to cook, the Bespoke AI Oven recommends meals based on ingredients at home.

The Bespoke AI Oven’s camera, by the way, can stream a live feed of what’s cooking in the oven to streaming platforms like Twitch. It’s not an AI feature exactly, but eye-catching all the same.

As for the 4-Door Flex, Samsung’s newest smart fridge, it packs an AI-powered camera that scans food labels to keep track of what’s in stock — and not in stock. Samsung’s previous-gen fridge had the same (as do rival models from LG), but the novelty of this year’s 4-Door Flex is a larger touchscreen on one of the doors.

AI-powered TVs

Not to be outdone, Samsung also introduced a new lineup of TVs with an AI-powered “auto-HDR” mode.

The company’s Neo QLEDs offer Auto HDR Remastering, which Samsung says “uses AI deep learning technology to analyze and apply real-time high dynamic range (HDR) effects on standard dynamic range content on a scene-by-scene basis.” (HDR increases the contrast between the brightest whites and darkest blacks a display can produce.) The system compares non-HDR content with HDR material and uses machine learning to analyze the differences and then make the conversion.

Rival LG debuted TVs with AI, too. The 2023 Z3, G3, and C3 OLED TVs feature a mode that can automatically detect and refine certain objects and like faces, to have more “lifelike,” colorful qualities. Another mode, AI Sound Pro, attempts to emulate a surround sound setup using only the built-in stereo TV speakers.

Upscaling GPUs

Nvidia’s using AI to upscale old, blurry YouTube videos.

During its CES presser, the company demoed RTX Video Super Resolution, a feature coming next month to all Nvidia 30- and 40-series GPUs. When enabled, It’ll upscale videos played in Chrome and Edge on a PC to the equivalent of 4K, similar to the AI upscaling feature that’s long been available on the Shield TV and Shield TV Pro.

According to PCGamer (via The Verge), RTX Video Super Resolution — which also sharpens and reduces artifacts in videos — will support any video with a resolution of between 360p and 1440p up to a frame rate of 144Hz.

Fatigue-battling watch

Wearable brand Citizen dipped its toes into the AI space this year with its second-gen CZ Smart watch.

The 2023 CZ Smart — which runs Wear OS 3, the newest release of Google’s firmware for wearables — sports what Citizen’s calling a “self-care advisor” driven by AI. Leveraging tech from IBM Watson (IBM’s AI research division), the CZ Smart attempts to determine a wearer’s “chronotype” after collecting roughly a week’s worth of sleep data to provide tips that help to combat fatigue.

To improve the relevancy of the recommendations, users can take gamified tests based on NASA’s Psychomotor Vigilance Test, which was originally developed to give astronauts on the International Space Station feedback on their fatigue levels. The CZ Smart tabulates the results to calculate an “alert score” capturing the wearer’s level of tiredness at a particular moment.

It’s worth noting that the CZ Smart isn’t the first wearable to track sleep and give suggestions to improve it — far from it. Samsung, Apple and Fitbit among others offer features on their various wearables to analyze and track sleep. But Citizen’s making the case that the CZ Smart is more holistic than most.

Flashy lighting

For gamers in pursuit of a more immersive experience, Govee introduced the AI Gaming Sync Box Kit at CES 2023.

It’s a bit of a mouthful, but the tech behind the AI Gaming Sync Box Kit — Govee’s answer to the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box and Nanoleaf’s recently launched Sync+ — sounds promising. Using AI trained on footage of “dozens” of different video games, the set-top box syncs (via HDMI and Wi-Fi) Govee-branded smart lights to whatever games you’re playing. One of 30 or so lighting effects trigger for certain in-game achievements and on-screen events.

As the company explains in a press release: “For example, when accomplishing a ‘triple kill’ in a competitive shooting game, a customized corresponding in-game lighting effects will show at once with near-zero delay. With Govee AI, products don’t transfer data to the cloud but instead directly transmit it back locally in real time, ensuring the utmost protection of user privacy.”

Govee says that its AI-based tech mitigates the issues typically experienced by lighting sync boxes, like “low color-capture accuracy” and slow performance. The jury’s out on that. But in any case, it’s certainly one of the more innovative approaches we’ve seen.

Bird-friendly feeder

Bird Buddy, the startup my colleague Devin Coldewey covered a number of years ago, is back with a new and improved model of its “smart” feeder that snaps photos of bird visitors and beams them to a companion app.

Equipped with a high-speed camera, the next-gen Smart Hummingbird Feeder can take photos and videos of birds with wing speeds of up to 60 mph. The camera’s triggered by motion and sends photos through an AI system trained on millions of photos to identify around 1,000 species of birds.

Future owners of the Smart Hummingbird Feeder — it’s a prototype currently, and hasn’t yet been priced — will also benefit from what Bird Buddy’s calling Heartbeat Map, which lets people track bird sightings in real time. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Bird Buddy companion app allows owners to build out their collection of identified birds, track birds’ visits over time, learn about their habits and share photos with the community.

Self-driving stroller

You’ve heard of self-driving cars, but what about self-driving strollers?

The Ella smart stroller by Canadian startup Glüxkind is a “hands-free” motorized buggy that uses AI to detect obstacles and danger on the pavement. Packed with sensors including cameras, the Ella can drive itself when empty, keep up with parents while they hold their infants and stop automatically if it encounters an obstacle.

The buggy’s cameras track moving and stationary objects such as people and bikes, alerting parents to potential collision dangers through sounds and flashing lights in the handle. As for the Ella’s motors, they aid when manually pushing the stroller, assisting with inclines and automatically braking when going downhill or stationary.

The Ella isn’t lacking in creature comforts, either, featuring an automatic “rock-my-baby” feature that sways the carriage back and forth on the stroller’s wheels and a built-in, customizable white noise machine. There’s even a companion phone app that tracks the Ella’s routes and distance and can locate the stroller if lost.

Pepper-picking robot

Gather ’round, pepper growers. There’s a new robot in town that promises to make your life a bit easier.

Developed by Japanese agritech startup Agrist, the robot can identify and pick “harvest-ready” bell peppers even when those peppers are covered by a thick layer of leaves. Using a combination of cameras and computer vision models trained for different parts of the pepper, the robot can identify each pepper’s position, size and maturity as well as its clipping point.

The robot moves along suspension wires that can be retrofitted to existing farms. A mechanical arm does the picking and clipping, placing harvested peppers into a collection box. Agrist claims that, over time, the robot’s software can begin to predict crop volume and offer suggestions on how to optimize growth by collecting data and analyzing the number of days required for peppers to mature.

Here’s a roundup of the top AI-powered products we saw at CES 2023 by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch