The NYTimes apparently had the story first: Keith Packingham, Samsung's chief product office for mobile, has left. It's unclear whether he quit or was fired, where he's going or how long the change had been afoot. Forbes has some good background about the guy and his tenure. Besides being in charge of Samsung's phones and tablets, Packingham was in charge of the new Galaxy … [Read more...]
Battery Tech: FLCB
We may be late on this, but we're hearing about a new flexible battery technology -- Lithium-Ceramic -- from a Taiwanese company ProLogium (be warned that the page likes to pop up lots of dialogs welcoming you). The batteries, called FLCB, are flexible and can apparently be made credit-card thin, as this video illustrates: ProLogium also has posted a video showing how … [Read more...]
Listening to Breath
This article had us with this snippet: Using 10 years of data, which amounts to over 10,000 recordings of various people’s breathing... BreathResearch has a KickStarter campaign to raise $30,000 to build a Bluetooth smartphone headset that also tracks the sound of your breath. The interesting idea is that your breath is an important indicator of your health; by comparing how … [Read more...]
Report: Microsoft to buy into wearables biz for $200M
Techcrunch is reporting this afternoon that Microsoft is negotiating to buy "the secretive Osterhout Design Group" for about $200 million. Osterhout's a military contractor that does a lot of work on stuff like heads-up displays. The Techcrunch piece has some drawings from Osterhout patents. Very Terminator looking. It's not clear how many people or what … [Read more...]
Hexoskin shirt goes Indigogo
Micro-investing seems to be the way a lot of wearable startups are raising money to build their second prototypes. Hexoskin, looking for $100,000 at Indigogo, looks maybe a little more advanced and thoughtful than most. The Hexoskin washable and strapless shirt has sensors that track movement, respiration, and heart activity -- just the stuff that athletes need to know … [Read more...]
Kiwi Wearable for “Developers and Normal People”
Kiwi Wearable Technologies, based in Toronto, has an motion monitor detector with what sounds like some interesting APIs. Rather than counting steps, the Kiwi Move records angular movement and can transmit real-time information to the internet; developers can use the information, the company said, to allow users to interactively create music, or to record dance, or to control … [Read more...]
Here’s Calico, but what is it?
Google today launched a new company called Calico, with a minor mission to extend human life. (Sorry, no link to the company.) It's headed by Art Levinson, who also chairs the boards of Apple and Genentech,so you know there's not a great deal of grass growing under his feet. In his announcement, made in a charmingly old-fashioned manner through an interview with Time … [Read more...]
Gassee on the Apple iWatch
Jean-Louis Gassee was one of the grown-ups at Apple when the company nearly ran onto the shoals. Though not always right, his insights about the company, its direction, and its thought processes are usually worth reading. Just before the latest iPhone announcements, he weighed in on why an iWatch isn't as interesting a product as one might think. Writing before the event, … [Read more...]
Smart Watches Old News to Casio
The idea of wristwatch communication is at least as old as, well, Chester Gould and Dick Tracy. Apple may have taken all the air out of the market with hardly a word and without a product, but the NYTimes points out that until now it's been the more-or-less-anonymous Casio that's done most of the grunt work in connected watches. I remember a Timex Datalink watch from 20 … [Read more...]