In fact, Dental hygiene company Oral-B announced its Bluetooth-connected electric toothbrush line, SmartSeries, which will be available in Germany this spring and in the United States in June. The Oral-B companion app will be available in iOS in May, and in Android in August. Oral-B will also add connectivity to some of its other electric toothbrushes. SmartSeries will offer users six different brushing modes — daily cleaning, deep clean, whitening, gum care, sensitive, tongue cleaning — so that users can personalize their brushing experience with their dentist. The app starts a timer when the user begins to brush and leads the user through whichever brushing routine suits their needs and will immediately alert users when they apply too much pressure while brushing. Users can see a graphical view of their brushing performance over time. Oral-B is the first prominent dental health company to come out with a connected toothbrush, but some smaller startups have been working on this technology for a few years.

At this year’s CES, another company, Paris, France-based Kolibree, launched a connected toothbrush. Unlike Beam Brush, which is a manual toothbrush, Kolibree’s offering is electric. According to the company, the sensors in the brush detect not only how long you brushed your teeth, but also whether you hit all the hard to reach places between gums and teeth. The brushing data will also be available via an API, so third party developers can build games or other applications that use the smart toothbrush. (A.A.)

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L'articolo It’s Time To Change Our Idea About Wearable Technology sembra essere il primo su Alessandro Allocca.

As a reminder, Beacon is an indoor positioning system developed by Apple to trigger and send relevant information to your smartphone when you are walking inside a shop. Beacon work on Bluetooth low energy to detect when a customer’s phone is close to a sensor.

There are many potential real world use cases, and this is what makes Beacon interesting. For example, when you enter a clothing shop, you can receive a push notification with all the latest promos. When you enter a coffee shop, you could get the brew of the week on your phone. Or a shopping mall could display a map to help you find the right store. It could power a new payment system as well, essentially a Square Wallet on steroids.

Hardware startup Sensorberg just raised $1 million (€750,000) from Technologie Holding GmbH and undisclosed angel investors. Part of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Berlin, Sensorberg is one of the most promising iBeacon startups in Europe.

The hard part is to convince big retail chains to use iBeacon. These customers have the potential to develop a good mobile app, get a large user base and integrate iBeacon features. In the U.S., Macy’s is experimenting with iBeacon. Apple will take advantage of its technology as well.

But for now, it remains a novelty. It can go either way and become a massive retail technology or end up like QR codes. Remember QR codes (A.A.)

L'articolo After BigData And BitCoin, It’s Time For Another B: Beacon sembra essere il primo su Alessandro Allocca.