Technology

Meet the Travel Backpack 45L. ItPeak Design latest creation and the company just launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring it to life. This product marks the eighth Kickstarter campaign for Peak Design — all of which have been wildly successful.

Peak Design turned to Kickstarter in 2014 to launch the first generation of its Capture camera clip. Over 5,200 people pledged support to bring that product to life. Since then, Peak Design used Kickstarter to launch several camera straps and mounts and, most notably, the Everyday Backpack, Tote and Sling, which saw pledges from 26,000 people for over $6 million. Peak Design collected over $15 million in pledges through its seven previous Kickstarter campaigns and is now the most active crowdfunded company — miss you, Pebble.

Crowdfunding is deeply lodged into the Peak Designethos, the company tells me. For one, Peak Design feels crowdfunding helps with the costs associated with bringing new products to market. The company offers pre-sale discounts through Kickstarter campaigns, which covers the costs of the product and lets the company use the extra to develop the next product. Second, Peak Design says it leverages the two-way communication Kickstarter provides to tweak product design, clean up messaging and ensure a high-level customer experience.

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The $299 Travel Backpack 45L is the companylargest bag to date and is designed with a traveler in mind. The bag is constructed from 400D weather nylon and the inside is coated to provide additional water resistance. The bag has compression and expansion straps to let it grow or shrink as needed. A bevy of lockable zippers and access points seem to be positioned in a smart way around the bag.

TechCrunch loves Peak DesignEveryday Backpack. Several of us use it as our everyday bag. Both sizes can handle a 15-inch MacBook Pro and they have the right mix of storage and access. I trust this new bag was designed with a similar level of competency.

Along with the backpack, Peak Design also released a series of packing cubes, each designed to address a different travel need. These are sold separately from the Travel Backpack and start at $29.95. There are six different types: standard packing cubes, a toiletry bag, an electronic bag, a camera bag, a shoe pouch, and a rain cover thatmade out of 200D rip-stop nylon.

WhatPeak Design Founder and CEO Peter Deringfavorite part of the new bag

&The entire back panel,& he says. &Not only does it beautifully conceal all the straps, italso got a beautiful grab handle that, for some reason I don&t understand, just makes you feel like a badass when you use it. It kind of feels like when Neo grabs that bag of guns in the Matrix, only my bag is full of drones, mirrorless cameras, and underwear. We&re all in agreement that any character Keanu Reeves plays is an aspirational character, right&

I guess heright.

The $299 Travel Backpack 45L and packing cubes are available for pre-order on Kickstarter now and the company expects them to be in major retailers by the holiday season.

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Bag design with Peak Design

Sonos today took the next step in its initial public offering price, setting a range for the shares it intends to sell that will help calibrate the final amount of money — and valuation — that it will have when it begins its trading debut.

This isn&t the final, final step in the IPO process, as this is usually done to test the waters and figure out the exact appetite for the companyshares when it goes public. Sonos is offering 5,555,555 (a wonderful palindrome of a number) shares, where it will raise as much as $105 million if it prices on the upper end of its range and sells them at $19 per share. The official range is between $17 and $19, but this can go up and down throughout the process —with a drop-off signaling a lack of interest or skepticism, and an increased range a sign of heavy demand. Companies will sometimes lowball their range, though we won&t find out for a little bit where everything lands.

Insiders are also selling 8,333,333 million shares in this initial public offering. Including that, the IPO could end up raising around $250 at the middle of that $17 to $19 range that itestimating, including the shares sold by existing stockholders. The proceeds from those shares sold by stockholders aren&t going to end up in Sonos& hands, so the company itself is only going to net around that $105 million at the top end of its range. Therealso an over-allotment, typically called a greenshoe, that consists of shares sold by Sonos and existing stockholders. That could add a total of $15 million and $22.5 million, respectively, at a price of $18 in the middle of that range.

The company is offering some preliminary estimates for its second quarter, saying it generated between $206.4 million and $208.4 million in revenue with a net loss of between $29 million and $27.1 million (this is probably because the final accounting isn&t finished up as we&re just about entering the front end for earnings season for major companies). The company said it sold between 880,000 and 890,000 products as an estimated range in the second quarter this year, up from 796,000 products in the second quarter last year.

Sonos is nicely positioned as a third-party option in an ecosystem thatgetting increasingly crowded by proprietary speakers from the larger companies that own voice assistants like the Echo, HomePod and Google Home. But Sonos has been around for a considerable amount of time and has clearly built up a significant following to ensure that it could find itself operating as an independent public company. In its fiscal 2017 year, Sonos said it brought in nearly $1 billion in revenue, an increase of 10 percent year-over-year. The initial filing indicated that the company had sold a total of 19 million products in 6.9 million households, with customers listening to 70 hours of content each month.

This is basically the next step in the process as the company continues its march toward making its debut, and we&ll get more details soon enough as to whether or not investors are interested in a publicly traded company thatknown for its speakers.

MyEtherWallet, the most popular crypto wallet service on the internet, is finally getting a mobile app as it bids to increase security for its users.

Today the company introduced MEW Connect, an iOS app that allows users to access their wallet through MyEtherWallet but without the need to type their private key. There are already solutions that allow them — such as hardware keys from Trezor and Ledger — but MEW Connect is offering the benefits for free.

The app is launching in the coming daysas a limited iOS beta. Given that the website receives more than 600,000 visitors per day, demand for the beta is likely to be high. Those who aren&t successful this time around shouldn&t have too long to wait asa full launch is expected to come by the end of September. An Android version is also in the works and is expected to be released around the same time.

How does it work

Itreally quite simple.The app uses a QR code scanner that replaces the need to enter a private key. Entering information like a private key on a website is something that people have always been warned against doing. Recent analysis suggests that more than $7 million has been stolen via phishing attacks on wallet services, but still people can be lazy or reluctant to buy a hardware wallet, so ita practice that continues to happen.

Now, using the MEW Connect app you simply scan a barcode on MyEtherWallet.com, which opens your wallet account using a peer-to-peer connection.

On the technical side, MyEtherWallet confirmed it is usingApplekeychain services to encrypt the app — which it said retains data on-device— and pair it with the web-based peer.There are plans to utilize the Touch ID feature in iOS in the future, but the feature is currently absent.

The app itself requires a master password to be set first — the app scores passwords and encourages stronger ones — and it provides a set of backup words, much like a device from Trezor or Ledger. The master password is designed to prevent unauthorized access, for example, if you lose your phone. The backup words, meanwhile — which should be written down on paper and stored carefully — are the key to getting access to your wallet in the event that you lose your phone.

Thatessentially it at this point. The app exists to remove the need to enter a private key. In testing, it worked fairly consistently across different browsers and computers I used, although there could be issues as with all alpha versions of software.

Payment potential

Whatparticularly exciting, however, is what the app could become as and when it adds new features.

The main app screen includes a debit card style design and iteasy to imagine that some form of payments, most obviously peer-to-peer, could be added to massively simplify the process of sending crypto.

But thatnot going to happen soon, according to MyEtherWallet founder Kosala Hemachandra, who told TechCrunch that he doesn&t want to rush introducing new features.Hemachandra said the intention is to move slowly to ensure users are comfortable with the app, but he did admit payments are on the roadmap.

&That&ll be the best use case for crypto we can implement in the near future,& he said in an interview. &If you want to go mainstream, that&ll be a huge advantage for the whole industry. First, we want people to get used to this MEW Connect concept, scanning a QR code and creating a P2P link.&

For now, the app does include a link that lets people buy crypto via a third party. Thatan approach MyEtherWallet has taken on its website service, and the affiliate money generated from that is enough to make the business profitable, cover payroll for its staff of 15 and generally keep the business sustainable.

Hemachandra said he knocks back interest from investors on a daily basis.

&I&m not really a fan of VCs,& he said candidly.

Removing private key risk

For the beta launch, Hemachandra said hehoping that lots of bugs are unearthed to improve the app experience.

&My hope is beta users will be developers who can go through our code. I really believe in open source and we don&t plan to hide anything,& he said.

Like MyEtherWallet.com, the plan is to publish the code for the MEW Connect iOS and Android apps online to allow scrutiny from the community. Given the reach of MyEtherWallet, this is definitely one project to keep a keen eye on.

Another is MyCrypto.com, a similar service whose founders includeHemachandraformer business partner at MyEtherWallet,Taylor Monahan. The company recently removed private key access from its website for the same reasons to the launch of MEW Connect: user safety.

Update: Italso been noted that MyCrypto.com supports the Parity Signer app, which operates in the same fashion as MEW Connect.

&Mass adoption of cryptocurrencies is unlikely in a world where a mis-click can cost you your life savings. Tragically, even when a user takes painstaking precautions in verifying that they are on the correct site before entering their private key, a compromise of the site itself can still result in a total loss of user funds,& MyCrypto.com CTODaniel Ternyak explained in a blog post.

That two of the weblargest wallet services are moving on from private keys is an important step for the crypto industry.