Wearables TechCon in San Jose

This week, the Wearables TechCon, plus Internet of Things TechCon were held in San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center. e2f attended to see what was new in these exciting fields.

There were a number of emergent trends at the show:

• Devices are going from concept to market in incredibly quick time frames.

• Everyone’s in the game: the field of vendors span the gamut from established players to brand new startups.

• Companies are already making profits.

• Standards matter.

• Quality matters.

• Usability matters.

• Design matters.

One of the most well-designed products spotted at the show was the new Nut 3 smart tracker (pictured above). This small device, which you can slip into your wallet, attach to your keychain, or tether to just about any other prized possession uses Bluetooth technology to keep in touch with your phone. If you go past a certain range of your Nut-connected item, your phone will beep, and you can use the Nut phone app to track down your item. Handy to prevent you from losing your wallet or keys!

Beyond its pragmatic purposes, the Nut 3 sports a beautiful new aesthetic form-factor. The design invokes the organic curves of rippling water or a Zen sand garden.

Nut’s Michael Tian used a successful Kickstarter campaign to get the new model to market swiftly. Hundreds of backers participated.

Nut’s phone-based app, available for iOS and Android, has already been translated into seven languages.

Vendors, overall, were receptive to the idea to make their devices and supporting apps globalization-ready. It was generally agreed that device designers would be well-served to ensure localization and translation were not left as last-minute additions in go-to-market planning.

How about at your organization? How far up-front in your strategy, design or conceptualization phases do you put localization and globalization engineering? We’d love to hear! Email us at projects@e2f.com.