Earlier players like Fitbit and Jawbone announced multiple new products and a host of promising startups (Athos, Atlas, Misfit, etc.) have emerged with innovative offerings.
With the momentum of these dollars and product releases, its no wonder industry analysts are predicting the wearable movement to be “the next big thing”. Credit Suisse estimates the market could be $50 billion in 5 years, and Morgan Stanley claims the wearable market could reach $1.6 trillion in value.
Those of us closer to the leading edge know that in their current state, wearables have next to no chance of attaining these lofty predictions. The big ugly secret of the current wearable market is that over a third of users who own a wearable device stop using it within 6 months. Certainly, price and the lack of design aesthetic contribute to this lack of retention. However, the main culprit is that despite manufacturers’ claims that these are “smart devices” most wearable products aren’t intelligent at all.
Granted, there’s a certain novelty consumers feel when they are first able to track the number of steps they take in a day, their sleep patterns, or heart rate. But after some time, the lack of any meaning or insight attached to the data means it just becomes another graph to view. Consumers don’t want data dumps — they want actionable information. This is why a wearable soon becomes just another gadget left in the drawer.
Despite manufacturers’ claims that these are “smart devices” most wearable products aren’t intelligent at all.
In 2015, the wearable market will reach a critical inflection point where it will gain mass market adoption (close to 20% of adults will have one by EOY – double the 10% seen now) and set itself on massive growth trajectory for the next 5 years. This key moment will hinge less on innovations in hardware, and more on the software and networks that make sense of all that data emitted by the devices. To succeed, wearables must expand from feeds of information to recommendations and other actionable health knowledge.
By now the pattern of platform companies, APIs, and independent developers is clear. We should expect Apple HealthKit, Google Fit, and similar efforts by Jawbone and Fitbit to drive innovative applications to combine personal fitness data with expertise in exercise, nutrition, and even sleep and relaxation to efficiently move participants towards better health. Done well, the result should be a democratization of what has historically been a privilege for those that could afford gym memberships or personal trainers.
Imagine a user with a specific goal – looking their best before a reunion, or competing in a race. Using a wearable device and software intelligence, they can now understand how and when they should be exercising, how to adapt sleep patterns to get better results, and how their nutrition habits affect performance. Imagine further an athlete wearing smart clothing that allows coaches to monitor their fatigue levels and muscular exertion. The coach now has real-time data that allows them to modify their training regimens to ensure peak performance when it matters.
The possibilities are endless and the amount and sophistication of data – and the interpretation of that data – will continue to grow. In this regard, wearables are no different than any other hardware category that rapidly expanded after attaining a smart software layer: networking, the personal computer, and most recently mobile phones.
No longer!
According to a Plus post by Googler Alex Wiesen, Google Voice MMS should work now on “AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Bell Canada, and many more” North American carriers.
Notice the omission? While the full list of now-supported carriers hasn’t been published yet, it seemed odd that Verizon wasn’t name checked. Sure enough, it looks like they’re the only major U.S. carrier that hasn’t hopped on board. Without naming names, Wiesen asks anyone who works at an unsupported carrier to reach out for the sake of “text messaging interoperability.”
While Google Voice MMS support has popped up from time to time on select carriers, it’s always been a bit of a crapshoot. Sometimes you could send an MMS to someone, but notreceive an MMS from the same person — or vice versa. Sometimes it’d work one day, but not the next. With today’s (albeit quiet) announcement, it’ll hopefully be a lot more reliable moving forward.
It still seems to be a bit wonky in our testing (some people get the pictures as links; others as photo attachments; some still not at all), but it’s a nice step in the right direction after a pretty long stretch of silence from the Google Voice team.
One catch: because of all the behind-the-curtain trickery Google is doing to pull this off, group MMS doesn’t work quite like you’d expect. You’ll still receive them, but as a bunch of individual messages. Which kind of defeats the point.
Facebook is reportedly working on a new app designed to encourage private content sharing — by making the process even more personal.
Citing multiple sources, a report on Techcrunch claims that the current code name for the app is "Moments" and will give users a grid-style interface from which to shareprivate moments with friends and family.
The reasoning behind the app, allegedly, is to assist Facebook users who want to share intimate content with close contacts, but have been put off by the site's increasingly complicated privacy settings.
The report hedges on whether or not the app will ever actually be released, citing numerous past internal Facebook experiments that never became public-facing products.
But if true, the app would indicate that Facebook is continuing to work to win back the trust of some users who have been daunted by the site's complicated and ever-shifting privacy settings and News Feed changes.
A Facebook spokesperson offered the company's standard response: "we do not comment on rumors or speculation."
Spotify announced that it has expanded compatibility for its Spotify Connect feature to allow users to play and control their tunes via Amazon’s Fire TV set-top box. Available only for Spotify Premium members, listeners can now use the Spotify app for mobile phones or tablets to connect their Spotify libraries with Amazon’s new set-top box. There are several new applications available to users thanks to the expansion. Say you have some friends over in your living room, you’re streaming some music with the service via your smartphone on your hi-fi sound system, and you realize you need to step outside away from the noise to make an important phone call. Instead of inconveniently having to switch to some other music source (iTunes, CD, vinyl, etc.) or nixing the tunes altogether to make the call, you can now simply alternate sources with Spotify Connect and push the music to the Fire TV.
With music streaming via Spotify Connect from your smartphone to the Amazon set-top box (and, in turn, its respective audio output system), you’re free to walk off with smartphone in-hand, make calls, use other smartphone apps, or even stroll right out of Wi-Fi range, all without causing a single break in the jams.
While the new feature is only available to Spotify’s Premium subscribers, the company is currently offering a 30-day free trial for Spotify Premium, in case you’ve got a Fire TV and want to give the new feature a try first without committing to $10 per month.
