Gizmo updates from MobileCon

Escort’s macho Smokey and the Bandit-style crowd sourcing platform is finding its feminine side. Their flagship 9500 model is sporting a pearl white finish with pink trim, all in support of the Susan G. Koman Foundation. Carrie would approve.

A company spokesman wouldn’t divulge subscriber numbers except to say growth is “huge”, with some interesting channel partners in the pipeline.

DeviceAnywhere, which offers developers online test-bed access to a long list of mobile devices and operating systems, was acquired a year ago by Keynote. I took a look at their business model back in 2009, and liked it.

Hottest dev frontier: testing HTML5 across the entire mobile ecosystem. They say it’s working well enough as everyone climbs the learning curve. Their Borg Mother Ship for mobile phones is looking slicker too.

Immersion is building a market for its smart phone haptic technology, “reaching out to developers” with their new Reverb product which automatically turns audio into a tactile experience.

It builds on their original release, which accesses the vibration functions in an Android phone and exposes an API to developers which allows them to make it buzz and shake in response to other actions. Their classic demo is a guitar app – you strum a tune on the screen, and the strings tickle your fingers like the real thing.

With Reverb, developers can avoid the heavy lifting by just feeding application audio into the API and, along with a little tweaking, let the software come up with some cool shakes to match the sound. Shooter games are an obvious market, but the marquee demo app is a roller coaster ride that uses haptic feed back to enhance that sinking-pit-in-your-stomach feeling.

HeartMath turns the heart rate monitor concept on its head. HRMs are mostly used by athletes as a personal tachometer to maintain a proper level of workout intensity.

Instead, HeartMath measures what it calls heart rate variability, in other words how much and how often your heart rate is jumping around. It’s a device that ties into an iOS app. The purpose of the information is to reduce stress – it comes bundled with stress management exercises to help you find your happy place.