Some folks have properties too vast to be covered by the fanciest of mesh Wi-Fi sets, especially if they’ve got vast tracts of land. It’s an issue Eero is looking to tackle with the Outdoor 7, an add-on to its Eero 7 series of mesh Wi-Fi nodes that’s built to live outdoors. The hardware is IP66 rated and the company says it’ll keep working in temperatures ranging from -40F to 130F, no matter the weather.

With a range of 15,000 square feet, Eero says the Outdoor 7 should suit everyone from cafe owners with patios to land owners looking to keep their security cameras connected. Each unit supports Wi-Fi 7 with speeds up to 2.1Gbps, works with Thread, Zigbee and Matter devices, and has a 2.5Gb ethernet port with support for Power Over Ethernet. You’ll also get a mounting kit that’ll help you screw it into stucco, vinyl, wood or fiber cement walls.

The Eero Outdoor 7 will be available to buy in the US on November 13 for $350, or for $400 when bundled with the company’s 30W outdoor Power Over Ethernet adapter.

Matt Peters has spent more than a decade working for cybersecurity vendors. He was a team lead at Check Point, climbed the corporate ladder to VP of worldwide operations at FireEye, and spent over four years at Expel, a managed detection and response firm, as chief product officer.

Peters says a surprising common thread ran through all these experiences: IT teams were frustrated because expectations around technology rarely matched up with reality.

Organizations demand a lot of their IT departments. According to one poll, nearly a third of staff at the average company bank on a response from IT within an hour. Roughly the same percentage expect help with any new tool that their employer requires they learn.

In these challenges, Peters perceived opportunity. Along with Peter Silberman and Mase Issa, both ex-Expel colleagues, Peters founded Fixify, an IT help desk platform with an automation twist.

Fixify connects to existing IT ticketing systems, like Jira and ServiceNow, to automatically categorize tickets and identify problem “hotspots.” Using AI, Fixify tries to identify the root causes of problems, then recruits IT analysts that it employs to diagnose and resolve the problems.

“Fixify is designed for tech-centric organizations between 100 and 2,000 employees that care about providing a high-quality IT help desk experience, but aren’t able to invest in the staff and tech stack required,” Peters said. “We charge an annual subscription based on the number of employees a customer has. For a company with 750 employees the cost would be $9,000 per month, or about the cost of one full-time help desk analyst.” 

Peters says that Fixify uses a sentiment analysis tool to gauge the tone and urgency of incoming requests. This not only helps with triage, he says, but gives analysts an idea of what to expect and how to respond.

“By tracking sentiment from the start to the close of a ticket, we can monitor the user experience and quickly spot when extra attention is needed,” Peters added.

As analysts work through tickets, Fixify customers — and their own IT workers — can lend a hand if they choose. Fixify automatically updates ticket statuses to ensure stakeholders remain on the same page.

From Fixify’s admin dashboard, customers can specify which categories of tickets they want analysts to prioritize. They can also view performance metrics (e.g. time to resolution) and suggestions to proactively address issues, as well as file requests to delete sensitive info from Fixify’s platform. (By default, Fixify retains data for 12 months subject to “customer needs and contractual obligations.”)

“Our goal is to manage around three-quarters of the customer’s ticket volume from start to finish – not just re-route them,” he continued. “Our AI assists IT analysts by suggesting next steps based on each customer’s specific processes. They also identify relevant tools for each task by analyzing the ticket context and playbook instructions.”

IT teams have shown a willingness to embrace automation as they find themselves stretched thinner and thinner. In a December 2023 Digitate survey, 90% of IT decision-makers said they plan to deploy more automation, particularly in functions like finance and customer support, in the next 12 months.

The idea of high-tech IT outsourcing isn’t new. Several startups are trying the idea, including Primo (which focuses specifically on hardware), Fleet (which also has a hardware bent), and Wizeline.

But there’s lots of money in the segment. Avasant Research’s 2023 IT Outsourcing Statistics survey found organizations increased their annual IT outsourcing budgets by 8.1% last year. Deloitte projected total spending on IT outsourcing to reach $519 billion by 2023 — a 22% tick up from 2019.

Investors seem taken with Fixify’s automation angle — perhaps because of automation’s potential to boost productivity while lowering overhead.

This month, Fixify closed a $25 million Series A round co-led by Costanoa Ventures, Decibel Partners, and Paladin Capital Group with participation from Scale Venture Partners. Mourad Yesayan, managing director at Paladin, plans to join Fixify’s board as part of the deal.

“The broader tech slowdown has actually created a couple of opportunities for us,” Peters said. “This series A investment provides funding for the foreseeable future – and certainly through the expected uptick in the economy that many economists are predicting.”

Arlington, Virginia-based Fixify, which launched in 2023, has raised $32 million to date. The firm’s near-term focus is growing its 41-person workforce and customer base, which currently stands at 15 companies.

Like a lot of tech companies, Lumon Industries is instituting a return-to-office policy for employees, but of course, this version looks a little scarier than real life. At least, that’s how it seems based on the first proper trailer for season 2 of Severance.

Following last season’s incredibly tense finale, the show picks up with Mark S (Adam Scott) heading back to Lumon to find things a little different than he remembers them, including a number of his coworkers. But some things haven’t changed — namely, the disorienting office hallways and the unyielding intensity of Milchick (Tramell Tillman), who looks intimidating even while holding party balloons.

For the uninitiated, Severance is a sci-fi story about a medical procedure — the titular severance — that allows Lumon employees to separate their memories between work and home, essentially creating two people in one body. It’s an extreme solution to the problem of work-life balance. The outies, as they’re known, remain oblivious to what goes on in the office, while the innies remain trapped in a hellish existence they can never escape. Well, except for the occasional Music Dance Experience.

The show is led by director Ben Stiller and creator / writer Dan Erickson. The first season (which is out on Blu-ray soon) featured a killer cast, many of whom will be returning. In addition to Scott and Tillman, the cast includes Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, Jen Tullock, Michael Chernus, Dichen Lachman, John Turturro, Christopher Walken, and Patricia Arquette.

Lomography has unveiled a new addition to its range of instant cameras, dubbing the Lomo Instant Wide Glass the ‘world’s best instant camera’. That’s a bold claim when the market has otherwise been dominated by Polaroid and Fujifilm Instax – so do instant photography lovers finally have a viable alternative?

It seems as though the best instant camera claims are based on the quality of the Wide Glass’s lens: a 90mm multi-coated glass lens, with 35mm effective focal length and minimum focus distance of just 0.3m. It’s a lens that Lomography says is the sharpest in any instant camera. That really does sound like some serious glass, especially when you compare it to the simpler optics of, say, the Fujifilm Instax Wide 400.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their breakthrough work predicting and designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life.

Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honoured research that made connections between amino acid sequence and protein structure.

That was actually called a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular in biochemistry, for decades. So, it’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today, he said.

Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle, while Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London.

Baker designed a new protein in 2003 and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said.

“The number of designs that they have, produced and published, and … the variety is absolutely mind blowing. It seems that you can almost construct any type of protein with this technology,” said Professor Johan qvist of the Nobel committee.

Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.

Linke said scientists had long dreamt of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins.

Four years ago in 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper managed to crack the code. With skillful use of artificial intelligence, they made it possible to predict the complex structure of essentially any known protein in nature, Linke said.

Another dream of scientists has been to build new proteins to learn how to use nature’s multi-tool for our own purposes. This is the problem that David Baker solved,” he added. “He developed computational tools that now enable scientists to design spectacular new proteins with entirely novel shapes and functions, opening endless possibilities for the greatest benefit to humankind.

Last year, the chemistry award went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots tiny particles just a few nanometres in diameter that can release very bright coloured light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the physics prize.

The awards continue with the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on October 14.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (USD 1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.