What does Fitbit need to succeed?

Fitbit is the current king of wearables, but for how much longer? The company has recorded four successive quarters of losses since the tail end of 2016, and that’s a problem. Fitbit will publish its latest earnings results later today, and those numbers won’t just tell us how the company is faring, but also how the wearables industry is doing as a whole.

Since 2007, Fitbit has sold more than 70 million devices, from its early, belt-worn pedometers to the wrist-worn activity trackers that made its name. It’s a brand that is synonymous with the wearables market, despite also selling headphones and smart scales. But the numbers suggest that the huge sales successes of 2015 and 2016 are not going to be repeated.

“The Apple Watch has undoubtedly put pressure on Fitbit,” explained George Jijiashvili, CCS Insight’s wearables industry analyst. Unfortunately, Fitbit famously struggled to build a full-featured smartwatch, with the Ionic making its debut in late 2017. Engadget’s Cherlynn Low said that the device’s “smartwatch-like features are either limited in functionality or require tedious, time-consuming setup,” though she did praise the watch’s “comprehensive tools” and “long-lasting battery life.”

The Ionic’s long gestation enabled others to steal Fitbit’s lead at the high end, with Apple being a clear beneficiary. Sales of the Apple Watch are believed to have surpassed those of the entire Swiss watch industry for the 2017 holiday season. CCS’ latest report claims that “Apple has become the market leader,” while Canalys believes that the Apple Watch “accounts for 51.6 percent of all smartwatches ever shipped.”

Fitbit can console itself knowing that it remains a big deal in the fitness market, but that position is under threat. CCS believes that just two companies, Fitbit and Huami, account for 80 percent of the global activity tracker business. But Huami, the Chinese company that designed the Xiaomi MiBand, has now edged ahead in the market, thanks to its “enormous home market advantage in China.” But even that battle may not be worth fighting for long, since the report believes that the tracker industry has shrunk by 18 percent. IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo agrees, saying that the “growth is now all in smartwatches” rather than simpler, cheaper fitness trackers.

Which is a shame, because Fitbit was arguably the best hope for a compelling alternative to Apple becoming a de facto smartwatch monopoly. Those who would suggest Google as a worthy opponent forget that the company has paddled around in circles. It doesn’t publish figures on how many Android Wear smartwatches have been sold, but — judging by downloads of the Android Wear app — it only broke the 10 million sales threshold over the holidays.

There is a hope that Fitbit’s Ionic will help satisfy demand from a legion of consumers who have been holding out for a Fitbit-branded smartwatch. That may not be justified. During the 2017 holidays, investment bank Morgan Stanley found that boxes of the watch were piled up at retailers. When Fitbit publishes its figures, the most important number will be the volume of devices that it sold across 2017. “Fitbit shipped 21 and 23 million units in 2015 and 2016,” says Jijiashvili, but he expects the 2017 total to be 14 million trackers and just one million smartwatches.

IDC’s Jeronimo is more optimistic about Fitbit’s sales, believing that the Ionic is likely to be “one of the 10 best-selling wearable devices of 2017.” He says that’s going to be a big achievement, especially since the watch only launched in October.

Separate from the volume of devices that Fitbit has sold (or shipped) will be the amount of money it’s been able to bring through the door. The company reported revenues of $574 million in the last three months of 2016, and it needs to do significantly better to avoid more red ink on its spreadsheets. Fitbit does, at least, appear to understand that its dominance in the consumer wearables market is under threat, and that it can’t beat Apple at hardware alone. This explains its hard turn into the healthcare market, where its relatively affordable trackers can undercut more expensive medical devices.

The company purchased Twine Health, a startup that created a platform for managing chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension. It also invested cash in Sano, a company that is building a very small blood glucose monitor for continuously monitoring diabetic blood sugar. “It’s a risky strategy,” says Jijiashvili, since the healthcare market is so fraught with necessary regulations to protect patients. Then again, the analyst believes that “it is a necessary move,” since the consumer wearables “space continues to shrink.”

Jeronimo is, again, more optimistic, saying that a move toward the healthcare business is a “good way forward.” He feels that a Fitbit is a better alternative than a bulky, medical-grade tracker for patients with heart conditions or those who need to lose weight. The crucial element, however, is to win the trust of the medical community and also to ensure that it can survive making the transition away from being a purely consumer-focused brand. Jeronimo also believes that Fitbit needs to make more of the data it collects from users, so that its devices can warn you that something is going wrong. But even here, the analyst admits that Apple also has its sights on doing this, and its flagship product has “far more functionality.”

In many ways, Fitbit’s struggles mirror those of GoPro, another brand that has found sustained success hard to come by. Both quickly rose to prominence by essentially defining a relatively niche category — fitness trackers and action cameras — that went mainstream at the right time. And both have suffered from the issues of serving that niche too well, and also being undercut by their competitors. A $149.95 Fitbit Alta HR has to compete with Xiaomi’s MiBand 2, which does almost everything the pricier unit does for less than $40. Jijiashvili feels that Fitbit has to be hoping that “its foray into adjacent products is more successful than GoPro’s efforts with drones.”

Not everyone believes that the company is doomed. Fitbit investor and writer George Kesarios is firmly behind the company. Last November, he wrote an article in finance journal Seeking Alpha that said he believes “that this company has turned a page, and things will be different from now on.” Kesarios’ belief is based on the increase in Fitbit’s revenue, even though that increase is not enough to cover its losses. He adds that he believes that the Ionic will “be the product that will sell year after year, like Apple’s iPhone.” But his opinion is a minority amid the tide of folks who are increasingly pessimistic about Fitbit’s long-term health.

If the wearables industry — as we understand it today — is to succeed and grow, then it needs Fitbit to remain as a viable wearable alternative to Apple. But if Fitbit can’t turn a profit during the launch of its first smartwatch, during a holiday season, no less, then it’s hard to imagine a future.

Qualcomm open to Broadcom merger for the right price

Qualcomm has long rebuffed a merger with rival chipmaker Broadcom, but now it looks like the two companies may be closer to a deal. Today, Qualcomm’s Chairman of the Board Paul E. Jacobs sent a letter to Broadcom’s CEO, Hock Tan. In it, Jacobs outlined that the bulk of Qualcomm’s issues have been addressed, but the companies are still too far apart on pricing. Broadcom’s current offer is $79 per share (it was previously $82 per share), but Qualcomm’s board believes that severely undervalues the company.

If the two companies can come to an agreement on price per share, then Broadcom’s takeover of Qualcomm looks like it could actually happen. Qualcomm’s shares have been lagging behind Broadcom’s for years, and Broadcom has expressed interest in its rival for some time. Not to mention that Qualcomm’s shareholders are fatigued with its patent licensing business, which has provoked the ire of companies like Apple. The company hasn’t shown a lot of interest in investor returns.

That’s not to say it would be a done deal if the two companies come to a pricing agreement, though. The merger of these two large chipmakers would definitely attract the interest of regulators, and those discussions could drag on for quite awhile. And beyond antitrust implications, the potential deal could have a huge impact on the consumer landscape for chips. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Source: Bloomberg, PR Newswire

Watch Sony’s Xperia XZ2 launch in under 10 minutes!

Sony phones have had a consistent look for years now — and we’ve never been sure if that’s a good thing. It seems like Sony might agree, too, as the Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact are some of it’s most distinct phones to date. That date is today, for the record, as Sony took to the stage (or, rather, it’s booth here at MWC) to reveal them to the world. Catch up on the best bits of the event right here.

Catch up on the latest news from MWC 2018 right here.

Airfox’s mobile wallet aims to replace banks in emerging countries

Mobile wallet applications aren’t anything novel, but most of the existing ones (like Venmo or Square Cash) all have something in common: they require people to have a bank account or a debit/credit card to use them. That’s where Airfox differentiates itself. The app is geared toward “unbanked” users in emerging markets who may not have a credit history, due to lack of resources or because they’re generally not fans of banks. Part of how Airfox plans to succeed is by adopting services that are already offered in certain countries. Like in Brazil, for example, which is the first place the app’s launching. There, users can put money in the app through a “Boleto,” a popular paper-based payment method that can be loaded by depositing cash in ATMs.

The benefit to digitalizing these Boletos, which the app verifies by scanning their barcodes, is that people are able to have all their funds in a single app and use those to transfer money to friends or family — so long as they’re also on Airfox. But that’s not it. Users can also pay their utility bills within the app and, in the future, they’ll have the chance to refill public transportation cards. Although Airfox making use of Brazil’s Boletos system is specific to that country, you get the idea of how it could be utilized in other emerging markets down the road.

Airfox also wants to entice people to engage with the app often by rewarding them with cryptocurrency. Later on, there will be video advertisements in the application that users can watch if they want to earn some crypto, which they can then turn into traditional money and add it to their balance. The company says it’s also going to offer micro loans, with the amount of money that can be offered and interest rates set to be based on how the app’s algorithms view an individual’s trustworthiness. Airfox says people can build up their score simply by using the app on a daily basis, as it’ll keep track of your activity and know if you’re depositing money often or paying bills on time.

Since this is aimed at people in emerging markets, Airfox doesn’t plan to launch an iPhone app soon, as it notes that its target demographic leans more toward Android handsets. All in all, Airfox says its goal is to be cheaper and generally more accessible than traditional financial services, and it hopes to expand all these features beyond Brazil in the near future — though it doesn’t see coming to the US soon, since there are more banking regulations there than in most countries around the world.

Catch up on the latest news from MWC 2018 right here.

YouTube enables captions for live broadcasts

YouTube is making live broadcasts more accessible by giving creators the power to add real-time captions in the English language. They could provide their own if they plan to read off a script or have access to professional captioners that can feed their work to the platform. But YouTube live broadcasts tend to be unscripted and pretty interactive, so creators can also choose to depend on the platform’s live automatic speech recognition technology to auto-generate captions.

The feature was developed by product manager Liat Kaver, who’s deaf herself and was inspired by the lack of subtitles in her native language as a girl growing up in Costa Rica. She told us:

“I am deaf, so closed captions are indispensable to enjoying content. Today, finding live streams that are captioned is a challenge, which is why this project is so important to me. Our end goal is to make every video accessible, leveraging Google’s technology to achieve universal captioning.

I’m excited about bringing automatic captions to live streams, making them accessible to people that are deaf and hard of hearing, as well as to viewers watching without sound, when professional captions are not available.”

Twitch introduced live captioning back in 2016, but only for shows it produces — pretty understandable since the company chose to hire professional stenographers to manually type everything out. This feature will be available to a small percentage of YouTubers in the next few weeks and will roll out more broadly in the coming months. The platform is also planning to make it available in more languages in the future, which doesn’t come as a surprise given Kaver’s history.

In addition to live captioning, YouTube is introducing live chat replays. Readers who want to read the comment stream of a live broadcast they missed can now do so: It will appear beside the video and will play exactly like it did during the broadcast. Thankfully — hey, YouTube’s comment section isn’t exactly a friendly place — those who have zero interest in reading the chat can still hide it anytime.

Creators who love to travel can now also add location tags to their livestreams and uploaded videos. When viewers click on one, the results will show them more videos tagged with the same location. Finally, YouTubers can start making their streams more interactive by allowing Super Chats to trigger real events using using IFTTT. They can connect devices such as lights, pet feeders or even confetti cannons to the feature, so fans can trigger them and be part of the livestream, so long as they’re willing to pay for the experience.

Source: YouTube

Google Assistant now launches specific tasks in Android apps

Believe it or not, Google still isn’t done with its slew of Assistant upgrades this week. The AI helper can now use Actions to perform specific intents within other Android apps for those times when voice alone won’t cut it. If you need to see the parking pass you just booked, for instance, you can tap a button to go directly to that pass in the relevant Android app. The feature is rolling out over the next few weeks, and it’s accompanied by a few other Assistant improvements that should make life a little easier.

For one, Assistant can ask for your location in mid-conversation. If you want to get a lift to a place near your home, Google can supply the position on demand. Third-party apps can also cut out the introductory fluff if it’s not your first time using them through Assistant. And Actions now work in seven new languages, including Hindi, Indonesian, Thai, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.

These may seem like modest updates, but they could be vital. Google is determined to bring Assistant to as many Android phones as it can (95 percent of all compatible phones by the end of 2018), and that means accommodating as many countries as possible. And if you’re going to trust Assistant, it needs to fulfill as many expectations as possible — even if that means passing the baton to another app.

Source: Google Developers

Samsung Reveals FCC-Approved 5G Commercial Products Planned for Late 2018 Launch

Samsung today at Mobile World Congress revealed a new set of end-to-end 5G commercial solutions, which will launch later this year alongside Verizon’s first commercial 5G network in the United States.

The 5G fixed wireless access solutions include “commercial form-factor” 5G home routers for both indoor and outdoor use, and Samsung said it used its own in-house technology to create the first commercial ASIC-based 5G modems and millimeter wave RFICs, “enabling the design of compact access units and CPEs.”

The solutions also include a 5G Radio Access Network, and Samsung mentioned that each product has “already been proven through months of field trials in multiple markets.”

Samsung has developed the world’s first complete commercial 5G FWA solutions, which includes: commercial form-factor 5G home routers (CPEs) for both indoors and outdoors, 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) comprised of a radio access unit and virtualized RAN, a next-generation core, as well as AI-powered 3D radio frequency planning tools and services.

“At MWC 2018, Samsung plans to show how our homes, cars and cities can be transformed by building user-centric 5G networks” said Youngky Kim, President and Head of Networks Business at Samsung Electronics. “Since the beginning of our 5G research in 2012, Samsung stood firm among industry players to trust in the potentials of the millimeter wave spectrum. Our efforts towards advancing this technology will see the light this year, making 5G a reality and opening up new territories’ possibilities for consumers, operators and enterprises.”

On February 23 the Federal Communications Commission approved Samsung’s 5G access units, which the company said makes the devices the first 5G millimeter wave products in the world to be granted government regulatory approval. At MWC 2018, Samsung also plans to present its first 5G New Radio products supporting spectrum bands both below and above 6GHz, which will be compliant with the 3rd Generation Partnership Project’s Release 15 plan, delivering the first set of 5G standards for the industry.

All of Samsung’s product announcements today follow an announcement earlier in the year that confirmed the company will be providing Verizon with commercial 5G home routers and other devices to help fuel the carrier’s 5G network rollout. This is said to begin in Sacramento, California in the second half of 2018 and expand from there.

Besides Verizon, most other carriers have announced tests or plans to introduce a 5G network in the near future, including AT&T and T-Mobile. Late in January, a new report suggested that the United States federal government was looking into building a centralized 5G wireless network across the country, which would fundamentally alter the way that communications networks are implemented by having the government “rent access to carriers.”

For Apple, the first iPhone that could support 5G is believed to be coming through a partnership between Apple and Intel.

Tags: Samsung, 5G
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Apple Confirms Some Encrypted iCloud User Data is Stored on Google Cloud Platform

Apple has confirmed that Google Cloud Platform is one of at least two third-party services it relies upon for storing encrypted iCloud account data, which it notes doesn’t include any user-identifying information.

Apple made the disclosure in the latest version of its iOS Security Guide, which was updated last month. This particular change went unnoticed until it was reported by CNBC’s Jordan Novet earlier today.

The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as S3 and Google Cloud Platform.

Previous versions of the iOS Security Guide mentioned Microsoft Azure, but Google Cloud Platform is now listed in its place. Apple also continues to rely on Amazon’s S3 web service for additional storage.

iCloud stores a user’s contacts, calendars, photos, documents, and more, and since each file is broken into chunks and encrypted with AES-128 and SHA-256 keys, storage on Google Cloud Platform shouldn’t be a security concern.

Apple reached a multi-million dollar deal with Google Cloud Platform in 2016, according to reports from CRN and the Financial Times.

Tag: Google Cloud Platform
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Vulkan Apps Now Compatible With macOS and iOS

Popular cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API Vulkan is gaining support for the Apple ecosystem, which means Mac and iOS developers will be able to build and run Vulkan apps on Apple devices.

Valve, LunarG, and The Brenwill Workshop, members of The Khronos Group consortium that developed Vulkan, have worked together with the Khronos Group Portability Initiative to allow Vulkan apps to be ported to Apple platforms.

The aim of Khronos Group’s Vulkan Portability Initiative is a universal subset of Vulkan 1.0 that is designed to run at native performance levels over Metal and DirectX 12 drivers. Metal and DirectX 12 are able to support almost all of Vulkan, with the exception of elements like triangle fans, separate stencil reference masks, Vulkan Event functionality, and a few other features.

Valve used Vulkan tools on macOS with Dota 2 and was able to achieve “significantly higher performance” than native OpenGL drivers.

An open source collection of tools, SDKs, and runtime libraries that enable Vulkan development and deployment on macOS and iOS is now available on the Portability Landing Page on the Khronos Group website. With Vulkan support for Mac and iOS devices, developers will be able to support multiple platforms while cutting down on porting and development costs.

“Running Vulkan applications on Apple platforms has been the number one request from developers and today’s release of the MoltenVK runtime and LunarG macOS SDK brings that capability to life,” said Neil Trevett, VP NVIDIA and Khronos Group President. “Developers are invited to download the open source Vulkan Portability tools today and provide feedback via Vulkan Ecosystem GitHub Issue. The Vulkan Portability Initiative will continue to strengthen the infrastructure and tooling around bringing Vulkan capabilities to multiple Metal and DX12 platforms – our long-term goal is to enable portable Vulkan code to be executed on any platform that developers care about.”

Starting today, a MoltenVK library from The Brenwill Workshop that translates Vulkan calls into Metal calls on macOS and iOS is being open sourced.

The open source LunarG Vulkan SDK for macOS is also available today on LunarXchange, enabling developers to build, run, and debug Vulkan applications on Mac. Going forward, LunarG plans to continue to evolve its Mac SDK to add additional tools and features.

More information on Vulkan support for Apple devices can be found on The Khronos Group website.
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Sony Reveals $280 ‘Xperia Ear Duo’ With Siri Support and ‘Dual Listening’ Tech to Combine Music With Environment

Sony today at Mobile World Congress revealed an upgraded version of its Xperia Ear earphones, called the Xperia Ear Duo. Sony previously showed the earphones in prototype form during last year’s MWC, but the company has now officially announced a price point of $280 and release date of May 2018 for its latest smart assistant earphones (via The Verge).

The main new addition to Sony’s earphones is the “Spatial Acoustic Conductor,” which Sony describes as a way to allow the sound generated behind the user’s ear by the unit’s driver “to be transmitted directly into the ear.” This way users will be able to hear their music while not being totally out of tune with noises coming in from their environment, which the company refers to as “Dual Listening.” As such, there is no toggle to turn off the feature and block out ambient sounds.

The Xperia Ear Duo doesn’t block the ear canal, so you can hear your music and the environment around you simultaneously. Even better, the volume automatically adjusts depending on your surroundings for an optimised audio experience.

The Spatial Acoustic Conductor, developed by our in-house technology incubator Future Lab Program™, allows the sound generated behind the ear by the unit´s driver to be transmitted directly into the ear. The specially designed ring supporter surrounds the ear canal so your music can blend seamlessly with sounds from your environment.

Similar to Apple’s AirPods, the Xperia Ear Duo earphones have multiple gesture controls that let users control music playback with taps. Additionally, Sony’s earphones recognize head movement and support head nods and shakes to accept or decline incoming calls.

The Xperia Ear Duo will support iOS and Android smartphone connections, and subsequently have Google Assistant and Siri integration for both types of users, with a single tap bringing up each voice assistant for traditional commands like starting music or reading texts. The assistants will also be able to read missed alerts from calendar, email, and other applications.

Additionally, Sony said the earphones last for about four hours on one charge, and will come with a carrying case that adds an additional three charges. When they go on sale in May, the Xperia Ear Duo will be available in black and gold color options. For more information on the earphones, check out Sony’s website.

Tag: Sony
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