Simband, Samsung's health-focused wearable blueprint, has arrived

Just call it a reference

Samsung debuted its Simband wearable and SAMI platform back in May, but things finally got rolling this week at the company's 2014 developer conference.

The Samsung Simband is a wearable loaded with health sensors that collect data like your temperature, blood flow and EKG levels. While Samsung just introduced a slightly improved second generation of the device it's not actually intended for sale.

Rather the Simband is meant as a blueprint for other device makers who want to incorporate Samsung's tech and designs into their wearables, and to that end the company has just released its APIs and development kit into the wild.

That's the real news, and it means developers can finally get started making their own health apps for Simband devices.

Samsung says Simband is "our concept of what a smart health device should be."

"Now, for the first time you will be able to ask specific wellness questions and get clear, insightful answers direct from the source: you," reads a Samsung site describing Simband and some other initiatives.

One of those is SAMI, or Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions, a cloud platform that will receive data from Simband devices and allow developers to leverage it with apps.

Here's a video describing some of what Simband's many sensors can do. With these tools now available to devs it could be only a matter of time before Simband really takes off. Of course, it already has plenty of competition.

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Samsung's Milk Music spills over to Web TV, wearables

NEW YORK -- Samsung Electronics is getting serious about its Milk streaming music service.

Samsung is pushing its Milk music service hard. Sarah Tew/CNET

The company unveiled an expansion of the service, which started on its Galaxy line of smartphones and will now be expanded to Web TV and wearables.

"It's effectively a big-screen jukebox for the 21st century home," said John Pleasants, executive vice president of Samsung Media Solutions Center of America, in an event held at its new offices here.

The Milk Music service will come preloaded with the Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge, he said.

Pleasants said that each version of Milk was designed to specifically fit each screen. In addition to smartphones, Samsung has a lineup of Web-enabled televisions and smartwatches like the Gear S.

Milk competes with a myriad of streaming music services such as Spotify and Pandora, which work across multiple products and platforms.

Samsung also touted the "Artist Den" component of Milk, which provides listeners with access to artists and provide listeners with exclusive shows.

To promote Milk's curation abilities, Samsung trotted out Maroon 5's Adam Levine and James Valentine to as "the anchor curators."

"We're going to curate the heck out of that thing," Levine said. He also joked that he would be taking part in a "ceremonial iPhone burning" after the event, eliciting a handful of cheers.

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