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Top 10 Most Important Wearable Trends in 2017

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Mobile App Development, Technology trends

2016 was a good year for wearables.  According to data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, total shipment volumes reached 19.7 million units in 1Q16, an increase of 67.2% from the 11.8 million units shipped in 1Q15. Ramon Llamas, research manager for IDC’s Wearables team, said that “the wearables market continues to mature and expand.”

Wearable devices still have a long way to go, but the technology has found its way into the hearts of consumers from around the world, who now eagerly await a new generation of products; one that will be sleeker, tighter, and more affordable than the current generation. These two meta-trends—maturation and expansion—will continue to play an important role even in 2017, as we’ll see when we go through our list of top 10 most important wearable trends in 2017.

10. Moving Beyond Smartwatches

For a long time, wearable devices were synonymous with smartwatches. Perhaps it was the influence of decades’ worth of sci-fi movies that caused the wrist to feel like the most sensible place where to put a small, sensor-equipped computer. Maybe it was our deep-rooted love for wristwatches combined with a desire to improve upon the timeless concept.

What matters now is that engineers and designers of wearables realize that our bodies offer plenty more convenient places for wearable devices, such as our fingers and feet. Nimb is a ring with an integrated panic button that can send an alert to friends and family, community members, people nearby, or emergency services. It looks like a beautiful fashion accessory, rather than a state-of-the-art piece of wearable technology, and works in a very discreet manner.

The word discreet has played an equally important role in the design of Ringly, a line of bracelets and rings that connect to smartphones via Bluetooth, effortlessly keeping track of steps, distance, and calories burned—metrics that previously required a person to wear a bulky smartwatch.

Under Armour has shown other footwear manufacturers how to design a good smart shoe capable of tracking time, cadence, duration, distance, splits, and other things in the natural way possible. Others, such as Xiaomi, followed Under Armour’s lead soon after, and we expect to see this trend continue even in 2017.

9. New Metrics

Walking a few hundred extra steps every day is a good way how to lose a few pounds of fat, but it takes much more than that to achieve happiness and balance in life. The upcoming generation of wearable devices is aware of this, and it leverages some of the scientifically proven effects of mindfulness practice on the brain to affect the structure and neural patterns in the brain.

One such device is called Feel. This smart bracelet recognized and tracks your emotions throughout the day and provides you with personalized coaching to help you achieve your emotional well-being goals. It does this by measuring responses from a variety of physiological signals sent by a person’s Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). Vinaya has similar goals, only with a greater emphasis on fashion and style, instead of science and data.

8. Project Soli

According to Google, “Project Soli is developing a new interaction sensor using radar technology. The sensor can track sub-millimeter motions at high speed and accuracy. It fits onto a chip, can be produced at scale and built into small devices and everyday objects.”

Compared to cameras, radar technology has several key advantages. It has a very high positional accuracy, allowing developers to sense the tiniest motions with utmost precision. It can also work through materials, and, above all, the whole technology fits on a single chip with no moving parts, which could break. “It’s a tiny sliver you could balance on your pinky toenail, with four antennas that provide full duplex communication for sending and receiving radar pings,” commented Hakim Raja, Soli’s lead hardware and production engineer.

With Soli, developers can borrow a language based on the metaphors we are already familiar with from physical controls and use it as a way how to interact with virtual objects and user interfaces.

7. The Ability to Power Wearables Through Motion or Body Heat

The limitations imposed by our current battery technology are at the very top of what customers complain about when it comes to modern electronic devices. Most smartphones are happy to work for two consecutive days on a single charge, and smartwatches are nothing to write home about either.

Fortunately, new ways how to generate electricity are just around the corner. “Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new design for harvesting body heat and converting it into electricity for use in wearable electronics,” states the university in a blog post. “Wearable thermoelectric generators (TEGs) generate electricity by making use of the temperature differential between your body and the ambient air,” the university further explains.

Chinese researchers have taken the concept of TEGs and turned it into a flexible, wearable thermocell capable of producing about 0.3 µW of power at 0.7V, which is enough power for a simple e-ink display, for example. Others, such as a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), create devices that can harvests mechanical energy from bending movements and convert it into electrical energy. As demonstrated during a fashion show in Bangkok, these technologies can be used together to develop smart fabrics that can harvest electricity from both the sunshine and the human body. Undoubtedly, they will play a central role in the design of many upcoming wearable devices.

6. Untethered Virtual Reality Experiences

Despite a substantial amount of skepticism, virtual reality headsets have become the coolest tech gift for Christmas 2016, proving to everyone that it’s here to stay and improve. One particular way how all VR experiences can instantly become more immersive is the attainment of what Jim Merrick, Qualcomm’s IoT director, calls “six degrees of freedom.” “We need to get to the couch, where people can consume content, where they already consume content, in the living room,” he argues against VR headsets that tether users to PCs. The ultimate goal is to allow users to move in a 3D space naturally. “If you step forward in the real world, you do [the same] in the virtual one.” Qualcomm’s solution is a reference headset called Qualcomm Snapdragon VR820, which relies on the incredible processing power of their Snapdragon 820 processor and a clarity of a pair of 1440 x 1440 resolution AMOLED panels that support up to 70Hz 4K video playback and a low latency of 18ms. Intel has also revealed their untethered VR and AR platform, Project Alloy. Alloy uses dual RealSense cameras to monitor location and position of objects around the user, promoting the concept of mixed reality. Other big names in the VR game are expected to demonstrate their upcoming untethered VR systems in the near future.

5. A Spiritual Successor to Pebble

One of the hottest tech news stories of the Q4 of 2016 was the acquisition of Pebble by Fitbit, an American manufacturer of fitness products designed to help users stay motivated and improve their health by tracking activity, exercise, food, weight, and sleep. Pebble’s talent and their homegrown smartwatch platform could help Fitbit better compete with Android Wear devices and high-end smartwatches from Apple. Unlike the products carrying the logo of either Google or Apple, both Pebble and Fitbit share data freely with other third-party apps and take a utilitarian approach to aesthetics. The upcoming successor to Pebble smartwatches is likely going to focus on health and fitness tracking while staying faithful to the original design philosophy, which helped Pebble rack up over $10 million in Kickstarter backings, becoming one of the biggest projects to date.

4. The Comeback of Smartglasses

In the world where the hype surrounding the initial release of Google Glass have fizzled out and morphed into skepticism about the entire concept, Snap Inc. have released an instant cult classic and single-handedly resurrected smartglasses from the ashes. Spectacles, a pair of funky video-recording sunglasses that take pictures and record video from the perspective of their wearer, removed everything that was nerdy and unappealing about Google Glass and replaced it with sheer, even if flawed, fun. After seeing the incredible success of Snap Inc’s Spectacles, other tech and sunglasses manufacturers, such as RaptorAR and Vuzix, have decided to join the party with sharply focused products. Apple is rumored to be working on a pair of smartglasses as well, so we have a lot we can look forward to in 2017.

3. Project Jacquard

“Project Jacquard makes it possible to weave touch and gesture interactivity into any textile using standard, industrial looms. Everyday objects such as clothes and furniture can be transformed into interactive surfaces,” states the team behind this amazing technology on the official website. In collaboration with their industrial partners, the creators of Project Jacquard have developed new conductive yarns that combine thin, metallic alloys with natural and synthetic yarns like cotton, polyester, or silk. These yarns are supposed to be indistinguishable from the traditional yarns that are used to produce fabrics today. When woven throughout the textile or at precise locations, Jacquard would provide manufacturers of wearable devices with a very discreet way how to capture touch and gesture data and wirelessly transmit them to mobile phones or other devices. One of the first articles of clothing that uses the technology is The Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket. “Jacquard allows wearers to control their mobile experience and connect to a variety of services, such as music or maps, directly from the jacket. This is especially useful when it might be difficult to use the smartphone, like when you are riding on your bike.”

2. Daydream VR

Mobile VR is seen by many as the perfect way how to experience the wonders of virtual reality, but the current technology is severely limited. On the one hand, there is Samsung Gear VR, which works only with a small number of flagship smartphones from the South Korean manufacturer. On the other hand, there is a large sea of Cardboard-compatible headsets that work with just about any Android smartphone but are limited in terms of graphical fidelity and the sense of presence they provide. Google wants to bridge this gap with Daydream, a virtual reality platform developed by Google for Android Nougat consisting of Daydream-compatible headsets, Daydream-ready smartphones, a wireless controller, and a special VR software mode that lets users use virtual reality apps, such as YouTube, Google Maps Street View, Google Play Movies & TV, and Google Photos in an immersive view. The first phone by Google, Pixel, is also the first Daydream-ready smartphone. Just like all upcoming Daydream-ready smartphones, Pixel has a crisp, low-persistence screen, ample processing power, and runs on the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system. Many manufacturers, including Samsung, LG, HTC, Asus, Xiaomi, ZTE, and Huawei, have already stated they will be making Daydream-ready phones, headsets,t and controllers. In 2017, a compatibility with Google Daydream could be a major deciding factor when buying a new smartphone; even mid-range devices are now powerful enough to satisfy most users, so extra features such as smooth, high-fidelity virtual reality, will likely play a vital role.

1.   The Rise of Hearables

We have yet to witness the first big hearable release, but the steady rise of this niche type of werable devices represents the noticeable shift toward persistent ambient computing. The same shift is represented by AI-enabled assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or the Google Assistant. Persistent ambient computing is possible, to a great extent, thanks to the recent advancements in artificial intelligence and speech recognition. The main idea behind hearables is to shrink the technology inside Amazon Echo or Google Home and fit it inside a small in-ear headphone. Some of the first hearables on the market will focus on music control and phone calls, but others have higher aspirations. For example, The Pilot is an earpiece which translates between languages “using the latest technologies in speech recognition, machine translation, and the advances of wearable technology,” as explained on the project’s Indiegogo page. The possibilities of what could be achieved in another few years with this technology are mind-bending. The rise of hearables could lead to the same fundamental shift in communication, our access to information, and our ability to cross borders and cultures as the internet did.

Benefits and Disadvantages of Hybrid Mobile Applications

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Mobile App Development, Software & App Sales, Technology trends, Uncategorized

Mobile marketing has become one the most important, if not the most important, parts of just about any marketing strategy. People rely on their mobile devices for just about any activity imaginable and any company that is not a part of this global trend seems to be out of touch. Traditionally, there were two main ways how to establish a mobile presence: one was to create a fully native application written in a programming language used by the targeted platform, and the other was to stick with a regular website and give up upon the native feel and look. However, now, in 2016, we have reached the point where more than 50 percent of mobile applications should be hybrid, according to Gartner’s 2013 mobile and wireless predictions.

With the imminent market domination of hybrid applications ahead of us, now is a great time to look at their benefits to see what exactly is behind their popularity. We, also, won’t avoid mentioning their main negatives, in order to get a clear, comprehensive picture of their role in the mobile market.

What are Hybrid Mobile Applications?

Let’s start with a brief background: native applications are built using a platform-specific programming language (Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android) and can use all native functionality of mobile devices and mobile operating systems, including the use of GPS, access to the filesystem, or common user interface elements. As a result, they usually have a consistent user experience, offer great performance, and are tied to just a single environment they were developed for.

One could say that hybrid applications actually have more in common with web apps than native apps. The reason is that they are actually just web apps wrapped in a native web view displayed via the smartphone’s native browser. What makes them so special is the particular framework using which they are built. This framework allows for an easy use native functions of each mobile platform using cross-platform APIs. Frameworks like Cordova require nothing more than a knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, tools which are very familiar to all web developers.

Main Benefits of Hybrid Mobile Apps

With the introduction behind us, it’s time to take a closer look at some of the main benefits of hybrid mobile apps. We are not trying to include every single positive aspect of hybrid apps; instead, we are focusing solely on their advantage over native and web applications.

Unified Development

By far the single biggest benefit that hybrid mobile apps can offer is the unified development. Companies can save a substantial amount of money that would otherwise have to be spent on developing and maintaining separate code bases for different mobile platforms. They can develop just a single version and let their hybrid framework of choice do the heavy lifting and ensure that everything will work flawlessly.

This, of course, directly leads to lower cost of development and, potentially, greater revenue. Many small businesses wouldn’t be able to afford to target all major mobile platforms, if there wasn’t the option to do so with a hybrid framework.

Fast Deployment

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach necessitates the fast deployment of functional solutions in order to be the first to penetrate the market and gain a substantial competitive advantage. Those who need to have their app in the App Store as fast as possible should seriously consider using hybrid applications.

Low-Level Access

Basic web applications are cut off from smartphones’ operating systems and built-in functionality. Even though they are getting smarter every day, they still don’t come anywhere near native applications. Hybrid applications elegantly bridge the gap between the two other approaches and provide all the extra functionality with very little overhead. As a result, developers can realize the much wider range of ideas and capture the attention of their target audience.

Offline Support

Web applications are critically limited by their lack of offline support. This may seem like a less important issue for people who live in urban areas, where the access to high-speed Internet access is ubiquitous, but potential customers from rural areas and less developed countries could be cut off from access to the application. At the end of the day, one customer survey showed that 79 percent of consumers would retry a mobile app only once or twice if it failed to work the first time, and only 16 percent of consumers would give it more than two attempts. Local storage can also dramatically enhance the overall user experience by storing personal information and preferences for later use.

Scaling

Hybrid applications are limited only by the underlying framework. Companies who partner with a good provider can instantly target all major platforms without any additional effort at all. It the platform is popular enough, it can be expected that it will quickly add support for any new mobile operating systems and their respective incremental updates.

Main Disadvantages of Hybrid Mobile Apps

It would be unfair to ignore the main disadvantages of hybrid applications and paint an unrealistic picture that doesn’t tell the whole story. Because as much as hybrid apps can help small and medium sized business reach wide audiences, they are also limited in several critical ways.

Performance

Hybrid apps add an extra layer between the source code and the target mobile platform: the particular hybrid mobile framework, such as Ionic, Cordova, Onsen, Kendo, and many others. The unsurprising result is a possible loss of performance. It really varies from application to application just how noticeable the difference can be, but the fact that Facebook migrated their mobile application from HTML5 to native shows that there really can be a significant difference, at least for large-scale applications. Mark Zuckerberg even went on to say that “The biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native.”

After all, 84 percent of users consider performance to be an important or very important factor, according to A Global Study of Consumers’ Expectations and Experiences of Mobile Applications by Dynatrace, an American application performance management (APM) software company with products aimed at the information technology departments and digital business owners of medium and large businesses.

Debugging

That extra layer also makes debugging a potential nightmare. Developers have to rely on the framework itself to play nicely with the targeted operating system and not introduce any new bugs. Since developers are not likely to have a deep knowledge of the targeted platform, figuring out the exact cause of an issue can be a lengthy affair.

Features

It’s hard to believe that the first iPhone was released just in 2007. We have come a such a long way since then, and the mobile industry is showing no signs of slowing down. Mobile operating systems keep evolving at much faster pace than their desktop counterparts, and many people now use smartphones and tablets as their primary computing devices.

Companies who want to stand at the very apex of progress and use all the latest and greatest features and hardware capabilities are probably going to experience difficulties trying to achieve their goals using hybrid frameworks. It can take quite a bit of time before new features are implemented by providers of these providers of these frameworks.

Conclusion

Hybrid mobile applications have their place in every situation where fast development is the main priority or where the high cost of targeting each platform with an individual native application would be downright prohibitive. Big players and companies who need to stay on top of the latest development are not likely to sacrifice performance and control. However, it may be just a matter of time before hybrid application frameworks reach such a high level of maturity that all previously mentioned negatives will simply disappear.

Enterprise Mobility in the Cloud Era

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Mobile App Development, Software & App Sales, Technology trends

Mobile devices and their use for business and personal purposes have transformed our lives and changed the way we work. Companies that allow employees to bring their own devices to workplace have first-hand seen many advantages of this approach to personal computing, but they also have noticed a handful of potentially serious issues. In this article, we are considering the current state of enterprise mobility, and what kind of transformation it will have to undergo to successfully enter the cloud era.

As described by Tech Target in their extensive handbook on mobile application management, work habits are shifting, as more employees work from home using their own devices and the power of the Internet. Indeed, one in every five people are estimated to work from home at least one day a week, and the total share of remote workers could reach 63 percent by the end of the year 2018.

That’s because telecommuters are, again and again, shown to be able to accomplish more in less time and greatly decrease the total overhead cost. A great example is when Washington accidentally saved approximately $32 million during 4 official snow days, which forced federal employees to work from home.

But it’s not all about cost and effectiveness, either. One of the main reasons why employees themselves prefer to avoid office environments is the much lower stress level, according to a study by PGI, the global leader in web conferencing and collaboration technology. Employees who are not dreading their daily trip to work are 69 percent less likely to avoid work, they feel more connected with their work and colleagues, and can feel good about their positive impact on the environment.

With such amazing benefits to enterprise mobility, it’s paramount that businesses manage to overcome all current problems and allow customers and employees to seamlessly interact with the company using their own devices. Cloudbook suggests that “As 70% of the North American workforce is now mobile, cloud-based environments require a transparent mobile policy management strategy.”

Currently, most employees who are allowed to work remotely use a mixed approach, which combines company-provided tools and technologies with employees’ own infrastructure and habits. For example, an employee can use pre-configured remote desktop application to connect to his work computer, download company files on his or her own hard drive, transfer these files onto an USB flash drive, conduct the actual work from a desktop computer, where it is automatically backed up to the employee’s personal cloud storage solution, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

Not only is the company put into a vulnerable position in terms of privacy and data security, but they also rely on the employee’s technical ability to navigate the vast jungle of technological solutions. Enterprises will need to go beyond the now traditional “mobile first” approach, and conduct a deep assortment of users’ needs, while placing the highest priority on data protection and security.

Several possible solutions already exist and include the use of virtual mobile infrastructure (VMI) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers. The goal is always the same: to run all applications remotely and store their data in a remote data center, rather than on computers and mobile devices of individual employees.

Companies can greatly decrease their informational technology spending by using pre-built tools as the foundation upon which they can expand and create their own custom-built tools and solutions. These can benefit from integrated monitoring and statistics gathering services to allow for Big Data analysis and subsequent optimization of all internal processes.

What’s more, with everything neatly stored under one roof, access control can be easily managed by a very small team of skilled support staff members, and employees can enjoy a much greater level of protection against their own mistakes, which could otherwise lead to security breaches and costly data leaks.

Given that the latest IDC report  indicates that mobile technology spending is likely to reach $1.2 trillion by 2019, we can expect to see a profound transformation in a very short period of time. Entire company networks are likely to migrate to the cloud, and employees will be given a tightly restricted access to a consistent set of platform-independent tools and applications to do their job.

The obvious winners are third-party companies like my firm OpenArc who specialize in providing and managing the necessary infrastructure and platforms. However, progressive businesses can also expect a great return their investment and high employee satisfaction and productivity.