Tag Heuer and tech firms unveil $1,500 smartwatch

Apple starts selling iPad Pro

ZURICH, Nov 10, (Agencies): LVMH’s Tag Heuer became on Monday the first Swiss watchmaker to offer a “smartwatch” to customers that combines Swiss design with US technology, seeking to tap a growing market for wearable devices amid flagging sales of traditional watches.

Co-developed with Google and Intel, the “Tag Heuer Connected” will cost $1,500. One thousand units are immediately available in 15 stores across the United States, with Britain, Germany, and Japan following in the coming days.

Tag Heuer Connected on sale in the US starting Monday is seen as a rival to the Apple Watch, which launched earlier this year starting at $349, with some versions at more than $10,000.

With its titanium casing, black rubber strap and digital watch hands, it is designed to look like a classical watch. But Connected houses an Intel Atom processor beneath its touchscreen that lets wearers connect to the internet, stream music and run applications via Google’s Android Wear platform, from existing favourites such as Google Fit and Google Maps to customised lifestyle and sports apps designed for the watch.

Customers can also swap their smartwatch for a mechanical watch at the end of the two-year warranty period if they pay another $1,500, encouraging what the traditional industry hopes will be a trend among young smartwatch wearers to buy “real” timepieces as they mature.

Customers “We are going after new customers ... once they have bought a connected watch, they are ready to buy another watch one day,” Tag Heuer Chief Executive Jean-Claude Biver told Reuters, adding the similar looks of the new connected watch and other Tag Heuer models would make the transition easier.

Asked about potential sales of the new product, he said: “I don’t really know ... I only have the gut feeling that we’re just at the beginning, and that the first (connected) watches are like the first phones we had twenty years ago.”

Makers of traditional Swiss watches have largely stayed on the sidelines of the emerging smartwatch market headed by the Apple Watch launched this year, with models ranging from $350 to $17,000 for an 18karat gold model.

But the industry needs a boost. Swiss watch exports posted the biggest drop since 2009 in the third quarter, with a 14.5 percent slip in the 200-500 franc category fuelling concerns the Apple Watch might be taking market share.

Bank Vontobel analysts in October forecast low to mid-market watches would be affected by sales of smartwatches and other wearable devices, and 30-50 percent of quartz watches would include some smartwatch features in the long term.

Switzerland’s biggest watchmaker, Swatch Group, has some connected products at its Swatch and Tissot brands, but has rejected making a “telephone” or “computer for the wrist,” as Chief Executive Nick Hayek told a paper in August.

Swatch has also eschewed big tech partnerships, which Biver said were needed to launch a smartwatch such as Connected.

“If you want to offer a smartwatch as sophisticated and complete as the Apple Watch, that is practically impossible for a Swiss company alone,” Biver said. “We cannot develop microprocessors to that level.”

TAG Heuer, the Swiss watchmaker that is part of the French luxury goods group LVMH, showed off its first Internet-connected wristwatch Monday designed with Google and Intel.

Also: LOS ANGELES: Apple is getting ready to sell its new iPad Pro this week: The 12.9-inch iPad will become available to order through the company’s website this Wednesday, and arrive in stores “later this week,” according to a press release.

Accessories like the iPad Pro keyboard and the device’s stylus, which Apple is calling “Pencil,” will become available at the same time. Apple will release the new device simultaneously in 40 countries, including the US, Canada, the UK and China. In the US the iPad Pro will start selling for $799.

Apple officially introduced the oversized iPad in early September. The company is positioning the device as a productivity tool capable of replacing full-sized desktop computers, pegging it directly against Microsoft’s Surface tablets.

That strategy is in part due to the fact that consumers have been buying fewer tablets for home and casual use, and are instead opting to purchase phones with bigger screens. Apple’s fiscal Q4 of 2015, which ended in September, was the first quarter during which the company sold less than 10 million iPads since 2011.

SAN FRANCISCO: Snapchat on Monday confirmed that six billion vanishing videos are viewed daily at the service in a three-fold surge from early this year.

The highly-valued startup declined to comment on what it thought was powering the rapid growth.

“It is a huge number for them,” analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group said of the Snapchat video viewing number.

“But, you have to be concerned about the nature of the videos; and if they are illicit in nature, a huge number could go away.”

The analyst considered it challenging to make money from videos that vanish after being sent from one person to another, instead of lingering for arrays of people to watch the way they do at online venues such as YouTube or Facebook.

Facebook revealed during a quarterly earnings call last week that more than eight billion videos are viewed daily at the leading social network, jumping to a level twice as high as it was early this year.

Videos are considered viewed at Snapchat after being displayed for fractions of seconds, while its takes several seconds to achieve that status at Facebook and approximately halfa-minute at YouTube.

Snapchat’s appeal has been the promise that messages shared disappear shortly after being viewed, providing users a sense of being able to keep pictures or videos private and ephemeral.

Last month, Snapchat introduced a “replay” feature for those disappearing messages, giving users an option to get another look at three “snaps” for a fee of 99 cents.

The feature was the first by the Los Angeles-based social network to get revenue from its user base in addition to advertising messages.

In May, the company said it raised $537 million in a new round of equity funding.

The vanishing-message service did not disclose who bought stakes in the Los Angeles-based company, which came at a price estimated to give Snapchat a value of more than $15 billion, according to media reports.

Snapchat rejected a $3 billion takeover offer from Facebook in 2013.

Snapchat rocketed to popularity in the United States, especially among teenagers, after the initial app was released in September 2011.

The smartphone app has since added features, such as letting users in the United States send money to friends by simply typing dollar amounts into new “Snapcash” messages.

The feature came from a collaboration between Snapchat and Square, a mobile payments company headed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

Snapchat also added a “Stories” feature that strings together a series of “snaps” to create a narrative that is available for repeated viewing by recipients for 24 hours.