Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky gave an exclusive interview to The Verge, in which he said that his company has sold 1,000,000 watches, and that 2015 will bring new products and a new software platform. Pebble's in a pretty difficult spot. It more or less pioneered the notification device use case for wearables, and but saw Google wield its sharp elbows in the market with Android … [Read more...]
Luxottica Seals Wide-Ranging Development Deal with Intel for Glasses; Doesn’t Rule Out Google
Luxottica, the world's largest maker of eyeglasses, has a deal with Google to make Glass-derived products. But that's not keeping the Italian optical goods giant from working with other companies, like Intel. Intel and Luxottica announced today a particularly wide-ranging development partnership. The two companies will establish an R&D lab in California, the New York … [Read more...]
Are Glass’s Best Days Behind It?
Reuters noticed late last week that all is not well in the world of Google Glass. Google CEO Sergey Brin recently walked into a high-profile event barefaced, they note. Glass is available on eBay for cheap and the project seems to resolutely to be resisting commercial release despite high-powered commercial partners. Seemingly released by the Reuters piece, bloggers spent the … [Read more...]
Google Ships Google Fit App
We wrote in August about Google's publishing an SDK to keep track of health and data; the company announced today that a Google Fit app is now available. Android only, of course, although there'll be a web interface that's not quite working as of this writing. The Google Fit app consolidates all your health tracking data into a single place associated with your e-mail … [Read more...]
Offline Music, GPS and Watchfaces Coming to Android Wear This Year
Now that the first Android Wear watches are on the market, it's time for Google to announce what's next for the software. A post on Google's official blog said today that AW watches will be able to play back music stored on them over Bluetooth headphones, without the need to tether to a smartphone. Also, AW will enable GPS functions, allowing wearers to not get lost -- or, at … [Read more...]
Alcon to Make Google Contact Lenses
We wrote a few months ago about a Google-developed contact lens that could analyze tears to determine glucose levels in diabetes sufferers. Novartis's Alcon division says today that it's reached a deal to license the technology and build them. Under the agreement, Google will develop the electronics, which will do the chemistry and send the information to a smart phone. … [Read more...]
Glass Roundup: New Frames, New Market, New Boss?
We're probably going to hear a lot from Google this week because its I/O developers conference kicks off this week. But before the balloon goes up, there are some small Glass-related items to report on. The long-expected Diane von Furstenberg frames for Glass are now available. For $300 above the $1500 base price, they're actually not bad, especially if you like the hipster … [Read more...]
New Android Wear Features Video From Google
Expect to see a lot of Android Wear information (not necessarily "news" as most of us understand the term) in the next couple of weeks. Google has just released a video for developers showing more of the user interface, which is unsurprisingly based on its concept of "cards." The video comes in advance of the Google I/O developers conference, at which there will be lots of … [Read more...]
Forbes: Google Is Set to Dive Into the Health Data Market
Forbes has "multiple sources with knowledge of the company's plans" who say that Google will soon a health data aggregation service called Google Fit. Supposedly slated to launch later this month at the Google I/O conference, Google Fit is apparently a set of APIs that will link equipment like fitness trackers through the Google cloud. If it's as described, Google Fit would … [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...]