Daily Tech Briefing: June 10, 2014

Just four days after Apple’s introduction of iOS 8 and its Health and Healthkit applications, the Nikkei reported that the company will introduce a watch-like wearable device this fall capable of recording user’s biometric information.

Apple will be partnering with Nike to create a device that will be able to collect health data such as calorie consumption and sleep activity, among others. While Apple has only hinted at these plans, however, rival Samsung has already made headway in the health and wearable device space, launching a Digital Health Initiative in San Diego on May 28 to introduce Simband and SAMI.

Simband is an open hardware reference design to help developers create new apps and services for wearable devices, while SAMI is an open software platform created in partnership with the bio-sensing research institute iMec, designed to help users better understand the health information collected by their wearables.

Cisco Systems, in an effort to bring together its third-party channel partners with mobile network operators seeking new services for enterprises, is introducing a new program called Small Cell Enterprise Select. The program is designed to facilitate bringing small cell technology to enterprises by partners and mobile service providers.

Small cells are believed to help businesses handle the challenges of expanding mobile connectivity in enterprises and for an increasingly growing mobile workforce by speeding up the network and improving its capacity.

Users can now enjoy the new and improved features of the latest open source Linux kernel, Linux 3.15. Improved suspend and resume performance is among the enhanced capabilities, an improvement especially useful for laptop users running Linux.

With the new update, laptop users will now be able to close their devices and open them up again later without losing any information or holding up the rest of the system. For reasons relating to his personal schedule, Linux creator Linus Torvalds opened the merge window for Linux 3.16 on June 1, before the official release on June 9.

Docker, the highly talked about virtualization technology, has finally reached the 1.0 milestone, marking the first stable release that will be commercially supported with various options provided by the company, according to Docker CEO Ben Golub.

With the support of both Red Hat and Amazon, Docker plans to expand the user base following this release by providing training, deployment and commercial support services.

Different from the traditional hypervisor virtual machine model used by VMWare’s ESX and Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Docker provides a model promising a light-weight, optimized approach for virtual application delivery at scale, something very attractive to customers.