Smart Motorcycle Helmet Maker Skully Lands $11 Million In Series A To Start Manufacturing The AR-1

Attention, San Francisco: Uber Is Chauffeuring the Tamale Lady Tonight to Deliver Free Tamales On Demand

While AllThingsD generally abstains from writing about Uber's myriad food delivery stunts, here's a fun one that may concern our readers who happen to be out enjoying the mild San Francisco weather tonight.

In hyper-hyperlocal news, ride-hailing service Uber is underwriting free on-demand tamales from San Francisco's famous Tamale Lady, Virginia Ramos, this evening.

Ramos will be chauffeured around town in an UberSUV, delivering tamales and hugs to anyone who can get through to make the request from the Mission and the Lower Haight neighborhoods.

A San Francisco institution and a friendly and recognizable face to many who enjoy the city's nightlife, Ramos was blocked in June from selling her tamales to hipsters and hippies and everyone else in San Francisco because she had been cooking them in an unlicensed kitchen.

Prior to that, she had been pushing her cart from bar to bar for some 20 years, selling homemade late-night snacks for $4, inspiring bumper stickers and nearly 350 Yelp reviews.

Now Ramos is trying to open a brick-and-mortar tamale shop, and has launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $50,000.

The tamales start at 8 pm PT tonight and go till they run out. Uber warns, "There's only one Virginia, so if you see a grayed-out icon and can't get tamales right away, please keep trying."

Canary Shatters Its Indiegogo Funding Goal For Its Smart, Dead-Simple Home Monitors

There are some 90 million homes in the U.S. without any security system whatsoever. Many of them are renters who don't want to invest heavily in a place they don't own, among hundreds of thousands of home owners who are simply priced out. There has never been a convenient, all-in-one system that could offer home security at an affordable rate, much less one you could pick up at the local Best Buy.

But that all changes with Canary, the latest crowd-funding sensation to hit Indiegogo. We caught up with NYC-based founder Adam Sager to discuss the project.

Canary is a little console, slightly smaller than the size of a paper towel roll, that's packed with a host of sensors, a mic, and an HD camera.

For $200 down, this little guy will connect to the Wifi, sync with your phone, and constantly watch your home. I say watch, and not monitor, because Canary can only see as far as its sensors will allow, whereas most home security systems are wired in to monitor every crack and crevice of a home. Canary can only hear as far as the mic allows, or the camera sees, or the sensors can sense.

However, Sager believes that when you place the Canary in the central part of your home, near the front door perhaps or watching over the living room, that a real threat, like a burglar, will likely set off the Canary no matter where it enters from.

Plus, if you have a larger space or want added security, you can always link more than one Canary (up to four, Sager tells me).

Canary's sensors include night vision, motion detection, temperature, air quality and humidity, along with a live feed to the HD camera at any given time. The phone will instantly alert the user whenever the home experiences a random change, like a temperature fluctuation or sudden movement.

But Canary is also smart enough to learn your home, sensing the difference between a burglary and a pet. It even understands when regularly scheduled events occur, like the arrival of a nanny or a dog walker at the same time each day, so that you don't have a panic attack each time Rover needs to take a wizz.

Canary's distribution model is different from any other home security system in that you will eventually be able to go pick one up at a local electronics store on the cheap. This has never really been available before, and the potential market is huge with 90 million homes completely unprotected and priced out of the alternatives.

Sager admits that margins on the hardware itself won't be that high, but the plan is to offer value-added services like monitoring (delivered by a TBD third-party) for $10/month.

Canary has been on Indiegogo for four days, and has blown far beyond its $100k goal to be at $550k at the time of writing. It only took a few hours to reach $100k, according to Sager.

If you'd like to back the project, head on over to the Canary website or check out the Indiegogo campaign.

Diet Robot, Autom, Now Available On Indiegogo, Will Ship In Six Months

Just in time for post-holiday guilt comes Autom, the diet robot that reminds you to eat healthy, asks you how much you exercised per day, and generally sits there being judgmental as you stuff your face with pecan pie. The robot, originally announced in 2007, is coming to life thanks to an Indiegogo campaign and the help of gadget masters PCH International, a manufacturer in Shenzhen, China.

We’ve written quite a bit about Autom so far but to recap, it’s essentially a little robot that sits in your kitchen and reminds you to input the foods you’ve eaten and the exercise you’ve done. It’s friendly about it, but insistent, and in tests users have grown attached to their little kvetches, even resorting to dressing them up.

“In terms of the weight-loss coach application, Autom has been shown to be much more effective at helping someone stick with a diet as compared to doing the exact same thing on a computer, phone, or tablet screen. When we gave the trial version of Autom out to people, they talked about her like a friend or a family member after only a few weeks of having one short conversation with her every day,” said Cory Kidd, founder of Intuitive Automata and creator of Autom. “Not only that, nearly everyone named her and many people even dressed her up with things like scarves, hats, or a red feather boa!”

The partnership with PCH allows the company to ship a mere six months after the Indiegogo offer ends, a first in the crowdfunding space. The company is also creating a developers kit so users can build their own apps, controlling the motors, vision system, and speech output.

“Autom was developed based on my Ph.D. work at the MIT Media Lab where I spent six and a half years developing an understanding of the psychology of human-robot interaction and the health-related applications,” said Kidd. “In other words, I helped to figure out why talking to a robot is much more compelling than interacting with a character on a screen. In short, it’s the exact same reasons that we prefer to meet face-to-face with someone instead of talking through the phone or video conferencing — we tend to trust the person in front of us more, develop a better rapport, and feel more comfortable.”

The Indiegogo deal gets you an Autom without weight-loss coach subscription for $199. An Autom with a 1-year subscription to the service costs $249 while the dev kit costs $299. According to the site, the dev kit gives you access to:

• Low-level control of her six motors
• The camera inside her eye
• The audio and microphone for sound in and out
• Define a series of movements using XML files for her to play out on her motors
• Text-to-speech (TTS) control including markup for improving pronunciation
• Higher-level behavior control using a simple markup language that allow you to combine motor actions with text during TTS

Whether you’re trying to lose a few pounds or just need someone small and plastic to talk to, the simple fact that Autom is shipping is great news for the artisanal hardware world, and here’s hoping she helps me get rid of this spare tire, spare chin, and extra bust.