Wearable Ecosystem
Samsung Electronics held its first application development conference for the Samsung Gear 2. Although the number of the participating developers was relatively small, many new creative ideas for new user experience were found there for better utilization of wearable devices.
The conference, titled Samsung Gear 2 Hackerthon, took place in Seoul between May 24 and 25, and a total of 130 developers from 32 teams joined the event. The Wearable Tizen SDK and the Samsung Mobile SDK were employed in their free-form development of dedicated applications.
The gathering for the development of wearable device applications is the first one of its kind in the world, and is very meaningful in that the Tizen OS was first in line. Google has encouraged such development activities since the release of the Samsung Gear 2 by unveiling the Android SDK for wearable devices. The Google I/O, scheduled for next month, covers the wearable ecosystem, too.
The Malibu team won the highest prize at the Samsung Gear 2 Hackerthon. The team came up with a portable score application, which shows the chords of a song in play on the screen of the wristband and comes with a metronome function.
Google and Apple are expected to jump into the market led by Samsung Electronics sooner or later. They already have sharp competitive edges in device manufacturing, platform management and contents and thus can get the inside track in the formation of the new ecosystem, which could result in at least some nervousness on the part of Samsung Electronics.
The Samsung Gear 2 Hackerthon and similar conferences are also scheduled in the United States, Brazil and other countries. The Samsung Gear 2 Application Contest is currently underway, too.