Hasta La Gadget!

Sony is calling it quits in the e-book platform market, the company announced today (via Engadget). The move isn’t entirely unexpected: Sony has always occupied a relatively small portion of the market compared to the big kid on the block Amazon. And in light of recent revenue figures, and the decision to cut the much more recognizable VAIO brand, absolutely no one should be shocked by this decision.

The Reader digital storefront for purchasing e-book titles will be shut down as of next month in the U.S. and Canada. Owners of Sony Readers (I’m looking at you, dad) in those countries shouldn’t be worried about what happens to all their purchases, since Sony is generously migrating accounts and existing libraries intact to Kobo, which works on iOS and Android devices as well as Android hardware. The Kobo Android now will also ship pre-installed on Xperia devices as part of the arrangement.

Sony has yet to reveal exactly how users can switch their content over, but they’ll be sending an email to Reader account holders to detail the process ahead of the projected end of March dead date for the Reader store.

As for Reader hardware, it appears to have been doomed as far back as October last year, at least for the U.S. market, when the company removed the Reader section from its website entirely and listed existing models as discontinued. Moving e-book sales to a partner is probably a smart move, given its existing decision to pull away from that category of devices.

Apple is seeking physiologists to join its team, according to a new call for job applicants discovered by 9to5Mac today. The position on offer is for a “User Studies Exercise Physiologist,” and seeks a candidate who will be responsible for creating and conducting studies “related to cardiovascular fitness & energy expenditure, including calories burned, metabolic rate, aerobic fitness level measurement/tracking” and more.

At the very end of the listing, Apple also notes that the right candidate will not only need to gather and research this kind of data, but also “apply relevant knowledge to the design of products and their testing/validation through user studies.”

The new job listing comes hot on the heels of a report earlier this week from 9to5Mac about Apple hiring a sleep research expert away from Philips, and the Jan. 31 report from the website about Apple working on a new dedicated health app called “Healthbook” for possible inclusion in its next major iOS iteration, iOS 8. 9to5Mac speculates that these, combined with recent reports that top Apple execs are meeting with the FDA, confirm the company’s intent to enter the health and fitness product market, and that an iWatch riddled with biometric sensors could be the first such device to come to market.

So far, Apple has kept mum on all speculation regarding a potential iWatch or any upcoming changes to iOS 8. But Apple CEO Tim Cook did at least acknowledge that “the wrist is interesting” and “natural” in terms of the wearable category, but also that there’s nothing really compelling already out there in the market to convince an average consumer who doesn’t wear something on their wrist to invest in wearable tech. I’ve argued in the past that the problem with current wearable tech is that none of it offers something you necessarily miss deeply when you forget it or it runs out of battery for a day; Apple may be trying to change that with all this focus on health-related hires, research and development.

At this point, there’s no question in my mind that Apple has wearable tech far along in the product pipeline. But unlike competitors including Samsung, it will never release anything half-baked, so it could be a while yet before we see anything launch, despite the growing number of signals that point to an iWatch’s existence.

Image courtesy Todd Hamilton.

Looking at this Android-powered landline handset which U.K. telco BT has just started selling — christened with the (relatively) catchy name of Home SmartPhone S — you really have to wonder what took them so long.

BT is a broadband provider however its legacy business was copper telephone wires and landline phones — so its Internet packages, even the fibre ones, require subscribers to install a traditional landline too. Ergo, the company still brands (and flogs) a lot of landline phones.

Recent landline handsets BT was pushing on its customers included the likes of the BT6500 (see what I mean about relatively catchy) — a handset that looks like it was forged in the yuppie fires of 1985.

From there it really is a revolution to the Home SmartPhone S which is a smartphone in all ways except for being tied to the house being as it lacks the cellular radio bit — using Wi-Fi to hook into your Internet router to support web browsing, apps, and the rest.

The price-tag for this 3.5 inch touchscreen device is £150 — so pretty pricey for a landline phone, sure, but it’s far from being the traditional dumb button-pusher.

The BT Home SmartPhone S is by no means the first Android-powered landline phone. It’s just the latest slice of old school hardware Google’s mobile OS has found its way onto — as Android continues its onward march from mobiles to tablets, TVs, cars, cameras, smartwatches, fridges… and so on.

Android domination marches on. smartphones, tablets, TVs, smartwatches and now home phones: j.mp/1kYvmR7 http://t.co/DX9jFjVS8a—
Ben Wood (@benwood) February 06, 2014

Other Android-powered landline handsets on the market include the likes of the Panasonic KX-PRX120 and the Gigaset SL930A, both released last summer.

BT itself has sold Skype phones and videophones for years, but those devices were still coupled with less than user-friendly fiddly old interfaces.

Such legacy interfaces are steadily being replaced on more devices, whether it’s car stereos or landline phones, with touchscreen panels running Android, as the platform proves itself capable of leveraging the user familiarity built up on mobile to make the leap onto more device types.

Back in May Google pegged Android activations at 900 million, up from 400 million in 2012. This year there’s no doubt Mountain View will break a billion active Androids, the question is how much it will break that figure by.

As Android continues its spread, pollinating more electronic devices, that growth can keep on coming.

Founded by ad agency man Tom Evans, BleepBleeps is a new London-based startup that’s creating a range of cute, kid-friendly, connected (or IoT-styled) devices to help with the job of parenting. Inspired by the “simple geometric shapes of kid’s building blocks” and Japanese vinyl toys, with a nod to the Italian kitchen utensil brand Alessi, the company is targeting design literate and tech-savvy parents (and their kids) with multi-coloured hardware, paired to a smartphone and accompanying app.

The first of those out of the gate, via a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, will be “Sammy Screamer”, a motion detector that can be placed on a door, in a bag, or on a child’s buggy, for example. Should it detect motion, a push notification is sent to your smartphone and the device itself lets out a scream.

“Sammy” has a magnetised back and loop fixing, and is powered by Bluetooth LE for up to 50 meters range. Early backers who pledge $65 or more can bag the device and iOS app, including worldwide shipping. The company intends to raise a minimum of $20,000 on Kickstarter to help fund production costs.

The “Sammy Screamer” motion detector isn’t the first product of its kind, no doubt, but BleepBleeps is, I suspect, all about the brand’s positioning. And, perhaps, the product road map is where BleepBleeps gets more interesting. It promises to span the gamut of parenting, from conception, birth, looking after your baby, and raising your child.

These will include “Tony Tempa”, a digital ear thermometer, which will relay your child’s temperature reading to your smartphone. The supporting app will also benchmark the reading for safety and provide tips on how to bring your kid’s temperature down.

BleepBleeps also plans to manufacture a GPS bracelet to track your child’s location; a small ultrasound scanner that lets them see your unborn baby on your smartphone; a male fertility tester; an ovulation tester; and a baby video monitor. Each planned device has a face, a name, and a unique bleep bleep sound when activated, hence the BleepBleeps name.

The UK startup is thus far bootstrapped. Along with founder and Creative Director, Evans, the team includes Niall Mccormack, who is said to have been a technical lead for Nike’s Nike+ Fuelband.

The Lumo Lift is the second product from startup Lumo BodyTech, and the second to help users with their posture. The Lumo Back was the first, and it raised around $200,000 in 40 days on Kickstarter. This time, Lumo opted to do the crowdfunding themselves, and the trajectory of the latest device has been quite different: Lumo Lift is at over $900,000 raised as of this writing, just under a month into the pre-order period.

That adds up to nearly 13,000 pre-orders, and totals about $32,000 per day raised thus far. The original Lumo Back campaign managed around $5,000 per day, or roughly one-sixth as much. Interest isn’t really waning the way it has a tendency to do with these kinds of campaigns, either – between Jan. 28 and Feb. 3, there were 3,149 pre-orders in total, which was close to on par with the very first week after a couple of weeks of slower, but still strong interest, as you can see from the chart below.

“It’s going well for a couple reasons,” explained Lumo founder and CEO Monisha Perkash in an interview. “Lumo Lift really differs from other wearable tech because it’s customizable to different fashion tastes. It’s really wearable tech that’s more than just tech: It’s fashionable tech. Also […] it focuses on bringing out the more confident, more attractive, the healthier you and that requires both staying active as well as good posture and we’re the only solution in the market that can do both.”

Interest in the campaign has produced some interesting demographic insight, too. Lumo has found that the majority of pre-order interest is from male customers, who are responsible for just over 67 percent of all orders. The U.S. is the big market for the Lift, unsurprisingly, with 86.7 percent of all orders, while 92.5 percent of sales come from the combined English-speaking countries of the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada. White is the most popular color choice with 54 percent of purchases, while 26 percent preferred black and silver trailed both with just 20 percent.

The difference between the initial campaign and this one is staggering – Lumo Lift will almost certainly exceed $1 million in pre-orders, likely before the week is out, which is five times what the startup accomplished on Kickstarter for the Lumo Back. I asked Perkash about how the two experiences compare.

“There are pros and cons of going in either direction [Kickstarter vs. self funding],” she explained. “What we’ve found is that because your customers interact with you on your website, you end up having a closer relationship with your customers. You can engage them more without having a third party between you, and you can also develop your own brand and messaging, […] and make it consistent with what you want to communicate.”

Perkash says Lumo is still happy with having used Kickstarter in the beginning, since it helped them reach a wider audience with a brand that people didn’t really know to begin with. Also, she says that going alone a year and a half ago when they first started out, crowdfunding was still a relatively new concept, so there wouldn’t really be an opportunity to build a big following using your own platform vs. partnering with someone like Kickstarter.

Despite massively exceeding their initial expectations, Perkash says that she doesn’t anticipate any hiccups with initial production, since they’re confident in the manufacturing system and relationships they built with the original Lumo Back. There are only three more days left to get the Lumo Lift at its discounted price of $69 before it goes back to $99, so we’ll likely have a better idea of what kind of initial shipment volumes they’ll be facing once that price change starts to affect pre-order demand.