Monthly Archives: October 2015

Cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks has identified new malware, which it calls YiSpecter, that infects iOS devices by abusing private APIs. Most affected users live in China and Taiwan.

Update: Apple has confirmed that iOS 9 prevents the class of issues caused by malware like YiSpecter. A good reason to always stay updated to the latest versions of iOS; YiSpecter, for instance only affects versions of iOS 8.3 and older, and can only take hold if users download apps from untrusted sourcesoutside the App Store. Apple has revoked the certificates used for the apps that were distributing this malware.

Apple issued the following statement:

“This issue only impacts users on older versions of iOS who have also downloaded malware from untrusted sources. We addressed this specific issue in iOS 8.4 and we have also blocked the identified apps that distribute this malware. We encourage customers to stay current with the latest version of iOS for the latest security updates. We also encourage them to only download from trusted sources like the App Store and pay attention to any warnings as they download apps.”

Once it infects a phone, YiSpecter can install unwanted apps; replacing legitimate apps with ones it has downloaded; force apps to display full-screen advertisements; change bookmarks and default search engines in Safari; and send user information back to its server. It also automatically reappears even after users manually delete it from their iOS devices.

Palo Alto Networks says YiSpecter is unusual for iOS malware—at least ones that have been identified so far—because it attacks iOS devices by misusing private APIs to allow its four components (which are signed with enterprise certificates to appear legitimate) to download and install each other from a centralized server.

In the post, Palo Alto Networks’ security researcher Claud Xiao wrote that by abusing enterprise certificates and private APIs, YiSpecter is not only able to infect more devices, but “pushes the line barrier of iOS security back another step.”

Three of the components can hide their icons from iOS SpringBoard (the standard app that runs the home screen) and even disguise themselves with the names and logos of other apps to escape detection from users. Palo Alto Networks says the malware has been infecting iOS devices for over 10 months, but only one out of 57 security vendors in VirusTotal, a free scanning service, is currently detecting it.

YiSpecter first spread by masquerading as an app that allows users to view free porn. It then infected more phones through hijacked traffic from Internet service providers, a Windows worm that first attacked QQ (an IM service by Tencent), and online communities where users install third-party apps in exchange for promotion fees from developers.

Last month, another malware called XcodeGhost infected almost 40 popular apps in the Chinese App Store, which is very unusual because Apple first subjects apps to strict reviews. Despite the unique nature of both malware, however, Palo Alto Networks says there is no evidence that XcodeGhost and YiSpecter are related.

TechCrunch has contacted Apple for comment.

Palo Alto Networks’ blog post has more information on YiSpecter, as well as detailed steps for removing it from devices.

Via: techcrunch

SOLS, a company taking advantage of 3D-printing techniques to custom print shoe insoles that help alleviate foot and back pain, among other ailments, is today making its product available directly to consumers with the launch of SOLS Flex, a modern-day alternative to Dr. Scholl’s inserts which are personalized to the individual customer.

SOLS previously worked with doctor’s offices who would prescribe these insoles to patients, but this is the first time it’s making the product available by way of direct sales.

The expansion to become more of a consumer-facing business has been underway for some time. When the startup raised an additional $11 million-plus in outside funding earlier this year, a good portion of those funds were earmarked for precisely this purpose. That round also brought in New York Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony as an investor, as well as Dallas Mavericks’ president and CEO Terdema Ussery, who additionally joined SOLS’ board of directors.

The company, which is one of few today that’s taking advantage of 3D printing techniques in the consumer space, was originally dreamed up by Kegan Schouwenburg, an early employee and former Director of Operations & Industrial Engineering at the 3D printery Shapeways. While there, she was inspired about the potential use cases for 3D technology, and saw an opportunity to use 3D printing techniques to stake a claim on the potentially unsexy, but also potentially profitable, orthotics market.

Using a smartphone application, SOLS’ customers – that is, patients – would virtually scan their foot by way of their phone’s camera. Then, the company would run a series of processing algorithms on the images to create a custom insole in combination with other data the patients provided, like weight, height, lifestyle and more.

To date, SOLS has been working with over 650 podiatrists across the U.S. who have prescribed the corrective orthotic devices to their own patients. The doctors were reselling the products at market rates of $300 to $700, the company said in February.

Now, with SOLS Flex, customers can use that same SOLS app to be guided through a similar fitting process. With the app, customer snap three photos of each foots in weight and non-weight bearing stances. From the images, SOLS extrapolates over 1,000 data points to generate its 3D model of the custom insole. The insoles themselves are designed to absorb shock, alleviate heel pressure and respond to your gait, like others on the market do, but are customized to match a customer’s foot almost exactly.

The Flex insoles are available in leather, neoprene and wool in a range of colors, like black or sea foam green, and cost $199. After the 3D printing, the insoles are finished with various topcoats and then shipped within 10 business days. Orders are placed directly in the SOLS app.

In conjunction with the launch, SOLS is partnering with the 2015 IRONMAN World Championship presented by GoPro on October 10 in Hawaii. The event is one of several that will see the two brands, SOLS and IRONMAN, working together over the course of 2016.

New York-based SOLS has raised over $19 million to date, according to CrunchBase. The insoles are available now via the iOS application, and ship free anywhere in the U.S.

Via: techcrunch

For nearly 10 years, online Q&A site Fixya has offered a way for web searchers to find information and receive troubleshooting support from area experts and other local pros. Today, the company is heading in a new direction with the launch of 6ya, a mobile app that lets consumers get product help and advice by way of a voice or video call from Fixya’s network of repair experts in 6 minutes or less.

The service is available on a subscription basis for $6 per month, offering the ability for users to place an unlimited number of support calls.

With 6ya, explains Fixya founder and CEO Yaniv Bensadon, the goal is to help fill the void on the market between customer support and repair. That is, there are times when consumers aren’t sure if anything is wrong or that they need to actually schedule a repair – they first need to troubleshoot the problem for themselves.

However, researching the product online is often too-time consuming – not everyone has the hours to spend looking up possible fixes or even using Fixya’s own Q&A site for help with getting answers. Instead, 6ya users will just be able to launch the app on their smartphone, choose the product category they need help with (e.g. cars, computers, smartphones, home appliances, etc.) and then be immediately connected to a knowledgable expert.

Many of 6ya’s experts are being sourced from Fixya’s online community, while others are former Apple Genius bar employees or former Best Buy Geek Squad members. Bensadon tells us that more than a million experts were invited to apply to join 6ya, but after vetting their qualifications and performing video interviews, the company narrowed it down to a few hundred who will be available as the product launches.

As more of an “advice” marketplace available by way of an app, Fixya/6ya isn’t liable for repair attempts gone bad – which helps it to reduce its potential liability. The experts aren’t showing up in customers’ homes, either, and they’re not suggesting or training customers on advanced repairs.

Instead, experts offer more operational advice – normal troubleshooting steps that any consumer might try to resolve a problem before determining that a repair is in order. The experts will also be able to diagnose those problems that actually do need an expert-level repair or warranty support, for example, but they don’t get involved in that type of repair themselves.

The 6ya service, to some extent, competes with other sort of “Genius Bar-on-demand” offerings now arriving on the market. For instance, a service called Eden dispatches tech support reps to consumers’ homes – and now, businesses, too. Meanwhile, former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson is working on Enjoy, a service that delivers tech devices from experts who can also aid in installation tasks and training when they arrive.

But both of these services involve more time and effort on a customer’s part – and require techs to come to the home. 6ya wants to place the tech in the home virtually, by way of the smartphone’s camera and video calling function. This allows the customer to show the tech the problem directly, while also explaining the situation by voice. The experts will then offer suggestions of how to fix the product or sometimes even text links and other tips to the callers, but they stop short of holding the customer’s hand all the way through the troubleshooting and repair process.

In other words, they may suggest tightening a screw or installing a new printer driver, but they don’t stay on the phone while the customer does so. (Longer calls where this level of support is available may be sold as an add-on in the future, however, notes Bensadon).

After the call, customers can rate the support they received. Experts, meanwhile, make $3 per call. At that rate, however, it’s more likely that experts will take advantage of 6ya as a way to make some extra cash on the side (or even market their own repair business), but not turn to 6ya as the primary way they make living.

“We feel there’s a bigger and untapped market…for all those people who don’t need a repair,” Bensadon says, explaining why 6ya decided against a model that would dispatch techs to customers’ homes. “Plus, from our experience…there’s a huge amount of overhead and cost when you need to get thousands of people that need to be trained to go into someone’s home. We can help many more people with a different type of service,” he says.

So far, Fixya has invested close to $3 million in this new business arm, with another $2 million already committed to help 6ya launch and scale, including expansions to other English-speaking markets outside the U.S., like Canada, the U.K, and Australia. Fixya itself hasn’t raised capital since 2007, and is cash-flow positive with a $10 million run rate. However, it may raise again to fund 6ya in the future.

The service is going live today as an iOS application available as a free download on iTunes.

6ya features a handful of categories at launch, including computers/internet; smartphones/tablets; cars/trucks; home appliances; and general handyman/electrical work. By year-end, 6ya plans to offer 150 categories.

Via: techcrunch

Maker-funding site Patreon was hacked last week resulting in the dump of gigabytes of code and user data. User passwords were encrypted using bcrypt which suggests they are mostly safe but some users have found their data in the trove.

Founder Jack Conte wrote:

There was unauthorized access to registered names, email addresses, posts, and some shipping addresses. Additionally, some billing addresses that were added prior to 2014 were also accessed. We do not store full credit card numbers on our servers and no credit card numbers were compromised. Although accessed, all passwords, social security numbers and tax form information remain safely encrypted with a 2048-bit RSA key. No specific action is required of our users, but as a precaution I recommend that all users update their passwords on Patreon.

The data seems to have come from a debug version of the site that was visible to the Internet. The debug version included a “snapshot” of the production database. “We protect our users’ passwords with a hashing scheme called ‘bcrypt’ and randomly salt each individual password. Bcrypt is non-reversible, so passwords cannot be ‘decrypted.’ We do not store plaintext passwords anywhere,” wrote Conte.

Conte recommends changing your Patreon password and the password to any other site using a similar passphrase. He said no credit card information was leaked.

Via: techcrunch

Third-party Twitter client Tweetbot is back with a new major version. Developed by three-man development studio Tapbots, Tweetbot has been a long-time favorite of iOS Twitter users who were dissatisfied with the official versions of the Twitter apps. With this new version, Tweetbot secures this position thanks to a few great new features, starting with a huge iPad update.

Tweetbot 4.0 is now a universal app that works for both the iPhone and the iPad. It’s a new app in the App Store available for $9.99. But the app is on sale at $4.99 for now. Once the launch sale is over, Tapbots will create an Update Bundle in the App Store for existing Tweetbot users, letting you complete your bundle for $5. Pretty neat workaround as the App Store still doesn’t provide an upgrade pricing mechanism.

Tweetbot is a polished, well-designed app, and this update is no exception. I’ve been using previous versions of Tweetbot for years — it’s even my most used iPhone app by a wide margin. The main reason why is that this app is a pure joy to use. It looks fantastic and works amazingly well, especially when you see it in action.

As a reminder, Tapbots already released an iPad version of its Twitter client, but it hadn’t been updated in a long time. In fact, it had never been updated for iOS 7 design standards — iOS 9 was just released, so it’s been a while.

But this is a thing of the past as Tweetbot 4.0 features the same modern design on the iPhone and the iPad. I would say that it is by far the biggest change with this update.

And yet, it isn’t just a visual refresh for the iPad app, as it now supports all the new features in iOS 9. For instance, you can use Split View and keep Tweetbot on the side while you do something else with your iPad. Tweetbot now also uses the newly introduced Safari View Controller for links, meaning that you can take advantage of content blockers, Safari extensions and more. It’s like having a mini version of Safari inside Tweetbot. If you put your iPad in landscape mode, Tweetbot now features a new activity column, showing your last mentions, retweets and new followers.

In addition to these improvements, there are a few design refinements here and there. For instance, you can switch between the existing day and night themes by swiping up and down with two fingers. This gesture is very reminiscent of a light switch, and it’s the kind of playful implementations that make Tweetbot stand apart from most iOS apps.

The profile view has been redesigned, and the activity tab I previously mentioned is also available on the iPhone. The iPhone also supports landscape mode now. A couple of other things changed, such as the action bar color below a tweet or the app icon, making the app color palette a bit more colorful.

All the existing strengths of Tweetbot are still there, such as granular muting of users, hashtags or keywords, Instagram previews, timeline syncing between the iOS and Mac app and more.

The superior design alone is already an important selling point for me. I don’t plan to switch to the official Twitter app anytime soon because Tweetbot has raised the bar when it comes to Twitter clients on iOS.

Via: techcrunch

Today at its first user conference, GitHub Universe, GitHub announced that it’s launching support for FIDO Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) security keys from companies like Yubico and others. These physical USB keys automatically generate a second-factor code for you when you plug them in, so you no longer have to enter a six-digit code from Google Authenticator, Authy and similar apps.

Two-factor authentication makes it very hard for attackers to launch a phishing or man-in-the-middle attack against you, but they can’t completely eradicate this threat either. Using a U2F security key adds another layer of protection, because the key won’t exchange information with any other site but the one you already authorized when you first set it up. This only works with Google Chrome, though, because other browsers don’t feature built-in U2F support yet.

GitHub already supported two-factor authentication through apps like Authenticator and over SMS. The company’s VP of security Shawn Davenport told me that about 300,000 of GitHub’s 11 million users currently use two-factor authentication. To increase this number — and jumpstart the adoption of security keys on GitHub — the company has partnered with Yubico, and it’s allowing the first 5,000 buyers to purchase keys for $5 and is offering a 20 percent discount for those who miss the cutoff.

Davenport also told me that the company started to run into a number of issues with supporting two-factor authentication lately. Sending SMS internationally, for example, is still somewhat unreliable. Users also often upgrade their phones and then forget to transfer their security tokens between phones, so the authenticator apps don’t work.

Yubico CEO and founder Stina Ehrensvard noted that GitHub is now her company’s third major partner for getting U2F keys into the market. The first were Google and Dropbox.  As she told me, the company is seeing “good momentum” from these partnerships. She argues that what’s missing right now for even wider adoption, though, is support from other browser vendors. Yubico is talking to Mozilla and Microsoft, but “they are not moving very fast,” Ehrensvard stated.

Via: techcrunch

In a anti-competitive move that bumps up against one of Amazon’s core principles – “customer obsession” – the online retailer confirmed today that it would no longer allow the sales of some competing media players, including Apple TV and Chromecast, on its shopping site. Specifically, the company informed its marketplace sellers by way of email that no new product listings would be allowed and any remaining inventory would be removed from the site on October 29th.

Bloomberg first reported this news, following a posting on internet forum Reddit which indicated that such a change was underway. Amazon later sent a statement to Variety confirming the move, and they’ve shared that same statement with us as well.

Explains an Amazon spokesperson:

Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime. It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion. Roku, XBOX, PlayStation and Fire TV are excellent choices.

In addition, the email Amazon sent to sellers reads as follows:

Dear Seller,

Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime. It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion. Therefore, Amazon has implemented listing restrictions for the followings products:

o Apple TV o Chromecast o Nexus Player

Effective immediately, you may no longer create new listings for these products, and as of 10/29/15, any existing listings for these products will be removed. There will be no adverse impact on your seller account for the removal, but we request that you refrain from relisting removed products.

Roku, XBOX, and PlayStation all interact well with Prime Video and are not affected by this change.

Thank you for selling on Amazon.

Sincerely, Amazon Services

We understand that ban is global, and affects Apple and Google directly as well as marketplace distributors. It also applies to all versions of the devices, including both older hardware as well as newer devices, like the brand-new Chromecasts announced this week.

According to Amazon’s statement, its decision has to do with Apple TV’s and Chromecast’s lack of support for Amazon Prime Instant Video service, its Netflix competitor which is one of the many benefits offered as a part of Amazon’s $99 per year membership program.

In other words, Amazon will continue to sell media players that work with Prime Video. Those that don’t will be pulled from the site.

But the statement is misleading in that it implies it’s Apple and Google who have made the decision not to support Amazon Prime Instant Video on their platforms. When in reality, it’s Amazon that has decided not to build for those platforms.

Amazon’s statement initially struck us as odd, given that Prime Video today works just fine on both Apple and Google’s mobile operating systems – if these rival companies were taking anti-competitive stances of their own (which Amazon is only reacting to), it seems they wouldn’t draw the line at keeping Prime Video off their connected TV devices. They’d ban Prime Video across the board. (That wouldn’t be great for consumers either, but it would be their right as closed platforms operated by private companies.)

Backing up this suspicion that it’s Amazon firing the first shot here in these new streaming media player wars, is the interesting comment on Reddit, reportedly from an Amazon employee [now redacted], which outright stated that the lack of Prime Video on Chromecast was Amazon’s decision, not Google’s.

Said this person:

“…In the case of the Chromecast, its lack of support is entirely because Amazon decided not to support it. With the next Apple TV, they certainly can make an app if they choose. I’m pretty sure they just want people to buy the FireTV, which sadly does not provide the best customer experience in a world where everything else supports AirPlay and/or Chromecast.”

Whether or not the anon user on Reddit was legit, the nature of the Chromecast SDK, which is the toolset a developer uses to make their app work with Google’s Chromecast device, basically confirms what that person was saying.

The Chromecast SDK is designed so that anyone can make their app (iOS, Android or web app) available on Chromecast, due to its open nature. That means that Amazon has no restrictions on building for Chromecast from Google’s side, it has just chosen not to.

Apple was not immediately available for comment. Google is not offering a public comment.

So not only is Amazon trying to position itself as the underdog that Apple and Google are pushing around, it’s doing so in direct conflict with its core principles about putting the customer first. How is pulling two of the most popular connected TV devices from its virtual store shelves at all a benefit to the Amazon shopper?

Leaders “work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust,” reads Amazon’s “customer obsession” principle. They “start with the customer and work backwards…they obsess over customers,” it says.

It seems like Amazon needs to add an asterisk to that statement now, which notes: “*well…except when it’s not in our best interests.” 

Via: techcrunch

Sad news for those who like free stuff – Klout Perks, the swag offered by social media scoring platform Klout, has quietly shut down. Lithium Technologies, the company that bought Klout more than a year ago, confirmed it ended the Perks program in a statement to TechCrunch today.

“Klout’s real strengths lie in its algorithm and wealth of social data,” wrote Lithium’s VP of communications Eric Channing Brown. “Perks is not core to this, and so we have decided to invest more in other areas of Klout’s data assets and on further integrating Klout into the Lithium product portfolio.”

Josh Butler, the head of Klout’s sales team, which serviced the Perks program, recently announced in an email to friends (and which has been obtained by TechCrunch) that he made the move to SocialRank, a social media platform that claims to locate your most engaged Twitter followers.

Hey Friends,

I usually don’t send these type of emails but I have some exciting news.

The last five years working at Klout and running Klout Perks has been some of the most enjoyable years of my career. Happy to announce I’m on to a new adventure and recently joined an NYC startup called SocialRank as their SVP of Revenue and Sales.

If you haven’t heard of them before, SocialRank has an amazing product that pulls in all of your followers from Twitter and Instagram and lets you filter and sort them by location, bio keywords, interests, influence, engagement and more at a very granular level. Sort of like a Hootsuite or Buffer but for audience.

I’ll be working on two products – SocialRank Market Intelligence, the ability to run any Twitter or Instagram account like it is your own and a new product released recently called SocialRank Engage (an evolution of Klout Perks in terms of transparency and authenticity).

I’m getting situated but would love to catch up with everyone. If you are doing anything with influencer marketing let’s talk…the SocialRank platform is next level.

If you need to reach anyone at Klout, feel free to hit me up. You can reach me at my new SR email – Josh@SocialRank.com.

Thanks,

Josh

According to Butler’s LinkedIn profile, he’s been at SocialRank for two months now.

Plenty of social media accounts still reference the Perks program as if it is still running. Take this one from a couple hours ago today:

However, the Klout Perks Twitter account last tweeted on August 10 and we’ve been told Klout is DM’ing influencers with details about their perks for now.

For those worried about not getting a recent perk, Lithium said it intends to honor those last remaining commitments.

“For customers with whom we have outstanding commitments, we will honor those commitments until the end date on those contracts,” Brown told TechCrunch.

He also mentioned that, though the program is over, some of the campaigns are still going on. “Some existing Perks campaigns do continue to run, and we have the account teams in place to support them until they are completed.”

However, a source told TechCrunch that both the New York and San Francisco Klout Perks sales teams and account managers associated with the program are now gone. We were also told the whole Perks team of 10-20 has also been laid off.

Klout made some tweaks to the platform since the Lithium acquisition, adding branded content and personalization, according to your score and social media activity. Brown told us that a big focus for Klout is now on “personalized experiences” for brand customers, rather than simple rewards for your social media score.

“This will continue to be a focus area, as will maintaining and refining the Klout score, adding support for additional social networks (we just added YouTube), and building new capabilities into Klout. Also, Klout will continue to offer its wealth of data – we have over 700 million social profiles analyzed – to third parties via partnerships,” Brown said.

Via: techcrunch

People are checking their phones more than ever. The average person checks their phone 150 times a day — up from 110 just two years ago, according to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report. Why? The majority of phone checks come from looking at the time, reading text messages or getting social media updates. Most of this obsessive checking can seem pretty trivial.

But what if we could harness this mindless activity into something more important — what if we could use it as a way to constantly encourage us, and help engrain positive behavior changes into our daily routine? The answer is that we may be able to — and sooner than you think.

With Apple’s announcements around Watch’s Airstrip app last week — a tool that has the ability to remotely monitor the vital signs of a patient — healthcare and mobile are finally being married in a real and powerful way. Salesforce, meanwhile, announced the launch of its Salesforce Health Cloud earlier this month — a novel platform that brings a patient’s health data, from medical records to wearable statistics, into one place for doctors.

And yet, a huge opportunity remains for platforms that not only report health results, but can actually help influence them — platforms that can help harness the power of our ubiquitous phone checking as a way to create powerful behavior change. The industry term for these phone interactions — when someone pulls out a mobile device to get an immediate answer — is a “mobile moment.” But what if we could create a mobile moment that helps our health — turning these distractions into a chance to empower consumers to change their health behavior?

What do I mean? Imagine mobile interventions for an asthmatic: their phone prompts them to take medication when the pollen count is high, or checks a historical calendar and a map to highlight locations around them with lower pollen counts. Imagine being able to use an app to look at the nearby restaurants and menu suggestions based on the amount of activity you have completed that day or your dietary restrictions.

Now I already hear you saying: We already use wearables such as Fitbits, Jawbones and the Apple Watch. But, in my opinion, these users are already fairly healthy people who use these devices to keep healthy. The true disruption will happen when we can more effectively use mobile and mobile moments to influence behavior for patients who desperately need positive behavior intervention.

Many of us know somebody in our circle of friends and family who suffers from chronic conditions, be it diabetes or congestive heart failure. What has the advent of mobile done for them? Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg, in his widely circulated model, theorizes that for behavior change to occur, three elements need to converge at the same moment: motivation, ability and trigger.

Smartphones can help provide us with these three aspects to encourage a healthier lifestyle, by providing reminders in vital moments for those who suffer from conditions. Imagine while dining out that you’re able to use your phone for helpful menu suggestions based on the amount of activity you have completed that day, as well as individually tailored to your specific nutritional guidelines.

But in order to make meaningful intervention through mobile moments, we need to use the technology that is already at our fingertips to build a web of connections. By analyzing the customer journey, we can link contextual and other pieces of disparate pieces of information that are all happening precisely in that moment and create a true health “graph.” We have the capability to create actionable insights and deliver it constantly through the mobile phone. But to get there, we need to build in those connections from the start.

There’s an old saying in healthcare: Prevention is better than curing. Every step we take toward delivering on the powerful potential of these mobile moments will bring us closer to preventing serious health risks, simply by using the devices we already use the most.

Via: techcrunch

The oddly named uBirds is manufacturing while Switzerland burns. Their product, called the Unique, is essentially a smartwatch hidden inside your watch band. This way you can strap on your Panerai or RGM and rock out while your band buzzes, not your watch.

Check out the video:

https://ksr-video.imgix.net/projects/1612332/video-585438-h264_high.mp4

Creating a “convertible” watch seems to be Switzerland’s Grail Quest. This solution, created by a company based in Poland, is one of the more clever solutions I’ve seen in a while simply because the entire thing is carefully hidden. The band contains an LED, a piezo buzzer, activity sensor, and Bluetooth chip. Your phone can send signals to the band to let you know when someone is calling or it’s time to hit your next appointment. From the Kickstarter page:

Unique looks like a traditional leather watch strap and fits any watch – but thanks to its discreet multi-colour LED, vibration alerts and gesture recognition, it lets you receive notifications, reject inconvenient phone calls, send pre-written texts, monitor your fitness, store all your security or transport passes, and be reminded instantly if you’re about to leave your phone behind.

I’ve seen this in action multiple times and have come away impressed with the quality and ambition. The straps are slightly thicker than traditional watch bands but, given the prevalence for cuff-like bands these days, they won’t seem odd. They are priced at $199 right now but you can get one for $139 during the early-bird offer. They are looking to raise $50,000 and are already half way there.

The Unique is a clever solution to a thorny problem. While it’s not quite as unique as its name – there are plenty of iterations on this idea out there these days – this one is the most unobtrusive. It’s well worth a closer look at the very least.

Via: techcrunch