It’s time to give you a heads-up on another month and what happened during the past 30 days for you to stay updated in the world of wearables.
Our highlight of the past month was of course the WT | Wearable Technologies Conference Fashion Edition in Milan. A full day with innovative and fancy wearables took place in the fashion capital. While fashion jewelry was a major the topic of the conference like the smart earring Ear-o-Smart or the e-ink bracelet tago arc, also medical devices had their spot at the event like the iTBra for cancer detection. Also the 7th WT | Wearable Technologies Innovation World Cup kicked off at the event. The database is now open again for submissions! If you missed the conference don’t worry, we covered it live for you!
A news roundup without a smartwatch? Not this time. New Smartwatches are still popping up every month. Interesting news in this field is coming from Samsung. The company recently unveiled that it was giving members of its global developer community early access to the Software Development Kit (SDK) of its next generation Gear device. This marks the first time that Samsung has released its wearable SDK for third-party developers in conjunction with the design and construction of its device before the product launch.
But that’s not the only smartwatches news from April. Asus also announced their new wearable: the Asus VivoWatch. It boasts 10-day battery life as its 128 x 128 pixel black-and-white touchscreen and the lack of a powerful processor help keep power consumption low, as does the very simple OS called Kood. The software was developed by Asus solely for the device and manages a variety of tasks, including fitness tracking, sleep monitoring, and notifications.
More exciting news came from Nokia. The company recently surprised all of us announcing its intention to acquire company Alcatel-Lucent for €15.6 billion ($16.6 billion). The deal will solidify Nokia’s ambitions to become a major provider of networking equipment. Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent plan to close the deal in the first half of 2016. The new company is expected to use the Nokia brand, but will retain Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs name for its R&D activities. Nokia also announced that it is reviewing it’s Here mapping business and may consider selling it off. We will see in the future what this merge will bring for the wearable market.
While the Nokia news is very true you shouldn’t believe all you hear about the gadgets that appeared in April. Crazy but real wearables or marketing strategies? Check out our April fool’s recap here.
Since this month was specially fashion related to us due to the fashion edition of our conference in Milan we don’t want to finish this recap without mentioning another smart jewelry. Say is social smart jewelry that at the same time provides the wearer with wellness features common to popular tracking devices today. The companion app’s capabilities enable users to socialize and share with groups of friends, follow celebs and thought leaders, and exchange messages within the SAY™ community.
