Author: azeeadmin

Back when Dennis Woodside joined Dropbox as its chief operating officer more than four years ago, the company was trying to justify the $10 billion valuation it had hit in its rapid rise as a Web 2.0 darling. Now, Dropbox is a public company with a nearly $14 billion valuation, and it once again showed Wall Street that it’s able to beat expectations with a now more robust enterprise business alongside its consumer roots.

Dropbox’s second quarter results came in ahead of Wall Street’s expectations on both the earnings and revenue front. The company also announced that Dennis Woodside, who has been the chief operating officer for more than four years, will be leaving the company. Woodside joined at a time at Dropbox when it was starting to figure out its enterprise business, which it was able to grow and transform into a strong case for Wall Street that it could finally be a successful publicly-traded company. The IPO was indeed successful, with the company’s shares soaring more than 40% in its debut, so it makes sense that Woodside has essentially accomplished his job by getting it into a business ready for Wall Street.

The stock exploded in extended trading by rising more than 7%, though even prior to the market close and the company reporting its earnings, the stock had risen as much as 10%. Following that spike, things have leveled off a bit, with it up around 2%. Dropbox is one of a number of SaaS companies that have gone public in recent months, including DocuSign, that have seen considerable success. While Dropbox has managed to make its case with a strong enterprise business, the company was born with consumer roots and has tried to carry over that simplicity with the enterprise products it rolls out, like its collaboration tool Dropbox Paper.

Here’s a quick rundown of the numbers:

• Q2 Revenue: Up 27% year-over-year to $339.2 million, compared to estimates of $331 million in revenue
• Q2 GAAP Gross Margin: 73.6%, as compared to 65.4% in the same period last year
• Q2 adjusted earnings: 11 cents per share compared, compared to estimates of 7 cents per share
• Paid users: 11.9 million paying users, up from 9.9 million in the same quarter last year
• ARPU: $116.66, compared to $111.19 same quarter last year

So, not only is Dropbox able to show that it can continue to grow that revenue, the actual value of its users is also going up. That’s important, because Dropbox has to show that it can continue to acquire higher-value customers — meaning it’s gradually moving up the Fortune 100 chain and getting larger and more established companies on board that can offer it bigger and bigger contracts. It also gives it the room to make larger strategic moves, like migrating onto its own architecture late last year, which in the long run could turn out to drastically improve the margins on its business.

The company is still looking to make significant moves in the form of new hires, including recently announcing that it has a new VP of product and VP of product marketing, Adam Nash and Naman Khan. Dropbox’s new team under CEO Drew Houston are tasked with continuing the company’s path to cracking into larger enterprises, which can give it a much more predictable and robust business alongside the average consumers that pay to host their files online and access them from pretty much anywhere.

Dropbox had its first quarterly earnings check-in and slid past the expectations that Wall Street had, though its GAAP gross margin slipped a little bit and may have offered a slight negative signal for the company. But since then, Dropbox’s stock hasn’t had any major missteps, giving it more credibility on the public markets — and more resources to attract and retain talent with compensation packages linked to that stock.

As a relentless swarm of successful cyber attacks severely disrupt companies in every industry and require enormous expenditures to repair the damage, what typically gets lost in the shuffle is that some industries are victimized more than others — sometimes far more. The corporate victim that almost always grabs this dubious spotlight is the healthcare industry — the second-largest industry in the U.S. and one in which hacker meddling of operations not only costs lots of time, money and operational downtime, but threatens lives.

The healthcare industry itself is partly responsible. In a seemingly admirable quest to maximize the quality of patient care, tunnel vision gives short shrift to other priorities, specifically cybersecurity.

In aggregate, healthcare organizations on average spend only half as much on cybersecurity as other industries. For this and other reasons, such as the unusually high value of stolen patient records on the black market, attracting extra-large flocks of hackers, hospitals especially find themselves in a never-ending cyber war zone. FortiGuard Labs, a major security protection firm, reports that in 2017, healthcare saw an average of almost 32,000 intrusion attacks per day per organization as compared to more than 14,300 per organization in other industries.

Some attacks are outright deadly. For example, MedStar Health, a huge, Maryland-based healthcare system, was severely incapacitated by a ransomware attack that made national headlines when, among other things, it threatened lives. Compromised by a well-known security vulnerability, MedStar Health was not only forced to shut down its email and vast records database, but was unable to provide radiation treatment to cancer patients for days.

Such trouble typically starts when a doctor or other healthcare worker is persuaded to open an email sent by an attacker and click a link or attachment that downloads malware to his computer, a so-called “phishing” attack. The attacker can then use this software to gain access to the healthcare organization’s financial, administrative and clinical information systems.

Attackers also can use the health network to spread into connected medical devices and equipment, such as ventilators, X-ray and MRI machines, medical lasers and even electric wheelchairs.

Any medical device connected to a network is potentially at risk from being taken over and exploited by hackers.

Compounding the threat are prevalent and vulnerable Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices, which integrate components and software from dozens of suppliers with minimal concern for security. Even individual patients can be targeted. A few years ago, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctors disabled his pacemaker’s capabilities because there were concerns about reports that attackers could hack such devices and kill the patient.

It’s a dire situation that must be addressed. Hospitals and other healthcare providers must practice better cybersecurity hygiene. For starters, healthcare organizations must improve the speed and thoroughness of software patching and update processes. As much as possible, organizations also need to use threat intelligence and automation, as well as institute cyber-awareness training programs to protect against social media attacks and other attack vectors.

As IoMT devices proliferate, more elaborate network segmentation and inspection is required. A segmented strategy enables organizations to institute checks and policies at various points of the network to control users, applications and data flow and to more quickly identify and isolate security threats. And on the network visibility front, healthcare organizations need more insight throughout the network, including the cloud.

Hospitals and other healthcare organizations must do a better job of protecting patient’s records, as well.  Since the transformation from paper records to digitized Electronic Health Records (EHRs), records are commonly updated and then sent by doctors to specialists in other hospitals. The problem is that hospitals are not banks, where financial information is locked up and not shared. This unencrypted information is vulnerable to profit-hungry hacker attacks.

A solution to this is likely to be homomorphic encryption, an impressive technology that allows for the encryption of data-in-use and that has tremendous potential to lock down the most valuable medical information. Specifically, this technology can secure and protect sensitive medical records and personally identifiable information (PII), often the target of cyber thieves.

Notwithstanding the fact that data-rich healthcare records are worth more than 10 times a credit card on the black market, this would shut down the most aggressive “data-focused” hackers.

These improvements will not occur without substantial monetary investment and effort. It’s commendable that hospitals focus overwhelmingly on day-to-day quality of care, but times change, and they must look at their mission with a broader perspective. Because they fail to do so, hospitals typically pay up in almost non-stop ransomware attacks, minimizing the possibility of additional health threats while systems are down.

Among the obstacles that hospitals face in pursuing the path toward change is intensifying merger and acquisition activity in the healthcare sector. IT integration challenges, including different medical technologies, create additional vulnerabilities, as does the need to share information between newly merged organizations.

The reputation of and trust in healthcare organizations depends on their understanding of the true extent of threats and taking sufficient measures to guard against them. The healthcare industry has no choice but to improve its capabilities regarding security. Nothing short of our lives are at stake.

One of the early backers of Musical.ly, the short video app that was acquired for $1 billion, is making a major bet that internet radio is one of the next big trends in media.

Goodwater Capital, one of a number of backers that won big when ByteDance acquired Musical.ly last year, has joined forces with Korean duo Softbank Ventures and KB Investment to invest $17 million into Korea’s Spoon Radio. The deal is a Series B for parent company Mykoon, which operates Spoon Radio and previously developed an unsuccessful smartphone battery sharing service.

That’s much like Musical.ly, which famously pivoted to a karaoke app after failing to build an education service.

“We decided to create a service, now known as Spoon Radio, that was inspired by what gave us hope when [previous venture] ‘Plugger’ failed to take off. We wanted to create a service that allowed people to truly connect and share their thoughts with others on everyday, real-life issues like the ups and downs of personal relationships, money, and work.

“Unlike Facebook and Instagram where people pretend to have perfect lives, we wanted to create an accessible space for people to find and interact with influencers that they could relate with on a real and personal level through an audio and pseudo-anonymous format,” Mykoon CEO Neil Choi told TechCrunch via email.

Choi started the company in 2013 with fellow co-founders Choi Hyuk jun and Hee-jae Lee, and today Spoon Radio operates much like an internet radio station.

Users can tune in to talk show or music DJs, and leave comments and make requests in real-time. The service also allows users to broadcast themselves and, like live-streaming, broadcasters — or DJs, as they are called — can monetize by receiving stickers and other virtual gifts from their audience.

Spoon Radio claims 2.5 million downloads and “tens of millions” of audio broadcasts uploaded each day. Most of that userbase is in Korea, but the company said it is seeing growth in markets like Japan, Indonesia and Vietnam. In response to that growth — which Choi said is over 1,000 percent year-on-year — this funding will be used to invest in expanding the service in Southeast Asia, the rest of Asia and beyond.

Audio social media isn’t a new concept.

Singapore’s Bubble Motion raised close to $40 million from investors but it was sold in an underwhelming and undisclosed deal in 2014. Reportedly that was after the firm had failed to find a buyer and been ready to liquidate its assets. Altruist, the India-based mobile services company that bought Bubble Motion has done little to the service. Most changes have been bug fixes and the iOS app, for example, has not been updated for nearly a year.

Things have changed in the last four years, with smartphone growth surging across Asia and worldwide. That could mean different fortunes but there are also differences between the two in terms of strategy.

Bubbly was run like a social network — a ‘Twitter for voice’ — whereas Spoon Radio is focused on a consumption-based model that, as the name suggests, mirrors traditional radio.

“This is mobile consumer internet at its best,” Eric Kim, one of Goodwater Capital’s two founding partners, told TechCrunch in an interview. “Spoon Radio is taking an offline experience that exists in classic radio and making it even better.”

Kim admitted that when he first used the service he didn’t see the appeal — he claimed the same was true for Musical.ly — but he said he changed his tune after talking to listeners and using Spoon Radio. He said it reminded him of being a kid growing up in the U.S. and listening to radio shows avidly.

“It’s a really interesting phenomenon taking off in Asia because of smartphone growth and people being keen for content, but not always able to get video content. It was a net new behavior that we’d never seen before… Musical.ly was in the same bracket as net new content for the new generation, we’ve been paying attention to this category broadly,” Kim — whose firm’s other Korean investments include chat app giant Kakao and fintech startup Toss — explained.

While automakers and startups continue to hone the technology for self-driving cars for individuals, a second track of development in the area of autonomous buses is also taking shape. Today, Navya, a French company that has been a leader in developing autonomous shuttles, announced that it has raised an additional €30 million ($34 million) from the European Investment Bank to continue building out its business.

The investment comes on the heels of another significant financial event in the life of the company. On July 24, Navya (first founded in 2014) went public on the Euronext exchange in Paris and raised €38 million ($44 million). It’s had a somewhat lacklustre early performance: the company’s market cap is currently at €188.8 million, compared to a debut at €190 million.

The company has in total raised €80 million this year, it said. “Navya thus has extensive resources to strengthen its technological leadership, to expand its sales and marketing teams and to invest in strategic adjacent markets, while pursuing further international expansion,” the company said of the financing round.

The EIB has backed a number of other fast-moving startups in Europe, including the payments startup iZettle, which later got acquired by PayPal. Its funding for Navya will come in two tranches of €15 million, with the second dependent on the company meeting (unspecified) targets.

The opportunities (and challenges) in fully autonomous cars are vast, and we are still likely many years away from seeing a full-scale roll of them anytime soon, as carmakers and their partners continue to work on safer and more accurate AI systems to run them on the seemingly endless number of permutations of roads, routes and driving scenarios; and that is before you consider the best usage models to underpin these businesses.

Autonomous shuttles, on the other hand, have had some interesting progress that points to their services coming to a stop near you, possibly sooner than you think. One of the reasons for this is that a lot of the deployments are focused on specific loops, often in closed environments where movement might be more easily predicted.

In May, it was reported that Apple had signed a deal with Volkswagen on a fleet of autonomous staff shuttles (and that it might also be partnering, with Mercedes-Benz and BMW, on self-driving cars). Daimler and Bosch are working on a self-driving shuttle service for San Francisco. There is now an autonomous shuttle in Times Square in New York (courtesy of Coast).

Navya itself has been involved in a year-long trial in Las Vegas, offering rides to passengers in a half-mile loop around the center of the city, along with a number of projects in its home market, using a version of its flagship Autonom shuttle. It says that 100 of these shuttles have been produced to date, with 89 of them already sold across 17 countries, including the US, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Australia. It’s also now developing a smaller version called the Autonom Cab that will begin tests shortly.

This is on top of earlier efforts from IBM, which has a Watson-powered shuttle built with Local Motors called Olli, and Yandex, the Russian search giant that has repositioned itself as a mobile and machine learning company, is also building a shuttle bus.

Open worlds have been a staple of gaming for a long time, but recent titles like Breath of the Wild and Horizon: Zero Dawn have significantly pushed the boundaries of what players expect from their environments. Rockstar, of Grand Theft Auto fame, is looking to make them all look like toys with Red Dead Redemption 2 and its wild west frontier that looks to be not just huge, but refreshingly real.

Rockstar is certainly best known for the immensely popular GTA series; but it’s arguable its most beloved game is actually 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, which, though a sequel, so spectacularly transplanted the run-and-gun outlaw freedom of GTA to the American West that gamers have been clamoring for a sequel for years.

RDR2 was teased back in late 2016, but only recently have we seen hints of what it will actually look like. And today brings the first of a series of videos from the developer detailing the world, character and gameplay systems.

The natural beauty of the frontier is, of course, simply amazing to see rendered in such fidelity, and Rockstar’s artists are to be commended. And it is realism that seems to be defining the project as a whole — which makes it a departure from other games whose creators bruit a living, breathing open world to explore.

Take Far Cry 5, which came out last year to mixed reviews: The natural landscape of fictional Hope County in Montana was roundly agreed to be breathtaking, but the gameplay and story were criticized as artificially and (strange juxtaposition) monotonously intense. It’s clear that Far Cry 5, like other Ubisoft games, was a sandbox in which interesting but unrealistic situations were bred by the developers — a helicopter crashing on the person you’re rescuing from bandits, and then a cougar mauling the pilot.

Horizon: Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild were both praised for the depth and extent of their worlds and gameplay, but they both had the significant advantage of being fantasies. A mechanical dinosaur or ancient killing machine (same thing?) arrests the eye and imagination, but because one can’t really compare them to reality, they can stay definitively unrealistic. Creating a compelling sci-fi or fantasy world has its own significant challenges, but on the whole it’s considerably easier than creating a convincing replica of the real world.

RDR2 seems to be attempting real realism in its game, to the extent that it’s possible. Take for example the fact that your items and cargo actually take up space on your horse. Your horse isn’t 20 more grid spaces of inventory — you can tie a deer you hunted on top, but then it can’t run. There are loops for two long guns but not three, and you can’t carry an arsenal yourself.

The flora and fauna are real frontier flora and fauna; they’ll react realistically. Encounters can be approached in multiple ways, peaceful or violent. Your fabulous hide coat gets dirty when you fall in the mud. You get new things to do by getting to know people in your gang.

Many of these have been seen before in various games, but what Rockstar is going for appears — and for now only appears — to be taking them to a new level. It will of course have the expected cartoonish violence and occasionally eye-roll-worthy dialogue of any game, but the attempt to realistically, and at this level of fidelity, represent such a major and well-known portion of history is an undertaking of gargantuan proportions.

Will the game be as good as the amount of work that has clearly been put into it? We’ll find out later this year when it comes out.

Today’s big Note 9 event was all about internals, but the company also had a few camera tricks up its sleeve. Scene Optimizer should prove familiar to Android users, as a number of companies, including, notably, LG have offered something similar. The software addition includes 20 different scene options, including Night, Snow, Street Scene, Birds, Indoors, Text, Food, Pets, Flowers and Sunset.

It’s a diverse and interesting bunch, and should go a ways toward helping amateurs take decent photos with Samsung’s industry leading cameras. But Flaw Detection is an interesting and unsung addition here. The feature alerts the user if a shot is blurry, there’s a smudge on the screen, the image is overly backlit or if the subject blinked at the precise wrong moment.

As Samsung put it, the new phone “does everything but take the picture for you,” and with Flaw Detection, the system takes a step closer to eliminating the weaestk link: humor error. I.E., you, dear user. Blinks and the like are easy enough to overlook, and amateur users might not be entirely aware of what excessive backlighting can do to an image (i.e. completely ruin it).

It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish phone imaging based on hardware alone. The camera you get on any 2018 flagship is going to be pretty damn good at this point. These new software features, on the other hand, go a ways toward making sure you’re able to take advantage of that sophistication, regardless of skill level. 

Lyvly, a London-based startup that offers what might best be described as a members-based shared living and rental service, has raised $4.6 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Mosaic Ventures, while Greg Marsh, who co-founded Onefinestay, has joined the burgeoning company as Chairman and investor.

The latest take on how to improve the experience for ‘generation rent’ in sprawling cities like London, Lyvly is at its most basic a two-sided marketplace that helps renters find high quality shared living accommodation and landlords find good tenants. However, it goes far beyond simply matching supply and demand for house shares.

Not only are properties fully managed — including providing tenant services such as managing household bills, replacing consumables and cleaning — but at the heart of it all is the Lyvly community platform, which treats Lyvly renters as members within a network of “like-minded individuals who share a passion for shared living”. And, as wishy-washy as that sounds, there is no doubt that city living is often devoid of community, and in London especially it can be difficult to meet new people.

“Renting is often not a pleasant experience, and living in cities can be lonely and stressful,” says co-founder and CEO Philip Laney. “Moving into your new apartment, sorting out furniture and utilities, and then trying to connect with busy people around you all whilst working long hours in a transient economy are frustrations many of us have experienced. We are confronting three problems for renters in the city: their desire for community, convenience and affordability”.

Laney says the current way people rent shared accommodation is also painful for landlords, who don’t have consistency and control over the quality of their tenants, and often pay high fees to a middle person and struggle with vacancy rates. “We provide them guaranteed income with no voids and no fees, and a genuinely positive social impact,” he says.

For renters, Lyvly operates a little like a members club. Once you’ve applied to join the community, you have a call with a member of the Lyvly team to learn more about your “life stage and values”. “We are people, not property first. So we establish what you’re seeking from your Lyvly move and whether you are keen to actively participate in the Lyvly community and share your life, not just spaces,” says Laney.

Next, you are given profiles of the members (and prospective housemates) you will be meeting with, and they are sent your profile and an overview as to why you are well matched. You then meet each other, and if you like each other, you can apply online to the membership committee, which is made up of the most active Lyvly members and the team. This includes submitting your bio and stating why you want to be part of Lyvly, and what you would bring to the community.

Adds Laney: “Once you’re in, we then guide you through the whole moving process, taking care of everything and removing any usual stresses that come from moving to a new place in London. You are introduced to other members in the area who have similar interests and values and other members reach out to you directly to invite you to other activities they’re hosting. We also regularly host events and actively support members to engage with each other and give value to the community”.

Lyvly’s target tenants are 25-35 year olds who are looking for single occupancy. Laney says that’s because they are at similar life stages to each other and this is where the startup can make a meaningful difference. “We really care about being something to someone, rather than everything to no one. In time however, we will be able to expand Lyvly into different community groups,” he says.

Landlords using the platform range from individuals who are first time owners to some of London’s biggest property companies.

Asked who Lyvly competes with, he cites the grey and black economy of shared housing and “dodgy landlords”. Technically the company is also competing with estate agents, although it is open to working with them to help find better tenants for their landlords.

Meanwhile, don’t confuse the startup for co-living, build-to-rent developers who “put property first” and aim to profit from the development of assets. In contrast, Lyvly makes money from the managed services it provides and is not developing new property but renting out existing housing stock.

“We believe people like living in existing houses and apartments and what we need to do is create a community around that. It’s not the configuration of the spaces that need changing, but how people interact inside and outside of them,” says Laney, adding that the use of existing housing infrastructure also means that Lyvly is potentially a lot more scalable.

Along with Laney, the startup’s other co-founders are Dario Favoino and Siraj Khaliq. Both Laney Favoino have a 10 year background in real estate investment and property management at Deutsche Bank and Realstar. And in case you aren’t keeping up, Khaliq is a Partner at London VC firm Atomico and was previously CTO and co-founder of Silicon Valley startup Climate Corporation, which exited in 2013 for over $1.1 billion.

Media giants Sinclair and Tribune were all set to merge and create one of the country’s biggest broadcasters — and a complacent FCC seemed to be doing everything it could to help the deal along. But the regulator had a change of heart after evidence surfaced of duplicity too serious to be ignored, and the resultant red tape and bad PR provoked Tribune into spiking the deal and suing its would-be acquirer for $1 billion.

The FCC, which until recently had been accused of being overly chummy with broadcasters, Sinclair in particular, last month issued a “de facto merger death sentence” to the deal, citing mounds of evidence that the company was shirking the terms of the merger and lying about it. The legal process of working out these issues with a view to approving the merger might have taken years.

Tribune wasn’t having that, and moved quickly to throw Sinclair under the bus. In a statement posted to the company’s website, the company wrote that “Sinclair’s entire course of conduct has been in blatant violation of the Merger Agreement and, but for Sinclair’s actions, the transaction could have closed long ago.”

The legal complaint published simultaneously goes into further detail:

From virtually the moment the Merger Agreement was signed, Sinclair repeatedly and willfully breached 3 its contractual obligations in spectacular fashion… Sinclair fought, threatened, insulted, and misled regulators in a misguided and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to retain control over stations that it was obligated to sell.

The damage, it asserts, amounts to a round $1 billion.

This merger failing can hardly be considered as anything but good news to consumers; as former counsel at the FCC Gigi Sohn put it:

This transaction had but two supporters – Sinclair and Tribune. It was opposed by large and small cable companies, rural broadband providers, conservative cable channels and the public interest community. Chairman Pai and his colleagues did right by the American people and the entire broadcast industry by putting the brakes on this merger.

The ACLU’s Jacob Hutt was even less diplomatic:

This was a terrible idea to begin with. The merger would have trampled on First Amendment principles, crippled the future of journalism, and disproportionately harmed minority communities. We thank the thousands of activists that raised their voices to prevent the damage this deal would have done.

But the most erudite insult surely comes from Sinclair’s complaint.

Sinclair was impervious to appeals to its contractual obligations. It intended to pursue its own narrow self-interest regardless of its obligations until the FCC found its conduct so egregious as to merit administrative review. Tribune is now the victim of that outrageous obduracy.

Emphasis mine. I congratulate Tribune’s lawyers on their prose.

Florida police have arrested a 25-year-old named Ricky Joseph Handschumacher. The young man is suspected of grand theft and money laundering. Handschumacher used SIM swapping techniques to steal thousands in Bitcoin and to “drain bank accounts,” according to security researcher Brian Krebs.

Handschumacher’s scam was simple: He called telecom operators and asked them to swap his SIM card for the victim’s SIM card. This, in turn, gave him access to two-factor authentication techniques via SMS and allowed him to access email accounts, bitcoin wallets and file storage systems. I experienced this firsthand a year ago when my phone stopped working and all of my Google passwords began changing without my control.

“In some cases, fraudulent SIM swaps succeed thanks to lax authentication procedures at mobile phone stores. In other instances, mobile store employees work directly with cyber criminals to help conduct unauthorized SIM swaps, as appears to be the case with the crime gang that allegedly included Handschumacher,” wrote Krebs.

The takedown happened after a mother overheard her son pretending to be an AT&T employee. Police found multiple SIM cards and a Trezor in the Michigan home of the first hacker, as well as logins for Telegram and Discord channels dedicated to SIM swapping. The police found that the hackers had stolen 57 bitcoins from one victim. Handschumacher was head of the group.

The hackers were allegedly targeting the Winklevoss twins before Handschumacher was arrested.

According to the police complaint, “Handschumacher and another co-conspirator talk about compromising the CEO of Gemini and posted his name, date of birth, Skype username and email address into the conversation. Handschumacher and the co-conspirators discuss compromising the CEO’s Skype account and T-Mobile account. The co-conspirator states he will call his ‘guy’ at T-Mobile to ask about the CEO’s account.”

Worried about getting hacked? Given the ease with which Handschumacher and his team worked, non-SMS-based two-factor authentication is still the best solution for ensuring you aren’t effected. There are also methods to add a SIM lock to your phone so outsiders can’t swap your SIM as easily, but remember: All the protection in the world can’t stop a dedicated hacker. Keep your important data and cryptocurrencies offline if possible.

Name aside, not all that much appears to have changed with the new Galaxy Watch. Samsung’s clearly used the Gear Sport as the jumping off point here. And that’s a good thing. Since the beginning, Samsung’s wearables have been plagued by a size issue.

They’re huge — big on my wrists, even, and I’m 5’11. That rules out a pretty massive potential user base right out of the gate. The Galaxy Watches on display appeared to be the smaller of the two, at 42mm, which fit pretty comfortable on my wrist. There’s also a 46mm for those diehard big watch fans. Samsung has yet to introduce a size for even smaller wrists, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

Those earlier rumors that the company would be jumping to the more widely used Android Wear operating system were off-base. Samsung’s sticking with Tizen here, with the Galaxy watch running version 4.0. Not a huge surprise, of course. Samsung’s taken ownership over the open OS — moving to Google’s would feel like starting from scratch.

The industrial design is also similar to earlier models, with a well, pronounced metal case and large buttons. There are two color designs, however, so you can opt for rose gold for a bit of a softer touch. And, of course, there are a whole bunch of different band options to further customize it.

LTE functionality is present here — Samsung beat Apple to the draw on that one. The watch is also 5ATM + IP68 water resistant and features a Gorilla Glass face, so it can take a licking, at all.

Like the rest of the wearable world, health is a big feature here. There are six automatic exercises (walking, running, cycling, elliptical, training, rowing, and dynamic workouts), plus sleep tracking and breathing reminder. Speaking of sleeping with the thing on, the company promises “several days of usage,” but that will depend in no small part on which size you opt for. The battery sizes are 472mAh and 270mAh for the 46mm and 42mm, respectively. So that’s certainly a point in favor of opting for the largest one possible.

We’ll no doubt be testing that, along with everything else soon. For now, I’m not seeing any features that really stand out the the rest of the wearable masses.  The 46mm runs  $350 and the 42mm version is $330. Pricing on the LTE models will be carrier dependent (AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon are all repped here). The device is launching at some unspecified time later this year.