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...]
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...]
Fitbit Leads the Wearables World: Canalys
Anyone can project billions of dollars in the future, but counting actual shipping products is hard. The consulting firm Canalys reports that Fitbit shipped nearly half of all wearable bands in the world in the first quarter of 2014. Overall, Canalys reported, 2.7 million wearable bands shipped worldwide last quarter, and Fitbit's strength was despite the skin rash-related … [Read more...]
Samsung Backs Away from Android; Will Ship Android Wear Watches This Year Anyway
When you're as big and aggressive as Samsung, you can afford to place big bets on several different things (although that strategy didn't work out so well for Nokia, did it?). Yoon Han-kil, the senior vice president of Samsung's product strategy team, told Reuters that his company will ship wristwear based on the Android Wear operating system later this year -- even though … [Read more...]
What Banks Think About Wearable Tech
Interesting story in American Banker about what and how banks are thinking about wearable technologies. Most of them are at least dabbling with wrist-based apps -- certainly with the announcement of Android Wear, but several were looking well before that. The story centers around notifications and information -- checking balances and the like -- although a couple of banks … [Read more...]
Can’t Google Stick With Anything? Why To Be Wary of Android Wear
We may be approaching End Times, because this is now the second time in recent memory that we've agreed with Robert Scoble. This time, Scoble has an opinion piece on Huffington Post, questioning whether Google has the ability to stick with anything beyond its core search products. His evidence is scant -- Larry Page wasn't wearing Google Glass at TED this week, therefore … [Read more...]
Pebble CEO Talks About the Android Wear World
So let's say you're the CEO of a highly touted startup that's just clearing the runway, when Google announces that it's creating an ecosystem in your product category that you're not part of. What do you do? One thing you and your investors do is give an optimistic interview to a publication that's as high on the journalistic foodchain as you can manage. Say, Fortune … [Read more...]
Inside the Moto360 Design Process
There's a nice interview in The Verge with Jim Wicks, the design chief on the upcoming Moto360 smartwatch, the flagship hardware of the Android Wear OS. (Remember: none of this -- hardware or software -- will ship for months.) The team, of course, had a lot of choices: mimic smartwatches that already existed, re-invent the idea of timepieces, or something else. They decided to … [Read more...]
Google Enters the Real-World Wearables Market with Android Wear
Now we know for sure: Google Glass was a toy. Google announced today its entry into the practical world of wearables, with Android Wear. This version of the Android operating system will essentially expand on notification devices like the Pebble watch or the Samsung Gear. Where those devices drive information from a phone to a wearable device like a wristwatch, Android Wear … [Read more...]