If a new Apple Watch debuts this fall, Google is likely to have a major new smartwatch (or watches) debuting right alongside it, powered by Qualcomm chips.
Pankaj Kedia, senior director and business lead for Qualcomm’s Smart Wearables Segment, said as much yesterday in a story reported by Wareable. But I sat down at Google’s I/O developers conference with Kedia and Dennis Troper, the new product director for Google’s recently renamed Wear OS, to get more information on what to expect next. It’s clear that the next wave of Wear OS smartwatches will be faster. They’ll also, however, be much more about getting the increasingly intelligent Google Assistant on your wrist.
BC: So then what exactly was the genesis of the watch project? In my mind, it felt like the last project with his fingerprints on it. But I guess that isn’t the case.
JI: The first discussion took place in early 2012, a few months after Steve’s passing. It caused us to take time, pausing to think about where we wanted to go, what trajectory we were on as a company, and what motivated us. Also, what concisely was our contribution to our users. And I think, incontrovertibly, that Apple since the 1970s has made difficult-to-comprehend and inaccessible technology easy to understand and accessible.
Fitbit’s recent acquisition of Twine Health has aligned the wearables company closer to clinicians, particularly for monitoring chronic conditions. In a new collaboration with Google, Fitbit is hoping to enhance its healthcare credibility.
Fitbit will use Google’s Cloud services and engineering support to advance its own products. The wearables business also intends to use Google’s new Cloud Healthcare API to help the company connect user data with electronic medical records. By using the Google Healthcare API, Fitbit hopes to accelerate interoperability with existing and future healthcare partners and provide data exchange that can scale to meet large enterprise partner needs. The idea is to give patients and clinicians a more comprehensive view of patient’s health to support more personalized care, according to a news release.
Do you know what happens when you remove GPS and style from the Fitbit Ionic? You end up with a Fitbit Versa. Which is probably the easiest way to describe the two watches. Certainly, the Fitbit Versa can be stylish in the right hands (or wrists), but ultimately the main differentiator is the lack of GPS compared to it’s more expensive sibling. Both have music storage onboard as well as 3rd party apps, and both can have contactless payments. And you can even swap the bands on both. So why have two units?
Well, the $199 Versa aims to fill the gap between the higher end $299 (but often $249) Ionic and the companies lower end activity trackers which lack apps and fancy displays. It also aims squarely at the Apple Watch Series 1, which is often found in the same price neighborhood. But does Fitbit pull that off?
See, that’s a more complex question to answer. Obviously the sales numbers probably say ‘Yes’, but the reality depends a bit on how you’ll use the watch – and what type of person you are. Hopefully, I’ll be be able to help you decide within this review.
… Sales jumped 11% to reach $711 million. As has been the case for the past few years now, Garmin’s automotive division shrank as that industry niche contracted. But the company easily offset that decline with solid growth in its fitness, outdoor, aviation, and marine segments.
A 20% spike in the fitness wearables niche was particularly good news, considering rival Fitbit (NYSE:FIT) saw its unit volume plunge during the period. Like Fitbit, Garmin has noticed a dramatic shift in consumer demand toward more premium trackers like smartwatches. Yet Garmin’s bigger product line scratched that itch for fitness fans thanks to popular new releases like the Forerunner and Edge franchises. Its lineup allowed fitness sales to rise 20% even as Fitbit’s revenue fell 18%.
Garmin managed healthy profitability, too. Gross profit margin jumped to 60% of sales from 58% a year ago, mainly thanks to a shift toward fully featured smartwatches and fitness trackers. Gross profit in the fitness segment — 58% of sales — was just slightly below the company average. It also compares favorably to Fitbit’s 47% gross margin.
For those that have been around the DCR block long enough, you’ll know that I’m always looking for tracking solutions for my worldly activities. Especially ones that don’t depend on having a mobile phone nearby, and even more so for ones that don’t depend on cellular service at all. I’ve long since played with various satellite trackers, be it on remote islands in the Pacific Ocean, or in random spots in Africa or beyond. And about a decade ago I even wrote a review of one of the original Spot Tracker’s. Talk about a blast from the past!
And today’s In-Depth review is exactly in line with all that past goodness. The inReach Mini was just announced today and is one of the smallest satellite trackers out there. The key thing that a satellite tracker has over other trackers is that it doesn’t have any dependency on cellular service. This can function just fine in the middle of the ocean. As long as you can see the sky, it’ll work.
In the case of today’s announcement, the inReach Mini also gains connectivity to the Fenix 5 and Forerunner 935 watches, hopefully paving the way for other devices. While the unit was announced today, I’ve been using it now for a few weeks across two continents.
… Considering the current power meter price landscape we all – consumers and bike and wheel makers – need to start to thinking more strategically about what our power platforms might look like in several years. But like the Slowtwitcher above, after rethinking it you may well end up right back at the pedal.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the School of Engineering & Applied Science is redefining the notion of a wisdom tooth.
The team is developing a smart-tooth technology that could someday be used to detect early signs of certain diseases in high-risk patients by analyzing saliva or gingival crevicular fluid.
“Salivary-based biosensors have generated a lot of interest because of their potential for wide applications in medicine,” said Erica Lynn Scheller, who trained as a dentist and is now an assistant professor of medicine and of cell biology and physiology in the School of Medicine. “We’re initially working to develop a biological sensor that measures specific peptides active in periodontal disease and that would be used in combination with a wireless device to retrieve that data.”
Life Fitness, the global leader in commercial fitness equipment, announced that it has partnered with Equinox, a leading high performance lifestyle destination, to launch the first Apple GymKit-enabled health club in Canada. Equinox’s Yorkville location in Toronto is the first club to add the new equipment, with others following later this year.
The technology lets exercisers tap their Apple Watch to compatible Life Fitness cardio machines, including ellipticals, treadmills, step mills and stationary bikes, for seamless and accurate data tracking, including calories burned and heart rate. Data from the machine and Apple Watch are synced in real-time during the workout and then stored in the Apple Health app.
Slate, Future Tense, Jessica Lipschitz and John Torous from
… Placebo control groups are the gold standard because participants don’t know whether they are in the treatment group or the control group. That means they have the same expectations for improvement and side effects as the treatment group. And in fact, these expectations themselves often have a positive impact on the outcome of interest—what’s known as the placebo effect. This study design also controls for the fact that some people in both groups may naturally improve on their own, without intervention.
That’s why we need a sugar-pill equivalent for digital health. Without placebos, we can’t know the actual impact of a treatment because we have not controlled for the known impact of user expectations on outcomes. This is well illustrated in a recent review of 18 randomized controlled trials evaluating the effectiveness of smartphone apps for depression. In studies where a smartphone app was compared with a waitlist control condition, the app appeared moderately effective in reducing depressive symptoms. But when participants were assigned to use apps compared with active control groups—like journaling or using other apps that researchers did not expect would work—the comparative effectiveness of smartphone apps being studied fell 61 percent. This difference is consistent with what would be expected based on the placebo effect.
The Life Signal Product platform, the world’s first family of semiconductor chips optimized for mobile and wearable applications in medical and health monitoring for life-critical applications, was introduced today by LifeSignals Inc. here. The product family was developed and industrialized in conjunction with STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) and 3M (NYSE: MMM) to meet the stringent needs of the medical market.
“The medical world is in desperate need of clinical-grade disposable and reusable wearables for a variety of markets ranging from human monitoring applications such as in-hospital patient monitoring, remote health monitoring, wellness, fitness, worker safety, and senior care, to veterinary healthcare such as pet, equine and livestock monitoring,” said Surendar Magar, LifeSignals CEO and Founder. “We are answering that need. We believe the Life Signal Processor Product family will become a cornerstone of an emerging ‘Internet of Lives’ – serving billions and billions of bodies generating billions and billions of bits of life-changing valuable information every second of every day.”
… When [Sally] Bergesen founded Oiselle in 2007, she wanted to make a pair of women’s running shorts that fit. Then she got into a spat with USA Track and Field and the IAAF over the logos her athletes could wear during competition—and secured her place as one of the running community’s icons. Oh yeah, and those shorts? Turns out they fit pretty well.
3D printing has incredible potential in the production of sneakers. It allows brands to create prototypes faster than ever and be able to devise new styles and get them to market. Adidas’s Futurecraft 4D sneakers are one of the first examples of such products. However, as a prototype, these sneakers have released to the public in limited numbers.
To date, sneaker companies have focused their 3D-printing efforts on sneaker midsoles. But, on the 17th of April, Nike announced a novel way of using the technique. It says it has made the first 3D-printed textile upper in performance footwear, called Flyprint.
The call came while Nyree Dardarian was driving. The Philadelphia Union forgot to take along Dragon Gels, their favorite sports energy snack, on their 2016 road trip to play the Seattle Sounders.
The players needed a substitute, and they needed it fast, said Garrison Draper, performance director for the Union. So he called Dardarian, who directs Drexel University’s Center for Nutrition & Performance, where a team of staff and students developed Dragon Gels, an energy boost in a soft, sweet square.
Dardarian dashed into a nearby Wawa, raced to the candy aisle, and began looking at nutrition labels for anything that would match the carbohydrate content in the gels, which measure about one inch square and a half-inch thick.
The closest match she could find was Swedish Fish, the popular, chewy fish-shaped candy. But it would take 15 of them to equal one Dragon Gel.
The post-exercise recovery trend has produced mountains of new research. But can you trust the results?
So you want to recover more quickly after your workout, using the latest backed-by-science approach? Great news! According to a new meta-analysis of post-exercise recovery techniques, there are 1,693 studies evaluating the efficacy of various approaches. The problem, unfortunately, is that most of them are crap.
Back in the early ’90s, Jason Blevins, a Texas kid fresh out of college, decided to delay law school for a year and moved to Vail, Colorado, to ski. One season of living in a closet in a house with 12 other people and skiing 130 days a year was enough to decide he would never take the Bar exam. Instead, in 1997, Blevins interviewed with the Denver Post and landed a job as a newspaper reporter with a daily deadline. With next to no experience, Blevins learned on the job and wrote about what he knew–skiing.
A nearly $5 billion annual boost to Colorado’s economy, skiing matters to the statewide newspaper. For 21 years, Blevins filed stories daily, often more than one and longer pieces for Sunday’s paper. He never approached his stories with fluff about the best snow or hot chocolate in Summit County. Instead, he dug into Vail’s corporate filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. He reported on small mountain towns finding solutions to big problems, like housing and income inequality. He was the reporter who scooped everyone else when Aspen and KSL joined forces to buy Intrawest and Mammoth last year. He’s in the corral at the finish line, filing stories in the snow to meet deadline from World Cup ski races, the X Games, and the Olympics. The Ringer called him out as ‘the world’s worst sports reporter,’ but he’s a skier, which is why, at the Pyeongchang Olympics, he recognized that a girl skiing the half-pipe in the backseat and with terrible form–Elizabeth Swaney–was, in fact, news. His story on Swaney became one of the most read pieces in the Denver Post of the year.
We’re bringing together the brightest industry leaders and game changers to create change and opportunity for all women in triathlon at this one-of-a-kind event. Please join us at the first-ever Outspoken: Women in Triathlon Summit, taking place November 30 through December 2, 2018 in Tempe, Arizona.
A new report on biking infrastructure in the United States suggests that, while progress has been made, it’s time to raise the bar. City Ratings, a new analysis released earlier today by the advocacy group PeopleForBikes, which is funded by Trek, a cycling manufacturer, offers a comprehensive, data-driven report card, as well as a sign that cycling in the U.S. may have reached a new phase.
“Cities have grown into an adolescence in terms of biking know-how,” says Kyle Wagenschutz, PeopleForBikes’s Director of Local Innovation. “They know what to build, and what safe bike lanes looks like, but they haven’t been doing a great job of quantifying what it means. This report is an attempt at suggesting new benchmarks to help them realize more effective programs.”
The new City Ratings system grades cities on five different categories—ridership, safety, network, acceleration, and reach—with perennial role models such as Portland and Madison, Wisconsin, ranking in the Top 10.
The physiotherapist who treated British Cycling’s athletes in the run up to 92 World Track Championship medals and 38 Olympic gold medals is bringing his expertise to the masses.
Having spent 12 years as Head of Physiotherapy at British Cycling‘s ‘medal factory’ and five years as Team Sky’s consultant, Phil Burt has launched his eponymous new brand, ‘Phil Burt Innovation’.
The services – available in London and Manchester – will include injury assessment, treatment, bike fit, aero assessment and saddle assessment.
Am I a data mine, or am I a data factory? Is data extracted from me, or is data produced by me? Both metaphors are ugly, but the distinction between them is crucial. The metaphor we choose informs our sense of the power wielded by so-called platform companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and it shapes the way we, as individuals and as a society, respond to that power.
If I am a data mine, then I am essentially a chunk of real estate, and control over my data becomes a matter of ownership. Who owns me (as a site of valuable data), and what happens to the economic value of the data extracted from me? Should I be my own owner — the sole proprietor of my data mine and its wealth? Should I be nationalized, my little mine becoming part of some sort of public collective? Or should ownership rights be transferred to a set of corporations that can efficiently aggregate the raw material from my mine (and everyone else’s) and transform it into products and services that are useful to me? The questions raised here are questions of politics and economics.