Some Of The Best Video From CES 2015

http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/some-of-the-best-video-from-ces-2015/

5 ways wearables must change to make us healthier in 2015

http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/01/5-ways-wearables-must-change-to-make-us-healthier-in-2015/

Many of us bought fitness wearables in 2014. We counted our steps, our distance walked, our quality sleep time. But almost as many of us probably ended up abandoning our new devices before we’d worn them even a month.

Because my job involves testing many of these devices, I’ve been through the adopt-and-abandon cycle several times over. I had hoped that one of these devices would stick — that I would continue wearing it and benefit from the so-called “actionable insights” gained from the data. But they all ended up in the junk drawer.

Here are some of the reasons that happens, and what needs to change to keep the wearable revolution headed in the right direction.

They need better functionality

Many fitness wearables on the market now are just accelerometers wrapped in a piece of plastic. The very limited set of features and functions that this enables is perfectly built for people who are OK with using a wearable for a couple of weeks then giving up. Many of these devices are so inexpensive that this loser of a use case can be a money maker for the manufacturer. But as the wearables market becomes saturated in 2015 this will be a tougher sell.

Many users will already have purchased (and thrown away) their first wearable, and will expect far more from their second one. In the last couple of months, we’ve seen wearables companies like FitBit and Jawbone begin to release devices that have more sensors and more refined algorithms for making sense of biometrics data.

The inclusion of a heartbeat monitor will become table stakes for wearables in the next year. They will not all be accurate, but consumers will begin to expect them. Manufacturers are also beginning to build smartwatch-like features (like notifications from a paired smartphone) into fitness wearables.

They need to be comfortable

This may sound fussy, but it’s a big deal. You’re asking me to wear your amazing device around day in and day out, even while I’m at the gym or in bed. So the thing has to be light, and it has to be comfortable. Many wearables simply are not comfortable on the wrist.

For instance, I was initially impressed with the Microsoft Band, but I eventually stopped wearing it because it felt to hard and blocky around my wrist. Plus, the touchscreen on the Band becomes very unresponsive when covered with perspiration.

Smartwatch makers need to take a deeper look into the materials available for watch bands, and get more creative about selecting them.

They should look good

Many wearables that entered the market this year were focused on hitting a low price point. For instanceXiaomi’s Mi Band sells at $13. Aesthetic appeal hasn’t been a priority, and cheaper wearables often look plasticky and toy-like.

Meanwhile, top-end fitness watches and smartwatches are often big and blocky. Part of that is an aesthetic problem, but part of it is a technical one. As more and more features and functions are built in to these devices, larger component parts, such as bigger batteries, are needed to run them. That’s why they’re bigger.

The lithium ion battery won’t be able to deliver the capacity improvements needed to get us through the smartwatch revolution. Manufacturers need to double down on power supply R&D and come up with some viable alternatives. This problem alone could kill the smartwatch category.

The numbers need to add up to something

At any one time I’m using several health devices, like a connected scale, a nutrition tracker, a sleep tracker, and a fitness band. I can open all the apps that accompany these devices and peruse all the numbers they’ve collected about my steps, deep sleep minutes, my calendars, etc. But what do I do with this data?

Too often wearables generate a lot of data, but they don’t give me contextual information I need to put the data to use. A device might give me my resting heart rate, but chances are it doesn’t know enough about me to tell me when my heart range has entered the danger zone. A dangerous rate for me, after all, might be perfectly fine for an athlete in training, or a life-threatening rate for someone who is morbidly obese.

I hope that smartwatch makers in 2015 will think of better ways to wrap enough contextual information around the numbers to make it all meaningful.

The apps should be easier to use

Some of the apps that accompany wearable devices are so poorly designed that it’s difficult to even see and make sense of the data they’ve collected. If the app is hard to read and understand, the device is basically useless. Since biometrics data is often best presented in charts and graphs, the app must make careful use of screen space to display it properly. Often, this doesn’t happen.

The numbers show that the market for health and fitness wearables is set to expand rapidly in 2015. As one wearable brand CEO told me, the devices are so easy and inexpensive to make, and the market is so ripe, he’d be crazy not to sell health wearables.

Hopefully, pure competition will weed the weak players out of the market, and new, more feature-rich and comfortable wearables will emerge.

Everyone In Management Is A Programmer

http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/01/everyone-in-management-is-a-programmer/

Editor’s note: Adam Evans is the co-founder and CTO of RelateIQ.

When it comes to the task of finding and nurturing great engineering managers, misunderstandings at startups are all too common. It seems that many people assume great engineers don’t want to “give up” coding to take on leadership roles. To be clear, this is flat out wrong — and could create tremendous churn in your talent pool if you fail to recognize and elevate leaders in engineering as you would with any other team.

But, you might argue, engineers are introverted, right? And they would rather ponder big problems than worry about resource allocation? And they aren’t really interested in business problems as much as tech problems, correct?

The answer to all of these suppositions is “Not really.” All of these are just biases, or preconceived notions of what an engineer is like. We have some fantastically chatty engineers, and we have some quiet ones. We have some developers who would kill me if I asked them to do performance reviews, and some who genuinely enjoy coaching and mentoring as part of their jobs. It just depends.

Engineers, like all other teammates within your organization, run the gamut in terms of interest and proclivity for management roles. Some, I’ve found, just need a nudge to get there. They need you to frame the challenge in the right way to make it accessible to them.

So here’s my pitch to my engineering team: Anyone involved in management is aprogrammer. Being a leader within your organization requires you to master the art of motivating and coaching people, which isn’t all that different from, say, programming a person.

Sounds silly, I know, but think about it: As a programmer, your sole mission is to get a computer to do what you tell it to do — run the program the way you designed it to run. You spend all day trying to get that computer sitting across from you to follow your instructions. And it’s really stubborn. One bad keystroke and it doesn’t listen to anything you say. Maybe this metaphor is becoming more clear to anyone who has had a challenging direct report in the past.

There are major differences between programming computers and programming humans, of course, not the least of which is that some runtimes are much more volatile when you’reprogramming people.

Talking about programming humans really mimics how an engineer approaches a problem. Framing the management role in this way makes it instantly accessible, even to developers who never saw themselves enjoying management — and that’s something we can all agree is a welcome development.

5 Big Trends that Shaped Social Media in 2014

http://readwrite.com/2015/01/01/2014-social-trends

Messaging, following, and anonymity

When we're mobile, we're social. In 2014, we spent 45 minutes a day on social apps on our smartphones and tablets—the biggest use for our devices after games, according to Flurry, the mobile-analytics firm Yahoo purchased this year. Social applications—social networks, messaging apps, and other forms of connection—now account for 28 percent of our time spent on apps, up from 24 percent in 2013.

Facebook still dominates our usage. But in many ways, the Facebook-defined paradigm for social networking fell apart in 2014. Social connections aren't about one big place where we all hang out—it's about a fragmented landscape of apps with connections that are more provisional than Facebook's old friends list.

These changes aren't lost on the Web's dominant social network. Facebook itself has been a participant in and sometimes a driver of these changes. But the most interesting part of the social landscape of 2014 is the sense that it's no longer just Facebook's game.

Breaking Up Is Easy To Do—Even For Facebook

Smartphones, always pulsing with notifications and updates, break our attention spans down to mere seconds. The smart response by social networks is to break themselves into multiple apps, or for new apps to define their purposes ever more narrowly.

The app that epitomized this trend was Yo. Launched on April Fool's Day, the messaging app only sent one word to your friends: "Yo." 

And Facebook’s standalone Messenger app brought the fragmentation trend to the masses. Some objected to its mandatory imposition, but it allowed us to converse with friends without contending with updates from our noisy news feeds. Standalone apps are like shortcuts to different social features that, on the Web, might make more sense as part of one big website. 

“Connecting everyone means giving the power to share different kinds of content with different groups of people,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a conference call with analysts early this year. “This is something we focused on by launching separate mobile apps beyond the main Facebook app – Messenger and Instagram are great examples of this.”

Paper, a social news-reading app, and Groups, an app for Facebook-organized communities, are more examples of apps Facebook spun off this year.

Foursquare also pursued the break-up strategy, spinning off Swarm as an app just for location-based check-ins.

Messaging Dominated The Conversation

Facebook's $17 billion purchase of WhatsApp focused everyone's attention on the rise of messaging apps. Mostly free to use, these mobile alternatives to old-fashioned texting or desktop-based instant messaging attracted hundreds of millions of users. And there was no shortage of contenders, from WhatsApp to Snapchat, Line, Viber, WeChat, and others.

The reasons we used messaging apps in 2014 varied wildly, from the high cost of texting in Europe to the preference for visual communication with emojis in Asia to American teens' desire for a less-permanent way of sending pictures.

The truth is that each messaging app serves its own purpose for connecting with people. The inherent complexity of human nature means that no one app will be able to serve all of our needs for connection.  

The Rise Of The Anti-Facebook

This was the year we lost our innocence about Facebook. It was easy enough to ignore the abstract warnings about how the social network tracked users across the Web. It was harder to stomach the way Facebook researchers conducted a massive psychological experiment on almost 700,000 unknowing users for one week, tweaking the posts displayed in their feeds to make them happier or sadder.

There was also the incident where a disgruntled user  sought to kick drag queens off of Facebook by reporting them for violating a rule that the social network rarely enforced.

Facebook executives apologized for both incidents, but together, they lay the groundwork for the rise of new social network Ello. Marketing itself as the "anti-Facebook," creator Paul Budnitz promised an advertising- and tracking-free environment. 

It's not clear if Ello will ever attract a large number of users. But its very existence is a reminder that social applications must put users, not advertisers, first.

The End Of The Friend Request

Social applications are slowly but surely distancing themselves from one-to-one connections and the concept of the two-way "friend request." Now everyone from Instagram to LinkedIn and Foursquare encourages users to "follow" other profiles.

“Following” people, celebrities, and brands that interest you gives networks more opportunities to grow than when they limit you to a small, finite pool of real-life friends or two-way connections. There’s less friction, too, in waiting for someone to accept a friend request. 

No Names, Please

The ultimate form of connection we explored in 2014 was one where we didn't ask for names. Secret, Yik Yak, and Whisper all took off, showing the strong interest people have in online anonymity. This, too, was a reaction to Facebook's creation of a world where everything we do online gets attached to our name.

These experiments with anonymity had their downsides. Secret struggled with mean-spirited chatter, eventually putting in measures to keep users from including names in their posts. Whisper got in trouble when executives bragged to reporters about their ability to track posters.

It's clear that anonymity or pseudonymity, in a throwback to the early days of the Web, are staging a revival. Even Facebook got into the game with an app called Rooms, which isn't strictly speaking anonymous but instead uses instant-messaging-style handles.

What will 2015 hold? We'd love to hear your predictions.