All of this is key to its industrial intent vision, where connected sensors on machines talk to the cloud and companies harness the power of industrial data in real time to automate industrial processes. GE has estimated that connecting devices to the “industrial internet” could boost global GDP to the tune of $10 trillion to $15 trillion by 2030.

GE’s new data and cloud products

GE is building big data software called the Historian that uses Hadoop to manage time-series data to help industrial customers track their rising industrial data. GE’s Bill Ruh, VP of the Global Software Center, pointed out that industrial data is growing at twice the rate of other types of data. For example, GE generates about 5 terabytes of data a day in its labs.

The Hadoop part of the software allows the data to scale across multiple nodes, while the time-series component helps manage the influx of tiny pieces of data that comes in almost constantly. Time-series data isn’t huge, but it’s always coming in, adding up to millions and billions of records over a relatively short amount of time depending on how often it is collected.

The partnership with Amazon (Amazon CTO Werner Vogels attended the event, and he’ll also speak at our Structure event tomorrow in San Francisco) means the cloud giant will be the first cloud provider on which GE will deploy its industrial internet platform. It’s not clear yet, if Amazon will use GE’s Hadoop software in its cloud or if there are just some API links being built.

Update: Vogels and Ruh say that the relationship means that customers can ship and store their data designed for the GE Predictivy software and the Historian platform to Amazon’s cloud. So customers can do it on-premise and/or in the cloud. Pivotal will help build some of the software connectors that will make it possible for customers to use this data where they want without concerning themselves about where it is headed.

In some ways the demonstrations that GE showed off, are taking direct design strategies from consumer applications such as Facebook, and its software options, called Predictivity are designed to connect the data coming in from machines to people in user-friendly ways.

The goal behind all of these products is to bring the internet of things back to the enterprise realm. It’s nice to connect your home, but when you can connect power plants you can drive a lot more results in terms of energy efficiency and even cost savings. And because the money is there, we’ll see a lot of interesting software to solve the problems associated with managing, analyzing and running predictions against data.

“Now for the first time I think we’re going to see innovation coming out of the industrial space and not just the IT space, “said Paul Maritz, the CEO of Pivotal, a company that GE recently invested $105 million in.

I’ll update the story with more information after the event.

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Driving (ha!) this change are regulations in various countries are safety regulations. From the report:

The growth in embedded connectivity is likely to be fuelled in part by regulations in the European Union and Russia making it mandatory for new vehicles to ship with systems that are able to automatically alert emergency services in the event of an accident. In this case, the advantage of an embedded system is that it will still work even if the driver’s handset does not have residual battery or if it is not present in the car. Sales of cars with embedded connectivity should also be boosted by regulation in Brazil that stipulates that new vehicles are equipped with stolen vehicle tracking systems that enable a car to be located remotely.

Such regulations also give governments a way to track people should they be so inclined. Maybe there will be a push back after the NSA domestic and internet spying revelations. Either way, there are still come questions about paying for such connectivity and what it might be used for.

On the consumer side, the survey mentions in-car uses of social networking, weather and music streaming, but not video, which would be a tremendous cost and bandwidth hog. It also mentions remote diagnostic and vehicle management systems as reasons for embedded connectivity, such as the type of systems found on electric vehicles. I wish the survey had spent a bit more time discussing who would pay for this connectivity and the pricing models that would come with it.

It does break down the opportunity into embedded connectivity, tethered connections (where the phone works as a Wi-Fi hotspot for the car) and connectivity via docking mechanism where the phone provides connectivity plus apps. The survey is cool on this latter option believing that regulatory demands will drive more vehicles to embedded while legal and manufacturer demands will favor tethering over integrating a smartphone.

The GSMA survey estimates that by 2015, one in five cars sold will come with embedded connectivity and half of cars on the road will have connectivity by some means, even if it’s just via tethering from a smartphone. That’s a lot of connected cars.

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This is one of the worst-case scenarios that Whistle, a company that launch last week hopes to solve with its connected tracking device for dogs. Ben Jacobs, the CEO of Whistle, lost a beloved dog to a sudden illness when he was eight and the experience stuck with him. In time it prompted him to start Whistle. The device tracks your dog’s movements against data from other Whistle-wearing dogs to determine how your dog stacks up against others of its breed.

In this week’s podcast Jacobs and I discuss how vets, researchers and pet owners could use this data (and in the case of researchers, already are using this data) to track dogs’ health to spot problems earlier and possibly help devise treatments. Because the Whistle doesn’t have to undergo testing from the Food and Drug Administration, it may open the door to proving how the internet of things can change medicine much sooner than human-centric sensors.

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Show notes:
Host: Stacey Higginbotham
Guest: Ben Jacobs, CEO of Whistle

• Why build a connected device for dogs.
• How data from dogs might change the way people benefit from their connected devices.
• Creating an ecosystem of devices for connected pets and the $50 billion pet industry in the U.S..
• Why Whistle isn’t the internet of things equivalent of Pets.com back in the bubble years of 1999 and 2000.

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While data plan prices are a little more palatable with mobile sharing plans, connected devices in the home might not come along for the ride. On the GigaOM Internet of Things show, Stacey Higginbotham chats with Ayla Networks co-founder and CEO David Friedman on the data price inclusion of connectivity. Don’t count out increased costs for manufacturers to update firmware on devices, even if you don’t get any specific data from them.

And on our GigaOM Weekly WrapUp podcast we roundup news such as the recent spotlight on smartphone thefts and a possible turning of the tide for patent trolling; a strategic approach that’s getting long in the tooth. But there’s good news to discuss too: Enterprises are spending billions as new technologies become available.

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A few interesting products are on the horizon, though. A forthcoming “smart” helmet from the sports-gear maker Riddell can send alerts to a coach on the sidelines using a device when one of his football players gets hit in the head with a certain degree of severity. The system can keep track of each player’s hits over time for review on a laptop.

A sensor from startup Brain Sentry can be applied to a helmet and cause an LED to flash red on the helmet whenever there’s it detects sudden acceleration. Reebok and MC10 have come up with the CheckLight skullcap with sensing technology and LEDs for use under a helmet in any sport.

The National Football League has been putting up money for research to better diagnose brain injuries, so devices like these could get beyond amateur use and go pro in the near future.

Big data could be coming to soccer soon, too. A German company has deployed sensors to track player and ball movement on a soccer field in Nuremberg, and data scientists got to work on the data at a Cloudera event in February. The winners, from Pythian, used Cloudera Impala to make a neat heat map showing where players and the ball were on the field during the game.

Source: Flickr user markusunger

Quantifying the slam dunk

Look to basketball and baseball for a couple of other applications in sensors that aren’t so far off. Think of a slam dunk, and then think about seeing just how hard a basketball player is slamming the ball through the hoop. Researchers at MIT removed the nylon core from a basketball net, dropped conductive silicone with sensors in its place and came up with a way to measure force, quantify it on a connected circuit board and transmit it to a computer. Working with TNT, the researchers deployed the Slam Force Net system at the 2012 All-Star Game’s slam-dunk contest, said Michael Bove, a professor at the MIT Media Lab. Readings were displayed on for everyone watching the contest on television.

Source: Flickr user terren in Virginia

The system doesn’t generate a ton of data, and it costs within the “tens of dollars” to build, Bove said. But that’s not the problem in getting the system to be used.

“The business model is more, ‘Does it make sense to show it (the data on screen)?’ And, if you’re going to show it, how graphically sophisticated do you want it to be?” Bove said.

But that’s not the only possible application of the sensor-laden net. It could also stop the clock when the ball goes through the net. The system would be more reliable than controlling the clock by hand, Bove said.

The connected baseball

Meanwhile, he can see the same material deployed in a net for training pitchers to throw at a certain speed inside a strike zone. “It would be tens of dollars, and it wouldn’t require the amount of setup you would need with a radar gun,” Bove said.

Source: Flickr user lmbaker3

The curveball of monetization

The common theme here is that we’re still in the early innings for commercializing professional uses of sensors in sports. Researchers at the CambridgeSens group at the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Pervasive Sensing at Imperial College in London and many other academic institutions are experimenting with materials, transmitters and data-analysis methods. Surely athletes will end up using some of this technology. The bottleneck at the moment seems to be the creation of systems that can deliver value to players, teams, leagues and fans on an ongoing basis.

A good example comes from the world of running. Research into sensor-rich insoles focused on clocking how long shoes touched the ground during a sprint. That data could be processed right after a run and displayed to runners, so they can adjust their performance based on muscle memory.

“The big decision is what sort of information you want to give to people and what sort of processing algorithms you would use to do this in real time,” said one of the researchers, Marcelo Pias. “That’s what we spent quite a lot of time developing.”

But the technology might be years away from commercialization. Pias’ group did market research and came to the conclusion that it would address “a niche market — very, very small compared to what you would achieve with something like Fitbit,” said Pias, who is now running Globosense, a startup focusing on the connected home.

Dealing with data

The dearth of sensible go-to-market strategies right now might be all right, because IT executives are still scrambling to figure out what to do as more data sets become available for analysis. The topic will certainly be up for discussion when my colleague Barb Darrow talks with the CIOs of the Pabst Brewing Co. and the Clorox Co. at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 19.

So as companies and organizations go forward with new ways to compute and store increasing amounts of data, entrepreneurs have some time to pencil out business models that could make money off sensor technology that many people in sports would be willing to pay for.

Until that happens, good old processed film will remain a viable option for analyzing player performance. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it sure would be nice to go a few steps further.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user khawkins04.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Many of the men leading these companies, and they are men, are aware of their need to seem visionary, and tend to speak with grand rhetoric and bold statements about the future. But Simon Segars, the incoming CEO of ARM isn’t even inclined to big hand gestures. Instead, he speaks in a low, even voice and shies away from making grandiose statements or predictions. As a current resident of Silicon Valley, he is a reserved Brit working among the frenetic futurists of the Bay Area’s technology entrepreneurs and executives.

Next month Segars, currently the president of ARM, will take over as the CEO of the chip licensing firm, replacing Warren East who has steered for the last 12 years. Segars, who has actually been at ARM longer than East, has been the president of the company since January of this year, and has moved around a lot within the company’s business units as well as its offices.

Outgoing ARM CEO Warren East.

He’s currently based out of the company’s San Jose office, where he plans to stay for the next two years while his daughter completes high school. In a recent interview, Segars noted that ARM only has one customer in the U.K., and even East spends only a third of his time in England. “The job of ARM’s CEO is a roving one,” Segars says. However, he said he doesn’t have any plans to move ARM’s headquarters to Silicon Valley.

Changing captains in calm waters

That fits with the ARM mentality. The company, which was formed in 1990, is a pragmatic and steady member of the semiconductor world. Unlike more flamboyant executives, ARM’s East isn’t one to insult the competition — although because of its licensing model, its competition is hard to define.

ARM designs processor cores that companies ranging from Apple to Qualcomm use to build the chips powering the mobile phones that have so change our world in the last seven years. Companies can either license the ARM architecture as is and pay a fee on every chip sold, or they can take a deeper architectural license that allows them to tweak the core to build new functions and features for their particular market. With its emphasis on power efficiency over performance (although it’s pushing the envelope there as well) ARM has maintained a dominant position in the growing mobile market, while rival Intel has failed to place one of its x86-based chips inside a mass market handset.

East has said he’s leaving at this point because remaining could act as a brake on inovation. Plus the company is at a high point, making a shift in leadership less fraught.

Meanwhile, it has also made bets — some as far back as nine years ago — on the data center and networking processors as well as the rise of graphics processors. Much like Intel drove the x86 architecture to prominence with its PC chips in the late 80s and early 90s (and then pushed those into the data center and other realms), ARM’s power-sipping architecture is taking on more and more workloads as computing and connectivity are embedded in more and more places.

In the first quarter of this year ARM was the technology behind 2.6 billion chips. It also has added several new licensing partners from surprising areas, such as AMD, which has taken a license to make chips for the data center.

From mobile first to data first

So what does Segars plan to do as the next captain of ARM? Graphics cores will be one important area. While GPU cores are still not a huge business for ARM, Segars pointed out that licensees sold less than 50 million of its Mali cores in 2011 but 150 million in 2012. ARM estimates its GPUs comprised about 13 percent of the GPU market in 2013.

Other forward-thinking moves were the launch of the ARM Cortex A15 chip in 2010, which helped push ARM into the telecommunications networking equipment world, and the decision in 2010 to invest in Calxeda, design a 64-bit ARM core and give an architectural license to Applied Micro. Both moves were integral to bringing an ARM processor into the data center server market, where Intel has dominated but where power was becoming a concern.

This is what Segars sees for the future of ARM: More devices with computing and connectivity trying to share data on a variety of networks. You can call it the internet of things or just the obvious direction we’re heading as a technology-inclined society.

But Segars sees more people getting smartphones, more sensors and all of those billions of nodes sending back data to the cloud or even to local hubs for processing. Thus ARM is pushing it’s application processors and GPUs for all kinds of mobile phones; fancier, but low power chips for networking boxes; ARM cores for inside the data center for data analytics, compute and storage and microcontrollers for those myriad sensors.

Software is eating the world, but ARM has to stick with chips

Thus ARM’s big challenges for the next few years are less related to identifying the next big thing than building out this vision of the world. When it comes to the internet of things he’s trying to figure out the lay of the land: how do we stay open to innovation while addressing privacy and security? On the data and cloud computing side, he’s adapting ARM to a world where software is eating everything.

One of Dell’s ARM server designs designed to get ARM chips into the data center.

“Everything is virtualizing, where you can run everything in software on top of the hardware so you have more flexibility,” Segars said. “That trend is catching up on the networking side.” He noted that while running applications directly on the hardware will always offer better performance, ARM is hoping to win in these areas by being open to the virtualization trend while still offering power-efficient performance.

But the shift to a more software-centric world leaves Segars walking a thin line. He sees the importance of software to ARM’s success as an architecture, but it cannot develop its own software because that wouldn’t serve its chipmaking customers. In many cases, ARM’s customers (and other chipmakers) are trying to respond to this same challenge of software gaining in importance (and value) by building their own software.

Intel, for example has developed its own distribution of Hadoop as well as its own software-defined networking strategy that will put it in competition with switch makers. That’s a story playing out across the chip ecosystem, as virtualization means one could run a variety of chip architectures in one data center.

While ARM can’t try to build an enticing software layer to add value to its architecture, it can join partnerships to help make sure software that runs on the ARM architecture exists and can match features with Intel. It has joined partnerships such as the Linaro effort, as well as a security joint venture with Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient to offer its customers an ecosystem that supports the ARM architecture without stepping on their own software development efforts.

Is ARM the architecture for the internet of things?

As ARM attempts to break the x86 hegemony in the data center it’s also extending it’s business further down the computing chain to microcontrollers — the tiny chips that act as the brains in washing machines, smart sensors and other devices. While mobile phones and tablets are still a growing market for ARM, albeit one that Intel is also targeting, the possibility of a microcontroller in every appliance or a sensor on every bridge is one that ARM can’t ignore. Microcontrollers may not have the margins that application processors have, but they will be everywhere.

Chart proved by IC Insights.

According to Gartner analyst, Adib Ghubril, the global MCU market is roughly $15 billion but ARM’s cores are limited to the large 32-bit cores, where ARM has about 50 percent of the $5 billion global market. Ghubril says ARM’s going to go after the whole market, but to go for the whole thing means getting a 32-bit core to act like an 8-bit core. That’s possible and some vendors are doing that. Plus, thanks to the internet of things and the automotive markets, Gubril expects the 32-bit MCU market to grow, “like gangbusters” over the next five years.

And as Segars discusses the various ways one might implement security on networked devices, it becomes clear that ARM might find a new market for application processors inside home and industrial hubs where data from sensors is aggregated and processed before getting sent up to the cloud. He also discussed some of the subtle problems of the emerging market in data around connected devices that might find an answer in silicon.

If we want to use connected devices for setting prices or even medical monitoring, authentication will be important. One thought is to employ biometric security to authenticate the person wearing a device, which then would require smarter microcontrollers and more sensors. From Segars’ perspective, everywhere he looks he sees a potential home for ARM’s architecture.

That may not be realistic, but much like Intel rode the wave of cheaper general purpose computing, back when the IT world saw the value in taking “good enough” chips at a lower price, ARM is hoping that today’s focus on lowering the energy consumption of devices, as well as the benefits of having a wide ecosystem of silicon providers based on its architecture, will benefit it in more markets in the years to come.

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Are these devices worth it? I’ve written how I decide whether connectivity justifies the price, but in this week’s podcast Ayla Networks co-founder and CEO David Friedman argues that the cost divide between “smart” and dumb devices will shrink in the next few years, with it costing about $5 to add connectivity to things.

And at that point there’s no reason why you might not have a connected microwave or smoke detector. But not all of this connectivity will serve the consumer. In the case of appliances they might be used by the manufactures for software updates, diagnostics (we’ve talked about this on previous shows) and perhaps to sell you services. So a connected fridge might not buy your groceries but it would offer to ship a replacement water filter to your door, when it sensed yours was past its prime.

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Show notes:
Host: Stacey Higginbotham
Guest: David Friedman, CEO of Ayla Networks

• Why the world needs yet another platform for connected devices.
• Big companies are intrigued by the internet of things, so what departments are trying to push the envelope?
• That high price tag associated with connected devices should shrink in the next few years.
• When our devices are connected, should we fear for our privacy?

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Whistle on Wednesday announced it has raised a $6 million Series A round led by DCM Ventures and it debuted its eponymous device. The small metallic puck that clips contains a three-axis access accelerometer that tracks a wide range of canine motion – or lack thereof. The device has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy radios, which it not only uses to send its data payloads to the internet and your smartphone, but also for proximal location. For instance, Whistle knows your dog is at home if it’s sniffing your house’s Wi-Fi network, and if it’s detecting your smartphone’s Bluetooth signal it knows the you and dog are together.

Your dog probably doesn’t care about counting calories and steps, but in the interest of keeping their pups healthy, dog owners certainly do. And that’s why the cornerstone of Whistle’s service doesn’t live in the collar sensor or phone app, but in the cloud, CEO and co-founder Ben Jacobs told me.

Whistle has been working with leading veterinary schools to create a hefty database of dog health information. It tries to determine what a dog’s optimal exercise and sleep levels should be based on breed, weight and age, and then compares them to a dog’s actual activity patterns. Dog owners can access all of that data through a web interface, and track activity on a smartphone app. They can also use the software to send or print out reports for their vets.

“We translate that accelerometer data into info you can use and give you a snapshot of what your dog’s day looked like – walks, playtime and the time spent resting,” Jacobs said.

Whistle, however, isn’t just graphing data and comparing it against a few charts. According to Jacobs, its analyzing millions of individual data points per animal, looking for patterns or “vectors” such as restless sleep or interrupted play that would indicate that something isn’t right in Fido’s world.

“Dogs tend to hide their pain from you,” Jacobs said. “They will act how their owners want them to act. Dogs will run a marathon with their owners until their paws bleed. That’s not an indication of health. That’s an indication of loyalty.”

Whistle’s job is to ferret those patterns out from perceived behavior, he said. What’s more, Whistle plans to aggregate all of its canine data and offer it up to its research partners. Despite the high level of dog ownership in this country, there’s a lot vets don’t know about individual breeds, Jacobs said. Whistle wants to supply them with the country’s largest live case study – giving them real data on how real dogs behave in domestic environment, not just the lab.

Though the major value of Whistle comes from its cloud service, the company is taking an Apple approach to the market, making its money off of hardware. It’s selling each Whistle device for $99.95, but will never charge for the data collection and analytics service, Jacobs said. He added Whistle might pursue additional revenue streams through a version of its analytics portal optimized for vets so they can keep track of their patients.

The quantified pet is definitely going to be an interesting space, and it targets a market segment that goes nuts over their pets and has money to spend on them (I can speak from personal experience). According to Whistle, pet owners spend $50 billion annually on food, treats, equipment, medicine, veterinary bills and even massages for their pets. The idea of a Fitbit for your pooch might sound silly to many people, but to dog owners used to fussing over and pampering their pets, Whistle’s wearable doggie tech is by no means a stretch.

We’re starting to see the emergence of all kinds of internet of things devices designed to let our pets “talk” to us and interact with their environments. Whistle, however, is particularly compelling because it doesn’t appear to be building a one-trick application, such as GPS tracking collar or an NFC emergency tag.

According to Jacobs, Whistle is trying to build a platform from which it and partners can launch new hardware and services. Future software updates or versions of its collar could use proximal location to create geo-fences or even allow for remote doggie door entry. We humans can get into our homes with Bluetooth keys. Why not our pets?

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The technology would be embedded in a Wi-Fi device, like a router or access point and would figure out the motions someone was making based on how those motions affected the Wi-Fi network.

For those who don’t think about the electromagnetic radiation Wi-Fi produces (that’d be most of us) it’s important to realize that Wi-Fi is sending out a steady array of signals that bounce and bump into things into your home. If you could see the airwaves in the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band you’d see that every move results in a ripple effect, like a type of radar system.

Normally those ripples are too small to be detected, but the WiSee researchers have discovered algorithms that help amply the Doppler effect created by a gesture disturbing a Wi-Fi network. It then can translate that difference into one of nine corresponding gestures with 94 percent accuracy rate.

Check out the video above and for those who have read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy feel free to recollect Zaphod’s challenges in getting the radio in the Heart of Gold tuned to a specific station and stay there. For those who have missed the book, he basically has to stay very still.

The researchers at WiSee have solved this challenge using an opening sequence of gestures that would act as a means to turn on the receiver and let it know you are ready to take action. From the paper on the topic:

Over a 24-hour period, WiSee’s average false positive rate—events that detect a gesture in the absence of the target human—is 2.63 events per hour when using a preamble with two gesture repetitions. This goes down to 0.07 events per hour, when the number of repetitions is increased to four.

The technology differentiates from different people in the room by using MIMO, an antenna technology that relies on multiple antennas on a device and at an access point that essentially identifies and tracks the “target user.” The paper notes that the WiSee receiver can identify the correct person as the target 90 percent of the time in a room of three people.

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Thalmic, which had raised a $1 million seed round and was a member of the winter 2013 Y Combinator class, has a who’s who of investors in the round. Formation 8, First Round Capital, FundersClub, Paul Graham, Marc Benioff and Sam Altman are among those who participated.

New UIs for the new era of computing

Our computing eras are defined by and constrained by our user interfaces. Desktops and laptops were designed for productivity, thus keyboards and alter mice dominated. Touchscreens helped computers go mobile and now, better voice interfaces such as Siri are enabling people to do more on those tiny screens. But as we prepare for connected devices everywhere, and wearables like Google Glass, touch screens and voice don’t make the grade.

That’s why devices like the Myo, the Kinect and the Leap Motion controller are so interesting. They expand the number of ways we can manipulate software, and in turn propel people to create new software. The Kinect or the Nintendo Wii are early examples that have spawned a new type of gaming. But something like the Myo is exciting for someone thinking about how to control a device like Glass or any other augmented-reality interface. Even touch is kind of a flat UI that can’t compare to manipulating objects in 3-D.

And when we start superimposing computing on the world, we’re going to need the 3-D capabilities of gesture controls. Since the Myo is worn, and doesn’t rely on a camera for sensing motion, it’s perfect for a more mobile experience like Glass. If you are wearing it, you can twist your hand to call up information, which is probably less distracting than speaking out loud.

The application gap

Stephen Lake, CEO and co-founder of Thalmic Labs, views the Myo as the means for interacting when computing becomes embedded all around us, and in a conversation a few weeks ago he explained that we’re moving from “graphical user interfaces to NUIs or natural user interfaces.”

“When you provide a new input tech the interesting question is how does that enable you to change the form factor and the computers,” Lake said. The Myo, he said, is just one form factor for Thalmic Labs, and the goal is to think about user interfaces in totally new ways for the next generation of computing.

This funding will certainly help Thalmic get there. Because as cool as the armband may look, it has an uphill road. New user interfaces have a chicken-and-egg problem. People don’t buy the Kinect in a vacuum — they buy a game system with cool games. While I was a speech-to-text aficionado before Siri came out, most people viewed my own Android speech-to-text apps as strange. Thalmic right now not only has to build a credible, working device, but it has to have cool software or hardware that takes advantage of the armband, and that’s a tall order.

Thalmic labs has received pre-orders for over 30,000 units from customers over the last three months. The pre-order price is $149, which is kind of steep for the general public to pay for a product with an uncertain application ecosystem. However, as part of the investment from Intel Capital, Thalmic Labs will gain access to Intel’s manufacturing and technology expertise to help it scale production. That could help the three founders from the University of Waterloo’s mechatronics engineering program avoid mistakes that could postpone or sink their dream.

Either way, anyone waiting for one of these devices will have to hold off until 2014, when the Myo band is expected to actually ship. Lately it seems, I’m covering more products that remind me that the future is here … almost.

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