Tech
South Korea’s Edenlux set for U.S. debut of eye-strain wellness device
People around the world now spend hours a day on their smartphones. On average, daily smartphone use exceeds three hours, and for many adults, total screen time climbs to six hours or more, according to research. This constant close-up screen exposure has been linked to a growing list of eye-health issues, including dry and irritated eyes, eye fatigue, blurred vision, headaches, and the worsening of nearsightedness, per reports.
Edenlux, a South Korea–headquartered startup, has developed technology to address eye and ear health issues caused by screen-heavy digital lifestyles.
The company’s mission is personal. Edenlux founder and CEO Sungyong Park knows first-hand what it feels like to lose control of your eyesight. While serving as a military physician, Park received a muscle relaxant injection for severe neck stiffness. It triggered a rare side effect: temporary paralysis of the eye muscles responsible for focusing. Doctors told him there was little to do but wait.
Park didn’t wait. He imported specialized ophthalmic equipment and began retraining his eye muscles himself. Over time, his vision gradually returned. That experience reshaped his understanding of eye health, leading Park, a medical doctor turned entrepreneur, to develop technology to help people protect and restore their vision in a screen-heavy world.
Now, Edenlux is preparing to launch its second wellness device, Eyeary, a daily visual recovery tool aimed at the U.S. market, with a planned Indiegogo launch around the end of March. Unlike medical devices, Edenlux’s products fall under the FDA’s wellness category, allowing them to be described for vision training and general eye health. (The company opted to launch on Indiegogo rather than seek investor funding, Park said, citing sufficient cash reserves to support operations for several years.)
The company’s first product, Otus, launched in 2022 in South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan. The bulky, VR-style device uses lenses to contract and relax the ciliary muscle. Otus has generated $10 million in cumulative revenue, and Edenlux says Eyeary is designed to be faster and easier to use.
“With Otus, users typically took about 12 months to reduce their dependence on reading glasses. Eyeary could shorten that to around six months,” Park claimed.
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Eyeary is also a design leap, he added. It looks like normal glasses, is lighter and more comfortable and the lens system includes 144 diopter focal points, allowing for finer focus adjustments and more precise eye-muscle training. (Otus has five diopter focal points) The device pairs with a mobile app via Bluetooth, collecting usage data and feeding it to Edenlux’s servers. The company analyzes datasets across age, gender, and vision profiles, using AI to predict improvement timelines and customize training programs.
Prolonged screen time can overwork the ciliary muscle, which controls the lens inside the eye. “When people are young, the muscle is strong enough to focus,” Park said. “But constant smartphone use keeps it contracted, and over time, it can weaken, leading to fatigue and vision problems.”
Edenlux has developed a suite of products targeting specific eye conditions, including Otus and Eyeary for visual recovery, Tearmore for dry eye, Lux-S for strabismus, Lumia for myopia prevention, and Heary for auditory recovery. Tearmore, Lux-S, Lumia, and Heary are expected to roll out in Asia, Park said.
Park sees companies like Oura Ring as peers. Both collect human data and provide insights via software, on a subscription model. But while Oura focuses on heart rate and sleep, Edenlux targets vision and hearing health.
Its target customers include all individuals who regularly use smartphones and earphones. “We aim to address the root causes of eye and hearing problems from digital device overuse,” Park said.
Edenlux raised $39 million in its Series A round in 2020 and $60 million in Series B funding in 2022. The company recently established a U.S. subsidiary in Dallas, Texas, where its devices will undergo final assembly.
While Edenlux currently develops and manufactures in-house, it’s exploring partnerships with major tech firms like Apple or Samsung, aiming to integrate its vision-protecting technology with smartphones.
Combining firsthand insight, advanced science, and hardware devices, Edenlux believes that eye health in the digital age is more than a wellness trend – it’s an emerging area in consumer technology.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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