Although it’s a seemingly new name for us, WIMM Labs is a former company that was acquired by Google a year ago. Why is it coming to light just now? Well no one really knew who purchased the company — most rumours suggested they’d been snapped up by Apple to lead their drive into the wearables market.
But thanks to GigaOM yesterday, it has finally been confirmed that it was in fact Google who purchased the company.
WIMM Labs built an Android-powered ecosystem for smartwatches which included a range of apps that would work on the small device. They also made their own smartwatch to show that their ecosystem was, in fact, usable. Clearly Google saw the promise in their product and decided to have have them work on Google’s own smartwatch, perhaps.
Now that it has been a year since their acquisition, it can’t be too long before the work the WIMM Labs team have done. It’s likely that we’ll see a platform for Android smartwatches launched by Google, with the company making a ‘Nexus-like’ smartwatch every X amount of years — smartwatches surely can’t be a yearly buy.
You can still view the beta app store that WIMM Labs created for their smartwatch — so this may be a look into what in store at Google.
Either way, we’re happy to see Google are working on an Android-based platform for smartwatches. We’re just hoping it has tighter restrictions and higher standards for both software and hardware than they have for smartphones and tablets.
Stop! GoogleTime.
YouTube can’t touch this!
I’d bet the acquired tech is going two ways: Some into glass, some into an Android watch framework.
Don’t expect a nexus watch (it would compete too much with Glass), but Google would need to make sure vendors making smart watches (eg Samsung) are using android instead of rolling their own.