“Ring is committed to our mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods by providing effective yet affordable home security tools to our neighbors that make a positive impact on our homes, our communities, and the world,” a Ring spokesperson said in a statement. “We’ll be able to achieve even more by partnering with an inventive, customer-centric company like Amazon. We look forward to being a part of the Amazon team as we work toward our vision for safer neighborhoods.”

Many customers who own Ring products have been eagerly awaiting integration with Apple’s HomeKit platform, and though Amazon is purchasing the company, Ring has this afternoon promised on Twitter that support is still coming. According to Ring, HomeKit support is being tested for Ring Pro and the Floodlight Cam, with the company promising to offer details on a release date following once testing is completed.

HomeKit support is a feature that Ring has been promising for some time. In October, for example, Ring said bringing HomeKit support to its Ring Pro and Floodlight Cam was an “ongoing project” but had “been delayed.” Ring support for Amazon’s Alexa products has been available for months now.

Amazon has recently become interested in smart home-related companies, and back in December, purchased Blink, another company that offers home security cameras and video doorbells. Amazon has also released its own home security camera, the Cloud Cam.

Amazon’s interest in smart home products stems from its Amazon Echo line of products, which offer Alexa integration and allow users to control their third-party smart home devices. Alexa works with many of the smart home products on the market today.

Flutter is Google’s open source toolkit for helping developers build iOS and Android apps. It’s not necessarily a household name yet, but it’s also less than a year old and, to some degree, it’s going up against frameworks like Facebook’s popular React Native. Google’s framework, which is heavily focused around the company’s Dart programming language, was first announced at Google’s I/O developer conference last year.

As the company announced today, Flutter is now officially in beta and a number of developers have already used it to build and publish apps that have hit top spots in both the Google Play and Apple App Store.

Seth Ladd, Google’s product manager for Flutter, told me that it’s no surprise that the company is making this announcement during MWC. The company wants to use this opportunity to engage with mobile developers and to highlight the advances it made over the course of the last year. For the most part, that means better tooling, like support for Android Studio and Visual Studio Code for writing Flutter apps.

Since launching its alpha, the Flutter team added support for new phones like the iPhone X, a number of accessibility features, right-to-left text support and worked on localization and internationalization, as well as the ability to run Flutter code in the background.

What’s probably even more interesting for developers, though, is Flutter’s support for stateful hot reloads. That means you can make changes to your source code and within a second, you can see that change reflected in the app on your phone. As Ladd noted, that not only makes the development process faster, but also reduces the need for prototyping tools.

With its focus on Dart, Flutter relies on what is still a bit of a niche programming language. Ladd, however, argues that Dart is the just the right language for Flutter. “We didn’t find another language that hit this sweet spot of fast development cycle plus the standard stuff devs expect and love like object orientation, a rich core library and very easy onboarding. With this beta, Flutter now supports the pre-release version of Dart 2, which offers better support for client-side development, too.

Ladd also noted that unlike some rival frameworks like React Native, Flutter uses its own GPU-accelerated graphics and rendering engine and not a web view. “There is a huge benefit to this in that the design that your designers envision and what they delivered to your developers are the exact some pixels and designs that your users will experience,” said Ladd. “By shipping our own graphics engine, we offer consistent design as your designers envisioned.”

The Flutter team also stresses that Flutter plays nice with existing parts of an app. You don’t need to write your complete app in Flutter. Indeed, many of the developers that have already used it have simply added new Flutter-based screens to their existing apps. As for apps that are fully based on the new toolkit,Google notes that the Hamilton app is among the most popular app to have been built with Flutter.

Featured Image: Getty Images

German robotics firm Magazino, creator of robots meant to work alongside people in warehouses and the like, has raised $24.8 million to continue development and deployment of its TORU and SOTO robots.

The bots are made for the kind of repetitive fetching and transport work that is so common in e-commerce distribution and storage facilities. They’re considerably larger than people, but are designed to move about and interact with the same spaces — ordinary shelves, lanes and tables.

The heavy-duty SOTO, which was just recently introduced, can handle boxes of more than 20 pounds and two feet across. TORU was recently redesigned but is intended for smaller payloads (think shoe boxes). The two robots load multiple target boxes into their internal storage, then navigate to their destinations to drop them off. It’s the kind of thing human warehouse workers tend to get really tired of doing.

It’s also done autonomously with 3D imaging in real time — not a simple by-wire system where it might grab at empty air and then plow through people in its path. Magazino is investing heavily into the sensing and real-time operation stack, which it calls ACROS (Advanced Cooperative Robotic Operating System).

The company was started in 2014, and by 2016 had landed major clients like Fiege, which now uses Magazino robots for some of its warehouse work, and recently ordered 30 more. Fiege also joined Körber, Cellcom and Zalando in the funding round (Körber leading).

Featured Image: Magazino

Back in 2016, Amazon’s Japanese rival Rakuten acquired Bitnet, a bitcoin wallet startup that it had previously invested in, to help it work on blockchain technology and applications. Today, one of the first fruits of that deal has come to light. The company is planning a new cryptocurrency called Rakuten Coin — built on blockchain technology and the company’s existing loyalty program, Rakuten Super Points — which it plans to use to encourage loyalty services globally and to help customers to buy goods across different Rakuten services and markets.

The news was announced by Rakuten’s CEO Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani on stage at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where he described Rakuten Coin as a “borderless” currency. Neither he nor a Rakuten spokesperson we followed up with would give a launch date for the service.

The news comes on the heels of a big wave of companies trying to figure out their cryptocurrency strategies, to tap into the current hype around decentralised financial services and the seemingly endless appetite of people to hear about and buy into them as their price skyrockets in the absence of much regulatory control.

Crypto is being used for a wide range of reasons — as a new funding platform, for currency speculation, international remittances, as a new payment currency and more. In the case of Rakuten, it seems that there are two things at play here.

First, the company wants to see if it can drive more transactions from people internationally by cutting out some of the exchange rate fees and other issues if they buy in fiat currencies. Second, there is simply the buzz of crypto today: people who might not have been all that interested in loyalty programs before might turn on to them if they see their reward as blockchain buy-in.

Even before Rakuten has launched Rakuten Coin, it’s notable and interesting to see a major e-commerce company — which has billions of users globally and reported $8.8 billion in revenues in 2017 — coming out with a move into how it might use cryptocurrency on its platform.

Interestingly, while Amazon has yet to make any significant moves in the area of cryptocurrency, there some speculate the company could get more involved, based on some recent domain purchases and bigger trends.

There have been over 1 trillion Super Points awarded to users since the program was launched 15 years ago, equivalent to $9.1 billion, and the idea will be to now give users more ways of applying those loyalty points to more purchases, as a way of driving more purchasing to collect them in the first place.

Points currently are collected each time you buy — or, in certain markets where Rakuten runs marketplaces, sell — items or services on the site. As with its rival Amazon, Rakuten has a payment also has an MVNO mobile service with plans to launch its own full-blown mobile carrier — all of which become ways of spending more money as part of the loyalty program.

A spokesperson said that there is a decent funnel of people who are already interested in buying items across regions. “People want special items that you can’t get anywhere else,” she said. There are some 44,000 merchants selling goods on Rakuten in Japan, its biggest market. Other holdings include PriceMinister in France (which is now rebranding to Rakuten) and Ebates, the rebates website operator in the US that Rakuten acquired for $1 billion in 2014. The logic will be to add Rakuten Coin to all of Rakuten’s businesses — some of which today have loyalty programs, and some of which do not.

Mikitani used his appearance at MWC to run through a range of other developments at the company, including yesterday’s news that the company planned to apply to become Japan’s fourth mobile operator, and an expansion of the social features on messaging app Viber, which now has around one billion registered users.

Mickitani stressed that Rakuten was “very different from Amazon.”

“Basically, our concept is to recreate the network of retailers and merchants,” he said. “We do not want to disconnect [them from their customers] but function as a catalyst. That is our philosophy, how to empower society not just provide more convenience.”

Featured Image: Photo Olivier Alluis

It’s no secret, Apple has been relying on third-party cloud companies for iCloud. And CNBC spotted an interesting tidbit in Apple’s own documents. The company now relies on Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Platform’s storage product to store iCloud data.

Back in 2016, CRN reported that Apple signed with Google for cloud storage. But Apple’s document represents the first official confirmation that this deal happened.

You can find the information in Apple’s iOS 11 security guide that was published in January 2018. The company mentions that user files are divided into tiny chunks and encrypted. The encryption keys and metadata information are stored on Apple’s own servers. But the encrypted files are stored on third-party services.

While users have no idea that Amazon and Google are managing their iCloud data, Amazon and Google can’t do anything with those files without the encryption keys. So it seems highly unlikely that Amazon and Google are looking at your data.

“The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as S3 and Google Cloud Platform,” you can read in the document.

In the past, Apple has mentioned Microsoft Azure in its partners. The wording of the document isn’t really clear. Apple could be using more storage services without naming them directly.

In all cases, this is a great example of asymmetric competition. While Apple and Google are fighting really hard to grab market share of the smartphone market, Apple is also Google’s client. Apple also competes with Amazon and Microsoft in other areas. So Apple would need to step up its cloud hosting game to cut ties with its competitors altogether.

Featured Image: Erik Von Weber/Getty Images