Steve Thomas - IT Consultant
The holiday season is over. January-style dread hangs thick in the air. And yet, the Consumer Electronics Show in the middle of the desert has found a way to lift our spirits. We looked at all kinds of gadgets, from 8K televisions to analog-style wearables to a whole host of Internet of Things-type products. There were robots. There was virtual reality. It was like Christmas happened all… Read More 
BlackBerry is continuing to expand the reach of its erstwhile walled garden messaging app, BBM. The latest platform it’s targeting is Google’s wearable focused flavor of Android, Android Wear — demoing an integration of BBM on Android Wear at CES this week. Read More 
The FTC has raised concerns about the complexity and privacy risks posed by the rise of an Internet of Things, with some 25 billion connected objects predicted to be online in 2015, and so-called smart home devices predicted to number around 25 million this year. Read More 
Oculus is at CES 2015, giving a larger set of people a chance to experience virtual reality with its latest prototype, the Crescent Bay version of the Oculus Rift. The Crescent Bay edition of the VR hardware originally broke cover back in September of 2014, but only a small handful of folks have tested it out thus far. After our demo, I became one of the slightly expanded group that can claim… Read More 
Babies are glorious miraculous blessings, but parents trying to get through a good night’s sleep with a newborn in the next room may have a tough time remembering that. The NapTime is a new baby monitor that employs Bluetooth-connected, vibrating bracelets to rotate through parental night time duties. Read More 
Fashion and tech, though perhaps an unlikely union, seem to have been getting along quite well over the past year. LookSee, an e-ink smart bracelet that allows users to customize the design through imagery, is the newest love-child of that union. The LookSee pairs with a LookSee app via Bluetooth to let users choose from either hundreds of pre-loaded photos and patterns or from their own… Read More 
If you’re any kind of aquarist or aquarium lover, amateur or otherwise, you’ve encountered that heart-sinking feeling that comes along with running into dead fish upon returning to your tank. It’s far too frequent an occurrence, and one that the founding team at Current Labs believes is entirely preventable in most cases, thanks to tech advances that make remotely monitoring… Read More 
Earlier this year, high-end gaming tech company Razer announced at Google I/O that it would be soon be making its first foray into Android-based gaming consoles. Today at CES, that device made its public debut. The Razer Forge TV is a micro-console, 4×4 inches and selling for $100, and Razer hopes it will give the company three new routes into your living room: as a platform for… Read More 
Sony’s SmartWear lineup is one of its key focal areas for mobile tech, and something that has grown in scope and ambition over the course of the past few CES events. This year it’s introducing even more in the way of wearable hardware, and looking at ways to help expand the available software and use cases far beyond what’s been available thus far. Sony SmartWatch 3 The… Read More 
On the cusp of the annual plunge into the CES-pool, where a gigantic cocktail shaker of consumer electronics companies will spray forth what will mostly turn out to be forlorn hopes for growth, it’s customary to shake one’s head at the sorry, self-obsessed state of tech. Read More 
Misfit, the maker of “connected” products including smart home items and its flagship wearable device, the Misfit Shine, has today teamed up with Swarovski to introduce a new product line focused on bringing a more fashion-forward sense to its wearables collection. The Swarovski Shine Collection, as it’s called, combines Swarovski’s crystal jewelry and… Read More 
