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Microsoft’s ‘Mimicker Alarm’ Garage Project helps you start your day with mini games

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Microsoft is back with another Garage Project (cute and novel apps made for iOS and Android phones), and this time it’s an alarm clock called Mimicker Alarm. At first glance, the style of this app looks eerily similar to that of the stock Android Clock app, but a deeper dive shows us that there’s a little more to it. Microsoft wants you to actually wake up when your alarm goes off, and to help you do that the company makes you play mini games powered by its Project Oxford machine learning APIs…


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Nest Protect (2nd gen) now available in 5 new countries via the Google Store

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The 2nd generation Nest Protect has only been available in Canada and the United States since its launch, but Google today added five new countries to the product’s availability list on the Google Store. As of today, customers in Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States (except Puerto Rico) can purchase Nest’s new CO2 detector.

In case you missed it, Nest unveiled the new Nest Protect last month, and with it comes a new split spectrum sensor to detect different kinds of smoke, a new smoke chamber to prevent false positives, new software features, and the opportunity to get a discount on home insurance. It’s available on the Google Store and from Nest.com for $99 (although currently out of stock through the former).

Nest pulls Nest Protect smoke detector from sale, remotely disables ‘wave’ feature due to safety hazard

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Nest—which was recently acquired by Google—pulled its Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector from sale today and issued a letter from Tony Fadell, the company’s CEO about a serious potential safety issue that arose in testing. Nest is advising existing owners that a feature on the device that allows users to disable the detector with the wave of a hand will be automatically disabled.

During recent laboratory testing of the Nest Protect smoke alarm, we observed a unique combination of circumstances that caused us to question whether the Nest Wave (a feature that enables you to turn off your alarm with a wave of the hand) could be unintentionally activated. This could delay an alarm going off if there was a real fire.


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