Hasta La Gadget!

Google has confirmed plans to throw Google Glass ownership open to general access in the US on Tuesday, April 15th, temporarily doing away with the current invitation requirement. The promotion … Continue reading

Think beyond watches and beyond glass, to a world fueled by the smallest bits of hardware humans have ever had the joy of experimenting with! Join us for another Wearable Wednesday SF as we dive into talking about the hardware powering tomorrow’s hottest innovations.

Sensors, batteries, and hard drives are no longer limited to clunky machines. They are being integrated seamlessly into jewelry, fabrics, appliances, and more! As the bits of technology that fuel our apps grow smaller and smaller the questions beg to be asked: how tiny can we truly go, how long can they really last between charges, and when will we finally live in a wireless world? We will dive into these questions and more Wednesday with the industry’s great minds – picking apart the pieces to the market’s leading technological products.

Join in on the event Wednesday April 16 from 5:00PM – 8:00PM at the Wearable World HQ (600 Harrison St., 4th Floor, San Francisco CA 94107) for a light cocktail reception, networking, a fireside chat and a panel!

The panel of speakers include:

• Philippe Kahn, CEO of Fullpower
• Eliane Fiolet, Co-Founder and Editor of Ubergizmo
• John McDonald, CMO of Silego
• Sutha Kamal, Former Founder and CEO of Massive Health
• Ben Bateman, Hardware Campaign Specialist of Indiegogo

Followed by a demo from Sense6!

You won’t want to miss out on this event! Ubergizmo readers can get discounted tickets HERE [Ubergizmo promo code: WWSF_Ubergizmo]

Wearable Wednesday SF: Avoiding Traps When Building Wearable Hardware April 16 , original content from Ubergizmo, Filed in Events, Featured, conference, event, tech conference, wearable, Wearable Tech,

With the recent  launch of the new Android Wear OS and the gazillion fitness bands and Smartwatches, wearable tech is the new hot trend in consumer electronics right now.

Last Sunday, I met with MbientLab co-founders Laura Kassovicand Matt Baker at their office in San Francisco where they developed the $30 MetaWear tiny board featuring a Nordic Bluetooth LE and ARM Cortex M0 SoC (System-on-Chip) that will allow enthusiasts with expertise and startups to build their wearable devices more rapidly at a lower cost.

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MetaWear $30 Wearable Chip With BT LE And Accelerometer On Kickstarter original content from Ubergizmo.

It would appear that the Samsung Gear smartwatch was only a smartphone-reliant device for a limited time – this week a new unit is appearing in tips from South Korea … Continue reading

A lot of folks say that 2014 will be the year of wearables, as in wearable technology. We’ve had wearable devices such as watches and cameras for decades, but the past couple of years we’ve seen devices like Google Glass, Pebble, fitness trackers and more. MbientLab is giving tinkerers and small entrepreneurs a chance to ride the wave with MetaWear.

MetaWear is a small, affordable and developer-friendly platform for creating your own wearable device, or at least a prototype. It’s powered by the ARM Cortex M0 SoC. It has Bluetooth LE connectivity and has a built-in accelerometer, temperature sensor, buzzer, coin motor and RGB LED. It also has two analog/digital I/O pins and an I2C bus. On the software side, it already has its own API, and MbientLab will be releasing open source Android and iOS apps for MetaWear as well.

In my brief chat with MbientLab’s Laura Kassovic, she said that the MetaWear can be used to build a fitness tracker that could compete with existing products like FitBit’s products or Nike’s FuelBand if you so choose, saving you a lot of resources in the process: “First off, you don’t have to spend 4 years at University to get your engineering degree just so you can write firmware. So that’s 4 years we are saving you! We are also saving you the time it takes to prototype, test, and certify hardware just so that you can put it on the store shelf. That’s another 4-6 months of reduced development time. We save developers 80 to 90% of their development time and cost with MetaWear (and I think that’s awesome).”

But Laura is also excited about the potential of MetaWear to enable tinkerers to create niche or even one-off wearable devices: “MetaWear will allow developers to create devices that large companies aren’t interested in building or devices that are very niche (and in my opinion, very cool). Perhaps you want to build a necklace that lights up when your Grandma calls. Perhaps you have an Oculus Rift and you want to add force feedback pods you wear on your body to create an even more realistic simulation. Maybe you have a pet iguana and you want to track its movement but you simply can’t outfit your iguana with a Fitbit Flex; so the natural solution is to build custom on MetaWear instead!” 

So put on your best fitting browser and pledge at least $30 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a MetaWear kit as a reward. Go and get that Facebook money. Or make a fatness tracker. The power is yours.