Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Designed by MIT entrepreneurs, Invincible is the ultimate city-proof bike

Bruce Brown
By
Invincible: City-Proof Bicycle
Fed up with trying to keep their bikes from being stripped or stolen by Boston-area thieves, Massachusetts Institute of Technology entrepreneurs designed a city-proof bike. Fortified’s Invincible has a rust-proof aluminum frame and chain, puncture-resistant tires, and theft-protection features.
Recommended Videos

Fortified Bicycle chairman Slave Menn was an entrepreneurial student in MIT’s Sloan Business School MBA program looking for a worthy problem around which to build a business. Menn was inspired by a friend who was hit by a car that didn’t see him because his bike light had been stolen. This was a problem he and his friends faced in the city every day: how to keep a bicycle from getting trashed or stolen in the city. The result was Fortified Bicycle. Fortified started by selling theft-resistant accessories, and is now launching two models of the Invincible city bike.

Related

A single-speed Invincible 1Speed with caliper brakes starts at $399. That’s the bike Fortified recommends for flat cities like New York and most of Boston. If you live in a hilly city, like Seattle or San Francisco, the Invincible 8Speed with eight Shimano gears and disk brakes starts at $649.

Both Invincible models have rust-proof frames and chains, puncture-resistant tires, weather-proof saddles, and a custom bolt system. To remove the seat, handlebars, wheels, or any of the optional accessories — including lights, fenders, and a bike rack — requires a special screwdriver that works with the custom bolts that hold everything together.

The lightweight aluminum frame makes it easier to carry your bike inside at home or work than most steel-framed bikes, but there is still a chance a determined thief could steal it, which is why the company offers one-, three-, and five-year theft protection plans. If your bike is stolen, report the theft to the police and alert Fortified. The company has staff that watches eBay and Craigslist for your area to see if your bike shows up on either site. If Fortified is not able to find your bike within one business day, you get a brand new bike for free, except for a shipping-and-handling fee. Fortified Theft Protection plans cost $99 for one year, $248 for three years, and $348 for five years.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Bruce Brown
Bruce Brown
Contributing Editor
Digital Trends Contributing Editor Bruce Brown is a member of the Smart Homes and Commerce teams. Bruce uses smart devices…
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more
4 simple pieces of tech that helped me run my first marathon
Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar displaying pace information.

The fitness world is littered with opportunities to buy tech aimed at enhancing your physical performance. No matter your sport of choice or personal goals, there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down. It'll cost plenty of money, but the gains can be marginal -- and can honestly just be a distraction from what you should actually be focused on. Running is certainly susceptible to this.

A few months ago, I ran my first-ever marathon. It was an incredible accomplishment I had no idea I'd ever be able to reach, and it's now going to be the first of many I run in my lifetime. And despite my deep-rooted history in tech, and the endless opportunities for being baited into gearing myself up with every last product to help me get through the marathon, I went with a rather simple approach.

Read more