The Oregonian newspaper and its website OregonLive.com keep very close watch on Intel's hirings and firings, in keeping with the company's status as one of the state's largest employers. The site recently published details of an unpublicized layoff of 1,155 US employees -- 2.3 percent of domestic workers. That's not at all unusual -- Intel's headcount waxes and wanes constantly … [Read more...]
Chicago’s TechNexus Picks 13 Wearables Companies for DHS Incubator
We wrote a few months ago about a call for applications to a Department of Homeland Security EMERGE program to develop wearables for first responders. TechNexus, a Chicago "venture collaborative" has picked 13 companies to work with it and DHS: BearTek: wearable tech built into task-specific gloves to wirelessly control devices. Energy Bionics: Develops, manufactures and … [Read more...]
Samsung Sneaks Next Gear Smartwatch
Samsung held a press shindig today to show off its latest cellphone and phablet (a word that our spell-checker seems to think is OK), and used the occasion to give a quick look at the Gear S2 smartwatch, which it won't formally introduce until next month. The round-faced S2, like most Samsung smartwatches, looks like it will be based on the Tizen operating system. Nice watch … [Read more...]
Salesforce & Dev Partners Make Early Bets on the Apple Watch
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...]
Omate Pivots to Jewelry With Ungaro
Omate was an early entrant into the smartwatch business, with a well-constructed analog device that included a microSIM and did not require a tethered phone. It still sells those watches, but has now entered the designer jewelry business with the French couture house Ungaro. The Ungaro x Omate is a notification ring that vibrates when you get a message from one person that … [Read more...]
Google Reorganizes into Alphabet [Updated]
There are some press releases that make you check to be sure that it's not April 1, but no: Google says it's re-organizing itself into a company called Alphabet. Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be CEO and president, respectively. Sundar Pichai, whose star has been rising rapidly at Google, becomes CEO of Google itself. The idea of Alphabet is to break out the moon-shot stuff … [Read more...]
Investors Say HTC Is Worth Only Its Cash Value
It may be the ultimate financial diss; the value of mobile manufacturer HTC has dipped below the value of its cash on hand. Inventory, brand, intellectual property? Worthless, the market says. Maybe even less. Bloomberg points out today that HTC's stock is trading so low earlier today that the company's market capitalization is less than its cash. Not long ago, HTC said it … [Read more...]
Blame Apple? U.S. Watch Sales Drop 11 Pct, Most in 7 Years
The market research company NPD says watch sales in the United States in June dropped 11 percent from the year before, to $375 million. Fred Levin, head of NPD's luxury practice, told Bloomberg that watches that cost between $50 and $1000 suffered across-the-board declines, with a 24 percent decline in the $100 to $199 range. Although Levin said that Apple "is going to gain … [Read more...]
Outlook Comes to the Apple Watch
It's not you'll be doing most of your work on it (unless you're really obsessed), but Microsoft has brought a new version of Outlook to the Apple Watch. We haven't tried it out yet, but this new version apparently works more or less like any e-mail notification on the watch, with the addition of quick replies and the ability to dictate responses. As good as the watch's voice … [Read more...]