ecobee closes $80 million funding round

Smart home innovator ecobee Inc. announced that it has closed on an $80 million CAD Series C funding round led by Energy Impact Partners, followed by eight institutional investors including Thomvest, Relay Ventures, and the Amazon Alexa Fund. This funding will allow ecobee to build upon its suite of smart home technologies connected by whole-home-voice control, sensor technology and artificial intelligence. It brings ecobee’s total funding to approximately $190 million to-date.

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Twitter Canada to live stream the Paralympic Winter Games starting Friday March 9

Twitter Canada announced a live streaming partnership for the PyeongChang 2018 Paralympic Winter Games. This one is unique as it’s exclusive to Canada so will only be viewable on Twitter in Canada. 

The live Paralympic action will be available to Canadians on Twitter starting Friday, March 9 and running through Sunday, March 18th. 

This will include a daily Canadian recap show from CBC and event action (both live streaming via the @CDNParalympics and @CDNParalympique Twitter accounts) This is the link where the English language content will be streaming.

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Netflix’s ‘Lost In Space’ gets first trailer

Netflix announced two years ago that it was going to remake the classic series Lost In Space. The original show aired on CBS in the US from 1965 to 1968. You may or may not have heard it but you might be familiar with the talking robot’s famous line, “Danger, Will Robinson!” Now the Robinson family are back and Netflix tries not to stray too far from the original show, which follows the Robinson’s misadventures in space. The original series was based on the sci-fi novel The Swiss Family Robinson. The series comes to the streaming service on April 13^th.

Source: The Verge

Google’s Gboard adds support for more languages including Korean and Chinese

Google is expanding the language support of Gboard by adding 20 additional new languages. The keyboard app will add in the coming days both traditional and simplified Chinese as well as Korean. These new additions bring over 300 languages supported by Gboard and while there are thousands of languages spoken around the world, this update is said to cover 74 percent of the world’s population. Google has said they are also dedicated to bringing lesser-used languages into the app. An example is the African language Fulani, which didn’t have a written alphabet until the ‘90s. The company is working with the brothers who developed its character set.

Source: Android Police