Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

The Apple Watch Has Gotten Simpler, But That’s OK

Apple’s decision to simplify the watch speaks to a larger issue facing makers of wearables: Advanced biotracking sensors would have made the Apple Watch less of a multipurpose consumer device and more of a medical device used to diagnose diseases or track chronic conditions — which could have opened the watch up to regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“I don’t think Apple wants to be a health-monitoring device maker,” said Harry Wang, director of health and mobile product research at Parks Associates. “They do want to leverage their popularity on the iPhone as a device platform, integrating all health data that can be collected for different devices.”

That information is being gathered through Apple’s new Health app, a dashboard of users’ health data, and HealthKit, a developer tool that lets wellness apps share data. The watch could be populated with messages from external devices and services that track specialized health information.

From the article "The Apple Watch Has Gotten Simpler, But That’s OK" by Stephanie M. Lee.

Previously In The News

Facebook Entices VR Content Creators With Open Source Surround Cam

What's more, this summer Facebook will offer the plans for the camera and the code for its software for free on the popular developers' website GitHub. "We're open-sourcing the camera and the softw...

Apple Mulls Time Warner Takeover; And Possibly Netflix

Parks Associates recently found that Amazon has moved into a virtual tie with Google at 22% of sales for streaming media players (Roku claims the top spot). Apple TV comes in at fourth place with 20%...

On-Demand Tech Support Companies HelloTech, Geekatoo Merge

Geekatoo Executive Chairman Christian Shelton saw demand for tech services rising as more people add internet-connected devices - such as the smart thermostat Nest or WiFi camera Dropcam - to their ho...

Apple May Be Prepping Siri for Smart Home Duty

Entry into the smart speaker market makes sense for a company with smart home aspirations. "As the success of Echo and Google Home took off, everyone expected Apple to follow suit," said Brad Russe...