FeibusTech Blog

Raise your hand if you don’t give two shoes about how many steps you took today.

That’s what I thought.

You are the smartwatch silent majority. You kept your mouths – and your wallets – on lockdown during wave after wave of wrist-worn wearables catered to minutiae-minded fitness freaks. You nodded knowingly as others’ Fitbit’s, worn with such conviction after New Year’s, ended up stashed with dusty Shake Weights and Abdominizers by spring break.

Well guess what? Your patience is being rewarded. Because as Black Friday approaches, manufacturers are now pointing their wearables squarely at you.

Read my entire USA TODAY Tech column HERE.

When it comes to healthcare tech, are you East Coast or West Coast? Here’s a quick test to help you find out.

OK, so you’ve just invented a new wearable that could revolutionize care for diabetics. The device measures glucose levels through the skin, so patients will never have to draw blood again. Your device sends continuous readings to patients’ smartphones, which will give them much finer control over their blood sugar levels.

You’ve clearly got a winner on your hands. Now what?

Are you feeling a rush of urgency to get your brainchild to market? Do you want to damn the torpedoes, and go full speed ahead? If so, then your health-tech geography is decidedly West Coast. If, on the other hand, you’re starting to think about how to securely feed the information into patients’ health records, scheduling clinical trials, and booking meetings at the Food and Drug Administration, then you’re an East Coast health techie.

Of course, the philosophical differences are borne more out of professional background than location. You can find plenty of both mentalities on each side of the Mississippi. That said, innovators grounded in healthcare, who better understand how doctors, nurses and other caregivers work, are more commonly associated with the East Coast. They better understand the arduous process of testing a new app or smartphone device and taking it through the regulatory process.

And tech-first companies, which typically bloom in West-Coast locales like Silicon Valley, Seattle and San Diego, tend to be driven more by, well, technology.

“The healthcare industry needs to drive better health, better cost and better population management,” said Dr. Michael Weiner, IBM’s Chief Medical Information Officer. “And the tech side brings the technology that makes it all possible. It’s a match made in heaven.”

It can be. To be sure, the companies that effectively mesh the two mentalities have a far better chance for success. Many point to Silicon Valley startups 23andme, which has a mail-in DNA-testing service, and Theranos, which offers a quick, low-cost blood-testing alternative, as examples of what can happen when one orientation overpowers the other. Indeed, both companies have suffered well-publicized setbacks dealt by the FDA.

Find out how successful companies are blending East and West in my USA TODAY column HERE.

Forward-thinking Chinese appliance vendors like Haier are getting aggressive about turning the Connected Home vision into a reality. They are integrating connectivity across their product lines, from wine coolers to water heaters. Because of lengthy replacement cycles for home appliances, Haier understands that an appliances it sells today will have to connect with a broad range of other smart devices ten years from now. To help ensure that happens, Haier is future-proofing its broad line of appliances by integrating intelligent, platform-agnostic connectivity components from Qualcomm.

Read more about Haier is trying to make the Connected Home dream a reality in my USA TODAY column HERE.

And find out how Haier is future-proofing its smart appliances in my blog post HERE.

If you were frustrated by early versions of personal digital assistance apps like Siri or Google Now, it might be time to try again. A new wave of the technology is beginning to roll out with a lot more knowledge and horsepower behind it to help our laptops, tablets and smartphones fit naturally into the way we work and play.

With the rollout of Windows 10 to millions of PCs now underway, Microsoft’s Cortana is the most visible effort of this new wave of personal assistance technology. But there are others, of course. Notably: Apple’s Siri, Google Now for Android, Amazon’s unique living-room product called Echo, and dozens of apps that leverage IBM’s Watson suite of cognitive tools. The apps all promise great advances in the search function, one of the most ubiquitous activities in our connected lives. Even more exciting, though, is the potential they have to transcend beyond looking up things we ask to begin anticipating our needs and, over time, even acting on our behalf.

To find out more about how they work and what they can do for you, read my USA TODAY column HERE.

The market for connected-home devices has been growing rapidly. But thus far, it’s been DIY’ers who have been driving demand. If the market is going to surpass the billion-unit-a-year mark as forecasted, the done-for-you types will have to join in. Sears thinks it’s figured out how to do just that.

Read my entire column at USA TODAY HERE.

MINI today unveiled a new heads-up display concept that’s embedded not in a windshield but in a pair of augmented reality glasses at the Auto Shanghai show. I got to try it out on Friday.

The verdict: it’s pretty cool.

The glasses have a few advantages over heads-up displays integrated into the windshield. For one, the speed limit, gas gauge, upcoming street names and other contextually relevant information comes with you if you happen to glance away. (Just be careful, OK?)

There’s also an opportunity to tailor the information on the heads-up display for where you’re looking. MINI showed off one example: a safety feature it calls X-Ray view. The demonstration vehicle has a pair of side cameras – one on each side – that it employs for detecting hazards. In the demo, the glasses lit up because a child’s ball was rolling toward the passenger side of the car. And when I looked over, I actually saw “through” the vehicle to see the ball by the front tire.

The glasses, by the way, are built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 processor. They make use of the chipmaker’s Vuforia augmented-reality platform to determine where you’re looking – and when to empower you with X-Ray vision.

The glasses are compatible with several MINI models already on the road, and could be made to work with other automakers’ cars as well. MINI doesn’t yet have a timetable for turning the glasses into a real product.

Here’s another advantage of the heads-up display glasses over windshield units: the heads-up display sits behind the glasses. On a bright sunny day, that means you don’t have to lift your polarized sunglasses just to see what’s on the display. As someone who’s in danger of developing repetitive stress syndrome from constantly lifting and lowering my sunglasses while driving, that may be the biggest advantage of all.

Windows RT was doomed from the start, with Microsoft offering only the Modern UI with few apps and shockingly little support for apps on the desktop, which had all the apps PC users ever needed. And now it’s over.

At least it sure seems that way. With the first two generations of its own-brand PC line, Microsoft offered the RT-based Surface models, which offered lots of battery life at the expense of support for the apps you cared about, and the Surface Pro, which had the apps but couldn’t keep pace on power.

With the third version, the Surface Pro has made great strides in performance, usability and battery life. And the Surface is now built around Intel’s low-power Atom lineup – which means it’s got great battery life and supports all the apps you know and love (and hate) on Windows.

The death knell for Windows RT? I’d say so. Read more HERE.

We learned a lot more about Samsung’s mobile technology outlook from the company’s annual reveal than how thin, light and powerful the new Galaxy S6 will be. You can read it all in my USA TODAY column.

On the eve of the biggest mobile industry event of the year, one of the more high-profile technologies for dealing with the growing cellular capacity crunch is leaving the lab and making its way out into the real world. The technology, called Unlicensed LTE, or LTE-U, puts the latest 4G cellular technology onto Wi-Fi bands.

Because LTE-U touches both Wi-Fi and cellular networks, influential trade groups from both sides want a say in how the standard develops. They’ll resolve their issues, I’m sure. They’ll have to, because the cellular capacity shortfall is getting worse.

In the meantime, I’ve seen LTE-U in action in a highly dense environment, where the technology should shine. And it does.

Read my entire USA TODAY column HERE.

“If you don’t want it now, you’ll want it in six to nine months. It’s proliferating fast,” Feibus said, adding that Qualcomm has been aggressie in pushing 4K into lower-cost devices.

Read the entire PC World story on Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon processors, which bring 4K video and fast LTE to mainstream smartphones, HERE.

Millions of us have busted our smartphone displays, and then suffered through the unconnected days that followed until we could replace our screens or phones. But there aren’t many who crash the screen on the eve of a critical week of back-to-back meetings. Which is what I just did – the night before the start of CES early this month. But guess what? I managed to stay connected. I was already wearing what I needed to get by, just like Dorothy. But my pair of ruby-red slippers was a smartwatch, which I used as a portal into the phone. You could do it too – and with a little planning, fare better than I did. Here’s how.

Read my entire column in USA TODAY here

Qualcomm announced here at CES that a dozen audio hardware and service providers are hopping onto the AllPlay bandwagon. They’re planning new products that connect to each other over WiFi to create instant sound systems, and music apps and services that take advantage of the systems.

Assuming my math is correct, the news will bring the number of hardware brands under the AllPlay umbrella to 15, and 18 music streaming apps and platforms. Building momentum by adding new supporters is vital at this stage of this white-hot market, because there is a sizable stable of competing wireless plug-and-play platforms all trying to build critical mass.

The alternatives fall into two camps, those that offer open approaches like AllPlay and Play-Fi from DTS, and closed systems such as those from Apple, Bluesound, Bose and Sonos. Sonos is the clear incumbent in the space, though I expect an interoperable platform to play a dominant role as well.

I’ve been playing with a pair of AllPlay speakers for the past couple of weeks. More precisely, I’ve been playing with two speakers: the compact PlayLink 4 speaker from Lenco and its big brother, the PlayLink 6. The speakers, which were announced late last year, can be configured as left-and-right stereo speakers – each one can play either role – or as a pair of multi-room systems. In the latter mode, the speakers can play the same song or separate streams. You can play music from your tablet or smartphone, and select songs stored on your device or streamed from the growing list of services.

The speakers also underscore the need for a better home network. I tried the devices using an older 802.11g router that was also supporting a few other devices. One speaker worked just fine. But when I added a second, I experienced gaps and delays that signaled the old router was sucking wind.

At home, with a comparatively more sophisticated 802.11n router that sports some quality-of-service features – but also supports far more devices than the 802.11g network – the system had no trouble playing songs in stereo through the speakers. There were a few annoying gaps when each speaker played independent music streams.

The jury is still out on which standard will prevail. But in addition to gaining some momentum with new hardware and services, AllPlay has something going for it that none of the others do: it’s part of the broader AllJoyn framework for the Internet of Things. That means services can tie more than just speakers and players together over the WiFi network. They could also use the living-room TV to display album cover art, for example. Or they could tap motion sensors so it could let your music follow you throughout the house.

So if you haven’t tried configurable WiFi music systems like the Lenco AllPlay speakers, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how easy it can be to put the music you want in the place you want it. The software is just as plug and play as the hardware. But be forewarned: make sure you’ve got a wireless router that’s beefy enough to support it. The more speakers – and the more streams you want to play over those speakers – the more network performance you’re going to need.

In 2014, fitness dominated the wearables scene. This year, however, the name of the game in wearables and Internet of Things is healthcare – and it will dwarf fitness.

Read my column in USA TODAY.

There’s nothing worse than that sinking feeling when you realize that your NFL team will be fighting for its post-season life during a holiday party you’ve committed to attend. At least it feels that way.

But with a little preparation and some creativity, you can keep tabs on The Most Important Game Ever. Find out how. Read my column in USA TODAY.

The flashlight app on your phone may be reporting your GPS location. Seriously. Here’s what you can do to keep nosy apps like that from overrunning your smartphone. Without actually doing what you should.

Read my entire column in USA TODAY here.

Have I really fallen and can’t get up? Or am I just starting my sit-up regime? If you’re in the room with me, that would be an easy call to make. It’s a different matter entirely for a smart device. It has a stable of sensors feeding it light, motion, temperature, pressure and other environmental inputs.

So how to turn that into actionable data? That’s the focus of a new industry initiative.

Watch my interview with Ian Chen, a manager in FreeScale’s sensor business unit, HERE.

Are you tired of listening to your uber-healthy co-workers comparing calories and steps at the office? Those of you with chronic conditions can now take heart. Thanks to a new wave of wearables, soon it will be your turn to annoy the crap out of them. Provided companies can clear regulatory hurdles, that is.

Read my entire Information Week column HERE.