The latest news in wearable tech is that everyone is talking about wearable tech.

At the beginning of the year this trend looked strong, but it’s completely outstripped expectations, pushed by the Smart Watch Bubble and Glass-mania. (Click here if you want to see Robert Scoble wearing Glass in the shower. A tad NSFW.)

Just announced, and disturbing: the Jawbone UP is being opened to developers as a platform.

The device will soon be able to monitor everything about you, and then how long before insurance companies or employers are requiring that people wear them and penalizing them for health behavior violations?

Also, researchers at Purdue have now developed LED glasses that let you read while running, syncing up moving text with your moving head. And there are HUD ski goggles (the Smith I/O Recon and the Oakley AirWave), because it’s all about the sensors right now. We are getting quantified.

People are doing cray VR stuff with the Oculus Rift. Since we’re still perfectly happy with the level of immersion provided by text and there’s plenty of Wincest on Ao3 we haven’t read yet, we’ll be late-adopting on the VR tip.

New RFID research means flexible, ultra-thin tags could soon be showing up in all kinds of fabrics. Internet of things, meet closet; you’re going to be great friends.

The Startup Battlefield is open at Disrupt NY.

Thirty-five companies have six minutes each to elevator-pitch their products, followed by six minutes of Q&A.

So far, contenders that look volatile to us include Floored, a 3D visualization tool for real estate, and Zenefits, a free, YC-backed employee benefits outsourcer.

Floored is an app built on Matterport, a system that uses a camera with Kinect-style sensors to capture interior spaces in 3D. It’s pretty ingenious, and having worked at a real estate office, I can see the potential of this tool. Also, I suspect this technology will be incorporated into VR porn sooner rather than later.

Today Zenefits announced that they are opening up payroll services, and expanding to New York State. Zenefits started here in the Bay Area, where startups with CEOs who couldn’t care less about administering employee benefits resent spending even HR-outsourcing dollars.

TriNet has been the titan in the HR-outsourcing arena for as long as I’ve worked at SF startups- fourteen years- but TriNet costs CEOs money.

Zenefits, which is essentially an automated insurance broker, is free to employers.

Plus, they cleverly describe managing the exchange of human labor for life-sustaining funds and critical health coverage as “soul-crushing busywork” on their homepage. This is sure to go over big with CEOs and VCs who see the Iowan twentysomethings who are at work building their actual company tech as inconvenient, interchangeable meatsacks.

We don’t think much of the “Mommy buy me a pony” app Ok’d from PaidPiper.

Transferring funds, sending money via Paypal, setting up wishlists on Amazon- none of those things are so hard that they need a “disruptive” technology to revolutionize them. Also, there’s an intrinsic lameness to software that helps you ask other people for money by sending them a picture of the thing you want.