We've heard a lot lately about how 2013 will be the year of the smartwatch, with upcoming products rumoured from a host of sources. But hey, guess what - it turns out that Google are already selling an Android powered smartwatch, through their purchase of Motorola Mobility. This is the Moto Actv, which probably isn't on a lot of people's radar because it's sold as a sports accessory. In this post we'll learn how to hack the Google smartwatch and install a full Android distribution on it, and see some examples of what we can do with it.

Earlier this year I wrote one of my most popular blog posts “Hacking the Google Smartwatch” about the hacking potential of Motorola’s Moto Actv smartwatch. In this post I’ll turn my attentions to the Samsung Galaxy Gear, which launched in Autumn 2013 and has already been quite comprehensively hacked to vastly expand its capabilities. I’ll conclude by showing you how you can run the Google Glass software to get an early peek at how Glass will work.

I recently gave the closing talk at the UCISA Networking Group's Bring Your Own Device event, ostensibly about the future of BYOD but touching on a few broader themes.  This is a companion post that teases out and expands on some of those themes.  Go grab some popcorn and take a seat - we're going on a whistlestop tour around hacking culture and how new hackers are born, wearable computing, the irresistable rise of Linux, and more!

Motorola Moto 360 smartwatch running Google's Android Wear operating system

“He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake”
– from Santa Claus is Coming to Town,
by Haven Gillespie / J. Fred Coots

Stephen Wolfram made headlines back in 2012 when he revealed that he had been “life logging” for over twenty years. But by now many of us are doing this almost incidentally, through wearable sensors from the likes of Fitbit and Jawbone and smartwatches with health features like Motorola’s Moto360 with its heart rate monitor and pedometer – see photo above. And by dint of knowing where you are and where you’ve been, Google were able to add an activity summary card to Google Now that attempts to guess (with varying degrees of accuracy) how much walking or cycling you have been doing.

And here we find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma – by aggregating and applying machine learning to health and activity data (really, as much data as possible) and medical records, we can suggest interventions and lifestyle changes and monitor their effectiveness, potentially across a huge population – think of those billions of Android users. Marry this with cheap $99 next generation gene sequencing from the likes of 23andMe and we are really heading for a step change in public health from a move to a more proactive approach to medicine. However, the potential for abuse is massive, as we’ve recently seen in relation to alleged improprieties at Uber. As one commentator put it: “Deleting Uber? Uber won’t delete you.”

[This piece originally appeared on the Jisc Technology Foresight blog]

This post takes us from the Quantified Self to the Quantified Driver, and the Internet of Things to the Botnet of Fridges. We've been hearing a lot about the Quantified Self movement, and how in years to come our gadgets (that other thing we hear a lot about - the Internet of Things) will be quietly collecting information about us to help us plan our routines, sleep, diets, exercise regimes, and so on. A landmark interview with Stephen Wolfram a couple of years ago put this onto a lot of people's agendas. This might sound like science fiction, but we can get a glimpse of that future right now if we know where to look, particularly around fitness tracking and what I suspect my Californian readers would describe as wellness monitoring. In this post I'll look at some of the tech which is out there now, including some surprisingly well established systems, and give you my own tale from the edge…