Shawn DuBravac | Vox

Where We Stand With Wearables

2019-03-06T05:16:11-05:00

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

Oh, how far we’ve come from the Pulsar calculator watch of 40 years ago. The now-iconic gadget debuted in 1975 with tiny input buttons and limited functionality, and can arguably be credited as the technology industry’s first “wearable.”

The Pulsar calculator watch can arguably be credited as the technology industry’s first “wearable.” Now, some 40 years later, we’re just beginning to see the wearables era start to mature.

It wasn’t until the introduction of Bluetooth headsets and Apple’s iPhone in 2007 that wearable technology began the shift that’s now under way, from self-contained, single-issue devices toward a market of complex, interactive computers capable of virtually anything entrepreneurs can dream up. And only in the last 36 months have we seen the wearables era start to mature.

The wearables market topped $4.2 billion in 2015, up about 40 percent from the year before, according to research from the Consumer Technology Association. And sales are expected to jump another 30 percent in 2016 to more than $5 billion.

We’ve seen phenomenal growth in this market thanks to a pronounced diversity of innovation. In the early stages of wearables, devices could track basic data like the number of steps you took. But in the past year or two, the capabilities have grown well beyond just measuring walking.

Most of today’s wearables are focused on maximizing our health and fitness. Wearables can now track not just the number of steps you take but also your heart rate, how far you ride your bike, how fast you ran. Some products can isolate measurements around very specific muscle groups, so it’s not just looking at the body, but also looking at very specific parts of the body.

And wearables aren’t just for measuring physical activity. They can help you get a better night’s sleep, too. Using a significant array of sensors, some wearables aim to improve sleep quality by capturing biometric data on heart and breathing rate, movement, body temperature, respiration and even perspiration. CTA has been working with device manufacturers and app creators to develop important standards for measuring sleep quality.

For women, Tempdrop’s wearable basal body temperature sensor tracks ovulation cycles through an ear bud that monitors your temperature and syncs with a fertility app to predict when you’re most likely to become pregnant.

The challenge for today’s wearables innovators is not in how to collect and analyze data; in many respects, we’re already there. Instead, innovators must prioritize meaningful data curation that results in actionable, customized advice to consumers.

The wonders of wearables aren’t limited to humans, either. The pet wearables market took off in 2015. From a GPS-enabled collar to track Fido’s whereabouts to virtual fence and leash technology to keep your pup from straying too far afield, wearables are truly for the whole family. One pet collar, still in the preorder stage, is set to include two-way audio for keeping in contact with your furry friend if he’s out of earshot.

Another pet collar serves as a health monitor, tracking your pet’s temperature, pulse, respiration, activity and more. The data can be accessed by a veterinarian to help keep pets healthy.

We’re in an interesting experimental period, where our technological capabilities can capture and measure a wide array of personal data, analyze this information and then suggest an array of services based on this information.

The challenge for today’s wearables innovators is not in how to collect and analyze data; in many respects, we’re already there. Instead, innovators must prioritize meaningful data curation that results in actionable, customized advice to consumers. With wearables and their accompanying software deciphering the answers hidden in a sea of our personal data for us, we are empowered to make more meaningful decisions about our lifestyle, health and work.

Shawn DuBravac is chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association, and the author of “Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Communicate.” Reach him @shawndubravac.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

The Coming Cure for ‘Digital Hoarding’

2019-03-06T05:44:10-05:00

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

Confession: I’m a recovering hoarder. I’m actually great at purging, but I do it in rare spurts. I have a hard time parting with things I think I might need, even when I know I’ll never use them.

We all know I’m not alone in this. You’re a hoarder, too. In fact, when it comes to our digital files, most of us are hoarders. Technology has the ability to forever change how we relate to our hoarded digital junk.

When was the last time you deleted a file because you needed space on your hard drive? We used to do that all the time, back when digital space was scarce and expensive. Now, it’s cheap and plentiful. The result is that none of us throw away anything digital anymore.

I don’t use the term “hoarding” lightly. I mean it in its negative, obsessive-compulsive sense. Our digital hoarding is a problem. Why don’t we delete any of our photos, even the bad ones? Because we might need them one day. This is why compulsive hoarders can’t bear to throw anything away. We might need it.

As with physical hoarding, digital hoarding induces anxiety and a feeling of powerlessness. We can’t delete anything, because it might be useful and decision paralysis consumes us. So, we accumulate more. And the more we accumulate, the greater our anxiety we might have something very good or important sitting at the bottom of our pile of digital stuff. Or something we consider unimportant becomes very important. Our solution is not to throw anything into our virtual trashcans.

As a result, we can never find what we want when we need it.

Digital companies are wise to our inability to hit “delete,” and so they created “cloud storage” as a solution to our problem of saving our digital goods in a secure location. Email systems have also adapted, offering search functionality to quickly find a single email buried beneath thousands upon thousands of others.

Google took the next logical step when it divided Gmail’s inbox into “Primary,” “Social” and “Promotion” tabs, giving users an easier way to filter the important messages from the unnecessary ones. And Google’s Inbox app turns your email into a “to do” list, writes Paula DuPont.

Still, the more we accumulate digitally, the harder it is to find what we need. In other words, our storage systems have little to no context awareness. Your cloud doesn’t know what’s important to you. It treats all files the same.

Your inbox might winnow promotional emails from personal messages, but that’s a superficial solution. You learn to ignore your “Promotions” tab, until you realize you missed a really good promotion that was applicable to your life. Maybe it’s a travel tip ,or a deal to use during your next business trip.

Services like IFTTT (IF This Then That) and Nimble offer solutions to rescue you from email inundation. IFTTT lets you set triggers for specific events online and then assign personalized actions to follow them, reports Popular Mechanics. For example, you can set a trigger for emails from an important email address, let’s say, a parent. You would then be asked to set an action to signal a new email, such as a text message to your phone.

The Nimble app offers an array of features, including “Stay in Touch,” an automated reminder system that watches your communications and prompts you to connect at the right time; “Mark as Important,” a star system so you won’t miss timely communications from important people; and “Last Contact,” a sorting format that it says “keeps current workflow top of mind.”

Nimble’s Teachable Rules Engine learns from you — via profiling through keywords, titles and the like — to surface important people. More, Nimble layers on relevant insights that identify why a contact matters to you.

That’s important, because the future is about getting what’s relevant when it’s relevant, with as little friction as possible. Take, for another example, your photos. You really want to keep only the best ones, but the only way is to manually delete the bad shots. What if your phone or PC deleted the bad shots for you? “But what if it deletes a good one?” our digital-hoarding brain screams.

That’s just it. The next revolution in storage technology will be “context awareness.” The system will know what you consider “bad” versus “good,” relative terms that will be tailored to your personal preference, not some universal standard.

In addition, facial recognition software will be able to store and retrieve photos based on characteristics and that technology is getting better. You’ll be able to search images and video like you search text. You’ll be able to say, “Show me football clips,” and get a list of what you want. (Today, if a video isn’t tagged “football,” it’s hard to find.)

Your future storage systems probably won’t “delete” the bad emails or photos — they’ll just prioritize the good ones. For example, your phone will keep only the photos you like (you and your dog). The rest (you and your ex-boyfriend) will be put in some recess of your cloud storage.

Our future storage systems will also prioritize data to fit, not just the user, but also the user’s situation. If you’re sick at home, what email would you rather read — the one from your doctor or from your CEO? The system will organize itself to meet your needs at the time. When you recover, the system will go back to giving your CEO preference.

The solution to digital hoarding is not so much helping us part with useless data. Storage is cheap, after all. The answer is to help what we see as the “good” stuff rise above the “bad” or “unnecessary.” When you cycle through your photos on your phone, you’ll only see the “good” ones. When you open your email, you’ll only see the ones you want or need to see.

With the arrival and mass adoption of context-awareness software, we won’t have to solve our digital hoarding ourselves. In fact, we won’t even know it exists.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Winter Is Coming to the Cable Industry

2019-03-06T04:56:44-05:00

Quick survey, “Game of Thrones” fans: How do you plan to watch Sunday night’s season finale? Will you watch the Lannisters live on TV? DVR the Dance of Dragons for later in the week? Stream House Stark through your HBO or cable provider’s app? Maybe you’ll wait until Season 5 comes out on iTunes and then binge. Or Periscope into someone else’s viewing experience to find out what the Mother’s Mercy has in store for Cersei.

Not so long ago, when none of these options existed, we all had access to the same limited, linear TV channels. In April, eight million people tuned in to watch the Season 5 premiere of “Game of Thrones” — but add in streaming and DVR viewers, and that figure goes much higher. Today, there are more ways to consume video content than ever. This rapid expansion of viewing options is fueling our shift from couch-surfing to content-streaming. The viewing experience is increasingly being defined by myriad attributes that we choose, including time, device and location.

With more than 22 million pay TV subscribers nationwide, Comcast is known by most people as a cable TV — not broadband — provider. Yet in its last quarterly conference call, Comcast announced the company’s broadband subscribers surpassed its number of cable-TV subscribers for the first time in company history. In the first quarter of 2015, Comcast gained 407,000 Internet-service subscribers while shedding 8,000 video subscribers — the continuation of a shift long under way, a trend we’ve seen quarter after quarter. The cable industry has had to reinvent itself as viewing habits evolve.

Television- and Internet-subscriber differentials are the first threshold we cross along our TV viewership transformation; however, revenue will likely follow in the years to come. For example, Comcast reported that video subscribers accounted for $5.3 billion in revenue, compared with $3 billion in revenue from broadband subscribers in the first quarter.

But where the eyeballs go, the dollars are likely to follow. And as long as George R.R. Martin keeps spinning tales about the great houses of Westeros — and David Benioff and Dan Weiss continue to bring them to life via video — viewers will invest in new ways to watch them, be it in their living rooms or on their smartphones.

Cable is not isolated within this fundamental shift of how American households consume entertainment content. According to the Leichtman Research Group, the top 13 pay TV providers in the U.S. — across cable, satellite TV and telecom companies — saw a net loss of approximately 125,000 video subscribers in 2014. With more than 95 million customers, however, traditional paid television services won’t disappear overnight.

What are the forces driving this transformation?

There are more homes with always-on Internet connectivity than ever before. In 2000, when roughly half of U.S. adults were online, only 3 percent of households had broadband connectivity. Today, eight in 10 households have Internet connectivity — and only 1 percent of them rely on dial-up, according to Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) research. Accessing Internet content has never been easier, faster or more pervasive.
There are more content options available through Internet delivery than ever before, and the list continues to grow. At the 2015 CES in January, Dish debuted Sling TV, a new service that lets subscribers receive streaming in-demand cable networks such as ESPN and AMC and CNN alongside several other cable networks — all without a full cable or satellite subscription. HBO and CBS have also announced on-demand streaming services. Digitization makes service offerings infinitely divisible and customizable, creating an endless and unbounded array of “a la carte” streaming options that bundle and unbundle content offerings to build personalized content options.
Forty percent of households subscribe to streaming video services, and the number of households with Internet-enabled TV has nearly doubled in the past year. All at once, we have grown increasingly comfortable with Internet-delivered content.
As a result of both more pervasive broadband connectivity and greater streaming choices, we are spending more time watching Internet-delivered content. While the bulk of our time spent watching content today remains via traditional paid television services, the Web’s share of the total continues to grow rapidly. The number of hours people spend watching content on YouTube each month is up 50 percent year over year. The time spent consuming Web-delivered content is another not-so-distant waypoint in this transformation.
We have more screens than ever before. We average 5.6 screens per household in the U.S., creating multipronged viewing experiences at home and on the go. All told, there are nearly 900 million shiny black screens in the U.S. waiting to be turned on. This is the perfect environment for Internet-delivered content — many screens, many diverse users — all wanting something different.

These factors and others suggest that the transition from linear television to more flexible wireless options has passed the tipping point. With many questions yet to be answered, we can be sure of one thing: The fight for the Iron Throne will be televised. And recorded. And downloaded. And streamed.

Shawn DuBravac is chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association and the author of “Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Communicate.” Follow him on Twitter @shawndubravac.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

“Smart” Cities and the Urban Digital Revolution

2019-03-06T06:04:22-05:00

Smog, sewage and congestion are three of the hallmarks of contemporary urban living. But these downsides to city living are gradually becoming things of the past. City planners are finding new ways to address these inefficiencies, leveraging connected technology to create smarter hubs that work for city dwellers.

Welcome to the era of “smart” cities. Advances in wireless sensor systems, information and communication technology (ICT), and infrastructure allow cities to collect and curate huge amounts of data capable of sustaining and improving urban life thanks to the new and ever-growing web of connected technology: The Internet of Things (IoT).

Last year, Los Angeles became the first city in the world to synchronize its traffic lights — all 4,500 of them — reducing traffic time on major LA corridors by about 12 percent, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. In Singapore, city authorities are testing smart systems for managing parking and waste disposal to adjust to daily and weekly patterns. In New York City, mobile air pollution monitors help city leaders pinpoint those neighborhoods most affected by smog and pollutants, so residents can modify their commuting paths and preferred modes of transportation to avoid exposure to higher levels of pollution.

And cities across the U.S. — including Chicago, Seattle and Washington, D.C. — are hiring chief technology officers to oversee broad implementation of digital systems and technologies. As more and more city functions evolve from analog to digital, it makes sense for municipalities to put the improvement, functionality and security of those systems into one department. These city CTOs will quickly become indispensable cabinet positions.

So what does it take for a city to earn the “smart” moniker? Smart cities around the globe have many differences but importantly they share a few common traits. These cities invest in infrastructure and people in ways that lead to a more connected, better-informed and more-efficient environment. The dynamic use of knowledge to improve both the utilization of scarce resources and a higher quality of life for its citizens is the hallmark of a smart city.

Since the first Industrial Revolutions fueled the explosion in urban population growth, municipal governments have looked for ways to efficiently run services for densely located networks of people. The challenges of urban life have historically produced results that are less than adequate. But as sensors become more affordable and more ubiquitous, city officials have access to systems that their predecessors could never have imagined. Today, sensors are being used to monitor and dynamically adjust important public services, from parking availability to public transportation to snow removal to security.

IoT promises to put cities across the globe on the fast track to becoming “smart.” But we’re not there quite yet. The evolution of IoT involves three distinct phases. First, physical objects facilitate access to digital information. Second, physical objects are embedded with digital sensors to capture and transmit relevant information. And finally, physical objects receive digital prompts and cues which then alter the state of the physical object. This final stage will result in a seamless physical-digital sphere that holds tremendous promise in the building of smart cities.

As a society, we’re barely in the middle of phase one — most of our physical objects are not yet connected, though connection alone is not enough. Cities must also have the infrastructure for efficient data transactions: How information flows from Point A to Point B. Indeed, all city services are based on a calculation of where to expend precious resources. The more data available for these calculations, the more sophisticated and tailored they become. An example, driverless cars alone won’t solve a city’s traffic problems — but driverless cars that signal street sensors will give city officials the appropriate data to improve traffic patterns. This will require city governments to work in tandem with private companies, whether they manufacture cars or operate garbage dumps.

The challenges facing cities on the path to being “smart” are large and varied. It will require a new way of thinking — akin to mastering a new language. Nevertheless, modern cities everywhere are moving in one inexorable direction: Toward a future where city governance and urban living will be as connected as the functions on your smartphone.

Shawn DuBravac is the chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and the author of the forthcoming book “Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Work, Live and Communicate.” Follow him @ShawnDubravac.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.