Smart Home: Windmill Engineered the "iPhone of Air Conditioning"
Emily Fazio
·4 min read
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Air conditioning season has officially arrived, but choosing a portable unit that works for your space — both functionally and aesthetically — has rarely been a possibility. Windmill, a company founded by two NYC-based brothers, invented Windmill Air and effectively transformed the portable AC/ HVAC industry you've known. Not only does their award-winning modern design suit contemporary and modern homes and apartments like a dream, but the brothers have engineered a quieter "whisper" inverter tech that traditional AC manufacturers just haven't mastered in any way.
"The air conditioning space overall has been stuck in the past for quite some time. Today’s consumers demand more from their brands and products, and we don’t think AC should be an exception. A great AC should cool quietly and efficiently and should be intuitive to interact with and use on a daily basis," shared Mike Mayer, Co-Founder of Windmill. "Before we started the business, we asked thousands of window AC customers what they wanted most from their air conditioning units. They told us they wanted a smart AC that’s beautiful (that they’re actually proud to have in their home!) and easy to install."
Ooni has discounted its pizza ovens by up to 30 percent as part of a Memorial Day sale. The most notable item here is the Ooni Frya 12 wood pellet pizza oven, which is $245 as part of the sale.
Adobe announced on Tuesday the addition of a Generative Remove feature for Lightroom. Adobe says the feature is up to the task, regardless of how complex of a background the object is set against. “Generative Remove is helpful for editing even the most complicated backgrounds and surroundings,” the company says, “including removing stains from a patterned shirt, wrinkles of a tablecloth in food photography, unwanted reflections in water and more.”
Hosting scams on your platform is bad for business, which is why on Tuesday, a group of major tech companies including Match Group, Meta, Coinbase and others are jointly launching a new coalition to take on online fraud across dating apps, social media and crypto. The new coalition, Tech Against Scams, will work together to find ways to fight back against the tools used by scammers and to better educate the public against financial scams.
It's a wrap: European Union lawmakers have given the final approval to set up the bloc's flagship, risk-based regulations for artificial intelligence. In a press release confirming the approval of the EU AI Act, the Council of the European Union said the law is "ground-breaking," and that "as the first of its kind in the world, it can set a global standard for AI regulation." The European Parliament had already approved the legislation in March.
A new self-driving truck — manufactured by Volvo and loaded with autonomous vehicle tech developed by Aurora Innovation — could be on public highways as early as this summer. The Volvo VNL Autonomous truck, which was revealed Monday evening at the ACT Expo in Las Vegas, is the product of a partnership between Aurora and Volvo Autonomous Solutions. Aurora plans to start hauling freight using these Volvo self-driving trucks in the next several months.
While many climate investors focus their efforts on breakthrough, deep-tech solutions, Patrick Sheehan at ETF Partners has other ideas. “I’ve actually got nothing against carbon capture and storage, apart from the fact it’s probably going to be commercialized too late,” he told TechCrunch. Instead, Sheehan and his colleagues are diving into more software-centric companies that promise to still move the needle.
OpenAI is removing one of the voices used by ChatGPT. Users found that it sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson, the company announced on Monday, and Johansson herself released a statement saying she hired legal council to inquire about the Sky voice and get exact details about how it was developed. "We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice—Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice," the company wrote in a blog post.
For those who haven't heard, the first crewed launch of Boeing's Starliner capsule has been pushed back yet again to no earlier than May 25. From NASA: "The additional time allows teams to further assess a small helium leak in the Boeing Starliner spacecraft’s service module traced to a flange on a single reaction control system thruster." Scheduling note: TechCrunch Space will be off on May 27 in observance of Memorial Day.