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

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

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 Flappy Bird Fiasco

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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.

People-Powered Publishing Is Changing All the Rules

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Personal publishing takes lots of forms … a personal publishing platform (like SB You) is a great way to hone a voice and develop confidence in writing for an audience. I think any sort of personal publishing is a step towards writing with a real purpose.

“Self-publishing used to be synonymous with unprestigious “vanity publishing,” where well-off authors who couldnt get their books into print by traditional means paid small, independent presses to publish them. But with the advent of e-books, social reading sites and simple digital self-publishing software and platforms, all that has changed. An increasing proportion of authors now actively choose to self-publish their work, giving them better control over their books rights, marketing, distribution and pricing.”

via People-Powered Publishing Is Changing All the Rules.

An Inbox I Can Enjoy

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I make absolutely no secret about the fact that I dislike email. I’ve been on a quest for years to reduce the amount of organizational work happening in email … it just is not a good platform to manage the type of ongoing discourse required to arrive at decisions and get things done on a daily basis. I would much rather see teams of people using a platform like Yammer to make work happen … but that is a post for another day. The screenshot below is of my inbox showing new SB You site registrations. Now that is an inbox I can get behind!

inbox sb you registrations

SB You Hits 3.8

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Only a few weeks after opening the doors on SB You we’ve updated the platform to WordPress 3.8 and it is quite a nice change. I am writing this from my iPad right in my Dashboard — no custom app needed. This is honestly the first version of WordPress I’ve used that really feels like it was designed with a mobile evidence in mind and that makes me happy. On the go publishing with SB You is now a reality.

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Even adding images is much improved!

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Revisiting the Publishing Platform

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As we are seeing some growth in the pilot of SB You, I wanted to reflect on why I feel it is so important for a community to have a platform the powers simple publishing … in doing so, I was drawn back to the post I made right as I was working at Penn State to spin up the original Blogs at Penn State project. At that time I was trying to move people to see that we weren’t talking about blogging per se, but instead about personal content management and simple publishing. From a post on May 25, 2006 I shared this observation,

So, when is a blog not a blog? When you brand it as a personal content management system. Think of the power then … you want to blog, publish, take notes, turn in papers, or do anything in an e-model? The personal content managent system can do it and it can do it so it is stored, managed, searchable, accessible, and easy.

The really interesting part about that post in my mind to this day are the comments … imagine at that time, people still commented on blog posts instead of clicking “Like or +1” links. What is striking to me is that the text came alive with the addition of the voices of the community. It was an important illustration of what that original project would become for us at PSU — a platform for digital expression. Trust me, we didn’t know inherently it would become that, but it did.

Fast forward to today and I am hopeful that our own steps into SB You will bring as many amazing opportunities and surprises as our students, faculty, and staff begin to write, share, and collaborate in a digital space. Even as the world has shifted from blogs to social networks of all types I still think a platform like SB You is a critical piece of the fabric that can bring a community even closer. If this happens it will become a public and living illustration of the collective intelligence this campus has. So, when is a blog not a blog? I think when it becomes the place that each of us individually or collectively can create, curate, share, explore, and engage each other.

Where I am Spending my Time

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It dawned on me just now that I haven’t posted a thing here since moving to Long Island to Stony Brook University. I have been posting, but just not here in my personal space. Not much to say today other than if you are interested in some of the things happening in my life, you can catch up with them at my Stony Brook University blog on our emerging publishing platform, SB You. I should also mention that the transition is finally starting to feel like it is real — like we live here as a family. Work is both amazing and challenging … to the point where I am excited on a daily basis to be doing what I am doing. At the end of the day, all is good. I would invite you to follow along if interested and reach out to say hi.

Building My Local Reading List

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One of the reasons I love seeing blogging communities in higher education is because it gives me a chance to see the collective intelligence of that community come together.Even after only a couple of weeks, there are blogs popping up on SB You nearly every day. We’ve not done any marketing and have really kept things quiet so far as we kick the tires and figure things out around here, so to see people playing along is really very cool. To keep up, I’ve created a new Feedly account and have been adding new SB You blogs as they are being created. The only thing I was I could do was share this SB You collection like you could back in the days Google Reader.

Feedly SB You List

I am already seeing this emerge as something very positive for the Stony Brook community in general. I can only imagine how interesting it will get as we move into the spring semester and faculty start using blogs in their classrooms! I always loved seeing what people at Penn State were doing with their university blogs and I know this will be the same kind of thing.