CES – MyCharge Battery Pack With Passthrough Qi Charging
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CES – MyCharge Battery Pack With Passthrough Qi Charging

Dave Hamilton ·

LAS VEGAS – myCharge, long-time makers of quality battery packs and charging bricks, this week announced at CES the upcoming availability of a new portable battery with two Qi surfaces built-in. The US$79.99 Portable Power Bank Unplugged 10K Dual is about the shape of a smartphone, and features a Qi pad on top so that your phone will charge when the battery pack is simply up against it. Cleverly, myCharge has included a Qi coil on the bottom of the pack, as well, allowing it to charge from a Qi pad (like then $29 myCharge Powerdisc shown in the picture). In a true “passthrough” sense, a phone stacked on top of a charging battery pack will see the phone charge first, then the pack afterwards, making for a very convenient setup to have on your desk or bedside table. Stack ’em at night to charge, grab ’em in the morning and go! The myCharge Portable Power Bank Unplugged 10 Dual will be available in March and has a list price of $79.99.

TMO Deals

Pay What You Want: Learn to Code 2018 Bundle

Bryan Chaffin ·

We have a new Pay What You Want deal for the Learn to Code 2018 Bundle. This is a collection of training courses covering coding for iOS, MySQL, PHP, Java, and much more. Here’s how it works: pay anything, even a penny, and get one course, Introduction to R Programming. Beat the average price ($15.36 as of this writing), and you’ll get all 10 training courses. Beat the leader’s price and you’ll get an entry in an iPhone X giveaway.

CES – TiVo Demos Alexa, Google, and IFTTT Integrations, Coming in February
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CES – TiVo Demos Alexa, Google, and IFTTT Integrations, Coming in February

Dave Hamilton ·

LAS VEGAS – TiVo has been making a lot of changes to its user interface lately, and it’s not all just on the surface. Under-the-hood they’ve added some hooks and been hard at work putting all the pieces together for some pretty impressive third-party integrations. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant integrations are pretty far along, and TiVo is close to getting certifications for both of those, likely being available before the end of February. More than just turning TiVo on and off, these voice assistant integrations allow for fairly granular controls, including channel changing, play/pause, rewind, and even commercial skip. IFTTT integrations take this one step further, allowing bidirectional communications. This means TiVo could tell IFTTT that the “press D to Skip” icon is on the screen, and that could trigger an IFTTT skill to send the “skip” message back to TiVo. Yep, auto-skip is available and I’ve seen it in action! Even better news: IFTTT integration will work all the way back to Series 4 (Premier) units and doesn’t require the new Hydra UI (except auto-skip actually will require Hydra, at least at launch). Look for more from TiVo soon.