San Francisco hosted a conference earlier this week on the next wave of gadgets for people who consider smartphones, tablets and laptops so last year. They're called wearables and many of them extend the capabilities of smartphones and tablets to a device you can wear like a pair of glasses or a multifunction wristwatch.
Robert Mullins photo
Close to 600 people - many of them wearing Google Glass - gathered at the first ever Glazed Conference hosted by Stained Glass Labs, a San Francisco-based incubator for startups in the wearables space. At the daylong conference Sept. 30, startups, investors, journalists like me and others, shared information on how the wearables market is evolving, what use cases people can make of the devices and how to finance their business ideas.
Some of the startups got started through what's called "crowdfunding," in which an entrepreneur posts a Web page explaining their business model and the product they're trying to bring to market, then invites individuals to donate money to the startup. I futuristic look wrote about the crowdfunded startups at the conference for another site, CrowdFundBeat.
One of the most highly publicized wearables today is Google Glass, which is in beta release, sold to a select group of people who will promote it and provide feedback to Google. Glass is scheduled for wide release sometime in 2014. Several people at the Glazed Conference could be spotted wearing Google Glass.
Smartwatches were also ubiquitous at the conference, particularly the Pebble Smartwatch, which was brought to market thanks to crowdfunding, through a platform called Kickstarter. Pebble CEO and founder Eric Migicovsky, whom I interviewed at the conference, explained how crowdfunding got them started.
"We thought we would raise enough money to build about 1,000 watches, that was $100,000. We raised $10.2 million," Migicovsky said. "We think we figured out what people wanted to buy."
After the crowdfunding, Pebble raised another $15 million in venture capital funding. Other startups at the conference were trying to figure out how to match Pebble's success at raising money.
Pebble is a multifunction smartwatch that can do everything from receive text messages to play music to display vital signs like heart rate and respiration. Many of the wearables coming to market or already on the market are health- and fitness-related as you'll see on the slide show attached to this story.
At another session, panelists discussed how wearables can be used in the delivery of health care, as doctors can wear Google Glass while performing surgery to get important information about the patient. Another pair of glasses provided an "augmented reality" view of a person's surroundings. If they are looking at a street with a number of stores on it, the augmented reality image can flash information about available specials at the different businesses.
Many more wearables are expected to come out on the market soon, which is just wearable-gadgets.net in its early stages. Get yours and enjoy!
