Thomas Ricker

Cargo bikes can save our cities from the pollution and snarled traffic created by delivery vans, and replace the family car to get the kids to school on time. They can also host a rave.

Sure, Aqara’s Door and Window Sensor P2 is just two chunks of rounded white plastic. But things like color, size (it’s smaller than it looks), and logo placement are important when deciding if you’ll attach one to every door and window of your Matter-enabled smart home to trigger automations. The Thread-enabled sensor isn’t yet Matter-certified, but we saw this prototype working at yesterday’s Matter launch event.

See the green and blue bars on the far right? That giant blue bar represents the expected growth in smart devices by 2030. Matter is here to make sure they work easily together. Good luck.

Matter, the long awaited fix to smart home interoperability, is having its big coming out party today in Amsterdam. The Matter launch event is expected to yield several product announcements as companies reveal specific plans to make old devices Matter-compatible, and demonstrate new devices that can be plugged directly into any Matter network.

The midterm US elections will be spared the @realdonaldtrump and other Twitter miscreants after Elon Musk said that any reinstatement of banned accounts is still “at least a few more weeks” away.

The Lectric XP 3.0 is a thorough update to the XP 2.0 with improved motor, brakes, and suspension to accommodate a second rider up to 150lbs. Introductory pricing starts at $999, but jumps by $75 for the comfy passenger package, and another $200 if you want the long-range battery. It’ll even accommodate a pet trailer for an extra $170.

52 percent of all new bicycles sold in the Netherlands are now electric, followed by Austria (45%), Germany (43%), Belgium (39%), and Switzerland (38%), with numbers expected to continue to rise, according to Bike Europe. Subsidizing the purchase price has helped spur adoption in some countries like France.

Ever since Twitter shut down the original short-form video service Vine, we’ve seen the rise of populism, a global pandemic, and Tom and Gisele get divorced. That’s no coincidence. Even Vine’s former boss thinks shutting it down was a mistake.