Posts Tagged ‘mobility’

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.

Daydream: Google’s Push into VR

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

Two years have passed since Google’s humble entry into the virtual reality market with Cardboard, and time has come for the company to take their efforts a step further. Their vision for a VR ecosystem powered by capable mobile devices has a prophetic name: Daydream.

The idea behind the project isn’t to throw away Cardboard into the pits of technological obsolescence, but rather to offer customers the next logical destination on their journey towards an immersive VR experience. Clay Bavor, Google’s vice president of virtual reality, commented, “We knew that Cardboard would only go so far, because there’s only so much you can do in terms of immersiveness and interactivity with—let’s be serious—a piece of cardboard, and a phone that was really only meant to be a phone.”

Google is going to keep Cardboard around as a highly affordable way how VR newbies can get a glimpse of what the once futuristic technology is all about. When the same customers reach the limits of what’s possible with Cardboard, they will know exactly what to buy next: Daydream.

So, what is Daydream? According to Bavor, Daydream is about enabling very high-quality mobile VR.  The key word here is “high-quality”. Google is well aware that any truly immersive mobile VR experience will require a suitable hardware to run on. Not only that, but the entire ecosystem – apps, operating system, VR glasses – has to work in unison.

That’s why Google is working with their industry partners and in-house developers to create a VR platform the world has not seen before. The first Daydream-compatible smartphones – the ZTE Axon 7 and Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe – are right around the corner, and so are the other two pillars of Daydream.

Three Pillars of Daydream

During his presentation at Google IO 2016, Bavor explained the steps Google took to create “our platform for virtual reality.” To succeed, Google needs to have a total control over the VR experience. Customers must know that when they purchase a Daydream-certified smartphone, they won’t run into any compatibility or performance issues.

There’s simply no more room for guesswork like there was (and still is and will be) with Cardboard. Samsung, with their Gear VR, has shown that customers are willing to pay extra for a smartphone that does something extra. But Samsung’s problem is the inability to control the experience from top to bottom. Users have to fight an operating system not meant for virtual reality and apps developed with only a vague idea of the kind of VR headset the apps are going to be consumed through. But all that is about to change.

Smartphones

Google doesn’t want any redundancy in their platform. The company expects smartphone manufacturers to bake all the functionality and features necessary for a smooth VR experience directly into their devices.

This entails powerful hardware capable of pushing demanding graphics at 60 frames-per-second, low-persistence displays with little to no lag to eliminate ghosting, and high-quality, latency-free sensors to increase the sense of immersion when inside a virtual reality world.

Prominent smartphone manufacturers, including Samsung, HTC, LG, Xiaomi, Huawei, ZTE, Asus, and Alcatel should have daydream-ready smartphones available this fall. The beauty of this approach lies in the fact that the whole platform can evolve in a similar way as video game consoles do. All that Google has to do to take Daydream to the next level is to bump up the reference specifications and call the result “Daydream 2.0” or something similar. With enough time, Daydream could start competing with PC-tethered headsets.

Headset and Controller

The current mobile VR experience is held back by the chaos that reigns among the headsets. The market is flooded with headsets ranging from a few dollars to few hundred dollars. Some are compatible with devices up to 6”, others can fit only smaller smartphones; certain models have a wide field of view and high-quality optics, but there’s a slew of other headsets that don’t even come close.

With Daydream, Google has taken their experience and created a reference design that others can use as a blueprint to come up with something of an equal quality. The sketch they showed at Google IO 2016 depicted a sleek, clean headset that should appeal to regular smartphone owners and tech enthusiasts alike.

To complement the headset, Google has also created a VR-optimized controller that’s both powerful and intuitive. Its DNA can be traced back to the Wii Nunchuk Controller, as a consequence of its minimalistic appearance and built-in orientation sensor that allows for intuitive motion control. A circular clickable touch pad is designed to bring touchscreen gestures to the virtual world, and two buttons – a home button and app button – provide all the essential functionality without overwhelming users with options.

Apps

The team behind Daydream has been working with the core Android team to include VR capabilities in the next version of the mobile operating system. Starting with Android N, users will be able to put their smartphones into a special VR mode, which will change the UI, making the device easily controllable even while still in VR. Substantial changes have also been made under the hood to allow for a very low latency of less than 20ms and increased performance.

Clay Bavor said that Google will take a strong stance on quality and not allow badly written, designed, or optimized apps to enter into the Daydream ecosystem. “We want to make sure that we’re representing good VR to our users.”

Google wants to lead by example with their apps. The Play Store, YouTube, and Street View are all going to be optimized at launch to deliver an uncompromising user experience. A new face among Google’s increasingly larger collections of apps is the Daydream Hub, a kind of home screen that acts as a gateway to all games and virtual reality apps.

More VR apps are expected to pop up in the near future, thanks to Google’s partnerships with the New York Time, WSJ, USA Today, Netflix, Hulu, IMAX, NBA, MLB, and many others. New VR games from EA, Ubisoft, NetEase, and OtherSide Entertainment are also on the horizon, so there’s no reason to doubt that there won’t be enough compelling content available when Daydream takes off.

It’s Coming

The release of Daydream is planned on Autumn 2016, shortly after Android Nougat is out. Given that Cardboard headsets hover around $10 and Gear VR currently goes for $100, Daydream will probably be positioned right above the Gear VR, in terms of its price.

Google’s vision of the future seems to involve ultra-powerful smartphones that act as keys to countless invisible virtual worlds around us. They recognize that once we reach the point where we no longer need to own a laptop or PC just to get more processing power, smartphones and mobile operating systems will become the only thing that matters.

Xiaomi as an Example of a Successful Post-Mobile Company

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

Xiaomi has seen an astonishing level of success, since the company was founded in 2010 by serial entrepreneur Lei Jun, who was named Businessman of the Year by Forbes in 2011. The company is now the third biggest smartphone manufacturer and has 16.4% share of the Chinese smartphone market.

But this $45 billion company led by a man who happily admits that being greatly influenced by Steve Jobs doesn’t want to be regarded as a smartphone business. Xiaomi insists that they are an internet company – a new kind of company that deals primarily with rapid innovation, community building, and lifestyle.

They see that in our post-mobile, interconnected world, tech companies have become much more than providers of useful gadgets. Our entire work and personal lives revolve around tightly integrated ecosystems developed by companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and, of course, Xiaomi.

But to understand how Xiaomi got there and where the company is going, we have to understand how they managed to sell over 70m smartphones in 2015 alone.

High-End Products Without High-End Prices

Xiaomi is often compared with Samsung and Apple, even though the company targets a substantially different market. Their bread and butter are devices with high-end specifications and affordable prices. Such products appeal mainly to tech-savvy people and members of the younger generation who don’t have enough disposable income to afford often obscenely expensive flagship models from premium smartphone manufacturers.

In India alone, there are more than 700 million consumers under the age of thirty. When Xiaomi’s devices go on sale in this market, the company often sells their entire stock in just a few seconds. For example, the entire first batch of Mi 4 smartphones in exactly 37 seconds, according to GSMArena.

A flagship device from, let’s say, Samsung is going to cost you around $600, but a device with similar or even better specifications from Xiaomi sells for just $400. And if you lower your expectations just a little bit and look at Xiaomi’s mid-range smartphones, then you are suddenly dealing with prices and value unrivaled by any established mobile manufacturer.

The younger market that Xiaomi targets is also a lot more passionate and vocal about their gadgets. There’s no need for Xiaomi to spend large sums of money on advertising – their own fans will spread the word out.

Lifestyle Company

In an interview for Wired, Lei Jun said, “Think of Xiaomi as a company that is bringing innovation to everyone. We put an emphasis on high-quality products that help to create a connected lifestyle for everyone as we move into a new era of technological innovation. This doesn’t only mean smartphones, tablets, TVs, routers — we invest in startups that form what we call an ecosystem. They make products that are sold on Mi.com, ranging from power banks to wearables to air and water purifiers, so we have hundreds of products that come together to create a lifestyle.”

This “lifestyle approach” could be the key to Xiaomi’s total dominance in the second part of this decade. As their core audience gets older, they are going to settle and shift their collective gaze from smartphones, tablets, and laptops to refrigerators, microwave ovens, water and air purifiers, air conditioners, smart light bulbs, smart weighing scales, and all those other products that Xiaomi is investing their time, money, and effort into.

In this new environment, a smartphone is going to be a sort of central hub that brings everything together. Similarly, a Mi account is going to be a form of personal identification that unlocks not just an online cloud storage – but the entire world around us.

Fitness Trackers: A Way to Good Health or a Big Privacy Threat

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

Since their first appearance on the consumer market, people from all around the world have fallen in love with fitness trackers. Data from Statistica reveal that there were more than 13 million sold in the United States in just the last two years. These devices are great at keeping people motivated to adhere to healthy exercise habits, monitor their daily caloric intake, or watch out for dangerously high stress levels. But many security experts and technology analysts are unsure whether they are equally great at protecting all the associated private data.

A typical fitness tracker (also known as activity tracker) is an electronic device fitted with a wide assortment of specialized sensors that measure anything from heart rate to the quality of sleep, distance walked, body and ambient temperature, elevation, acceleration, speed, position, or calorie consumption. We can expect that future fitness trackers will be FDA-approved devices capable of alerting users to medical problems and suggesting the best possible remedy or action to take.

Integrated sensors collect various information, which are then both processed locally to display results on the device itself and sent to the cloud in order to allow for multi-platform access and management. This is exactly where the biggest problem is: most users are not aware of how their data are being used, who exactly can access them, and how they could be used for identity theft in case it falls into the wrong hands.

This is not surprising at all. With the average terms of service agreement nearing 5,000 words, the temptation to skip all that hassle and just click on the “agree” button is very high. However, when customers do so, they unknowingly give access to their private data to third-party companies, as discovered by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2014. The commission reported that a sample of a dozen health and fitness apps collectively sent data to 76 third parties. What exactly can those third-party companies do with users’ data is only between them and the manufacturer of the particular fitness tracking device.

To outline some of the contemporary data handling issues in this industry segment, Open Effect, a Canadian not-for-profit that conducts research and advocacy efforts focused on ensuring people’s personal data is treated securely and accountably, create a report called Every Step You Take.

They studied some of the most popular fitness tracking applications in the Google Play store as of mid-2015 and asked the following questions: What technical security mechanisms are in place? How could they be exploited? What categories of data does each device actually collect?

All device except for one transmitted their data over the internet. In some cases, this included sensitive and unnecessary information such as the IMEI number or fine-grained location data. Out of all devices, only the Apple Watch randomized the MAC address as a protective measure against persistent monitoring of the wearer’s presence. What’s much more alarming than the absence of the MAC address randomization is Garmin’s failure to implement HTTPS encryption to secure the transmission of personal information. The company has since then corrected this flaw, but nobody can know for sure how many other devices on the market remain similarly defenseless against even the most basic types of attacks.

As explained by Theresa Payton, president and CEO of Fortalice and a former White House CIO, “The culprit is the innovation life cycle. There is tremendous pressure to get cool and affordable products on the market at a dizzying speed.” She went on to say that wearables and associated apps “have a track record of poor privacy and security measures.”

A good news is that substantial effort has been and is being made to protect the privacy and security of end-users. The IEEE Center for Secure Design released a paper titled, “WearFit: Security Design Analysis of a Wearable Fitness Tracker,” to “addresses each of the top 10 software security design flaws” of fitness trackers and show developers of these devices how to design a product that meets all modern security standards.

Their WearFit system is an imaginary wearable personal health monitoring device that resembles many currently available products. The device can measure step count and heart rate and sends the data to a compatible mobile application, which then communicates with the platform backend. Many common attack vectors were taken into consideration, including Denial of Service (DoS), falsifying the users’ data, stealing users’ data via SQL injection or phishing, and, for example, compromising device integrity with malicious firmware updates.

It’s hard to predict what future holds for fitness trackers. As customers are becoming increasingly more conscious of their privacy and security, companies will have to ensure that their products are free of any vulnerabilities that could lead to a data leakage or a loss of sensitive information. Customers themselves should demand a high level of transparency when it comes to how exactly their data are handled and used. Only then we’ll be able to embrace all latest technological innovations and used them to improve our daily lives.

The Internet of Things and the (R)Evolution of Manufacturing

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

Manufacturing is about to undergo a transformation that could have similar consequences as the Industrial Revolution, which took place from the 18th to 19th centuries and completely changed the face of, up to that time, rural Europe and America. That’s because the Internet of Things and smart manufacturing can create the perfect decision-making environment and help companies of all sizes optimize all aspects of their operations and maximize their revenue, as illustrated by King’s Hawaiian, producers of frozen entrees in a bowl as well as Hawaiian bread. The company managed to put out extra 180,000 pounds of bread every day, thus effectively doubling their previous production, as reported by Forbes.

The same story of success can also be told by General Electric. More than 10,000 sensors on their Durathon battery factory in Schenectady provides the company with non-stop stream of data. Using cutting-edge statistical approaches and Big Data analysis, General Electric can get an instant overview of their entire production and tweak it as they see fit. According to Industry Week, the Siemens’ electronics manufacturing plant in Amberg, Germany uses around 1,000 controllers to handle up to 75 percent of the value chain autonomously.

Given these fascinating examples, it may come as a surprise that “only 10 percent of industrial operations are currently using the connected enterprise,” according to John Nesi, vice president of market development at Rockwell Automation. What’s more, apparently, one in five factories today are completely cut off from the Internet, as discovered by SCM World’s recent survey.

However, this number is expected to drop to near zero in just the next five years, resulting in almost 50 billion connected endpoints. It won’t take a long time before every single instrument, machine, and part is aware of all other parts around it.