There are skeptics aplenty about the Apple Watch, but Salesforce is certainly a believer. The enterprise cloud services giant was part of the Apple Watch launch and is promoting Salesforce Wear as a tool for developers to create apps for the device that also sync with the Salesforce Cloud. The company hosted a media event this week in San Francisco to talk about 20 new … [Read more...]
Nymi Completes First Commercial Transaction Using Heartbeat ID
We've written before about Nymi, which makes a wristband that uses your unique heart pattern to authenticate your identity. For the first time, Nymi has been used to make a credit card payment. The payment was made on July 10 as part of a pilot project with TD Bank and MasterCard in Toronto, Ottawa, and Regina (that's in Saskatchewan -- north of North Dakota and Montana). In … [Read more...]
Hajj Wearable to Help Pilgrims Navigate
It may be difficult for non-Muslims to understand the scale of the Hajj, when more 2 million people descend on Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia each year to participate one of the holiest obligations of Islamic life. It's a logistic nightmare -- housing, transportation, food, crowd control, health care, policing, and other governmental functions like visas, all need to be … [Read more...]
Apple’s Earnings Are Up; Doesn’t Break Out Watch Sales [Updated]
Apple announced its second quarter earnings today, up 38 percent supported by big sales increases in China and strong iPhone demand. The company did not break out Apple Watch sales, lumping them instead with Apple TV, Beats products, and iPods. Sales for that group of products grew 49 percent in the second quarter, to $2.64 billion. CEO Tim Cook said watch sales were … [Read more...]
Anandtech on Apple Watch: A Geeky Thumbs-Up
Anandtech was one of the web's first deeply geeky tech sites, and its review of the Apple Watch is about what you'd expect: long on speeds and feeds and kind of unsophisticated about usability case. The bottom line: the Watch is the first wearable to sell the millennial author on the idea of wristware, but the overall package is first-generation. In typical Anandtech style, … [Read more...]
The Apple Watch Story May Be Turning Back
We wrote last week about how the media's narrative seems to be turning against the Apple Watch, despite a lack of good evidence that the watch is "failing." The more mainstream press finally appears to have caught up with this story, applying some actual fact and reporting to the story. And guess what? The watch is doing pretty well after all. Re/code dug a little into … [Read more...]
Woven Niobium Super-capacitors Could Help Power Wearables
The question of how to power tech-enabled fabrics is one of the larger problems facing smart garment makers. Science Daily is reporting on researchers who have made yarns from niobium nanowires to create super-capacitors that may do some of the job. There has been a fair amount of work on using graphene as super-capacitors, but this research suggests that niobium, which is a … [Read more...]
The Third Shoe Drops: Jawbone Sues Fitbit in the ITC
Jawbone said it would, and how it did: sued Fitbit in the International Trade Court in an attempt to keep Fitbit's products from being imported. Since Fitbits (like most, if not all, electronics products) are made abroad, a victory would essentially keep Fitbit off the U.S. market. Jawbone has previously sued Fitbit, the market leader in smart bands, for poaching its … [Read more...]
Is the Apple Watch Really Failing?
In the slow days of summer, it seems like journalists sometimes distract themselves from watching cat videos by writing apocalyptic stories about how everything on their beat is going to hell. Lately, there's been a spate of clickbait headlines (including this one) about the Apple Watch and how it's failing in the market -- more or less on schedule of reporters' typical … [Read more...]
History of Wearables On Display at Museum
For most of us, "history" as it relates to wearable technology goes back about three years. But in fact, wearable tech has been around for decades, and curators at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, have put together a nifty exhibit to connect the past of the future. The exhibit is drawn from the collection of Thad Starner, a professor at Georgia Tech who was … [Read more...]