Nike+Fuelband

Nike looks to abandon at least part of wearable effort

NikeFuel, one of the most widely know sports wearables may be headed to the recycle bin as the company has slashed the development team internally just as a large number of rivals are looking to enter the wearable space.

There are few facts yet in the situation as Nike has not yet released an official announcement about its moves but last Friday C/Net broke the news story saying that Nike had laid off as many as 55 people from the 70 person division that develops the FuelBand. Its Digital Sports arm will still employ approximately 150 people after the cuts.

It looks like not only the FuelBand but also its sportswatch and any other wearables that were on the drawing board are now on the chopping block. Nike confirmed to C/Net that a change in direction and layoffs were in the works but said that it would continue to support and sell the Nike+FuelBand SE for the foreseeable future.

However the move does not mean that Nike is leaving the space, or that the money and effort that went into its recently opened lab in San Francisco are going to waste, instead the company is shifting its focus to software, which as the core mission for its just opened lab.

Of course this opens the door for a whole new range of speculation. Will Nike, which has appeared to favor Apple and its platform, continue down this road and possibly be the supplier of the software to the expected Apple smartwatch? Apple has a long history of doing both its own hardware and software and while it has been happy to accept Nike support on the app side, is that what Nike wants?

Then it could focus more on Google, which is the largest mobile OS provider and has a major push in the wearable space. While Google Glass gets most of the attention that is really just the tip of the iceberg. Google recently announced its Android Wear project designed to expand the wearable space and with it use of the company’s operating system.

This will be an interesting trend to follow and could show the impact that the growing strength of Google is having on a wide range of market segments going forward.

Jawbone UP24 support comes to Android

For the fitness band user and Android owner there are a few options not available to you as some products are only available for Apple’s iOS app platform. But in this emerging market but one of the stalwarts, Jawbone, has just made the transition to supporting Android in its most recent release.

A few months after Jawbone released an Apple version it has released the UP 3.0 app that brings Android support to the UP24 fitness tracking band, opening up a much bigger market.

The new app enables users to track a wide variety of physical activities up to and including sleep, food, and drink nutritional data. It is designed to enable a user to both set goals and milestones and to track progress towards achieving them. Users can log workouts, team with friends or rivals to establish competitions.

It has an array of alerts that a user can customize from ones that set nap time and lengths to ones that alert you to any time that you have been inactive too long and this can be set for different levels at different times of day. The app supports a wide number of languages including English, Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

The fitness band space is increasingly competitive as sports watches seemed to pioneer this space but a number of the lightweight and flexible bands have started to emerge as a viable and easier to wear alternative.

There are also a number of fitness bands such as the Nike + Fuelband, the Fitbit Flex that are strong players in this space and larger, more dedicated watch like devices that originally started out as single sport appliances have pioneered this field but it seems likely that the emergence of Android and probably other OS wearable devices from Google Glass to a possible Apple iOS-based watch will start to compete here as well going forward.

Nike looks to abandon at least part of wearable effort

Jawbone UP24 support comes to Android

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