It's hardly news that Samsung is serious about the wearables market, but it now appears that it intends to put its considerable global weight behind a health-tracking platform and a set of health-related APIs. The Simband reference device and the SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interface) platform tie together sensors, software, and cloud. The president and chief … [Read more...]
Who’s Making How Much Money in the Wearable Band Market
We've been thinking a lot about the recent Canalys report about market share in the wearables business, and we've been trying to tease some actual revenue numbers based in the results they published. This is valuable because these companies are either private and don't publish revenues, or are public and don't break this market down in their financials. Canalys said that … [Read more...]
Samsung Files Wristwear Patents
A patent application is not a product (let alone a patent), but it's worth noting that Samsung's been revealed to have filed a few applications about wristwear interfaces. The filings, uncovered and collected by SammyToday and better explained by 9to5Google, seem to cover a lot of UI ground: the appearance of screens and interesting ways of interacting with the device using … [Read more...]
WSJ Says Samsung Will Ship Wrist Communicator This Summer
The Wall Street Journal is saying that Samsung, which already has several bits of wristware in its product line, will come out this summer with a wrist-worn communicator that will not require a cellphone. Citing "people familiar with the company's plans," the Journal says the device will run the open-source Tizen operating system (like the Gear Fit and Gear 2, but unlike the … [Read more...]
Google Exec Changes Point to Glass Productization
Some personnel changes that have just come to light among executives involved with Google Glass make it look like Google means to turn its widely heralded experiment into an actual product sooner rather than later. Adrian Wong, a lead electrical engineer on the project, has left to join visor company Oculus, his LinkedIn profile says. Wong's profile lists two projects at … [Read more...]
Project Florida: Data-Driven Wearable Startup With Serious Cred
GigaOM is on the trail of a well-pedigreed launch company calling itself (for the time being) Project Florida. Clicking that link is distinctly non-informative, but reporter Janko Roettgers has been doing some digging and found this from a job posting: You will play a major role in defining our company’s first offering, a wearable piece of tech. This wearable sensor device … [Read more...]
Report: No Apple Wearables at WWDC
Apple's big annual geekfest is its Worldwide Developers' Conference, slated this year for June 2-6. It's usually focused on software, although there are usually small hardware-related announcements. With all the smoke surrounding Apple's likely entry into the wearables markets, there are those who thought that WWDC would be the Grand Unveiling. Re/code says otherwise. It's … [Read more...]
Funding Roundup: Owlet, APX Labs
Two small funding stories of note: Owlet, which makes an instrumented baby bootie that tracks skin temperature, heart rate, blood ox, and sleep data, has raised $1.85 million in seed funding. R/GA and Techstars, which incubated the company, participated in the round. Owlet, which costs $249, hopes to ship the summer, company officials say. APX Labs, a software company … [Read more...]
Curved Li-Ion Batteries from Samsung
It's not always the way electronic companies work, but it makes sense that Samsung, which makes and sells the curved Gear Fit fitness tracker, would also make and sell a curved Li-Ion battery. The Samsung SDI carries 230 mAh of power, which is not a lot compared to a smartphone (2,000 mAh and up is pretty typical) but is rather a lot for wristwear. Now the question is, what … [Read more...]
Walgreens’s Mobile App Connects to Wearables, Rewards Healthy Behavior
People who use Walgreens's iPhone and Android apps have long been able to renew their prescriptions with the app, and the company opened up its API to third parties last year. We're now seeing that the app connects to a wide range of wearable devices -- and the company is paying customers for healthy behaviors. The Walgreens Balance Rewards app will pull data from devices … [Read more...]