TechCrunch
Yet Another Smart Watch Joins The Fight And This One's “Hot”
Pebble not meeting your needs? The Basis knows just a little too much about you for your comfort? Is the Metawatch too meta?
Well then meet the Hot Watch, out of Dallas. The company just launched the product on Kickstarter, and though the campaign is mostly bull shit (with arguments like: “your phone is too expensive to risk taking out of your pocket”), the product seems to be pretty fly for a new guy… in the smart watch space. I’m funny, dammit. Laugh!
Anyways, the Hot Watch claims to be different from any of its competitors by offering more full-featured functionality when it comes to making calls, sending and receiving messages and emails, and checking up on your social world.
Like the Pebble, the Hot Watch has a 1.26-inch E-paper multi-touch projected capacitive display from Sharp, with a Cortex M3 processor running the show and a secondary DSP processor to handle things like Bluetooth, call control and various audio features. It uses Bluetooth 4.0 to connect to any Bluetooth-enabled phone, but the founders say it works best with Android and iOS phones.
You’ll also find an accelerometer, gyroscope, pedometer and vibration motor in there, and if that weren’t enough, the Hot Watch is water resistant. Plus, it can detect when your phone is out of reach and will send you alerts that it may be lost or stolen.
But perhaps more interesting than the specs themselves is the fact that the Hot Watch allows for private calling. When you hold the Hot Watch up to your ear, the cup of your hand as it naturally holds up the watch will amplify the call into your ear.
This allows for entirely private calling, the same way it would be on a smartphone. Of course, the Hot Watch covers all the bases when it comes to calling functionality, allowing you to use speakerphone as well. Users can also receive and reply to messages, social feeds, and emails.
Also like the Pebble, the Hot Watch comes with customizable watch faces, as well as an SDK for third party developers who want to build snazzy apps for the forthcoming watch.
The Hot Watch also has a number of gestures for answering calls, rejecting them, dialing, muting, ending a call, or even calling your favorite number. In fact, the sensors built in can detect when you’ve fallen down and will dial an emergency number if you haven’t responded in 30 seconds.
Plus, there are Hot Gestures that let you get straight to a feature from the lockscreen. For example, write a D on the screen and go directly from the lock screen to the dial menu.
The Hot Watch has just launched its Kickstarter campaign and already received $42,000 of its $150,000 goal. Head on over to the Kickstarter page to check it out.
It’s getting hot in here, so put down all your phones.
NSA Project X-Keyscore Collects Nearly Everything You Do On The Internet
Further leaks have revealed an NSA project called X-Keyscore that, with a few keystrokes, can give a data analyst access to nearly everything a user does on the Internet – from chat sessions to email to browsing habits.
The system requires an email because many behaviors online are completely anonymous and it is only via some sort of identifier – a username and domain – that the system can scour the database of collected Internet traffic and metadata.
As Snowden said to the Guardian on June 10, “I, sitting at my desk could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.” X-Keyscore is how it is done.
The system is available to NSA analysts and can be accessed without a warrant. According to training manuals produced in 2010, the system requires analysts to request data on certain individuals. The system then scans traffic beginning and terminating the United States using keyword searches. The system can also search Facebook comments as well as other social media data.
The data is not permanent. Because the system gathers billions of records a day the database can store it for at most a few days. The NSA claims that these searches, which can pinpoint communications between people online and over the phone and find mention of certain terms and names in blog posts, emails, and other shared content, are completely audited and are aimed at overseas targets – although American nationals are often swept in during the intelligence gathering.
“XKeyscore is used as a part of NSA’s lawful foreign signals intelligence collection system,” said the NSA to the Guardian. “Allegations of widespread, unchecked analyst access to NSA collection data are simply not true.”
ActiveReplay's Trace Wants To Bring Quantified Self Tech To Action Sports For Players And Spectators
New Kickstarter project Trace is like a Fitbit for your extreme sports needs, allowing people who skate, surf, snowboard and ski to track a lot more than just time, distance and pace while participating in the sport they love. The Trace is the latest from ActiveReplay, a company that created AlpineReplay, an app and network for skiers to track and share their stats on the mountain.
Both AlpineReplay and the Trace are the brainchildren of Dr. Anatole Loshkin, one of the founders of GPS company Magellan, and his team of seven engineers based out of Hunting Beach, CA. The waterproof and shockproof Trace is a small cylinder, roughly the size of a Reese Peanut Butter Cup, which can affix to your board using a separate mount (and it’s detachable so that you can use it on multiple boards in multiple sports).
It’s designed to gather data including speed, distance, jump height and rotation, and has specialized free apps on iOS and Android for surf, skate and snow sports. The apps not only collect your data and give you a history you can check at any time, but add in a social element, allowing you to share that info with other athletes in your field. Through repeated use, ActiveReplay says they’ll be identify more and more tricks, letting them know exactly when a user lands a kickflip, for instance, or a 360, etc.
I spoke to ActiveReplay VP of Products David Loshkin, who himself has a background in applied mathematics from Harvard and has been writing a lot of the code for ActiveReplay, and whose personal interest in and passion for surfing, skating and snowboarding drove a lot of the product direction for ActiveReplay.
“If you’re a biker or a hardcore runner you have all these really cool gadgets to tell you your mile splits, heart rate and so forth,” he said. “I grew up skiing and snowboarding, and surfing and skating, and none of this exists for those sports, even though I think the information is way cooler. You’re doing complicated tricks where the board is spinning in all sorts of directions around you, you’re getting air time, you’re not just going in a straight line. This is a product I’ve always wanted, and there’s no reason at this point why surfing can’t be measured, why I can’t know how many waves I’ve caught for the year, for the month, or for just that session.”
The Trace is definitely cool, but is it something that can scale? Action sports are already more limited in appeal than general fitness activities like biking and run, after all, and only a small portion of people who participate in those sports track their activity with a dedicated device. But Loshkin argues that there’s a very big market for Trace, and notes that huge brands like Red Bull and ABC invest a lot in action sports, and they make up a good chunk of marquee broadcast events like the Winter Olympics.
“There are two sides: There’s the athlete’s side, and we feel that this is definitely going to change everything for surfers and skaters and stuff, but there’s also that spectator side,” he said. “When Tony Hawk says that he did a tre flip for example, my friends don’t know what a tre flip is, but that trick could instantly populate on the screen and you could instantly know that that’s one rotation in the x-axis and one rotation in the y-axis, and we could show that with cool graphics.”
The ActiveReplay Trace campaign is seeking $150,000 to get the device to mass production-ready state, with funding set to close in September and a ship date of January for the first batch of devices. The Trace starts at $99 for an early-bird pledge, and the company is being smart and staging batches so that they only have to manage fairly small volume shipments with each. Dr. Anatole Loshkin has lots of experience shipping hardware at Magellan, and clearly knows that promising too much too quickly is a pitfall to be avoided with hardware startups.
As a former (very) amateur skateboarder, I’m very interested in the kind of data the Trace can gather and report. Action sports may have a smaller user base than more broad activities like running, but it’s not as small as you might think, and it’s also a much more dedicated and invested group, so something like this makes a lot of logical sense for that market.
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