IRL Wall-E

Good morning, afternoon, or evening, depending on where you are in the world. This edition is coming to you from Berlin. 

Here’s some news: 

👓 The Apple Vision Pro is finally dropping on February 2nd.

🎧 Will.i.am is getting into the car audio world with his new startup.

🚗 Volkswagon is planning to integrate ChatGPT into its car. 

📸 Sony is launching a new digital certificate that sounds a lot like NFTs.

Wall-E has made its way to the real world. Well, kind of. Remember Ballie? Samsung’s spherical home robot from CES 2020? You’re forgiven if you don’t. I didn’t either – until Samsung unveiled the latest version at CES 2024 yesterday. 

The new Ballie is reminiscent of a bowling ball if you give a bowling ball wheels and a face and inject it with a healthy dose of AI.

In a charming video paired with a “Disney-esque” soundtrack, Samsung showcased a bunch of cool tricks that Ballie can do, including projecting movies, entertaining a dog, and projecting a video call onto a wall. 

In the demo, Ballie also serves as a smart home assistant that can control different aspects of your home, such as your lights, air conditioning, and tumble dryer. It can also communicate with specific devices to feed your pets and text you status updates throughout the day. 

Projection is critical to Ballie. According to Samsung, it’s “the world’s first projector to automatically detect people’s posture and facial angle and adjust the optimal projection angle for you.”

This also doubles as a cuteness feature. Just imagine the little thing looking up and down at you as it adjusts itself.  Now I'm wondering why didn't they name it Ball-E?

• iStock just launched its own generative AI platform for crafting stock images. 
• Mama Mode App is a mindfulness app to help moms destress throughout their day.
• Sama AI is a wearable AI that listens to and recalls conversations and gives feedback.

• snippet.run is a platform that lets you host and run your code snippets in the cloud. 
• Paint Potion lets you instantly generate trendy and consistent vector assets. 
• Status Ticker keeps you in the know about any services going down so you can react.