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The Smartwatch Era Is Here

If you are an Apple fan, April 24 2015 marks the beginning of the smartwatch era – the date the Apple Watch is available. (Preorders start Apr 10th.) Smartwatches have been around for a while, but given the Apple reality distortion field, they will initially sell in large numbers, even though they are the most expensive ones available. The basic Apple watch is functionally the same as the most expensive gold watch edition that starts at $10,000. (Someone said that if you can afford a $10,000 watch, you probably don’t need to know what time it is.)

But there . . . [more]

Posted in: Technology

Smartwatches Still in the Running

I’ve written about smartwatches before. So far they have not been selling as fast as some expected. The marketplace still hasn’t sorted out the right combinations of features and price.

Apple’s iWatch is arriving in April. It will no doubt sell well – if for no other reason than it’s an Apple product.

The first real smartwatch was the Pebble, which broke Kickstarter records in 2012. They announced a new version of it yesterday, called the “Pebble Time”. They launched a new Kickstarter project yesterday morning – but this time just to take pre-orders at a discount for May . . . [more]

Posted in: Technology

Will a Smartwatch Be on Your Wrist? 10 Things to Ponder.

As expected, Apple introduced its Apple Watch (not iWatch) last week with great fanfare. It is actually not a single watch, but a series of watches in 2 sizes and 3 models with various types of bands. It will be available “early 2015”.

Of course only those with iPhones can use an Apple Watch. Those with Android phones will use one of the options running Android Wear.

The reaction to the smartwatch phenomenon has been interesting. Traditional watch manufacturers are being dismissive about it – which sounds a lot like how Rim (Blackberry) dismissed the iPhone when it first . . . [more]

Posted in: Technology

Smartwatch Week

The IFA – the European equivalent of the Las Vegas Consumer Electronic Show – starts Friday – although manufacturers have already started pre-show press conferences. A wide range of consumer electronics and appliances will be on display. The tech press will have extensive coverage, including CNET and engadget.

Smartwatches will be prominent. With Google’s recent launch of its Android Wear smartwatch operating system, several new smart watches are being announced. Some are updates of existing models, and some are new. Examples include the Asus ZenWatch and the Sony SmartWatch 3. Not to be outdone, Apple is expected to . . . [more]

Posted in: Technology

Is a Smartwatch in Your Future?

Many people don’t bother wearing watches any more because its so easy to check the time on our phones. But that may change as watches move from just telling time to being a display device that works with our phones. A Datamation article entitled 5 Tech Trends That Will Bring Back the Wristwatch explains why. 

The 5 trends:

  • Multi-screen functionality where devices work together
  • Wearable computing
  • Voice interaction
  • eInk displays that are thin and consume very little power
  • Bluetooth 4.0 that consumes very little power

See, for example, the Pebble watch, a Kickstarter project that is now shipping. I’ll take . . . [more]

Posted in: Technology

Jurors and the Lure of the Internet

The Internet taunts jurors. Promising them answers. Beckoning them to Google the parties, the law, the lawyers. And after-all, how bad could one search be? If only those lawyers weren’t so boring. If only the evidence was presented clearly. If only the judge’s instructions weren’t steeped in legalese, then we could decide it without the Internet. Whatever the justification may be, whether curiosity got the best of them or it was something else, jurors are Googling. And they are compromising the appearance of justice and maybe justice itself by going beyond the evidence in the courtroom.

Last year, the Ontario . . . [more]

Posted in: Justice Issues

A Supercomputer on Your Wrist

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the specs and quirks of our current technology that we forget how far we have come.

To put it in perspective, consider a smartwatch. There are many ways to measure computer performance – CPU speed, amount of ram, amount of storage memory, network speed, etc. A common way to compare basic performance, though, is by FLOPS, or floating operations per second.

A smartwatch can do somewhere in the range of 3 to 9 gigaflops. To put that in perspective, the Cray-2 supercomputer in 1985 could do about 1.9 gigaflops. You could buy . . . [more]

Posted in: Technology

Divide to Conquer: Content Strategy for a Distracted Digital Age

There are two somewhat related media consumption patterns happening right now that most law firms haven’t given much thought to yet – mobility and distraction. You can use these developments to your advantage by building modular content that can be sliced and diced in a variety of ways to help you get more mileage out of your lawyers’ substantive writing and create a more unique online presence for your firm. Let me explain. . .

The first pattern is the ongoing shift to consuming content on mobile devices – by which I mean phones and tablets (and by all that . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Marketing

The Next Tech Trend – Smart Watches

A few smart watches are on the market now. The Pebble that resulted from a Kickstarter project is probably the most well known one.

Many manufacturers are working on their own versions. Samsung today revealed its Galaxy Gear smartwatch .

For now, it apparently only works with Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3, but I’m sure that will change soon.

So what does a smartwatch do? Basically, it works as an interface for your smartphone. You can make and receive calls from it, send and receive texts, control music, and interface in other various ways. It responds to touch, voice, and gesture . . . [more]

Posted in: Technology

Big Data and Wearable Computing Spark Legal Issues

I think we are going to see over the next while some interesting technical developments with some equally interesting legal issues to ponder around big data and wearable computing.

One of the things I like about being an IT lawyer is that I get to see interesting new technology and businesses, and with any luck do their legal work.

Earlier this morning I was at a business that has some cool technology around social media and big data. It has the ability to turn into a 5 minute project what can now take months to do manually, if you can . . . [more]

Posted in: Technology

Wearable Computing – Legal Issues?

What do readers think about wearable computing? Is it cool or creepy? Where is the technology headed? What legal or other issues might arise from it?

I’m thinking about this because I find the intersection of technology and law interesting, and I’ve been asked to speak about it this fall. Google Glass privacy concerns is a popular topic today, especially around the issue of the ability to record and save images and video, and what might happen with all that. In addition to Google Glass we are seeing the debut of the smartwatch. The Pebble was a very successful . . . [more]

Posted in: Technology