CES 2015 - Six15 Technologies has introduced a new wearable headset designed for heads-up data delivery and text messaging during CES 2015. The glasses allow wearers to maintain their situational awareness while out and about, because they don't need to look down at a mobile device.

The new glasses connect to a device via Bluetooth and have a built-in rechargeable battery that provides up to 1,500 text messages sent and received during one battery charge. Six15 will release thermal and visible cameras for the headset, designed to assist in using business applications.

"Our glasses are a more realistic and less obtrusive application to wearable tech and head-mounted displays, unlike other devices currently in the market that have struggled to go mainstream," said Rich Ryan, CEO of Six15 Technologies. "Merging some of the capabilities we have delivered to defense customers with some of the key attributes of the consumer market, our new device is a testament to how advanced technologies can provide solutions to a wide range of problems from everyday issues, to safety in a warehouse, to critical medical data in an ER, to GPS displays for first responders."

CES 2015 - Audio company A-Audio has unveiled the Rose Gold Lyric On-Ear Headphones during CES, the first addition to its LUX line.

The headphones have a diamond-quilted leather band and octagonal bezels located on each ear cup. The ear cups have memory foam padding to better isolate sound and still feel comfortable. A-Audio also provided dual jacks so owners can share music with friends, along with 40mm customer drivers and anti-vibration aluminum.

The headphones will be available for early-access in February, sporting a $199 MSRP.

CES 2015 - Optoma announced it acquired NuForce at the end of 2014, and didn't waste any time before adding to the NuForce line, launching the NE750M and NE800M earbuds. It's good to see Optoma decide to continue expanding the NuForce product line in 2015, and launching something so quickly after the acquisition.

The NE750M are made up with an aluminum body that was designed to be comfortable and durable. Owners can answer and disconnect from calls directly through the earbuds, along with navigating their playlist.

The NE800M are made from carbon fiber, promising reduced vibrations that help provide a clearer sound quality. With a frequency response from 10Hz to 40kHz, there is a bit of additional sound quality delivered when compared to the NE750M.

CES 2015 -Seagate has managed to fit 500GB into an amazingly slim external hard drive. The aptly-named Seven is only 7mm thick, and is intended for users on the go who require plenty of storage capacity. The Seven connects via the speedy USB 3.0 interface, and is manufactured from premium steel to withstand the rigors of portable use. Even with its rugged exterior the Seven manages to be aesthetically pleasing and feather light.

The Seven is thin even in comparison to a modern smartphone, and below we can see the size of one of the first 500GB HDDs. Storage has certainly came a long way, and with SSD manufacturers beginning to encroach upon the external storage market Seagate is upping their game to compete by offering the highest capacity available in external storage devices, and now also the thinnest.

The city of Shenyang, the largest city in Northeast China with more than 6 million residents, could have been home base for the North Korean government's secretive Bureau 121 hacker group, according to defector Kim Heung-Kwang.

Kim left North Korea in 2004 and previously served as a computer science professor in Pyongyang, saying some of his students graduated and began hacking for the North Korean government.

"Bureau 121 began its large-scale operation in China in 2005," Kim recently said in an interview published by CNN. It was established in the late 90s. Team members entered China separately - in smaller groups - 20 members at a time. When they entered China, they came under different titles. For example an office worker, an official with a trade company or even as a diplomatic staffer."

Storage Visions 2015 -Chris Bross from DriveSavers stopped by the TweakTown booth to discuss the latest in data recovery technology. Increasing HDD capacity presents numerous problems, both with storing data and with recovering it. We also recently had the opprutunity to tour DriveSavers labs, and covered the data recovery process in our DriveSavers Data Recovery Site Tour - Your Data, Recovered article.

New drive technologies, such as helium drives and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recovery), add another layer of complexity that DriveSavers has to master to continue to offer data recovery services. New types of software layers and filesystems also present more hurdles, but DriveSavers maintains close contact with all storage vendors to enhance their data recovery services.

CES 2015 -HDDs are evolving to address new challenges in the datacenter, and the Seagate Kinetic line offers a radical new way of improving performance and reducing TCO. Hyperscale customers are constantly looking for refined systems to lower operating costs, and new data storage methods to address the massive influx of data.

Kinetic drives interact with an open-source Seagate-developed API that eschews normal filesystem implementations in favor of more robust Key/Value Object storage. The Kinetic platform also dramatically reduces host overhead and removes CPU processing from the majority of tasks.

The Kinetic drives are physically similar to normal HDDs, but connect via a dual Ethernet connection. This provides multipath and fail-over capabilities. The drives can also perform disk-to-disk data migration and other tasks independently.

Storage Visions 2015 -Shawn DuBravac from the CEA stopped by the booth to discuss market trends and challenges facing the broader PC market. The emergence of mobile devices has challenged the PC market, but growth has returned as users are upgrading their computers to new operating systems. Tablets were projected to kill the PC market, but sales of tablets have actually began to decline.

CEA organizes CES, the world's largest tradeshow, but is also an ANSI accredited standards body. They also feature several policy groups and research firms. As the internet of things expands, CEA is tracking market trends. There are many theoretical uses for embedded sensors, and this will eventually result in over 50 billion devices connected to the internet. Shawn discusses some of the emerging trends.

Storage Visions 2015 -Mike Chen from Marvell stopped by the TweakTown booth at Storage Visions 2015 to display the Altaplus controller along with a new SSD that has an integrated controller on the NAND package. NVMe has several performance advantages, but also enables low power operation modes particularly well-suited for mobile applications. Marvell is delivering both PCIe 2.0 and 3.0 SSD controllers that feature robust LDPC error correction technology.

There are multiple lengths in the M.2 standard, and here we can see the difference in size between the different solutions.

Using a standard SD card for scale we can observe the amazingly small size of this NAND package. What makes this solution unique is the fact that it is actually a fully functional SSD. The controller is embedded into the NAND chip, which allows for ultra-dense configurations. This small SSD contains 128GB of Toshiba flash.

Storage Visions 2015 -Dinesh Bahal from SanDisk stopped by the TweakTown booth to discuss SanDisk's latest offering, the SSD Plus. The SSD Plus is an entry-level SSD based upon second-generation 19nm NAND.

The SSD Plus comes in 120 and 240GB capacities, and is geared specifically for the entry-level market with a price of $70 and $110. SanDisk also announced the mSATA variant of the Ultra II. The mSATA Ultra II comes in capacities of 128, 256, and 512GB. It will retail for $74, $116, and $221 and will reach the market this quarter. Both SSDs also come wich SanDisk's toolbox, which eases data migration and simplifies drive management tasks.