Apple Watch at Colette
Apple has picked up a few new hires and advisors to assist its growing Watch team ahead of the Apple Watch launch currently on track for March. Among them, Apple has recently hired another executive from the fashion industry, this time from Louis Vuitton, in addition to two new hires from the medical industry.
Jacob Jordan, previously based in Paris as Louis Vuitton’s director of the company’s men’s ready to wear collection, joined Apple in October and since confirmed the move on his LinkedIn page. Jordan now serves as Director of Product Merchandising on Apple’s Special Projects team in Cupertino, likely working alongside other fashion executives Apple has hired to assist in preparing for the upcoming Apple Watch launch. Prior to the two and a half years spent at Louis Vuitton, Jordan held various fashion executive roles stateside at Theory, Thom Browne, and Helmut Lang. Jordan is yet another fashion executive hire for Apple as its new retail chief Angela Ahrendts, formerly of Burberry, and the company’s Apple Watch team recruit team members for the launch of its first product crossing into the fashion world.
Another notable recent hire for Apple is Dr. Stephen H. Friend, co-founder and president of Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit doing biomedical research and developing an open-source platform for sharing and analyzing data. The non-profit’s work includes a platform dubbed Synapse that the company describes as “a collaborative set of technical services that allow scientists to access, share and analyze data together, in a visible and traceable way.” It also has BRIDGE for allowing patients to share data with researchers through a web-based open source platform.
The Synapse platform is composed of a set of shared web services that support a website designed to facilitate collaboration among scientific teams, and integrations with analysis tools and programming environments…Synapse goes beyond being a data repository and creates a computational platform for real-time research collaboration. We have begun to see evidence that a shared environment can help scientific teams find and correct analysis errors more quickly, get more diverse teams working on complex problems, and integrate disparate data to answer scientific questions
Sources say Friend is advising Apple on medical technology.
Also now advising Apple on medical related technology is Dan Riskin, MD, founder and CEO of Vanguard Medical Technologies and an Consulting Associate Professor of Surgery at Stanford University, according to sources in the medical industry. Vanguard describes itself as “a medical technology incubation firm” with several products and spin-off companies already in the healthcare industry, although there aren’t many details on specific companies it has invested in. It is likely that Apple’s latest medical hires are working alongside Apple’s growing team of medical and fitness experts, many of which are working on projects related to Apple Watch and its upcoming launch. Riskin declined to comment for this article.
Earlier this week we reported the first solid launch date for the Apple Watch as retail training is set to get underway in mid-February signaling a likely March release for the product.
Apple’s new hires add to a long list of medical and fitness experts hired in the time leading up to the Apple Watch announcement last fall and its launch later this year. On the retail and marketing side of things for the Watch, Apple has also added a number of hires from the fashion industry under its new retail chief, former Burberry exec Angela Ahrendts.
Mark Gurman contributed to this report.
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Apple is clearly taking its biometric functions for the watch and iOS generally. I do not get any sense that any other party out there announcing “smart watches” is doing anything remotely like this. Almost makes them come across as “toy” like features.
Does anyone know if this thing will be able to receive notifications over wifi when not paired to an iPhone? Sounds like it has a Broadcom wifi chip but may only be used to transfer data to and from your iPhone.
For me to buy, I’d want it to be somewhat standalone over a wifi network. I’ll stick with my Pebble if it’s just a notification relay’er.
It won’t the WiFi is for BT High Speed.
somehow i do not believe the “biometric” functions will be for the apple watch 1.0.
They are coming, as we saw with the original Watch demo.
Apple Watch 1.0 uses heartbeat recognition for Apple Pay instead of a fingerprint.
No, that’s not exactly how it works. The heart rate sensor, will detect the presence of a heart beat and through software will be able to determine when the watch is removed from the wrist. Once applied again Apple Pay will require you to input credentials to verify that you’re the user of that particular watch so that you can purchase things using the NFC in the watch. Right now it’s not exactly clear what will be required.
The sensor is merely being used as security in instances that your watch may be lost/stolen.
I think it’s great to see Apple really trying to make a genuine health focused device beyond the gimmicky heart rate monitor that every smartwatch has, and oddly some phones, and most are pretty crap. It’ll make for a lifestyle add on that can truly be of use for health improvement, this seems to be the plan with such dedicated hires. I don’t think we’ve seen all that Apple Watch can do health-wise yet either from the initial teaser. Reflectance pulse oximetry is a real possibility which would make for a pretty well rounded fitness device :-)
How soon is Apple hoping to release the first version of biometric watch?
“Apple’s growing team of medical and fitness experts, many of which are working on projects ”
Oh come ON! I believe these experts are humans. Should be “many of WHOM are working on…”