Month: June 2015

The BlackBerry Athos

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In my previous articles on smart wearables, I focused on smart watches and smart bands. I also mentioned the DIY aspect of wearables available with Adafruit. To expand on the functional wearable, I am now going to move on to smart fabric wearables. This new segment takes body monitoring to the next level beyond the smart band. When I bought my Nintendo Wii, it came with the sales pitch of getting people off of the couch to play games with friends. Nintendo didn’t just stop at making games that made you jump around and fling your arms, they also create Continue reading The BlackBerry Athos→

Mobile Development and ROI (Return on Investment)

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Over the last 3 years or so, I’ve been very lucky in mobile development and IoT.  I’ve built hundreds of applications and games cross platform (yay for me), passed my 250,000th download (celebration time), but I’ve had some mistakes and also learned a few hard lessons along the way. I’m going to share my top 15 “rules” I use to define my development model, and share what I use to make my apps and games profitable today. Disclaimer:  Some of this information may be obvious and these concepts may not be a good fit for every developer and every platform, Continue reading Mobile Development and ROI (Return on Investment)→

Custom Category Icons

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I mentioned in my new template post that I might add back the Category images to the posts. Well, I thought I would give it a try, but the first step was to see if something existed in the WordPress Plugin world.  There were a few options, but they either only posted the images on the Category template page or only did one image per post.  And all methods required modifying the template files. So, no go on that, time to re-add my original hack. I had previously created a way to pull up the Category description and image in Continue reading Custom Category Icons→

New Template and Join the Conversation

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My blog has never been a hub of post post communication. The main reason for this has been the spam bots that join the site when registration was open or leave comments when comments are open. It isn’t that I don’t want to have discussion on my blog, but it is annoying to keep up with the right plugin or setting or managing all the invalid user accounts. I’ve decided to try a different method of conversation using BBM Channels. Why would I want to do that? BBM is free and on BlackBerry, Windows, Android and iPhones BBM, as far Continue reading New Template and Join the Conversation→

The BlackBerry Adafruit

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So far I have talked about a smart watch and band, two items that are fairly straight forward on their functionality and how they are used. The other side of smart wearables are those with flexible usability. This market, as far as I can tell, is mainly in the DIY segment.  Being mostly DIY makes it hard to sell to the mass consumers, as it is not simple to put a finger on what it is or what the use would be for more than the individual who created that one item for their specific use.  Luckily, there is room for standardization of Continue reading The BlackBerry Adafruit→

The BlackBerry Nabu

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I recently posted a wish of mine, BlackBerry getting a smart watch by purchasing Kairos and making it their own. But, I don’t think BlackBerry should just stop at watches. I believe that they should have all sorts of smart wearables. The Kairos watch also has the option of providing a smart band, which makes any watch a smart watch. It also does health monitoring, which brings me to the Razer Nabu. Razer provides gaming systems and peripherals, so they aren’t new to the tech community.  So, unlike Kairos, they probably won’t make or break on a wearable.  But, getting into Continue reading The BlackBerry Nabu→