TAG Heuer, Breitling and Swatch to join smartwatch fray

Premium timepiece makers Tag-Heuer and Breitling, as well as trendy watch maker Swatch, announced their own smartwatches. TAG Heuer, renown for quality precision sportswatches, is teaming up with Intel and Google to produce its own Android Wear watch. TAG Heuer will be responsible for designing and manufacturing the watch, which will have an Intel microprocessor.

Luxury brand Breitling has a $15,000.00 connected watch. The B55 Connected has two LCD screens and is smartphone connected plus has many aviation related functionalities. 

Swatch, which owns Omega and Tissot is expected to come out with a smartwatch that will work with Android and Windows phones and will also feature mobile payments in certain countries.

Pebble encourages smartstrap development with US $1 Million funding for successful concepts

Pebble is putting their money into encouraging smartstrap development for their upcoming Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel wearables. The smartstrap allows for expanded functionality on Pebbles by making the strap a peripheral. Various concepts have been revealed including one that enables direct connection to an LTE signal. Another concept will add GPS, NFC, OLED displays and varied other components to the Pebble Time.

Pebble pledged 1 million US dollars to encourage development and commercialization of othe smartstrap projects. Interested inventors can get a team together, build a prototype and place their project on a crowfunding platform and Pebble will offer the necessary support to make sure the projects see the light of day. I'm curious to see how far the smartstrap development can go and how much it can add to the Pebble Time.

Amazon.ca Appstore offering up to $115 in top paid apps for free

The Amazon Appstore is celebrating its birthday this week and to honour this special occasion, starting today until Saturday, March 21, the Amazon.ca Appstore is offering a free app bundle, with up to $115 in top paid apps – completely free! 

Customers will be able to download apps such as the critically acclaimed thriller Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 – currently one of the Top Paid Apps globally. To access and download the full list of apps, customers can visit the Amazon.ca Appstore here.

IBM: 40 per cent of app developers for large companies not investing in security

“Building security into mobile apps is not top of mind for companies, giving hackers the opportunity to easily reverse engineer apps, jailbreak mobile devices and tap into confidential data,” said Caleb Barlow, Vice President of Mobile Management and Security at IBM.

IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute today announced research unveiling an alarming state of mobile insecurity. The findings show nearly 40 percent of large companies, including many in the Fortune 500, aren’t taking the right precautions to secure the mobile apps they build for customers. The study also found organizations are poorly protecting their corporate and BYOD mobile devices against cyber-attacks – opening the door for hackers to easily access user, corporate and customer data.

The number of mobile cyber-security attacks is continuing to grow. At any given time, malicious code is infecting more than 11.6 million mobile devices.

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