DoorDash can now drop off your packages

Never mind asking DoorDash to deliver meals or groceries — it can now take items off your hands, too. The service has introduced a Package Pickup option that has a courier grab your prepaid packages from various carriers (including FedEx, UPS and USPS) and drop them off at the appropriate mailing location. You can use a prepaid shipping label if you have one, but you can also send shipping QR codes directly to the courier and skip the printer or box.

Package Pickup is available for up to five items at a time and costs a flat $5, or $3 if you’re a DashPass subscriber. DoorDash hopes to entice early adopters by offering the first pickup for free in January. Conveniently, it’s arriving in time to return unwanted or broken holiday gifts.

This is far from a new concept. Shyp was offering similar shipping options in 2015, right down to the $5 fee. And if you’re only interested in shuttling items across town, Uber Connect has been available since 2020. However, DoorDash is obviously counting on convenience as a selling point. You can use a familiar app to ship packages when you’d rather not make the trek to the local depot.

The new feature is also part of a larger trend of expanding delivery apps beyond food. It’s now relatively easy to use DoorDash, Uber and similar services to get convenience store essentials, prescriptions and even your Facebook Marketplace purchases. The expansion is ultimately a hedge against uncertainty in the pandemic recovery period (services can make money even if food deliveries tank), but you might not mind if it saves you from lengthy trips.

Formlabs’ new automation accessories turn its 3D printers into mini factories

There are plenty of reasons why we’re not yet in a mass-production revolution enabled by 3D printing. One of them is the technology is time-consuming and often forces you to leave a print running overnight without supervision. It means there’s likely plenty of dead time, when a finished print is sat in the hopper, and there’s nobody around to pull it out and get the next one going. It’s a problem that Formlabs is hoping to address with its “Automation Ecosystem,” a family of products you can bolt on to some of its printers to help automate the fiddly bits.

This includes Form Auto, which can remove a printed part from a machine, freeing it up to start on the next one. You can also add a High Volume Resin system which will increase the printers’ raw material capacity up to five liters. And there’s Fleet Control — new software that’ll help manage a fleet of printers, letting you balance the workload across all of your units. The systems are all, naturally, designed for small and medium enterprises who rely upon manufacturing but can’t spare the warm bodies to worry at each printer in turn. (It’ll also come in handy for companies like Hasbro, which is 3D printing people’s heads for its custom action figure line.) 

Formlabs says that the benefits — beyond being able to leave work running unsupervised for longer — include less material wastage and cheaper prints. The company says it expects to see users’ per-print costs fall by anything up to 40 percent, as well as reducing packaging waste. As for pricing, Form Auto will set you back $3,400 (with a year’s free Fleet Control thrown in), with shipping expected to begin in the second half of the year. 

Panasonic debuts its first hybrid autofocus mirrorless cameras, the S5II and S5IIx

Though popular with videographers, Panasonic’s mirrorless cameras have always been at a disadvantage to Sony, Canon and other rivals due to the inferior contrast-detect-only autofocus. Now, the company has finally introduced its first cameras with hybr…

Goodyear shows off 90 percent sustainable tires and traction-tracking treads at CES 2023

Last CES, Goodyear dazzled the assembled crowds with a protype tire that derived some 70 percent of its recipe from sustainable sources. This CES, Goodyear is back with an impressive iterative improvement — 90 percent sustainable materials will go into this one! A full 20 percent more sustainment, huzzah! 

Goodyear reports that the 90-percent blend has already undergone — and passed — DoT testing, making it approved for road use. The company is still working with its supply chain partners to secure sufficient precursor materials to produce them at commercial scale and hopes to devise a fully sustainable blend by 2030. 

In addition to their diminished carbon footprint, the 90 percent tires reportedly offer a lower rolling resistance than the company’s test reference tires, which translates into better gas mileage and longer EV ranges. The new materials include four different types of carbon black produced from both organic and inorganic sources, soybean oil and rice husk silica, post-consumer polyester and bio-renewable pine tar resins.

“Last January, we announced a 70% sustainable-material tire, and while we celebrated this accomplishment, we knew it set the foundation for us to continue to push forward,” said Chris Helsel, senior vice president, global operations and chief technology officer. “Over the past year, we researched new technologies, identified opportunities for further collaboration and utilized our team’s ingenuity and tenacity to achieve this tremendous accomplishment, increasing the sustainable-material content used in a tire by 20 percentage points.”

Thanks to a partnership with Gatik, the Goodyear tires of tomorrow will be a bit intelligent as well. The tiremaker announced its coordination with the B2B logistics company to develop a proof-of-concept technology, dubbed SightLine, that “can accurately estimate tire-road friction potential and provide real-time information to Gatik’s automated driving system (ADS),” according to a company release Wednesday.

The two companies recently, successfully trialed the grip-sensing system in Toronto. Data from the tire sensors is combined with that from other vehicle systems — such as tire wear state, load, inflation pressure and temperature — and fed into “Goodyear’s cloud-based proprietary algorithms” where they jiggle and cajole the information into friction estimates that help the onboard systems detect “low grip” conditions. Those estimates can then be shared with the rest of the local Gatik autonomous vehicle fleet. Whether this technology, either the sensing system or sustainable tires, moves forward remains to be seen.

Samsung’s $200 Galaxy A14 5G features a better selfie camera

For an event that was once the venue where Samsung announced its latest Galaxy S phones, CES isn’t much of a mobile show these days. But you do still see the occasional phone unveiling, including the newly announced Samsung Galaxy A14 5G. It’s a more a…

Microsoft is reportedly integrating ChatGPT’s technology into Bing

Microsoft’s Bing search engine might soon become more attuned to users’ needs and return results in a more human-like fashion. According to The Information, the tech giant is planning to incorporate the OpenAI software powering ChatGPT into Bing in hop…