Salesforce.com has announced Salesforce Wear, its new developer platform dedicated at wearable devices, including the much fawned upon Google Glass, Samsung Gear, Nymi and Pebble smartwatch amongst others. The global leader in CRM technologies is believed to be looking at staying competitive in mobility technologies, more importantly the wearable technologies. The Salesforce Wear is an application development platform for creating apps dedicated at six wearable service types at the moment. The cutting-edge platform comes equipped with open-source code, reference apps, demos and other things that are required in the development of mobile applications for wearable devices.
Explaining the premise of developing apps for wearable devices is difficult, according to Daniel Debow, the Senior Vice President (VP), emerging technologies, Salesforce.com, who in a report by the Informationweek said, “they all have different form factors, different screens, and different processing power. Some require a connection with a smartphone, some don’t.” With the newly revealed Salesforce Wear platform, “we want to take care of some of the plumbing and make it easier for developers to design, build, and deploy secure business apps and connect wearable devices to the Salesforce.com platform. We give people starter code that they can modify and use for themselves.”
ZDNet reports that Salesforce Wear caters to two of the most widely appreciated and recently introduced wearable devices, such as Google Glass and Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch. This app development platform also services the pioneer smart device, Pebble smartwatch, the Bionym Nymi wristband, devices designed for the Google Android Wear and the Myo gesture controlled armband created by Thalmic Labs. It has been reported that ARM, the global player in semiconductor expert and software design, has joined the Salesforce Wear team as partner firm. ARM’s partnership with Salesforce indicates that they are indeed intrigued with the potential and the compelling promising future of wearable devices.
At the heart of Salesforce Wear lies in what can be referred as a collection of many open-source reference apps, the Salesforce Wear Developer Pack. It must be noted that apps developed using the Salesforce Wear Developer Pack can connect to the company’s standalone mobile application platform – the Salesforce1. The apps available in the bundle have many examples of how the company created applications for Google Glass, Android Wear, Samsung Gear, Myo, Nymi and Pebble wearable devices. The idea is to share the company’s open-source app development documentation with the developers, such that they can use to create their own applications and learn during the process.
Wearable devices are being considered as the next big thing in the gadgets & gizmos market, which is why more and more businesses are looking at wearables as a medium to engage with their target consumers. As per an industry research conducted by IHS, as many as 50 million wearable devices are expected to be sold this year, while that figure is expected to touch almost 180 million within the next four years. At present, Salesforce Wear is available with all user licenses of Salesforce CRM and the Salesforce Platform.