The ugly truth about wearable technology

When it comes to putting computers on our bodies, everyone's an armchair Anna Wintour. Take a look at the comments on any story about wearable technology, just about anywhere. Ugly is in the eye of the beholder. And with good reason. While some of us view our PCs, smartphones and tablets as status symbols, our clothing and accessories are more closely tied to our identities than anything else.

Over the past few years, the frenzy for wearables has reached its peak. This week alone,Sony, Samsung, LG and Motorola have all shown off their next attempts at wrist-worn technology. And with each announcement comes a new set of sartorial critiques.

And yet, despite a seeming consensus from the tech press about the aesthetic appeal of devices like the Moto 360 and Pebble's Steel, the world is still waiting for the one wearable that will have us all strapping a computer to our wrists, faces, waists or whatever. But the real obstacle to wearable adoption isn't a matter of style; it's a matter of taste.

The real obstacle to wearable adoption isn't a matter of style; it's a matter of taste.

New York Times tech-scribe-cum-style savant, Nick Bilton recently penned a speculative editorialproclaiming the as-of-yet-unannounced iWatch as the device that could finally take wearables mainstream. Apple will no doubt roll out a beautiful piece of machinery -- it has an excellent track record and a proven team of designers, engineers and businesspeople on board -- but the truth is, no matter how good the software, no matter how innovative the functionality, no matter how versatile and beautiful the design, there will never be one wearable for everyone.

Almost every player in the wearable game thus far has proven an ability to produce successful consumer technologies. Some of us can even agree that they're starting to get the style right, but the truth is we all fancy ourselves individuals when we get dressed in the morning. No single company, whether it's Apple or Motorola or even Swatch is ever going to make a single device that we all want to wear.

Apple's wearable device, whether it's a watch or a fedora or even a condom, will no doubt be a meticulously designed piece of hardware, but it's going to take a much more robust and diverse market, full of choice for wearables to really take off. It's going to take more than NFC, fitness tracking and Jony Ive's magic touch. It's going to take more than killer features and refined hardware.

Read more ...

Obama names Google exec Megan Smith as new US chief technology officer

Former Twitter lawyer and NSA resister Alex Macgillivray is second-in-command

Megan Smith, a Google vice president and champion of women in technology, has been named the new chief technology officer of the US. Smith is an MIT-educated engineer who worked most recently at Google X, the company's lab for hyper-ambitious projects like the self-driving car and the future of robots. Before that, she led the business development team for nine years.

Alex Macgillivray, Twitter's former top lawyer, has been named deputy CTO. It's an interesting choice: at Twitter, Macgillivray set a tone for that company's independence from the US government and resistance to law enforcement data requests.

SMITH IS ONLY THE THIRD US CTO EVER

The US CTO position is relatively new. The first US CTO, Aneesh Chopra, served from 2009 to 2012. He was succeeded by Todd Park, who left in late August. Smith will be the third US CTO ever.

The role is loosely defined as an advisor on technology policy. "Smith will guide the Administration's information-technology policy and initiatives, continuing the work of her predecessors to accelerate attainment of the benefits of advanced information and communications technologies across every sector of the economy and aspect of human well-being," writes presidential science advisor John Holdren, according to The Washington Post.

The previous US CTO, Todd Park, has been moved to an advisory position based in Silicon Valley. Park was responsible for launching the much-lauded Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which brings young tech talent to the White House for two year stints, and helping to coordinate repairs to the technical side of Healthcare.gov.

The appointments of Smith and Macgillivray, both hard-hitters from two major Silicon Valley companies, shows the White House is taking this role seriously. The position is so new, however, that Smith and Macgillivray have the opportunity to define what the US CTO should be.

Read more ...

Apple's iWatch And The Technology Of Cyber Luxury

Apple AAPL +0.87% has emitted a time-release drip of information about the iWatch. Starting with John Gruber’s joke-as-leak and seeming to culminate in Re/Code’s sourceless pronouncement, the era of Apple wearables is almost certainly upon us. The most curious leak came on Wednesday from Nick Bilton at the Apple-PR-approved New York Times. According to Bilton, an Apple designer who works with Jony Ive described the Cupertino design czar gloating on the demise of the Swiss watch industry. Ive apparently dropped the “F-bomb” “in bragging about how cool he thought the iWatch was shaping up to be.” The designer spoke of Ive, “gleefully [expressing] how he thought the watchmaking nation might be in a tough predicament when Apple’s watch comes out.”

Gold iWatch concept and matching iPhone 6 by Martin Hajek

What’s funny here is not the fact that Apple’s design chief swears like a sailor or a chef—or a designer. What’s funny is that Apple wanted us to know it. This whole iPhone season featured earlier-than-usual leaks followed by more-than-usual direct briefings of journalists. This “openness” appears to be the stamp of Tim Cook. Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac wrote an exhaustive series of posts last week on the history of and changes within Apple’s PR machine.

The other funny thing about Apple is its reticence. Like a person who doesn’t say much, when they open their mouth you hang on every word. There is a confidence to Apple’s releases because if it isn’t confident, it doesn’t release. Therefore, it is axiomatic to say that the iWatch will be amazing. Because if it weren’t, Apple would just keep “pulling the string” as it is with the Apple TV.

iWatch concept with Health app by Martin Hajek

This brings me to my real point—and the point that Ive is making about the Swiss. Unlike the smartwatches to date, the iWatch will not just be a product but a platform. I don’t just mean that it will have an app ecosystem. So do Pebble, and Android Wear and even Samsung Gear. The Moto 360 is an elegant instantiation of Google’s software, but it doesn’t go farther than that.

iWatch concept by Martin Hajek

The difference with Apple is that both the chips that drive the iWatch and the software that runs it are its own. It can package the chipsets and software for sale to other manufacturers and luxury good brands—some of them in Switzerland. In the 20th century, “Swiss mechanisms” were the ne plus ultraof luxury timepieces. On Tuesday, Tim Cook will raise his iWatch-bearing hand and say, “our turn!”

Apple is not only pursuing the luxury channel with the iWatch. Health, fitness, the connected home and electronic payments are each significant drivers of customer adoption. But it is the appeal to status and the invention of cyber luxury that Apple is most confident of. Just look at the trio of European fashion heavyweights it has brought on board. Ahrendts, Deneve and Pruniaux are not at Apple to sell medical devices!

I got a peek into Apple’s possible strategy from Omri Yoffe, CEO of the Israeli wearable tech company LifeBEAM. If there are any discussions between the two companies, Yoffe is not saying, but the strategy he laid out to me is like what Apple may be embarking on with the iWatch. LifeBEAM got its start making highly-accurate biometric sensors for fighter pilot and astronauts. These are mission critical wearable devices, quite literally. They protect lives and expensive equipment from harm in extremely challenging situations.

LifeBEAM specializes in optical sensors for a wide variety of body locations. These can capture data from the forehead, temple, inner ear, arm, wrist and foot. It packages these as compact components for wearable applications from bike helmets to clothing. It’s current components are part of its first generation Ray Platform. This provides “plug-and-play bio-sensing technology that delivers the most accurate pulse and activity data available.” Most striking is that there are two more generations in the pipeline (Spark and Flare, respectively.) LifeBEAM combines the quality of its existing sensors with the promise of continued innovation. This make it an attractive supplier for wearable manufacturers.

With the iWatch, Apple will be selling this promise of high-quality hardware combined with the software and data infrastructure that drives it. As LifeBEAM shows, Apple is not the only vendor that makes these kinds of promises, but it is the most important one. To follow LifeBEAM’s aerospace metaphor, the sky is the limit for what affluent consumers will pay for luxury timepieces. Bespoke sensors and software along with de rigur precious materials could make for limited edition iWatches with price points in the tens of thousands.

It is axiomatically true that if Apple is confident about wearables, consumers and the rest of the industry will be too . Apple owns the technology of luxury in this century as the Swiss did in the last.

Read more ...

GM to Offer Technology to Help Avoid Vehicle-to-Vehicle Crashes

Auto Maker Could Have First Wireless System Available in Some Models by 2016

DETROIT— General Motors Co. GM -0.14% plans to install vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems on some products in two years, part of a broad push by regulators and auto makers to introduce technology that can prevent collisions without human intervention.

GM Chief Executive Mary Barra is expected to announce the auto maker's move toward so-called V2V technology on Sunday at a conference in Detroit, people familiar with the matter said. The auto giant's strategy is one example of how car companies are seizing on advances in computing power, cheaper machine vision technology and better software to automate more aspects of daily driving.

Delphi Automotive LLP, a U.S. auto-technology supplier once owned by GM, said on Friday it has an agreement to supply hardware for V2V communications systems for a major auto maker's North American models by 2016, but didn't identify the customer.

GM's decision to push ahead with V2V technology comes after months of controversy over its decadelong failure to recall vehicles with a potentially deadly safety defect. Ms. Barra has responded to that crisis by vowing that GM will make vehicle safety central to its business.

"We are past the tipping point," Delphi Chief Technology Officer Jeff Owens said on Friday. "Everybody's making moves" to bulk up vehicle safety.

A group of auto makers and suppliers, including GM, Ford Motor Co. F -0.75% , Toyota Motor Corp. 7203.TO +0.46% , Honda Motor Co. 7267.TO -0.01% and Nissan Motor Co.7201.TO -0.29% are funding an expanded transportation research effort at the University of Michigan. The program aims to put 9,000 vehicles equipped with V2V technology on the road in Ann Arbor, Mich., the university said on Friday.

Cars that use radar sensors and cameras to detect other cars or objects and warn drivers are increasingly common. Vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology could go a step further, and warn drivers of potential collisions with cars they or their bumper-mounted cameras and radars can't see.

The Troy, Mich., company said the agreement signals some auto makers want to move ahead of a potential government mandate requiring that all vehicles sold in the U.S. be capable of communicating their position as part of a system programmed to prevent collisions.

The U.S. Department of Transportation last month said it is considering adopting a rule by 2016 requiring such vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems in the future.

"We are very bullish on the technology that is emerging in the auto industry," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in an interview on Friday. Mr. Foxx will join acting National Highway Traffic Safety Administration administrator David Friedman at the technology conference in Detroit where Ms. Barra will outline GM's plans.

Wide adoption of vehicle-to-vehicle locator systems could advance the industry's progress toward automating larger chunks of the daily commute, although many auto industry executives caution that fully autonomous driving in all conditions remains years away.

Mr. Friedman said auto makers don't necessarily have to wait for regulation to offer emerging autonomous driving systems that enable automatic braking or hands-free driving in certain circumstances, such as traffic jams.

"It is common to bring new technology well before we regulate them," he said. NHTSA will look at whether such systems improve safety, Mr. Friedman said.

Auto makers so far have tended to introduce advanced safety features, such as automatic braking or cameras that alert drivers to cars in blind spots, as options on expensive models.

One way in which the NHTSA could respond is with new rules designed to push such technology into more cars. NHTSA is aiming to decide within about six months whether to require automatic braking systems, Mr. Friedman said.

Car makers have resisted mandated safety technology in the past, worried that customers won't accept the higher costs of vehicles. But competitive and regulatory pressures are changing that.

In Europe, a consortium of auto makers has agreed to start rolling out by 2015 cars capable of communicating with each other, or with transmitters embedded along the highway. European crash test standards already are pushing car makers to equip vehicles with automatic braking systems, and by 2016 will reward them for installing systems that can detect pedestrians and brake to avoid injuries, IHS Inc. IHS -0.26%senior analyst Jeremy Carlson said.

"Consumers are expecting more and more out of the vehicle to help keep them safe," said Mike VanNieuwkuyk, executive director, global automotive at market researcher J.D. Power and Associates.

Toyota officials said this week they plan to offer an array of crash avoidance technology across all of its Toyota and Lexus models by 2017, including automatic braking systems the company currently offers mainly on its luxury Lexus models.

Toyota will be chasing rivals, including Ford and Korea's Hyundai Motor Co.005380.SE -1.81% , that are already offering automatic braking systems in mass market models for the U.S.

"Rapidly emerging technology will have a profound effect on the industry," Bill Fay, head of the Toyota brand in the U.S., said during a briefing this week on the company's technology plans.

Read more ...

Massive Celebrity Hacking Shows Need For Technology Companies To Give Us A Better Default

It’s no longer a surprise when you hear that a major company has the personal information of millions of their customers compromised. Every day identity theft becomes more of a problem, passwords become an even less reliable defense, and the threats you face online become more sophisticated. Yet the vast majority of the time, things still seem fine; your life really isn’t impacted that much. You only become fully aware of how poorly protected you are online when you or someone you know become a target.

With the recent news that dozens of female celebrities had their property stolen and maliciously released to the public without their consent, people are worried that they might be next – and they are wondering what photos they may have taken in the past. At this moment, the pitfalls of cyber-security feel like an abstract issue and more like a real problem that everyone will have to deal with at some point. Articles explaining how to disable cloud backups are already making the rounds. But the reality is that this type of thing happens all the time online, it just doesn’t make the headlines. There’s an entire sick, seedy subculture devoted to exploiting security loopholes to expose, embarrass, and harass people – especially young women.

We have all seemed to collectively ignore the advice on how to responsibly use our devices. Technology allows us to do so many things immediately that we don’t really pay attention to the theoretical possibilities involving long-term risks. Instead, it’s far more productive to examine how we can develop a privacy and security situation that works to protect us by reducing our chances of being at risk.

But that will require a change in thinking. Too often technology companies have put your security second to their priorities, and that has a real cost. Whether it’s Apple promoting iCloud integration, Facebook testing a new feature, or Google mandating sharing on its networks, the burden is passed on to you. You have to figure out what it means, whether you actually want it, and determine if you are even allowed to not participate. That’s been great for business – but users are having to deal with the consequences without adequate preparation or explanation.

Compare the amount of attention that goes into the magical experience of opening a new iPhone box versus the confusing mess that is your Photo Stream settings.

Yes, we still need companies to make two-factor authentication mandatory, institute rate limits on passwords, and implement other common sense practices that should been reviewed long ago. Far more research needs to be done on usable and intuitive security practices. Privacy policies need to become readable, supplemented with easy to understand information and defined in overarching philosophies. Alternatives to the password should continue to be developed and tested — but all of these things will eventually become inadequate.

New technologies and features will come out that will challenge the status quo and require us to revisit the way we configure settings. The pace of technology today makes it quite impossible to stay ahead of the curve. It’s enormously difficult to completely secure something that is constantly changing and growing. The people who work at these companies have good intentions but limited resources, and it’s understandably difficult to align the priorities of everybody involved.

What’s needed is a serious acknowledgement by the industry that your security and privacy online are directly linked. When a person can’t easily follow how their information is stored, shared, and managed, they are far more likely to be at risk. The only practical solution is to give users default settings that are more in line with human behavior. The more we rely on technology and the deeper it becomes engrained into our everyday activities, the more important that becomes.

The devices we have are designed to be addictive, personalized – even intimate. The allure of technology is how natural it feels, we learn to coexist with the possibility of massive embarrassment and failure that are constantly looming. Technology companies have done an incredible job of knocking down the barriers between the digital and physical world, especially when it comes to our identity and relationships. Yet they have not held up their end of the bargain in giving us a safe, secure space to be ourselves. We deserve to have an internet that is optimized for our interests.

Check out my upcoming book, Identified: Why They Are Getting To Know Everything About Us

It’s unclear at this time whether iCloud was the only service compromised

Read more ...