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Today’s topics include a new smartwatch offer from Apple for developers, an estimate of the potential size of the U.S smartwatch market, the announcement of a new Office 365 Management Activity API from Microsoft and an update for WordPress site administrators.
Apple so badly wants iOS developers to envision, create and offer new apps for its upcoming Apple Watch that the company is making special offers to some developers via email so they can buy one of the sold-out devices quickly and receive it by April 28 to begin development work.
The special purchase offers, which will allow selected developers to buy a 42mm Apple Watch Sport with a blue sport band, apparently began going out to developers on April 21. The chance to buy one of the watches is being offered by random selection, according to Apple, and quantities are limited.
Smartwatch ownership in America is forecast to reach 9 percent of the adult population by 2016, closing in on the number of activity trackers, according to IT research specialist NPD Group’s Connected Intelligence Wearables report.
The survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 and older predicts that by the end of 2016 activity-tracker ownership will have peaked at 32 million after growing significantly for four years.
At the RSA Conference in San Francisco, April 21, Microsoft announced, several new offerings aimed at providing its customers with greater transparency and control over the data they entrust to the tech giant’s cloud platform.
The company announced the Office 365 Management Activity API, which Microsoft’s customers and partners can use to monitor more than 150 security, compliance and operational signals, with more to come.
Tens of millions of self-hosted WordPress site administrators have received an email since April 20 advising them that their blog site has been automatically updated to version 4.1.2.
The reason for the update is to fix a number of security issues, although administrators who only read the WordPress email notice might not be aware of exactly what was updated.
The automated update mechanism for bug fixes and critical security updates has been in place since the WordPress 3.7 release in October 2013.
WordPress has provided multiple incremental updates for its users ever since, automatically protecting them from core WordPress bugs and security issues.