It all started with beavers. When Alex Pentland was three years into his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, in 1973, he worked part-time as a computer programmer for NASA’s Environmental Research Institute. One of his first tasks — part of a larger environmental-monitoring project — was to develop a method for counting Canadian beavers from outer space. There was just one problem: existing satellites were crude, and beavers are small. “What beavers do is they create ponds,” he recalls of his eventual solution, “and you can count the number of beavers by the number of ponds. You’re watching the lifestyle, and you get an indirect measure.”
It's been almost a month since wearable pioneer Fitbit unveiled a much-needed update to its Charge and Flex ranges, giving them a bunch of aesthetic and functional upgrades in the process. Customers have been able to secure their orders ahead of the loose "fall" release date but from today, anyone itching to get their hands on the new devices can now do so.
China may become the world’s largest wearable customer in 2017, if sales continue to surge as they have in 2016, by 84 percent.
Demand for wearable gadgets hasn’t lived up to the hype, and a report suggests things are only getting worse ahead of the company’s expected Watch reboot