Roost smart water leak detector should keep your drier, richer

Smart home startup Roost has announced its entry into the water leak detector market on Wednesday with a new product, the Smart Water and Freeze Detector.

The new device, unveiled at CE Week in New York City, is able to identify a water leak and can also detect frozen pipe water damage, mold and mildew damage, and inefficient energy usage due to ineffective cooling systems or broken cooling systems.

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Once it recognizes a problem, the Smart Water Leak and Freeze Detector will send an alert to the homeowner through Wi-Fi to a connected smartphone. And unlike a lot of other water leak detectors, Roost is battery powered, letting you place it wherever is convenient.

Roost believes that the device will save U.S. consumers and insurance companies up to $8 billion per year in water damage, by alerting them to issues and notifying them of any future problems that may occur.

“We are excited to introduce the Roost Smart Water and Freeze Detector, and expand our ability to offer consumers safer and smarter homes,” said Roel Peeters, Roost CEO and co-founder. “Our unique technology delivers consumers tangible solutions that are simple to install and at affordable costs.”

“With the new (smart detector), Roost now provides the ability to manage the all-too-common water leak or freezing pipes situation that we’ve all experienced in our homes at some point,” he added.

The new device builds on Roost’s smart home platform, which currently consists of a smart smoke detector and a Wi-Fi battery that connects to any old smoke detector.

Roost will begin shipping the new Smart Water and Freeze Detector in the fall. The device will cost $49 when it launches, a bit pricer than some of the other options, but a lot more mobile.

The groom, identified as Usman Ali, reportedly put down a $7,100 deposit on the car. However, he is now on the hook for an additional $28,000 in insurance costs. "I don't think he had enough experience driving this sort of car," a friend of Usman told The Daily Mail. Let this be a lesson for the rest of us. Just because you can afford to rent a Ferrari doesn't mean you know how to A) drive a Ferrari or B) can afford to repair a Ferrar

Toyota has announced plans to open a new division called Toyota Connected in the United States, focused on building new car technology and humanizing technology added into cars.

The new division will be located in Plano, Texas, and will employ around 100 people. Toyota has purchased a 20,000 square foot factory to test the new technologies, and has a budget of $5.5 million.

Toyota has partnered with Microsoft Azure to build the car technologies. We’re not sure how active Microsoft will be on the building side, we assume it will just provide its cloud services and not be involved in the building process.

“Toyota Connected will help free our customers from the tyranny of technology,” Zach Hicks, chief information officer and vice president of Toyota Motor North America said. “From telematic services that learn from your habits and preferences to use-based insurance pricing models that respond to actual driving patterns to connected vehicle networks that can share road condition and traffic information, our goal is to deliver services that make lives easier.”

Some of the automakers planned services – from health monitoring to dinner reservations systems – could be offered to customers over the air by being beamed directly into their connected Toyota, but the firm stresses that privacy concerns will be at the forefront.

New Toyota division looking at AI, self-driving technologies

The new division comes as the Japanese automotive giant starts to invest more into artificial intelligence and self-driving cars. It has already invested $1 billion into the Toyota Research Institute, with centers at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology dedicated to designing and testing automation services for cars.

Toyota is the largest car manufacturer in the world, so the investment into future automation is a green light for rival manufacturers to begin similar tests. General Motors, Ford, Audi, BMW, and Tesla are already testing self-driving features, though some are shooting for full automation while others are just testing automatic parking and lane switching.