Inversion Space has become the third company to receive a spacecraft reentry license from the Federal Aviation Administration, paving the way for the startup to launch and return its tech pathfinder mission for orbital delivery later this year. 

The three-year-old startup has ambitions of transforming space into a new “transportation layer for Earth” using ultra-fast, on-demand cargo deliveries to anywhere on Earth from orbit. The Ray vehicle is the first hardware Inversion will be sending to space. Mounted on an oven-sized bus, the actual Ray capsule is only about twice the size of a Frisbee — much smaller than the company’s full-scale spacecraft. But the mission will still put much of the final tech to the test. 

According to a draft environmental assessment (EA) of Inversion’s plans released by the FAA in May, the aluminum Ray capsule “contains and is intended to test and demonstrate many of Inversion’s custom developed systems that allow for a decreased cost and increased cadence of reentry space capsules.”  

The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation issued the vehicle operator license for Inversion’s Ray under new Part 450 regulations designed to modernize spacecraft licensing. It joins SpaceX and Varda on the short list of operators with approval to reenter spacecraft, though only Varda was also approved under Part 450 regs. The new regulatory framework was finalized in 2020 to streamline the licensing process for satellite and rocket operators, though there have been a fair number of critics that question whether Part 450 has achieved that goal. The licensing process for Inversion’s Ray took 18 months, a spokesperson said.

The new license gives Inversion a green light to return the Ray capsule back to Earth for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. Ray, which will launch on SpaceX’s Transport-12 rideshare mission (likely sometime this month), will spend between one to five weeks in space, Inversion CEO Justin Fiaschetti said in a previous interview with TechCrunch. 

The reentry would occur in two stages, the EA says: First, the capsule would deploy a drogue parachute when Ray is traveling at around Mach 2 and help the capsule decelerate from supersonic speed. When the capsule is around 6,000 feet above sea level, the main parachute will deploy, and the capsule will slow to 15.5 miles per hour to splash down. 

The craft will then activate a recovery buoy that will broadcast the capsule’s location to Inversion’s mission control center, and a team will go recover the 41-pound capsule from the water. 

Following the Ray demonstration missions, Inversion plans to introduce a larger vehicle named Arc and launch that as early as 2026, though this will require a separate license. 

Meta is adding an “activity status” to Threads so that you can see who’s actively online as you’re scrolling your feed. In a post, Threads boss Adam Mosseri pitches it as a “way to help you find others to engage with in real-time.” The activity status will show up next to your profile picture in the feed and on your profile, based on screenshots Mosseri shared.

Fortunately, if you don’t want people to know when you’re online, you don’t have to share that. “Only people who have activity status turned on will be able to see when you’re online, and you can turn this off within your settings at any time,” Mosseri says.

I can’t currently find how to turn on the feature. It might be user error, but I’m guessing it just hasn’t rolled out to me yet. Even when I get it, I’ll probably be keeping it off.

The Shazam Band is a new AI-powered collar containing speakers and sensors that lets your pet talk to you, just like the dogs in the Pixar movie UP can. Once your pet is wearing the band you can have a conversation with it, and the band emits a human voice in response to your questions.

You can also use the Shazam Band to track your pet if they wander off, and it will alert you via text message if they get into danger, say from other animals or traffic, or if they got left behind somewhere. You can find them using the Shazam app and the GPS inside the band.

A real life UP

All of us talk to our pets, but what if our pets could talk back? That’s the premise of Personifi AI’s Shazam Band, a wearable that puts your pet’s mood, movements, and emotions into words. By using AI, it actually makes a two-sided conversation possible.

If all this sounds crazy, it’s only the beginning of what makes the Shazam Band one of the maddest pieces of tech we’ve seen in a while. And if I hadn’t actually seen it working, I doubt I’d believe it was real.

This is Shazam, an AI pet collar

Shazam (no, not that one) comes in two sizes, one for a dog and one suitable for cats, and is worn like a collar. It contains various sensors, including a 6-axis gyroscope, GPS, temperature sensor, speaker, and microphone. There’s a battery inside that lasts for several weeks on a charge and another battery in the box, so you can always have one charged up and ready to go. It uses AI to interpret your pet’s movements and actions and the tone you use when speaking to it to create verbal responses that reflect your pet’s intentions, thoughts, and personality.

I know. It sounds either staggeringly stupid or like the best thing ever, depending on your level of pet obsession. But stay with me, as it’s way better thought out than you may expect.

Wondering how Shazam interprets what your pet is thinking accurately enough to put it all into words that match your pet’s personality? The company has teamed up with Matt Beisner, a dog trainer best known for the Dog: Impossible show on Disney+, to train the AI, along with social media voice-over sensation Bobby Johnson, also known as “The RxckStxr,” and voice actor Jorjeana Marie.

Another key member of the team is Roscoe, Personifi AI’s founder and CEO John McHale’s dog. Roscoe is one of several hundred animals that have already been training the AI. Over a short Zoom video call ahead of the announcement, I saw Roscoe interact with McHale and other members of the team through Shazam. Not just tail-wagging, bouncing-up-and-down interaction, but verbal interaction. No, I haven’t gone crazy; it’s as barking mad as it sounds.

One of the strangest tech demos I’ve seen

When I spoke to McHale, it was early morning at their offices, and Roscoe had not been fed or walked and was apparently a little grumpy at being woken up. We laughed at the prospect of running a tech demo using an animal, a wearable, and an AI system interpreting its actions and operating in real time and how it was a recipe for things to go wrong. In reality, the next few moments were an eye-opening glimpse of a Dr. Doolittle-style future.

Roscoe was asked if he wanted to go for a walk and chase squirrels, as well as if he had been fed yet, all spoken in that usual rhetorical way we speak to pets. Except through Shazam, Roscoe replied. Not in that if-you-listen-hard-I-think-he-said-sausages way, but actually talked.

Well, Roscoe didn’t talk, but the words came from the speaker on the Shazam wearable and in a voice that brought out Roscoe’s lackadaisical personality. Yes, he was hungry, the squirrels were likely to get chased, and he was frustrated that none of these things had happened. The voice and style will be familiar to anyone who watches Bobby Johnson’s voice-over comedy skits.

It was one of the most bizarre tech demos I’ve seen, and I smiled and laughed throughout, my mind flip-flopping between childish joy and complete bewilderment. You won’t be discussing Tolstoy with your Shazam-wearing pet, but you will see a new side to its personality.

However, there’s the potential for a more serious use case too. McHale explained that he got the idea after Roscoe had been bitten by a snake and managed to hide the problem, but was clearly not himself. Roscoe eventually underwent several serious surgeries and survived, but if he had been able to say he’d been bitten by a snake, then things could have been taken care of far sooner.

Does it turn your pet into an AI chatbot?

Even with Shazam, Roscoe is unlikely to have been able to articulate he’d been bitten by a snake, but he may have been able to vocalize that he wasn’t well in a way we could quickly understand and act upon. Any resulting vet visit would have been memorable, too, that’s for sure.

Shazam may also be able to help your pet vocalize concern for you, bringing further emotional support to the moment when they come over and check in, as they seemingly understand that you’re sad, unwell, or in need of a furry hug.

Because Shazam is AI-driven and always learning, it’s not like getting a series of canned responses that approximate emotion. It’s more like an AI chatbot, but rather than being a voice from an empty vessel, Shazam takes real emotions and your pet’s personality, or the personality you give it, and blends them into a voice, so it shouldn’t come across as something it’s not or a completely artificial fabrication. Shazam has a choice of 27 characters, each with its distinct persona and tone ranging from a witty Southern belle to a fast-talking mafia boss, plus the ability to further craft individual personality traits through the app. Several voices are available in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese as well.

The app also shows activity tracking data from the Shazam collar, and the built-in GPS keeps track of your pet, plus it has a geofencing feature to encourage it to stay within certain set boundaries. It does so by verbally telling the pet through the speaker that it’s going where it shouldn’t, as if it were its own subconscious, which should confuse the neighbors. You set a single voice as the primary caregiver and can program other secondary voices as well, to both add safety and keep things simple for the pet.

Giving your pet a voice isn’t cheap

Only you know if it’s worth it

We already recognize and try to understand our pet’s personalities and emotions. Shazam takes it to the next level by vocalizing those emotions in a language we understand. When you see it in action for the first time, it may look and sound a bit silly, but after a few moments, you will understand how much fun could be had with it and even how it could help keep your pet safe and healthy, too. How long that fun will last after the novelty has worn off is the big question. There’s also the considerable expense to find out.

Shazam is such a crazy product that you’re either going to walk away after seeing it, desperate to put in your order, or think it’s one of the most ridiculous things ever made. The voices and characters created by Personifi AI won’t be for everyone either, and the ones I heard went hard on their chosen hook — the superhero character was like an even more hyped-up Buzz Lightyear, for example. I imagine they could get quite grating. Though, if you don’t want Shazam/your pet to interrupt you, it’s as simple as saying “quiet,” just as you would normally do.

Every owner has wondered what their pet would say if it could talk, and Shazam does make it possible to somewhat answer that question. As to whether it works in the real world and outside the confines of a very short demo remains to be seen, but I came away from seeing Shazam in action thinking that there are going to be a lot of crazy cat and dog people out there who will lap this insane piece of tech up, no matter the cost.

Android’s Theft Detection Lock started rolling out in June with a wider rollout earlier this month, but today Google is making it even better with additional features in Android 15. If you were unaware that Theft Detection Lock even existed, that’s not surprising. It’s not exactly one of the more exciting features of Android and it’s not something that’s immediately user-facing like new homescreen features tend to be.

That being said, it’s a feature that most users should become familiar with. It’ll help you become better prepared for what to do if your phone is ever stolen. For instance, if your phone gets snatched, Theft Detection Lock uses AI to sense motion commonly associated with theft and locks the screen. This way thieves don’t have immediate access to your data. The device can also be automatically locked if excessive failed attempts are made to authenticate.

With Android 15, Google is expanding the helpfulness of Theft Detection Lock with the addition of authentication requirements for settings that thieves tend to go after.

Theft Detection Lock in Android 15 now requires authentication to turn off Find My Device

Find My Device and the Find My Device Network are great tools for any user to help locate a device that’s been misplaced. Unfortunately, thieves know how useful this is and tend to target it by disabling the feature. Making it harder for you to locate the phone and easier for them to resell it. Starting with Android 15, a new authentication requirement will be in place to prevent turning this off. So if your device gets stolen, thieves will still need to authenticate if they want to turn the feature off.

Google says that accessing this setting to turn it off will now require either a biometric authentication or the entry of a PIN or password. While not impossible to bypass, it’ll be a lot harder for the average thief to get around these protections. Another new authentication requirement being added is for removing your SIM.

Device resets become harder, ‘Identity Check’ coming later this year

When a thief steals your phone, the intention is to probably sell that device to make some quick cash. However, that’s a lot harder to do without being able to factory reset the device. With the new Theft Detection Lock improvements it will now be harder to perform a device reset without the device’s Google account credentials. This and the other features are most certainly useful, but of course, not foolproof. That being said, these are also meant, at least in part, to be deterrents for thieves as devices won’t be as easy to crack and resell.

Google mentions another feature coming later this year that should help add to these deterrents called Identity Check. This feature will be opt-in so it won’t be on by default. If enabled, however, biometric authentication will be needed to access a variety of Google account and device settings. This includes things like disabling the theft protection or changing the PIN. This authentication requirement also kicks in if someone is trying to access your passkey from a location that isn’t trusted.