Big companies have been trying hard to make the long-awaited smartwatch "revolution" happen, so tick tock, what's taking so long?
Smartwatches are just not very smart when left to their own devices - they need to be connected to a smartphone for full functionality.
While the industry is growing quickly, nearly all still need a smartphone's Bluetooth connection to tell you much more than just telling the time.
Apple's smartwatch is rumoured to exist already... or not exist at all. Or exist sometime soon
What a smartwatch could potentially do, at least to thousands of children in the 80s, was typified by the wristwatch David Hasselhoff's character used in Knight Rider to control his car.
But the industry is still so new there are many different approaches.
"Smartwatches can already be split into three or four categories," says senior analyst Josh Flood, of ABI Research.
"There are notification watches - the really basic ones which just link to the phone, voice-capable smart watches which is a really cool idea and health and fitness smartwatches for heart rate and running."
Others see even greater potential.
"Through NFC [near field communication], could you transfer travel cards to the watch?" says Skooks Pong, vice president of Synapse, a company working with Nike to develop its FuelBand activity tracker/watch hybrid.
Now here’s the invention that we’ve all been waiting for: A device that instantly charges our cell phones.
A gadget like this might soon be on its way thanks to a bright 18-year-old from Saratoga, Calif., who was recently honored at an international science fair.
Eesha Khare is the mind behind a super-powerful and tiny gizmo that packs more energy into a small space, delivers a charge more quickly, and holds that charge longer than the typical battery. Khare showed off her so-called super-capacitor last week at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Ariz. In her demonstration, she showed it powering a light-emitting diode, or LED light, but the itty-bitty device could fit inside cell phone batteries, delivering a full charge in 20-30 seconds. It takes several hours for the average cell phone to fully charge.
Khare also pointed out that the super-capacitor “can last for 10,000 charge cycles compared to batteries which are good for only 1,000 cycles.”
Khare’s invention is flexible and could be used in roll-up devices and might even have applications for car batteries.
The judges at the science fare were wowed by Khare’s brilliant invention and the senior at Lynbrook High School in San Jose received the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award and $50,000.
“With this money I will be able to pay for my college and also work on making scientific advancements,” Khare told a cheering audience after receiving the prize money.
I’m sure her parents are proud and thrilled!
SEATTLE – A new touchscreen payment system – designed to frustrate data thieves -- should start appearing in hundreds of restaurants across the nation over the next few months.
The system, called RAIL, introduces a novel way for restaurant patrons to pay for a meal using a proprietary mobile device designed expressly to frustrate data thieves.
"RAIL allows you to self-swipe your card, which is really important for security, and, just as importantly, the system encrypts each transaction so the restaurant never sees or stores your credit card number," says Joe Snell, co-founder and CEO of Viableware, the Seattle start-up that raised $6 million in funding to develop this new technology over the past 2 years.
Almost every major tech company is making a bet on smartwatches.
We've heard rumors of an Apple iWatch for a while now. We have knowledge of Google working on a smartwatch. Executives at Microsoft's suppliers in Asia told Bloomberg last month that the company asked them to ship displays for touch-enabled watch devices. LG is reportedly working on a smartwatch, and so is Samsung.
But if any company is going to succeed in the market, it sounds like it's going to be Samsung or Apple, or maybe even both.
"Samsung and Apple are traditional hardware companies and have spent nearly the last decade combining powerful technologies into the smartphone," Skooks Pong, VP of technology at Synapse, tells Business Insider.
With companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung all reportedly working on smartwatches and other wearable technologies, some people have said that it marks the end of the smartphone.
But smartphones are going to be around for quite a while, Synapse VP of Technology Skooks Pong tells Business Insider.
Cookie Monster's Interview with Impatient Optimists (The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Blog) about his new gig with Sesame Workshop promoting health and sanitation in Bangladesh, India, and Nigeria.
"Me cookie eating reputation precedes me. Of course me have ritual! First me wash hands. This part very important because it help keep me healthy. Me not sure exactly how long me wash, but me sing the ABCs slowly and when me get to Z, it time to rinse and then look out, om nom nom nom nom. Me also like to share me cookies with Elmo and Big Bird. Little known secret, a birdseed cookie is delicious."
For all those nerds out there who still love to play with Legos: Tobias Tøstesen's amazing floor to ceiling chandelier made from 8,000 clear Lego window pieces.
The speakers are one-of-a-kind, 3-D printed on an Objet Connex 500 at Autodesk and endowed with an audioreactive LED system by LumiGeek, a new company that makes Arduino-compatible microcontrollers for an LED development kit. Built by LumiGeek founder John “Parts” Taylor and Autodesk applied innovation engineer Evan Atherton, the speakers are both a drool-worthy experiment and an example of what 3-D printing can do now.
With about $2,200 worth of 3-D printed material, the cost is nearly prohibitive. Made possible by the ultra-high-end Connex, which can print two different materials in seamless integration — and thus a nearly continuous spectrum of materials by mixing the two — the speaker housings incorporate a web of flexible black material with hard translucent plastic interspersed on the grid. The result is two cantaloupe-sized hollow balls that look a little like futuristic blooming onions, and sound pretty darn good too.
Skooks Pong, Senior VP of Technology, stole the cover of EEWeb's Pulse Magazine. Inside is an insightful interview and article detailing Synapse's skill and work ethic. Also featured in this issue is Ziv Magoz, Electrical Engineer, explaining our partnership with Viableware, and the product we developed for them: Rail.
A team from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology created a "smelling screen" with a display capable of producing localized smells.
-Darren Quick, Gizmag
