Latest news with #productdevelopment
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Altair's AI-Powered Engineering in 100 Use Cases
New eBook highlights organizations applying AI across the product lifecycle and how businesses can implement AI-powered engineering initiatives TROY, Mich., July 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair, a global leader in computational intelligence, has released an eBook highlighting 100 AI-powered engineering use cases, which demonstrate how artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the product development lifecycle across industries. Designed as both a reference and roadmap, the eBook empowers organizations to explore proven strategies for digital transformation and AI adoption. With insights on how to use AI to cut costs, accelerate timelines, and innovate faster, the eBook provides practical inspiration for how to start or scale your own AI-powered engineering initiatives. "AI is no longer optional in product development and engineering; it's essential. Altair has seamlessly integrated AI across our tools and workflows to bring AI capabilities directly to our customers," said Sam Mahalingam, chief technology officer, Altair. "The real-world use cases in this eBook demonstrate how our customers are applying AI to enhance their productivity, solve today's toughest challenges, and improve business outcomes. We're proud to empower companies with accessible tools that help transform data into strategic advantage." The 100 use cases address a wide range of industries including automotive, heavy equipment, healthcare, energy, aerospace and defense, and more. Each use case illustrates how AI can deliver tangible results, whether it's predicting battery lifespan, optimizing aerodynamic performance, or enabling real-time digital twins. To explore all 100 AI-powered engineering use cases and download the full eBook, visit About AltairAltair is a global leader in computational intelligence that provides software and cloud solutions in simulation, high-performance computing (HPC), data analytics, and AI. Altair is part of Siemens Digital Industries Software. To learn more, please visit or Media contactsAltair CorporateBridget Hagan+1.216.769.2658corp-newsroom@ Europe/The Middle East/Africa Altair Asia-Pacific Louise Wilce Man Wang +44 (0)7392 437 635 86-21-5016635,,825 emea-newsroom@ apac-newsroom@ SOURCE Altair Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
CNET
7 days ago
- CNET
This Robot Vacuum Blew Me Away With Its Ingenious Navigation Capability, and Now It's 20% Off
Deal alert: The Dreame X50 robot vacuum is available for $1,360. That's a 20% discount on a robot vacuum that usually lists for $1,700. If you're looking for top-tier performance, this robot vac is better at climbing obstacles than any robot vacuum we've tested. CNET's key takeaways No robot vacuum has truly solved the challenge of multi-level cleaning without requiring you to physically move it between floors. This robo-vac can do it, for the high-end price of $1,700 (on sale right now for $1,360 You won't find another robot vacuum with its features for less than $1,000 right now. The whole point of owning a robot vacuum is so you don't have to do the cleaning yourself. But that was never the case at my house -- partly because of what I call my "Ikea chair challenge." I've seen many robo-vacs get stuck at the bottom of one of my chairs, which has an unusually-shaped base. It's just one obstacle among many in my home, which is also filled with pet hair, paw prints and three teenage sons who leave things lying around everywhere. Luckily I'm the product development design engineer who oversees operations at CNET's testing lab, and after the Dreame X50 robot vacuum was named CNET's best for obstacles and pets, I got to see how it performed in real-world conditions at my place. Well, it conquered the Ikea chair. It was actually pretty entertaining to watch as the Dreame X50 struggled, regrouped and then used its auxiliary climbing arms to get over the chair's base -- just one of the tools it has in its arsenal. Watch this: Follow These Tips for Buying a Robot Vacuum in 2025 03:18 My experience with the Dreame X50 Ultra robot vacuum Performance-wise, the Dreame X50 Ultra was generally solid. It started with a full deep clean, then vacuumed and mopped on its second run. During the app setup, I told it I had pets, so it emptied its dustbin a bunch during the first run. I found it to be pretty smart about lifting its mops while vacuuming the carpet. It took it 123 minutes to complete its work around my home. The mopping function was surprisingly effective, tackling muddy paw prints on my vinyl plank flooring as well as I could myself with a stick mop. And I was particularly impressed with its object avoidance; it navigated around shoes, cords and even my two dogs without issue. Setting it up was a breeze: The app was intuitive and the quality of the machine's build felt robust, although with so many moving parts -- like its auxiliary climbing arms and lowering turret -- I question its long-term durability. The Dreame X50 also did a great job at identifying cords, and it knew to avoid them. Jared Hannah/CNET One key feature that really stood out was the tangle-free roller. In my home test, comparing the Dreame X50 to my older Roborock Q5 after cleaning a large area rug, the difference was striking. The Roborock was clogged with hair, while the Dreame's roller was completely clean. This is a massive advantage over competitors, which often struggle with pet hair. This is another one of my big tests -- I call it my "Great Pyrenees challenge" -- and the Dreame X50 passed with flying colors. My family quickly grew accustomed to it zipping around, and it became almost like another member of the household -- quirky and sometimes a little confused, but overall very helpful. In the end, watching it conquer obstacles like the base of my Ikea chair, where other robots get stuck, was not just effective -- it was actually fun to watch. A closer look at the Dreame X50 brush roller. It can be removed easily if you ever need to clear anything that might get caught between the dual rollers. Jared Hannah/CNET The specs Price: Approximately $1,700 (at full price) Approximately $1,700 (at full price) Features: Tangle-free roller, climbing arms, navigation turret, mopping with base cleaning, object avoidance. Tangle-free roller, climbing arms, navigation turret, mopping with base cleaning, object avoidance. Connectivity: Wi-Fi Wi-Fi Mapping: Quick mapping, room and flooring detection. Quick mapping, room and flooring detection. Navigation: Camera and lidar. Camera and lidar. App: Live view, customizable settings, pet photos. Live view, customizable settings, pet photos. Cleaning: Vacuum and mop combo. Vacuum and mop combo. Base Station: Mop cleaning and drying, tanks, cleaning solution spot. Mop cleaning and drying, tanks, cleaning solution spot. Cleaning Time: Slower than some. CNET's buying advice The Dreame X50 will take photos of your pets if you enable that setting. You can click on the pet icon on the cleaning map to see the photos after a cleaning cycle. Jared Hannah/CNET The Dreame X50 Ultra is feature-rich, ideal for pets, obstacles and object avoidance. It's best if you want advanced navigation and mopping, and are willing to pay extra for features like the climbing arms and lowering turret. However, it's not the absolute best at pure vacuuming, especially on carpets, and the software can be a bit quirky. At its full price of around $1,700, the Dreame X50 Ultra is a very expensive robot vacuum. If you highly value its unique features like the climbing ability and advanced furniture navigation, then it could be worth the investment. However, if you're primarily concerned with raw vacuuming power or are on a tighter budget, there are more cost-effective options. It's a luxury product, and the value aligns with its premium features. For better carpet vacuuming performance and a lower price point, the Ecovacs Deebot T30Sor the iRobot Roomba Combo J7 Plus both performed better on carpet and pet hair tests during CNET's lab testing. While all three have vacuum and mopping functionality, the Ecovacs Deebot T30S ($1,400 with a stick vac included) or the iRobot Roomba Combo J7 ($600) are both cheaper than the Dreame X50 Ultra ($1,699). It's worth pointing out though, that the Dreame X50 Ultra is one of the few robot vacuums we've tested at CNET with the ability to climb over objects, surmount spaces and lower itself under furniture. This is the live view mode in the app so that you can see what the robot sees in real time from its front facing camera. It's a neat way to check on your house when you're not home. Jared Hannah/CNET To see how the Dreame X50 compares with other models, check out our list of the best robot vacuums available now.
Fast Company
16-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
How to launch a great product: advice from a Google exec
A few years ago, our team was preparing to launch a major update when we hit an unexpected snag. The accessibility team flagged that our new voice search feature—while technically impressive—was failing users with speech impairments. Marketing was eager to highlight the cutting-edge AI capabilities. Engineering was proud of the breakthrough. But for a significant portion of our community, this 'innovation' was actually a step backward. This moment crystallized something I'd been thinking about for years: product development never happens in a vacuum. Every decision we make sits at the intersection of three powerful forces I call the three P's: People (the communities we serve), Politics (the internal dynamics and external pressures that shape our work), and Product (the manifestation of our choices, trade-offs, and values). Great product leadership isn't about avoiding these tensions—it's about navigating them without losing sight of our purpose or compromising our values. The companies that do this well don't just build better products; they build products that genuinely improve lives and change society. P1: People—The Customer at the Center When we talk about 'users,' we often default to thinking about individual consumers. But every product decision ripples outward, affecting not just individual users but entire communities, families, and society at large. Take something as seemingly simple as a default setting. When we design the TV home screen, we're not just organizing apps—we're shaping how families spend their evening hours together. Do we prioritize the latest blockbuster movies, or do we surface educational content? Do we make it easy to discover local news, or do we default to global content? These choices affect real conversations happening in real living rooms. The rise of inclusive design has taught us that accessibility isn't just a moral imperative—it's a business one. When we design voice controls with speech impairments in mind, we didn't just serve users with disabilities; we created features that helped anyone using the TV in a noisy environment or trying to search quietly while others were sleeping. Designing for the margins often leads to innovations that benefit everyone. But where it gets tricky is balancing individual desires with collective needs. Our data might show that users spend more time on certain types of content, but does that mean we should optimize for maximum engagement, or should we consider the broader implications of what we're promoting and how do we balance these? The biggest risk I see among product teams is designing for internal stakeholders instead of external users. It's easy to fall into the trap of building what impresses investors, what satisfies regulatory requirements, or what looks good in quarterly reviews. But products built for boardrooms rarely succeed in living rooms. P2: Politics—The Power Structures Around the Work Let's be honest about something most product leaders don't like to discuss: every product decision is political, in the sense that it involves navigating competing interests, conflicting priorities, and power structures both inside and outside our organizations. Internally, we're constantly balancing conflicting roadmaps. The business development team wants partnerships that drive revenue. The engineering team wants to optimize for performance. The design team advocates for user experience. Legal wants to minimize risk. Each perspective is valid, but they often point in different directions. I learned this lesson early in my career when we were deciding whether to optimize for channel placement. The partnership team saw revenue opportunities. The user experience team worried about bloatware. The content team wanted to ensure quality standards. The regulatory team flagged antitrust concerns. No single stakeholder was wrong, but finding a path forward required understanding how all these perspectives intersected. External politics add another layer of complexity. We operate in an environment of increasing regulatory scrutiny, shifting cultural expectations, and evolving privacy norms. What was acceptable product behavior five years ago may be considered invasive today. What satisfies regulators in one market may be irrelevant or counterproductive in another. The challenge isn't to eliminate these political pressures—that's impossible. The challenge is to navigate them with transparency and integrity while staying true to our core mission. This means having difficult conversations about trade-offs, being clear about our decision-making criteria, and sometimes accepting that we can't make everyone happy. P3: Product—The Expression of Everything Here's the reality that many product leaders struggle to accept: your product is never neutral. Every feature you build, every default you set, every interaction you design is an expression of your values and priorities. The product is where the rubber meets the road—where all the considerations about people and politics get translated into actual user experiences. Consider the fundamental tensions that every product grapples with: privacy versus personalization, freedom of expression versus content moderation, centralized control versus decentralized empowerment. There's no 'right' answer to these trade-offs, but there are thoughtful approaches and thoughtless ones. When we were designing product recommendation engines, we had to wrestle with this directly. More personalization meant better recommendations but also meant collecting more data about viewing habits. How much personalization was worth how much privacy? The answer wasn't in our analytics—it was in our values and our understanding of what our users genuinely needed from the product. The most important product decisions are often invisible to users. What you choose to default to, what you decide to hide, what you make easy versus what you make difficult—these are ethical and strategic choices that shape behavior in profound ways. Every 'minor' UX decision is actually a statement about what you think is important. This is especially true as we integrate AI into our products. The algorithms we build don't just process data—they shape attention, influence decisions, and ultimately affect how people spend their time and mental energy. With that power comes responsibility. The Two Questions That Cut Through Complexity After years of navigating these tensions, I've come to rely on two core questions that can cut through almost any complexity: 'What do our customers really want?' 'What's the best strategy for meeting our goals in a way that is in line with our values?' These might sound simple, but they're deceptively powerful. The magic happens when you ask both questions together. The first question forces us to look beyond surface-level data and really understand the deeper needs and contexts of the people we serve. The second question ensures that we're not just chasing metrics or market opportunities, but building something we can be proud of. The 3Ps—people, politics, and product—will always be in motion, and they'll often be in tension with each other. But the tension is where the interesting work happens. It's where we're forced to think more deeply, design more thoughtfully, and lead more intentionally. True product leadership means being willing to have difficult conversations, to push back on stakeholders when necessary, and to make decisions that serve long-term value over short-term convenience. The companies that navigate the 3Ps well don't just build successful products—they build products that make the world a little bit better. The choices we make in conference rooms and code reviews ultimately play out in living rooms and communities around the world. In a time when technology's impact on society is under increasing scrutiny, that's not just good business. It's essential leadership.
Finextra
15-07-2025
- Business
- Finextra
How The Future of Data is Personalisation & Scalability
Stepping away from a busy Communify Fincentric User Experience 2025, Nichole Nakashian, Chief Operating Officer, Communify Fincentric spoke with FinextraTV on the process behind product development. Discussing security and customer protection, Nakashian explains how events help to contextualise the importance of products and how the future will feature higher data personalisation and quality data for heightened scalability.
Geek Wire
15-07-2025
- Business
- Geek Wire
Seattle startup Zucca raises $5M to help food brands launch products faster with AI
GeekWire's startup coverage documents the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial scene. Sign up for our weekly startup newsletter , and check out the GeekWire funding tracker and venture capital directory . Zucca team members, from left: Carly Rector, acting CTO; Karen Huh, CEO and co-founder; Theo Han, engineer; Nana Gilbert-Baffoe, CTO; Matt Jinkens, engineer; and Jesse Guzman, COO and co-founder. (Zucca Photo) Karen Huh spent two decades and thousands of hours launching consumer products for companies like Starbucks and Bulletproof Coffee. So when she saw a prototype that Pioneer Square Labs was cooking up — using AI to bring new products to market faster and more efficiently — she recognized the value immediately. 'It was a light bulb that went off,' she said. Huh is the CEO and co-founder of Zucca, a new Seattle-based startup and PSL spinout emerging from stealth with a $5 million seed round. Zucca's software uses generative AI to help food and beverage companies reimagine product development — making it a parallel process rather than a sequential one. Instead of waiting for concepts, R&D, sourcing, and business planning to happen one after the other, Zucca lets users manage all those steps simultaneously in a centralized workspace. The platform integrates internal and external data, automates key functions, and systematically manages details or requirements as changes happen in real-time. The end result is a tool that turns product development into a 'symphony orchestra,' rather than a baton-passing relay race, as Huh put it. Zucca's main competition isn't other startups, but classic productivity tools like Google Docs and Excel, Huh said. 'We're enabling folks to get smarter, catch things before they fall through the cracks, and be able to do so much more than they would have been able to do before,' she said. Huh also billed Zucca as way to 'de-risk' product development — enabling teams to take more swings at different ideas. 'Zucca provides the ability to take a deeper run at a number of concepts in parallel, so that you don't have to put all your eggs in one basket,' Huh said. Zucca generates new product concepts within minutes based on product guardrails. (Zucca Image) Zucca is built on models from OpenAI and Anthropic to help create a unique architecture that 'understands the workflow for food and beverage product development,' said CTO and co-founder Jesse Guzman. Interest in AI-powered product innovation is rising. The Wall Street Journal recently spotlighted how CPG giant Clorox is using AI to accelerate development of Hidden Vally Ranch flavors and other products. Zucca is initially targeting mid-market CPG brands and R&D firms. The company has about a dozen beta users and is transitioning to paid customers. Huh was previously CEO at Joywell Foods; Guzman was most recently a principal at PSL and also spent time at Rain, NerdWallet, and Prophet. Zucca was previously featured in GeekWire's Startup Radar spotlight. It has five employees. Acre Venture Partners led the seed round, which included PSL Ventures, AIStudio Fund (funded by Mayfield), Sugar Mountain Capital (holding company behind Beecher's Handmade Cheese), and other angel investors. 'As we were getting to know the team, we put them in front of a range of customers, and the response from people we've known for many years was so clear that we quickly wanted to ensure the company is well-funded,' Lucas Mann, managing partner at Acre in Southern California, told GeekWire.
