Wearables Take a Turn to Industry
Wearables Take a Turn to Industry by Michael F. Finneran
The TMC.Net’s Wearable Tech Expo took place in New York this week and the consensus was that the enterprise rather than the consumer market was where wearables would find their first success. This is the second year I attended the expo, and I found a very different line-up than last year. Finished products from smart watches like the Pebble, to activity monitors like Nike's Fuelband, Jawbone's UP and Fibit, were the focus last year along with viewers like Google Glass, telemedicine devices and smart clothing. This year the focus was enterprise.
The cruel reality that seems to have descended upon the wearables market is that while wearables are indeed a “fashion statement,” it's a “statement” most people don’t want to make! There are still glitches in the technology and battery life remains a challenge, but more than that, people aren’t going to wear something that makes them look “weird.” Sure, we all love our technology, but if you’re wearing it, it’s “fashion” and that represents a very personal choice.
There are also challenges on the marketing side. Retail marketing expert Robin Shea from consulting firm dciArtform, who clearly knew a thing or two about marketing, gave one of the more interesting and entertaining presentations. Ms. Shea talked about the challenges of selling wearables through traditional electronics outlets. She made the point that as wearables are indeed “fashion” products, so consumers will want to try them on. Of course electronics stores are big on security and that presents a major obstacle. Packaging is based on indestructible bubble packs hung on locked peg boards where you can’t even read the packaging. High ticket items are either in glass display cases or structures that look like shark cages. Things like smartphones are tethered with retractable strings like the pens at the bank. And if you do manage to try it on, they don’t have any mirrors so you won’t know what it looks like!
With the consumer market stalled in the starting gate, the emphasis shifted to potential enterprise sales. Joe Fitzgerald, Senior Manager in the wearables practice at Deloitte, identified a number of potential markets for wearable viewers or video cameras in areas like field service, retail, health care, and public safety. Coming at the issue from the viewpoint of a consultant, Mr. Fitzgerald identified asset and resource efficiencies, product differentiation and reduced risk for workers as key business drivers.
Importantly, industrial applications also take the “fashion” factor out of the picture. To illustrate the point, one speaker drew a comparison between fashion eyewear and safety goggles. In truth, wrist-mounted mobile computers with bar code and RFID readers have long been used in industrial settings and voice-driven picking solutions are commonplace in warehouse environments. So the addition of industrial wearables isn’t that much of a stretch.
There were a few interesting wearables on display, though they also pointed to some of the challenges. Thalmic Labs from Waterloo, Ontario was showing off an armband that would allow you to control various electronic devices with gestures. The gestures it recognized were making a fist, spreading out your hand, of waving your arm in or out and those could be used to simulate a game controller, operate a drone, control an audio or video player, or to advance your PowerPoint slides. Watching them advance PowerPoints by waving an arm was pretty cool, but I think the appeal would wear off quickly. The game control functions seemed the most attractive but offered little in the way of enterprise application.
Augumenta, a software company from Oulu, Finland, was demonstrating its soon-to-be-available software for Google Glass or other wearable viewers. The software projects a keypad or device controller onto the palm of your hand when you look at it and lets the user operate it with a finger. The video and demonstration by the company’s CTO was quite impressive, but when I tried it I found it to be difficult and frustrating to operate. It was apparent that using it effectively would take considerable training and it would not be a plug-and-play experience.
Rather than complete products, it seemed that about half the exhibitors were hawking development kits, custom software, data center services and even a system for fully waterproofing electronic devices. The waterproofing company was HZO, and their exhibit had an iPhone working at the bottom of a fish tank.
In his presentation, Avi Greengart, Research Director at Current Analysis, brought up the oft quoted number of $50 billion as the potential sales for wearables, but quickly dismissed it as a near term likelihood. So while the tone was not as optimistic as what I’d heard last year, it seemed to be more grounded in reality and focusing on the real challenges to adoption. It’s clear that we’re still a long way from that $50 billion target, but it did remind me of one of my favorite quotes from Microsoft’s Gurdeep Singh Pall who said (I’m paraphrasing), “In technology we routinely overestimate the degree of change that can occur in three years, but underestimate the change that can occur in ten.”
With wearables, I’m afraid we’re on the ten-year plan rather than the three-year.