That’s what Caavo is hoping to solve with its new, long-in-the-works media streaming box, a $399, multi-port box that puts all of your streaming video apps into one interface, and even works with third-party voice control, like Amazon’s Alexa.

Company co-founders Andrew Einaudi and Ashish Aggarwal, who serve as CEO and CTO, respectively, demoed the Caavo box onstage at Recode’s Code Media event earlier today in Dana Point, Calif. Another Caavo founder, Blake Krikorian, was the co-founder of Sling Media, maker of the Sling Box; Krikorian passed away suddenly last year.

The Caavo box — so named because “un cavo” translates to “one cable” in Italian — is a 16-inch, four-pound flat box with eight HDMI inputs, an ethernet port, two USB ports, a power port and a 3.5mm jack for an IR extension cable. It’s solid, with three different aesthetic options for the top of the box (bamboo, mahogany and tigerwood) and a steel base to keep it in place.

The idea is that you’re supposed to run all of your external TV boxes — Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, etc. — as well as a cable box through the Caavo box, and it will present every video option available to you in the same interface. It supports 4K video and also comes with a capacitive-touch, voice-controlled remote.

In an earlier demo of Caavo in San Francisco, I was able to see both iTunes’ and Amazon’s video on the same, uncluttered screen; pull up a series of programs, ranging from “Jessica Jones” to “The Crown” to “Frozen,” using Caavo’s own voice-controlled remote; and switch from a cable feed to a video streaming apps to a PlayStation 4 without actually having to change inputs. The only thing I wasn’t able to try was using Amazon’s Alexa, located in an Echo speaker in the corner of the room, to pull up videos, because the Echo speaker wasn’t set up; the company insists this will work, whether the video is coming from Amazon’s own video app or not.

The box won’t ship until the fall and is still a work in progress. It doesn’t support all DVR features right now. Dish and DirecTV DVR work, but other time-shifting features “require direct partnerships,” the company said. The company is also still figuring out dynamic pricing — in other words, showing users the cheapest option for watching movies or TV shows they’re looking for.

$400 is also a high price for a streaming TV device, which can range anywhere from $30 for a Chromecast stick to $200 for a new Apple TV. But Caavo’s assumption is that if you already have enough boxes and game consoles to warrant this product, then you’re not afraid to spend on a better TV experience. Einaudi called the price “premium but approachable” in an interview before the Code Media event.

Caavo also only plans to ship around 5,000 units in its first year of availability, citing a desire to make sure the product is “absolutely nailed” first.

Caavo was founded in 2014 by Blake Krikorian, who co-founded and ran Sling Media; Einaudi, who worked on Jawbone’s earliest wireless headsets and later worked at Sling and Microsoft’s Xbox division; Aggarwal, who has a PhD in electrical engineering and worked on the PortalPlayer chip that was used in the first-generation iPod, among other roles; and Vinod Gopinath, an expert in embedded systems and wireless technology who has worked at Snap Networks and was founding CEO of Althea Systems.

Krikorian died of a heart attack last year, at the age of 48, leaving behind his family; investments in a series of technology startups, including projects like Caavo; and a legacy as a well-respected and beloved Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

San Francisco-based Caavo has raised $15 million to date from DCM Investment Group’s Jason Krikorian (Blake’s brother, who co-founded Sling with him), David Sze of Greylock Partners, Sky’s investment and partnership arm, Silicon Valley Bank and Hearst Ventures. It currently has around 45 employees, many of whom are based in India.

“This problem, so to speak, is something we’ve been thinking about since even prior to Slingbox,” says lead investor Jason Krikorian. “But I think it’s fair to say that it’s gotten much worse since then, since 2003. It’s gotten more complicated. Paid TV is still a mass phenomenon, but increasingly people are getting other devices that are getting a good share of their viewing time.”

So why hasn’t something like Caavo been done before? Einaudi says it’s because most of the big tech companies are still prioritizing their own content stores or content delivery mechanisms. “It’s hard to be very egalitarian, to be the Switzerland of TV, when you have a horse in the race,” he said. “We’re coming into this just wanting to make it as easy as possible for consumers.” 

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Apple said in a press briefing earlier today that it has the “most effective security organization in the world,” and discussed multiple layers of iPhone security on both the hardware and software side to underscore this point.

The press briefing with Apple engineers was highly technical, including details that were previously undisclosed and in some cases might require deep knowledge of security protocol to understand. But it doesn’t take a degree in CS to understand the timing and relevance of the briefing: Apple is currently at odds with the U.S. government over the issue of encryption. While the government is exerting pressure on Apple to make the iPhone less secure and to cooperate when it comes to obtaining crucial digital information, the company is adamant that doing so would compromise the privacy and security of consumers.

Apple used today’s briefing to hammer that point home and to point out that it can build security into every level, because it controls the entire phone.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Augmented reality app Blippar has been around since 2011, but until recently it focused mostly on advertising and content for brands: Point your Blippar smartphone app at a bold “B” embossed on the pages of a magazine or a bottle of ketchup and more information would pop out on your phone’s display.

But it’s safe to say that augmented reality is coming into a new phase: The contextual information being supplied is getting smarter, and people are gradually becoming more aware of the capabilities of AR and virtual reality (some are even excited to wear headsets, if you can believe it). So Blippar, in an effort to evolve along with the rest of the AR world, has just launched a new version of its smartphone app that is supposed to recognize literally any object you point at it — whether it has been “tagged” with an AR code or not.

Blippar co-founder and CEO Ambarish Mitra showed off the new version of the mobile app today at the Code/Media conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, Calif. He pointed the app at a variety of random objects — a magazine, a salad and an apple — to demonstrate how the app’s image recognition capabilities work.

“This is a really big change in our business model,” Mitra had said in an interview before the conference kicked off. “Initially, AR was about very static image recognition. You store images of Starbucks or Coca-Cola or General Mills in our database, and the images match. But now you’re able to analyze any environment in the world in real time, over a 3G connection.”

Mitra said over the past year and a half he has moved his technology team from the U.K. to Mountain View, Calif., to focus on machine learning, which is all the rage in Silicon Valley right now, with everyone from small upstarts to behemoths like Google trying to crack the code on how to make accurate predictions from large sets of data. (Google, actually, has an app that works similarly called Google Goggles, but it works when you point the app at a QR code or a famous landmark or something else recognizable — not necessarily everyday objects.)

In short, this is not an easy thing to do. In fact, ahead of the event, one of our staffers tried it out by pointing the app at his dog, and it thought the pup was a goat.

Mitra has said that, right now, the technology has elementary capabilities, like the brain of a six-year-old; it can recognize “car,” but not “Prius,” or it can recognize an item of clothing, but not the label. However, with machine learning, the app should be able to get to the level of an 18-year-old pretty quickly, Mitra said, in terms of its recognition abilities. And during the onstage demo, it did properly identify a pug named Milton as a dog. (No dogs were harmed in the making of Code Media.)

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.