Here's an interesting article from the Communications of the ACM (the ACM is a major professional group for computer scientists) about the various uses of wearables to change people's behavior: getting them to quit or limit drinking, keeping them from wandering off, and so on. A certain amount of the magic of such devices, as pointed out by one interviewee, is to find ways … [Read more...]
MIDI Controller Jackets from Mexico City
We sometimes get so caught up in product and sales that we forget the creative side of wearables. A cool reminder crossed our desk today: a Mexican company called Machina that makes jackets and hoodies chock full of movement sensors that send out MIDI signals. The result: clothing you can use to make music. (We're embedding the video here, but take a look at the whole page; … [Read more...]
Researchers Explore Capacitors Instead of Batteries to Power Wearables
Batteries are a well-known problem for wearable tech. Researchers at Rice University have developed a flexible and rechargeable power resource that bypass batteries entirely in favor of supercapacitors. James Tour, a chemist at Rice, suggests using an electrochemical capacitor a hundredth-of-an-inch thick to store power. The capacitor is easier to build than a battery, Tour … [Read more...]
Salesforce Brings Wearables Into the Enterprise with Salesforce Wear
We've long believed that the most exciting thing about wearables isn't the Quantified Self movement as much as it is how wearables can change the relationship between people and entities. (It's much the same as early personal computers: standalone computer were much less interesting than computers connected to the Internet.) Salesforce -- the world's top CRM platform -- … [Read more...]
A Big Letdown At Computex
Not all trade shows or conferences are worth the time. We wrote briefly about Computex -- the big Taiwanese tech show -- last week, but CNet says the show was pretty much a waste for wearables. Frankly, we're not all that surprised. Asian companies in the back corners of big shows like CES or the late lamented Comdex are full of knock-off concepts that we can't believe … [Read more...]
Glazed Conference Day 1: Moving On From Gadgetry
If the wearables business a year ago was about building devices, the first day of the Glazed conference underlined that it's now about building ecosystems. Drawing themes out of a conference is a tricky business because it inevitably overlooks interesting subcurrents. But speaker after speaker talked about how wearables are finding their way into businesses and people's … [Read more...]
Dyson Had A Glass Prototype in 2001
To celebrate its 21st anniversary, Dyson (the vacuum cleaner folks) are talking about some of the projects it's tinkered with over the years but never brought to market. Turns out that one of them was something that looks an awful lot like Google Glass. We're talking 2001 technology, so the electronics, storage, and communications aren't to contemporary standards. But the … [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...]
Wearables Market to Dip, Then Surge, says NPD Displaysearch
NPD DisplaySearch has a thoughtful analysis of the wearables market over the next five or six years, predicting a slump next year -- the depth and length of which they acknowledge is unpredictable. What's interesting about the Wearable Device Market and Forecast Report is that it offers three different scenarios for market growth. The most pessimistic postulates that … [Read more...]