Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel Acquires Basis Watch

wearableworldnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 43 posts

Re: Intel Acquires Basis Watch

#21

Post by rmc »

wonnage wrote: post #16
blackdogie wrote: post #10

How does the Basis rank against the other smart watches out there ? I see it's priced higher, $199, where others come in at $100 - $150. The one difference I see is that it can do heart rate monitoring, and a lot of the competition can't (yet). It's nice to see that they have an API to export your data too.

FYI, there's no API. Heart rate monitoring is a bit of a sham, if you're looking to use it during exercise. It's designed to gather more of an average rate throughout the day than give an accurate reading while you're exercising. The Basis tracks sleep without you having to put it in sleep mode (e.g jawbone UP), which is pretty handy. They recently added some features that attempt to recognize walking/running/biking…

There's no offical API, but you can figure out the HTTP calls to make. My husband wrote some Nagios checks for himself. We just gotta pay attention to the "heart rate is CRITICAL" alerts now :P

http://tomsalmon.eu/2013/12/data-download-and-nagios-plugin-...

Re: Intel Acquires Basis Watch

#22

Post by rmc »

pisarzp wrote: post #11
blackdogie wrote: post #10

How does the Basis rank against the other smart watches out there ? I see it's priced higher, $199, where others come in at $100 - $150. The one difference I see is that it can do heart rate monitoring, and a lot of the competition can't (yet). It's nice to see that they have an API to export your data too.

It also measures your perspiration. They focused on gamification and achievements you can unlock ("slept full 8 hours" etc). However it lacks any wireless connectivity, so you need to plug to your computer to download data every day. I thought it's the most interesting of all smart devices, but I was looking for next gen which hopefully would be wireless and smaller.

> However it lacks any wireless connectivity, so you need to plug to your computer to download data every day.

Recent ones sync automatically over bluetooth with an smartphone

Re: Intel Acquires Basis Watch

#23

Post by rmc »

mahyarm wrote: post #20

I wonder if this will make an API less or more likely. #1 complaint with the watch. Simple stuff like wifi weight scale and runkeeper cardio integration would be pretty nice! Otherwise congrats to the company!

There's no offical API, but you can figure out the HTTP calls to make. My husband wrote some Nagios checks for himself. We just gotta pay attention to the "heart rate is CRITICAL" alerts now :P

http://tomsalmon.eu/2013/12/data-download-and-nagios-plugin-...

Re: Intel Acquires Basis Watch

#25

Post by bjackman »

webwielder wrote: post #15

Can someone explain to me Intel's continued fascination with being a consumer company? From constant B2C advertising to their TV and wearable endeavors, they seem to be fixated on being something they're not. Is it corporate vanity? Is there a strategic motivation? If so, have any of their consumer endeavors ever actually borne fruit? I guess it's reminiscent of Microsoft, who don't seem to understand that Windows wa…

Im not a business analyst but possible explanation: Intel want their chips in embedded, low power devices, beating ARM chips to new markets. Nobody is building x86 wearables, so Intel want to start the ball rolling by doing it themselves. similar to how they subsidize x86 tablets.

Re: Intel Acquires Basis Watch

#26

Post by jrockway »

webwielder wrote: post #15

Can someone explain to me Intel's continued fascination with being a consumer company? From constant B2C advertising to their TV and wearable endeavors, they seem to be fixated on being something they're not. Is it corporate vanity? Is there a strategic motivation? If so, have any of their consumer endeavors ever actually borne fruit? I guess it's reminiscent of Microsoft, who don't seem to understand that Windows wa…

Is any of this affecting their products? I can't think of any Intel product I've ever owned that wasn't extremely well-made. Their prices are also good. $350 for a 22nm 4-core chip with with 8M of cache? That's nothing. I also like their SSDs and Xeon processors. The Haswell integrated graphics are also very, very good. (My $600 NVidia card has major issues with MST DisplayPort monitors. The Intel chipset Just Works.)

To me it just sounds like they hired a marketing firm to get people to pick Intel over AMD when they don't actually care what they're getting. Nothing wrong with that.

(As for mobile, Intel is getting their lunch eaten by ARM, so I can see why they might want to put more skin in the mobile game. Although, as I understand it, Intel just sells ARM manufacturers time in their last-gen fabs, thus making ARM cheaper than current-gen Intel stuff, but with not as much raw power. ARM cores make up for lack of raw power with lots of special functionality on-die, like video decoders and encoders, which your x86 Intel chip will just do in software.)

Re: Intel Acquires Basis Watch

#27

Post by zimpenfish »

webwielder wrote: post #19
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Intel's "strategic motivation" is simple. The US stock market demands ever increasing revenues and earnings from a company. In order to achieve that, often companies do something that the great Peter Lynch called "diworsification" [0]: The term was coined by legendary investor Peter Lynch in his book, "One Up Wall Street," where he suggested that a business that diversifies too widely, risks destroying their…

It's a shame that the one time event of going public dooms a company for perpetuity to being subject to the unreasonable demands of shareholders, so often ironically resulting in the downfall of the very value that was supposed to rise as a result of said demands.

It's even more ironic that companies which make astounding profits (cf Apple) and largely ignore the whims of shareholders (cf Apple) are constantly berated for this.

Re: Intel Acquires Basis Watch

#28

Post by matznerd »

rmc wrote: post #24

My husband has one and wrote some Nagios checks which download the data over the web. He's basically put himself on Nagios. We just gotta pay attention to the "heart rate is CRITICAL" alerts now :P http://tomsalmon.eu/2013/12/data-download-and-nagios-plugin-...

Are you a bot or something? You posted the exact same comment 4 times.

Re: Intel Acquires Basis Watch

#29

Post by matznerd »

I predict wearables, specifically smartwatches, are the next huge consumer category. The tipping point to mainstream will occur when the fashion of the watches catches up with the technology.
Post reply on HN