by Pavel Bondarev | Feb 10, 2016 | Other, Technologies, Uncategorized, Wearable Tech |
As you probably remember, not so long time ago I wrote about Pebble – why I believe it is the best smartwatch on the market, and why its simplicity and intuitivity, as well as lack of over-complicated gizmos, are what users really need.
So now I’d like to reiterate my belief and to thank Pebble team for their amazing product and the service they provide.
It looks like that pebbloids (or how the Pebble guys call themselves) keep a close eye on the market and search for the ways to deliver better product and improve services for their customers. I know it for sure, because they somehow found my post where I briefly mentioned the troubles with my Pebble, found and connected with me, and exchanged my old watch for a new one.
Just… Wow!
The entire process took a couple of days to communicate and work out the details, and a few days later I got a parcel with my new Pebble Classic. And you know, I liked the simplicity of the product replacement service – all I had to do was to take a photo of the Pebble watch back side with a handwritten number I received from their support. That’s it! The picture was sent to their Support team, and the next day I found a confirmation of the new watch shipping.
As you know, the crisis affected almost all the markets, including the hi-tech industry, and made companies pay close attention to the quality of services provided. Until quite recently, Zappos were traditionally on the top in terms of the service quality, and now the newcomers overtake it and grab the leading positions. Based on what I saw Pebble is one of such new leaders. This is really great – the more competition and the better services for us customers, the happier we are! 😉
I was lucky to meet Eric Migicovsky at CES 2016, and used the opportunity to express my personal gratitude to him for that amazing devices he made.
Hope that Pebble will avoid the transformation when a cool young and energetic startup turns into a small dinosaur with all the problems common for big corporations. I believe in the guys and think they will continue developing cool products and deliver their amazing services for us. We’re looking forward folks to see your new offerings!
by Pavel Bondarev | Dec 21, 2015 | MYLE, Other |
With 2015 behind us, I want to take this opportunity to “Thank You and Wish You Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!” to you my favourite MYLE team, which consisted of all customers, supporters, partners, developers, friends and family.
Without your incredible support and faith in MYLE, we would not be where we are today, doing what we are passionate about and changing our lives by making them much simpler.
This past year has brought many challenges, but we all stood together with support for each other. That’s why we’ve been able to overcome those challenges through hard work and cohesion.
However, this past year had more exciting and decisive moments, because we could complete the crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo successfully. Also, we’ve almost completed beta-testing of MYLE devices, thus, we became much closer to bring MYLE to you.
We are excited and looking forward to 2016 because it will bring us a lot of new bright moments.
We are pretty sure that MYLE team will overcome anything on its way because we have everything to do so – love, friendship, solid support, and, more importantly, a passion for innovation that has no alternatives in this world.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year my fabulous MYLE team.
Pavel Bondarev,
Founder & CEO.
by Pavel Bondarev | Dec 2, 2015 | Assistive Technology, MYLE, Speech Recognition, Technologies, Wearable Tech |
The high-tech industry has been recently developing at a staggering pace, and more and more new “smart” gadgets hit the market with every new day. November was noteworthy for two interesting announcements made by two top market players.
Both Microsoft and Google stated that by the middle of the next year they each plan to roll out their own wearable devices – the so called “hearables”: Microsoft Clip and some yet . Well, folks, welcome to the club, we’ve been expecting you!
Both devices are advanced versions of Bluetooth microphones that clip on your clothes, hook onto your smartphones and perform a set of voice commands to be executed on your Microsoft or Android smartphones. It’s too early to judge these devices’ functionality and “smartness”, however, we tend to believe they will perform their intended roles well and will be useful to their adopters.
There is a funny thing here for anyone who ever watched that old sci-fi gig, Star Trek, as the devices resemble the famous Star Trek communicator, and also because these devices were announced virtually in the 50th Anniversary of the original movie. Another no less funny coincidence is that the announcements happened four months after MYLE revealed a similar device in its own very successful IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign. Well, we all know that it is indeed a pure coincidence and events are completely unrelated, and I’m absolutely sure that this novel and innovative idea beamed upon MS and Google’s wizards many years ago, and they just waited for the right moment to reveal it…
To be honest with you, it’s really amazing news for the MYLE team because 1) announcement happened at the moment, when market for the “hearables” should start growing; and 2) current tech market is in critical need to raise an awareness for the “hearables” products.
It’s especially great for small start-ups, like MYLE, that create amazing breakthrough products, however don’t have enough resources for a proper product popularization. So, indeed, thank you very much! We’ll return our gratitude by revealing our next steps regarding the design and development of our truly innovative products, and by feeding you with cool and innovative ideas.
But seriously, we truly are grateful! Please, do not be shy and call us anytime – we’d love to help newbies 😉 All the more so that we do have a lot to share and teach.
Virtually, with zero budget MYLE team developed a truly breakthrough wearable device, that works independently without a smartphone or a computer. We developed a user-friendly and infinitely customizable application for it, that’s capable of working with various operating systems, as well as revealed a smart analytical platform that allows users to integrate the “hearable” wearable into any app or a software system that people use for personal and business purposes. Our wearable device only requires a fingertap and a voice note to start filling applications and software systems with data to automatically execute numerous daily routine operations.
Believe us, it is very, very exciting… Well, the excitement is also boosted by the trillion-dollar opportunity!
by Pavel Bondarev | Nov 20, 2015 | Assistive Technology, Healthcare Tech, MYLE, Technologies, Wearable Tech |
Have you ever experienced insomnia? Did you think of how to defeat it? There’s a wearable to help you.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you go to bed late at night and cannot fall asleep. You spin in the bed, try to count sheep or meditate, or take a magic pill, when everything else fails. In the morning you wake up with a heavy head and leaden body, exhausted before you even get out of bed, completely incapable of focusing on anything. Your thoughts are like glass beads that scatter out of a can, and come the next night, the cycle repeats.
More than 50 million people in the US only battle some sort of sleep dysfunction, and one of the biggest causes is information overload. For the past decade, the data we must process in our heads has expanded ten-fold, and the amount of information going through our minds grows every day.
This information overload causes a vicious cycle of stress: stress that is driven by a failure to start and complete a myriad of tasks of varying importance, stress caused by inability to relax, stress caused by lack of time. This cycle builds and pushes us towards a sort of psychological abyss, getting out of which gets harder with every day.
The solution seems obvious: stop the race. Relax. Capture and sort all those niggling thoughts. Pick the important ones and get them done. All to-dos would be attended to, no pesky thoughts would rush through your brain, stress would be gone and your sleep be back.
But it’s not so simple. Sorting and acting on all this incoming information is incredibly challenging, and you will be running out of post-it notes before you are even half-way through your list.
This is where we call on a tech for assistance. In particular, a miniature wearable devices that help us remember everything and even look after many routine tasks for us, like MYLE.
Miniature and elegant, MYLE is worn on your lapel or shirt collar. It’s ready to instantly capture and save any thought or command that you say, with a simple finger tap. You don’t need to take out your phone, or even have it nearby.
Just imagine – one finger tap and you never forget anything again. Also, a good portion of this data is analyzed and executed automatically, without any effort on your part.
To envision the value of a device like MYLE, take note of the stream of routine thoughts that pass through your mind: call John tomorrow at 2 pm; don’t forget to buy milk; add search system to the project; I ate an apple; my daughter spoke her first word; I had a coffee, spent $2.35 – on and on it goes…
Here’s the catch: only 10-20% of our conscious thoughts are actually urgent and important. But, the other 80% are things that must nevertheless be acted on, or remembered. What happens is that important items get pushed aside, and you are back to the familiar cycle of stress, spinning in bed and waking beaten down and red-eyed.
Now imagine that, with a swing of some magic wand, a note to call John appeared in the calendar. Milk showed up in your shopping list (with a pick-up date and specific store name). The idea for a new search system landed in Evernote or your Slack work group. Calories from that apple calculated automatically. The cost of your coffee was accounted for in your expenses file. And, your family album received an entry under your daughter’s photo, with those memorable first words… Things simply get done – automatically.
This is the main attraction of MYLE – its simplicity and smartness. You just need to tap the device and speak… that’s it! MYLE captures your thought, analyzes and executes it in some form.
When you use MYLE, you’ll start noticing that you’ve suddenly gained an hour or more of free time, every day – and yet your ‘to dos’ are done, your stress level not as bad, your mind is fresh, and your sleep is coming back.
So, you can be a part of that 50-million army of insomniacs, or you can try MYLE. To pre-order it, visit getmyle.com
by Pavel Bondarev | Oct 23, 2015 | Assistive Technology, MYLE, Technologies, Wearable Tech |
As the founder and CEO of MYLE, it’s one of the questions I get asked most frequently. Why would a guy like me who has actively been using a smartwatch for almost three years need an additional gadget?
The answer is: simplicity, convenience, and efficiency.
It’s true that smartwatches have significantly changed the technological landscape in the past few years. Thanks to guys like Eric Migikovsky, the Steve Jobs of the smartwatch field, they became ubiquitous, and won the hearts of millions of users.
In a previous post, I talked about why smartwatches are so useful: they can provide your most pertinent information and notifications — like emails, messages, weather updates — while you keep your phone in your pocket. In many cases, such brief information is enough to get updated and make decisions. But, there’s a catch: namely, how to feed your smartphone with information, and how to do it in a simple yet effective way. And this is what smartwatches cannot do.
Well, you can put information into your phone by tapping tiny buttons on some smartwatches (though you’re unlikely to have the patience to do this — I know I don’t) or using Speech-to-Text (or Voice-to-Text) recognition. The latter can significantly simplify the data input process, and many smartwatch developers have raced each other to add this new feature to their devices. But the question is how they do it.
I myself played with a few watches with these capabilities. In fact, in the early stages of MYLE’s development, I intended to use smartwatches for data input purposes rather than inventing an entirely new device. I had to give up on that idea fairly early on. Here’s why:
First off: Simplicity. If your smartwatch operates as a remote mic, you still need to go through several steps to put your voice into it — unlock the smartwatch if required, find the right button to start communication or to save an audio note (how and where — is another problem).
All these operations are the simplicity killers — wouldn’t it be easier to just take out your phone? Not to mention how strange you’ll look doing all of this. Most of the people I discussed this concept with admitted, besides the sheer inconvenience of such a process, they don’t like the idea of talking to their watches. They don’t want to look like a spy.
And, there’s another problem. A smartwatch has to be connected to your phone at all times, and we all know how often they end up reporting they’re out-of-range. Try to imagine you have a million-dollar-idea and you are trying to save it in your Evernote — “save the idea to my Evernote account — here’s how we can send people to Mars” — but there would be no connection at the moment. You’d try again and again, with the same result. Then, you get distracted, you focus on something else…and a few years later you see in the news that Elon Musk is going to send some folks to Mars, and he’s got a few billion bucks to do it.
“But it was my idea!” you say. “I wish I’d recorded it at the time!” This is why we made MYLE operate independently, and collect everything into its memory, with further automatic connection to a smartphone and the cloud, to transmit the data, convert it to text, analyze, categorize, and fulfill. Nothing will be lost or forgotten.
Speaking of Evernote… Have you ever thought of how many apps you use? Have you dreamed about a magic tool to instantly put your information in there? Have you ever used smartwatches for that purpose? I did. It went poorly.
Most applications provided by smartwatch makers are focused on a few general things, and aren’t flexible enough to be customized for personal needs. Undoubtedly, Sky Guide or Hole19 are cool apps; people have fun playing with them. But, what if I need to do something more specific, like sharing my idea with my team via Slack, logging my work hours into a timesheet system, adding items to my grocery list, or counting the calories I consumed? With a smartwatch, I run up against limitations.
I always dreamed of making a personalized tool that would serve as a real personal assistant — a Mrs. or Mr. Johnson who appears invisibly behind my shoulder with a notebook and a pen in hand, and who writes down all my thoughts, ideas, and commands, and executes them immediately. I just need to speak out my mind, and that’s it. My assistant knows my habits and my behaviour, and anticipates my needs to meet them at precisely the right time. MYLE was born out of these dreams…
MYLE’s biggest advantage is in its analytics; it’s able to model your behavioral patterns and vocabulary, instantly improve your speech recognition quality, and align with your particular manner of speaking and accent. Those who, like me, speak English with an accent can understand me well, and know that the , “Eleven,” is only partially a joke. One of MYLE’s goals is to make your speech understandable, recognizable, and actionable, regardless of who you are and how you speak. No smartwatch can even come close.
And finally, there’s cost. The average Android-based smartwatch is priced around $350. The Apple Watch will cost you twice that. MYLE comes in at a tenth of that price — $99 on pre-order (and you can also get $20 off if you use a magic word – GETMYLE ).
So, if care about your time and money, and want to use them more effectively, you need MYLE.
If you have hundreds of thoughts and ideas in your mind and want to remember all of them (as well as to get results from them), you need MYLE. If you’re running a company with dozens if not thousands of employees, and want to give them a simple, effective tool for timesheet reporting, communication, project management, and other related tasks, you need MYLE.
Actually, I can hardly imagine a crowd of field technicians with Apple Watches, who deliver their services and talk to their wrists: “I’ve just finished a door installation. Roger that.” Can you?
With MYLE, it’s a different story — a tiny, simple and affordable device on a technician’s collar or pocket that can operate without any smartphone, and collect all of his or her notes and commands with a single finger tap. For instance, “I started a door installation,” “I’m driving” or, “I need to buy milk and eggs.”
The notes are automatically processed, deployed between the tech’s applications (both business and personal), and fulfilled. Some will go to the company’s timesheet or corporate communication system; others to a grocery shopping list. Oh, and in addition to audio and text, MYLE will provide you with a GPS location and time stamp for each recorded note.
So, comparing MYLE and smartwatches we can see clearly that they have been designed for very different purposes. Smartwatches are information outputs, whereas MYLE is a crucial information input that collects thoughts and commands from you, processes them, and executes.
My Pebble saves me 20 minutes a day by providing updates and notifications and letting my smartphone stay in the pocket; MYLE saves me an additional hour per day by keeping my phone in the same place and feeding it information. This is why I need them both. They’re not competitors — they supplement each other.
So, really, question should be, “Why don’t I use MYLE if I have a smartwatch?” To see for yourself, pre-order a MYLE.
Stay tuned,
Pavel
