Nickelodeon launched the Nick Jr. app for the Apple Watch, enabling better parental controls for the preschool app on the iPhone, the company said Tuesday. When the Apple Watch is used in tandem with the Nick Jr. app for iPhone, parents will be able to manage screen time via a timer, supervise their child’s activities on the phone and regulate the volume settings, it said. “These watch functions are extensions of the user’s iPhone experience and can be accessed by tapping on the Nick Jr. icon on the watch.” Additional features include the ability of parents to see at a glance what kids are watching in the app at any given moment, it said.
The introduction of the Apple Watch is “a game changer,” ranking it in first place among the top five developments that will affect the smart wireless devices sector this year, Juniper Research said Monday in a report. The Apple Watch “offers radical new features and functions” in a wearable, but also “a best-in-class consumer experience” that forms part of “a seamless ecosystem,” Juniper said. Intel is “betting hard on the smart devices sector with a range of chipsets,” and that puts Intel in second place among the top five developments, it said. “From Edison to Curie, these new chips are going to drive many smart wireless devices this year.” Rounding out the top five: (3) Microsoft’s “bold announcement” of the HoloLens “envisions consumer-friendly smart glasses” that can bring artificial reality experiences throughout the home. (4) GOQii Fitness, which aims to shake up the fitness device sector with a subscription-based service. The service links a user with a virtual fitness coach to help interpret output from the fitness device and provide motivation and context for the data. (5) The Google-TAG Heuer smart watch “opens up the wider premium watch market to Android Wear and Intel chips.”
British CE distributor Kondor began marketing the Mota-brand line of wearables and mobile accessories in the U.K. and Ireland, the companies said Monday. The distribution agreement is California-based Mota's first expansion into the U.K. and Ireland, they said.
Smart watches are catching up to activity trackers and are on pace to reach the wrists of 9 percent of the U.S. adult population by 2016, said an NPD report. As smart watch penetration grows, activity tracker penetration will plateau and peak at 32 million units after significant growth for four years. “The smartwatch will clearly begin to take a bite out of the activity tracker market moving forward,” said analyst Eddie Hold, citing health and fitness apps on smart watches as the reason consumers are moving away from simple trackers. The activity tracker is under threat not only from the smart watch but from its limited use cases, said Hold. Counting the number of steps taken daily limits the addressable market size, and 40 percent of activity tracker owners stop using the device within six months, he said. Sports offer an opportunity for activity trackers, said Hold, citing demand for sophisticated trackers with GPS support, heart rate sensors and rugged, waterproof design. Third-party activity apps will be key to the growth of the sport-related activity tracker market and to the long-term “stickiness” of the smart watch, he said.
A Juniper Research study puts the advertising spend on smart watches at $69 million by 2019, up from $1.5 million this year, the company said Tuesday. Growth in smart watch advertising will be driven by high-profile brands including Apple entering the category and will correlate to increased consumer acceptance of wearable technology, the report said. The emergence of an additional consumer screen would likely stimulate interest among advertisers, though until a user threshold is reached most ad spends are likely to take the form of ad hoc campaigns, it said. Brands will need to develop advertising formats designed for the limited real estate of a smart watch screen, and behavioral differences between smartphone and smart watch usage are likely to challenge advertisers, Jupiter said. “With consumers viewing smartwatch screens for seconds rather than minutes, advertisers will have markedly less time to engage their audience,” it said.
Health insurer Anthem and health information exchange company CareEvolution said Monday they’re partnering on the cFHR (collaborative Family Health Record) app, one of the first apps to be available for Apple Watch when it launches April 24. The cFHR app will enable the health care provider to send Apple Watch users notifications about preventive screening, gaps in managing care, prescription refills and potential drug interactions, the companies said. Anthem’s 37 million-user customer base gives it the “scale and footprint” to make an impact on how Americans track and manage their health and well-being, the company said. “The industry is at a crossroads where consumers and technology are intersecting to create a new paradigm for managed health care,” Thomas Miller, Anthem chief information officer, said. “Consumers want autonomy over their health choices and wearable technologies are making that increasingly possible,” he said. The Apple Watch app works with the existing Apple HealthKit-enabled iPhone cFHR app to give providers and consumers access to medical histories in a unified record, Anthem said.
Apple will take Apple Watch pre-orders exclusively at apple.com beginning Friday at 12:01 a.m. PDT, for delivery starting April 24, the company said Thursday. Apple expects Apple Watch demand at launch will easily outstrip supply, Angela Ahrendts, Apple senior vice president-retail and online stores, said in a statement. The online-only pre-order policy will be in place “to provide the best experience and selection to as many customers as we can,” she said.
More than 75 million wearable devices will be adopted in enterprise and industrial environments between 2014 and 2020, said a Tractica report released Wednesday. Smart watches are expected to be the largest category of wearables in the workplace, followed by fitness trackers and smart glasses, it said. In the enterprise segment, personal wearables will predominate, along with fitness trackers or smart watches provided by employers as part of corporate wellness programs, said Tractica. In industrial environments, wearables will revolve around use cases in fields including oil and gas, mining, aerospace, warehouse, engineering services, transport/logistics, field maintenance and mobile workforce management, it said.
An opening day update of the At Bat app will include support for Apple Watch, Major League Baseball said in a Friday announcement. It called At Bat the highest-grossing sports app for a record six straight years. At Bat for Apple Watch will give fans live scores, statistics, pitch tracking for every regular season and post-season game, individual MLB player cards, notifications and breaking news, MLB said. MLB.TV Premium subscribers again will receive a free upgrade to the complete suite of At Bat's premium features, it said.
Movado in the past year has made “a great deal of progress in evaluating the wearables category,” CEO Efraim Grinberg said Tuesday on an earnings call. Though Movado operates “predominantly in the luxury watch and fashion watch categories” and thinks consumers “are drawn to our watches by their quality, beautiful designs and strong brand images,” the company also sees “significant opportunity in this new emerging space” of wearables, he said. “We have always embraced technology that allows us to make well-designed products that provide consumers with desired functionality.” And so Movado has “a number of projects” in the works “in close collaboration with several tech companies to develop smart watches for Movado that will celebrate a point of difference, with introduction planned for either later this calendar year or early next year,” he said. Movado as a company has “always been a leader in embracing innovation to make beautiful products,” Grinberg said in Q&A. “So when technology allows us to do that, we will embrace it and those are the projects that we are working on” in the wearables space, he said. But when it comes to most smart watches that previously have been introduced, “you’ve seen a lot of wearable products out there so far that are not beautiful products or commensurate with what a watch company would produce and much more commensurate with what a consumer electronics company would produce,” he said. “So those are the projects that we’re working on. And that’s really probably all I’m going to say, other than the fact that we are partnering with several technology companies on that front, and as soon as we have more news to announce about that, we will.”