I wear a Fitbit every day. Before that, I had a Pebble Smart Watch … before that I used my iPhone to track my steps. Honestly, I use these devices for one reason only — to help me reach my daily goal of 10,000 steps. I am, however, looking forward to when these devices move from dumb to smart and allow me greater functionality — it is inevitable. I wonder what it will mean to us in education? Will we try to take advantage of these devices as we have with each of the other disruptive technologies to hit the street? I would assume and would love to spend some time talking about that with some people.

The wearables device market is still in its infancy but it’s growing fast — with more than 17 million wearable bands forecast to ship this year, according to a new forecast by Canalys.It reckons 2014 will be the year that wearables become a “key consumer technology”, and is predicting the smart band segment alone will reach 8 million annual shipments, growing to more than 23 million units by 2015, and over 45 million by 2017.

via Wearables Market Heating Up, With More Than 17M Bands Forecast To Ship This Year, Says Canalys | TechCrunch.

The whole Flappy Bird story is absolutely fascinating … from the rise to the fall, it is the stuff of pure Internet wonderment.

Second, for good or ill, Flappy Bird had become controversial. Last week, my fellow reporters and I noticed some chatter on Twitter about how the game and Nguyens other titles had suddenly risen in popularity. We saw people suggesting that Nguyen may have used bots—computer programs that would repeatedly download and/or auto-generate reviews of the game in order to raise its app rankings. We were intrigued, but couldnt find anyone who had proof and left that story alone. Since then, Ive seen blog posts from people who are sure Nguyen did or didnt get help from bots.

via The Flappy Bird Fiasco.