New Trend Reports – Wearable Technology

New Trends

Many domainers try to be looking ahead and trying to find the next great product or service before it goes mainstream. Many times the best domains in new trends have been taken for many years.

In an effort to look at new trends and take a look at what the kids are regging and talking about, we are going to start doing feature articles on specific niches that are gaining attention.

First let me say upfront, nothing written here is a recommendation to buy a new trend, we have nothing to sell you and any domains that anyone here at Hybrid Domainer have regarding the featured topic will be noted at the end of the article.

The goal with these articles is to give you a well rounded view from around the web on the niche, the good and the bad. Curating these articles in one place I hope is a vital resource for you in doing your research on the topic.

The topic of this articles will be Wearable Tech. Wearable technology has been getting a lot of buzz lately from all areas, from domainers, to acadamecis to big companies looking to explore this areas.

Wearable Tech is a pretty big topic featuring things such as Google Glass, to the iWatch from Apple. Applications in the fields of science and medicine are looking to make big breakthroughs.

Press Coverage

Cnn mentioned:

This week, two major conferences on wearable technology are taking place in the U.S. — Wear Tech Con in San Francisco and Wearable Tech Expo
in New York City. CNN spoke to keynote speakers from both events to
imagine how a day in the life of a wearable technology user might look
in the year 2015.

The article on CNN looks at what is called “Bionic Fashion” They run through what they believe will be a typical day in 2015, wearable tech that will turn man into machine.

One feature is the Smart Glasses from Vuzix

 

Read the CNN article here

An article on July 9, 2013 in the Daily Mail talks about Samsung investing heavily in wearable computers.

From the article:

Samsung confirms it is ‘investing heavily’ in wearable computers to take on Google Glass and Apple’s rumoured iWatch

• Samsung said it is working on wearable computers but did not confirm the existence of its rumoured watch
• Apple and Samsung are believed to be preparing products to go on sale within months
• Watches will link to an owner’s mobile phone and offer email and app downloads

You can read that full article here

We get some really wild predictions from BGR.com on Wearable Tech klling off the smartphone.

From the article

Since we’re still witnessing the slow death of the traditional PC, it may seem a little premature to already start talking about the deaths of smartphones and tablets. But Frog Design’s chief creative officer Mark Rolston, writing at Technology Review, thinks that it’s only a matter before we start talking about the end of today’s mobile devices and the rise of wearable and embedded computing devices that are even less visible than smartphones.

You can read that full article here

A recent article on Venture Beat goes science fiction on us and predicts wearable computers will be inside us. The article is not talking about 50 or 100 years away either.

From the article:

Wearable computing like Google Glass is just beginning to invade our lives. Soon, it will be inside our bodies.

That’s the prediction from one of the panelists in the wearable computing track of VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2013 conference, which kicked off this morning.

“My daughter is getting a PhD in biomedical engineering, and they are
floating the idea that wearables will be inside us in the next five to
10 years,” said Gary Clayton (pictured middle), chief creative officer
at voice recognition firm Nuance.

Read the full article here.

M.I.T. Technology review takes a look at another side of all this technology. Will it be an even bigger distraction for people than things such as their phones and texting ?

Don Norman has quite the resume and his article is well worth reading.

From the article:

Ever talk to someone at a party or conference reception only to discover that the person you are talking to is constantly scanning the room, looking this way and that, perhaps finding you boring, perhaps looking for someone more important? Doesn’t the person realize that you notice?

Welcome to the brave new world of wearable computers, which will tread within the uneasy space bounded by continual distraction, continual diversion of attention, and continual blank stares along one border; and focused attention, continual enhancement, and better interaction, understanding, and retention along the other. Google’s latest hardware toy, Glass, which has received a lot of attention, is only the beginning of this challenge.

Actually, it isn’t the beginning—this stuff has been around for over a decade. In my former roles as a cognitive scientist, vice president of technology at Apple, and now as a management consultant in product design, I visit research laboratories at companies and universities all over the world. I’ve experienced many of these devices. I’ve worn virtual reality goggles that had me wandering through complex computerized mazes, rooms, and city streets, as well as augmented realities, where the real world was visible, but with informative overlays.

Read the full article here, and read the comments as there are plenty of good ones that give more things to ponder about this wearable technology.

Christina Bonnington at Wired wrote a few weeks back about the new vulnerabilities this technology may bring about.

From the article:

Google Glass is a pre-production device made for developers. It has bugs, and it has problems, some of which are related to security. That’s the main reason why Google distributed the devices among a limited sample group. The company has tasked these developers with discovering and reporting security vulnerabilities in Glass so Google can address
them.

And many of these issues are entirely new. For instance, one of the latest problems to be addressed, discovered by Lookout Mobile Security, involves how Glass interprets QR codes when it snaps a picture. QR codes themselves are a fairly new development, and only recently have mobile devices had enough processing power to be able to automatically
execute QR code commands in a photograph. Thus for the first time, this has provided malicious folks with the opportunity to gain access to your device through these machine-readable blobs of black and white blocks.

Read the full article, which is not that long here.

Lastly from the tech side let’s look at Wearable Cameras

Memoto has created a tiny camera that was the subject of an Allthings D article that included the following:

Memoto raised more than $550,000 through Kickstarter
to fund production of the $279 camera. It is currently set to ship at the end of April or early May. It’s being manufactured in Taiwan, after early samples were made in Stockholm.

When I asked Kalmaru today how many SXSW photos he now has stored on his laptop, he said it was around 10,000, which would take up 14 gigabytes of memory (Kalmaru cleared the camera during the festival).

Considering the frequency of shots, plenty of these were off-center, blurry, dark or black photos. Others were cool images of SXSWers crossing Sixth Street in Austin, with the sun bouncing off buildings and crisp blue skies in the background.

That’s where the Memoto software comes in, Kalmaru says: The subscription-based, photo-storage service smartly organizes your photos in a timeline, and chooses the best photo from a moment or an event.

Tapping on that photo in the Memoto mobile app will reveal the collective photos from that event, but they’re not all cluttering your feed.

Read the full article here.

Projections About The Business of Wearable Tech

The Guardian wrote a piece a couple weeks ago advising naysayers that they may be the one who plays the fool. While there is a long way to go to match mobile units the article said the following:

As big as mobile?
Bolting hardware to bodies
instead of in portable plastic slabs could conceivably make for an industry that is bigger than even mobile as we know it today. But will this really come to pass?

Despite some individual anomalies, analysts’ forecasts for wearable device shipments have reached broad
consensus at least on a consistent growth pattern — to 171 million in 2016, according to IMS. This could make wearables about a tenth the size of this year’s smartphone market, forecast by IHS to hit a billion shipments.

Could wearables really become such a large part in such
a short space of time? Consider that, in 2002, only just over 40 million smartphones were shipped (ARC), and it’s clear wearables would need to boom significantly to match this pace.

Read the full article here

Business Insider did an article on Wearable Tech saying:

Credit Suisse released a massive report on Friday detailing the outlook of the wearable technology market.

The main takeaway: wearable tech is already a $3- to $5 billion market today. In the next two to three years, it could skyrocket to $30-to $50 billion.