#022: Wearables, Measurement, and Monetization, Oh My! with David McBride

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. We apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

[00:00:26] Hello everyone. Welcome to the digital analytics power hour. This is Episode 22.

[00:00:32] Well today I’m excited we’re having a little bit of tangential conversation about the thing that you’re probably wearing on your right or left wrist that measures all your steps your heart rate and your bank account. That’s right. Don’t adjust your Fitbit. Don’t check for your steps. We’re talking about one aspect of the IoT Internet of Things it’s about wearable technology wearables measurement and monetization Omai and of course to help us cover a topic this broad and dense and awesome are bringing in a guest to help us with the conversation. But first let me bring in my two cohosts. Hailing from Columbus Ohio in the green trunks at two buck fifty.

[00:01:20] What is the measurement as we just thought and always up.

[00:01:24] Tim Wilson senior partner at web analytics or analytics demystified. Hello Tim. Hey Michael. And of course Jim Kane he started napkin. He started Babbage. He’s the CEO squared up in Ottawa Canada.

[00:01:39] Welcome Tim’s a buck fifty. I’m like What. Thirty five pounds. It was kilograms. But yes. Nice. Great. Now I got it. OK. But like I said we have a guest and I want to introduce him.

[00:01:52] David McBride most of you know him from the always awesome UN summit conference that happens right before Dhobi summit each year in March but by day he is the marketing director of data and cloud services at Intel Corporation. And in that role he takes on the challenge of figuring out how to measure wearable technology. Welcome David.

[00:02:17] Thanks. Good to be here guys.

[00:02:19] You said in he said in Intel Intel.

[00:02:23] That’s a little yeah there a fast growth startup that are out for a couple of years are out a little for a little while yet Santa Clara. They tend to lay claim to more as little things like that. All right Tim. Jim David let’s jump into this. The wearables space covers a lot of ground. So where do we want to start. I don’t know where you guys want to start. Let’s start with the question of what is what constitutes a wearable like what would be a wearable device obviously like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch. Would those both be wearables. Those are wearable stuff. Awesome. We’re on the right track. What about the earring that has GPS location. Absolutely. It’s that exist. Think I don’t know but I’m thinking about it right. And I thought this would be a really great thing to invent. Think you can buy them in the NSA store.

[00:03:15] What was there. There were some little one of the articles that was kind of skinny and prope had the little the little tattoo like the hat like the temporary tattoo type wearable.

[00:03:24] I guess I didn’t want it did you have heard it that I can’t remember. These are all really interesting things. So a lot of the development in wearables right now is coming out of Kickstarter because democratized the access to funding. And so you’re getting things like temperature patches needles that are really they don’t go all the way into your skin but they can sense bodily fluid levels and and and transmit them over to to your thought. It is you’ve got. Oh good. Go ahead.

[00:03:56] Well you say kickstarter is that because really but kind of by definition it has to be something small relatively simple and compact and it’s kind of who comes up with the combination of sensor sensors plus processor plus application. And there’s just kind of an infinite range. As things get smaller and smaller like like why is Kickstarter kind of the the place where they’re cropping up. I’m

[00:04:21] not sure entirely. Go ahead.

[00:04:23] Yeah it’s because so many of the wearables are so very very niche use that you couldn’t mass audience them so you can use Kickstarter to go to your core stakeholder audience you know like if you were to take most wearables are so so specific in terms they could single use single group. I was shown one month or so ago that’s designed for people with poor posture and it has an iPhone app that helps you correct your posture. And it’s really really neat that you’re not on one it’s great. It’s really really I have brutal posture I’m looking at one right now. But it’s a very very specific audience for that kind of product. Kickstarter is great at going after a niche I think a lot of those wearable tools are coming up there. I don’t know if you think I’m not on that or not. I think it’s good. I got it right.

[00:05:07] I think there’s also potentially the concept that a lot of these devices are coming out of people who are sort of tinkerers or makers and it’s just you know they might not have access to capital they or they think they want more control or you know that’s a good way to start or to get sort of a prefunding round go to Kickstarter you can move pretty quickly. You can test the quality of your idea really quickly. I think it’s probably a combination of these things but there’s some really interesting innovative ideas not just on Kickstarter but you know from a variety of corners.

[00:05:40] Interesting and also obviously wearables are in technology kind of that next frontier you know we’re really as a society starting to really grow in the adoption of them as well. So it’s not just in Silicon Valley. I mean there’s some that are famously kind of you know weren’t successful like the Google vagal or Google Glass but you know the fit it in other sports related ones you know a lot a lot of people are using now and those are the consumer applications.

[00:06:08] There’s also a lot of potential enterprise markets so you can imagine a warehouse worker being aided by what could be a head worn wearable like Google Glass or directional indicator on their wrist or something like that so they can find something on a shelf that has applications in the medical field as well where nurses might not know exactly where to pick up something but you know they can be directed to a certain closet and they can find the bandage that they need to find or whatever. And that’s that’s kind of exciting you can think about enterprise applications and accessing a building like authentication. There’s a bunch of a wide range of applications not just in the consumer space.

[00:06:46] And I’ll bet you a shiny new American nickel that in the next couple of years there’s going to be a health insurance plan tied to a wearable. Well no. I mean there are a carry yourself.

[00:06:56] There already are. I mean they believe Michael that you’ve found one that was talking about the wellness programs can you get your break on your insurance if you’re.

[00:07:04] Yeah as part of the Affordable Care Act insurance companies now can use wellness programs as a way to dictate who’s rates will be a certain point and wearables are very much a point of that.

[00:07:16] So you know my insurance happens to be through Humana and I can take my Fitbit and integrate it into that wellness plan. And so every time I get my steps in it goes in and gives me points in that plan which takes me to a certain level of wellness which then changes my rates on insurance potentially over time. So yeah absolutely.

[00:07:36] I feel like I was thinking of wearables as the base of all the bits and all those derivatives are heavily collecting collecting data of you or your immediate environment.

[00:07:50] But David you mentioned like the factory worker it seems like some of those are there’s very little about the immediate location.

[00:07:58] And a lot of the data is actually coming the other direction that you may have a process that is central is actually pushing data to the user as opposed to recording data about the user.

[00:08:09] Is that a fair distinction. Yeah I think that’s a distinction but I think that in many cases what we’ll see is future evolution accommodating both of those paths in the same in the same device or on the same person. So if you imagine I met one of my favorite wearables or augmented reality kinds of environments is Jarvis from Iron Man and Jarvis provides information to Tony Stark but I think he’s also able to take in the surrounding information and store it and stark. Obviously that’s not an exciting part about the movie but it could go back and provide provide a platform for analysis later on as well.

[00:08:51] So I guess that I mean Jarvis is really kind of just a logical extension of Siri right. So if you if instead of your phone it was your phone was a little bit more wearable it was in your ear or on your head and it was a little faster and a little smarter and a little better. Even though it’s been out now for a month or so we’ll see if iOS 9 the where the jury really lands on whether the Siri improvements there or what they are. But I guess that’s that’s kind of your. Once you achieve the singularity the computer the robots will be able to control us by.

[00:09:23] Through wearables and you for one will welcome them. And I already have.

[00:09:27] I’ve seen Terminator Manneh I’m not welcoming anybody.

[00:09:32] Well that’s I mean that’s actually kind of a whole other area which is sort of the data that wearables generate to who’s better for whose benefit will be generated and who gets it.

[00:09:44] Are there emerging standards in terms of the way that that data gets collected and things like that. So I mean one example is Google Analytics universal analytics protocol is a good platform to potentially capture data for any of these kinds of things however. Is that what wearable technology companies are doing are building proprietary models. Is there any emergence of any semblance of order in that space. Have you seen we’d like that.

[00:10:12] We talked about a variety of different sensors and companies on the wrist on the head you know hanging from your ear could be in your handbag. There’s also a variety of business models that are coming into play and we kind of touched on a few of those. We’re seeing a variety of architectures of mechanisms for collecting and storing and retrieving and querying visualizing this whole stream of data that we have. For those of us who have spent time in the digital marketing ecosystem we’re kind of used to JavaScript software as a service log. There’s obviously innovation and there’s exciting things happening and data processing more and more people are using a variety of query tools. But I think we’re in a more I guess a less mature space on the wearable side of things it’s sort of backed up several years where it feels like we’re maybe back in the logfile days a little bit in the sense that there’s just a ton of different ways that one can collect data and store it forward and it really depends on the needs and can be driven by the business model of the device or the hardware or the functional characteristics of the device. Google Analytics could potentially be a place to store that but you could just put it up in in one of the many data warehouse tools available on Amazon. Maybe you have a device that goes as its own cell phone contract or maybe you require the device to be tethered to a smartphone that can run through an SDK send the data out to interview us or any other cloud kind of system. So it’s pretty open right now.

[00:11:41] I don’t know that at this point we could say that there’s one model that’s going to win there’s going to be some innovation.

[00:11:47] I think that it sounds like you’re actually thinking of it that it’s the business model is very interrelated with the decisions on the collection transport aggregation storage like you and maybe this goes back to where you said we’re if it’s not particularly mature and it’s kind of the tinkerers.

[00:12:04] There are a lot of people throwing a lot of models at the model kind of capital M that is business model and technical model like if not just the data model was how am I was the model for this entire thing to work and it does seem like those two have to be very much in alignment or you know the thing probably collapses if you don’t have a method for getting money with connecting to users consumers or enterprise. That makes sense but then also overlays with whatever kind of supporting infrastructure you need to layer on the collection storage and use of that data for something that seems like it’s a wearable it’s small and simple then it’s actually really complex to figure out how the conceptual pieces fit together to build that say that there’s so much that can and should can change.

[00:12:54] There is a bit of a paradox of choice in terms of what should things look like. But that’s also that gives the developers the hardware software a good amount of freedom. I’d like to say that that means that everybody’s approaching the creation of these devices much like everyone always creates their websites by thinking about the purpose first before we’re going to build a new landing page because nobody ever builds landing pages without thinking of the purpose of tilting the landing pad you read or websites and entire websites.

[00:13:21] So it’s good digital marketing so much more mature than so.

[00:13:25] So maybe wearables can learn from all of those lessons that digital marketing has figured out now.

[00:13:30] But you know it’s not at all uncommon to for us to the product development world in the world of space to encounter the same kinds of challenges that we’re all familiar with from a Web site or a mobile app development perspective where sometimes we put the cart for the horse in terms of you know what should we be building first. We should be thinking about how are we going to make money from this thing. And sometimes we don’t actually do that to the extent they should.

[00:13:53] DAVID Can I call you David. Absolutely lovely. Thank you. So the thing I was thinking per the Kickstarter conversation earlier is that unlike a lot of large businesses that have a website and they’re treated as kind of corner of the marketing department. Most wearable companies are smaller shops and therefore they’re chasing money and therefore they do nothing but talk about monetization. So you know I would wonder if they’ve got almost too near a cash to focus on how much money do we make this month and not enough of a focus on how can we leverage this data for product management metrics. You know we added a new feature that anyone use it did lead to longer usage did lead to more frequent usage that kind of stuff. Is that what you’re seeing is it just how many more of these jimmy jams did we sell and not enough on how many people are deriving ongoing value.

[00:14:43] I hear the initial conversation tends to be around the hardware and how many can we saw. What should the price point be. And then you start to get into conversations around the hardware includes the software in that particular piece of it because you can’t operate the hardware without the software. And so those development efforts are kind of lumped together the data often becomes or the metrics of the analysis of that data is a bit of an afterthought in many cases. I’m not saying this is the case everywhere because like you said there’s a bunch of companies out there some of them very large and that maybe they don’t like this. My sense is that you have then after you’ve talked about price points you’ve got and how many are you going to sell. Then you start to think about OK well how are we going to improve this thing and you start to think about metrics that are almost like a heatmap for a Web site like how much does this button get pushed or how much does the feature use or what’s the repeat usage frequency.

[00:15:33] But so far in my limited exposure I haven’t really seen a lot of those conversations upfront. It’s more about the device and what new and interesting things can we do with the device. And one more thing I’ll add there you mentioned that a comment that there’s a lot of companies out there wearables companies and I guess if you looked at each one of them it’s probably a long tail in terms of volume and so in that case there are a lot of them I would guess that the head is pretty big in terms of fit that Apple jawbone Google through the Android Wear platform.

[00:16:00] And so there’s there’s still these very large entities at the head of this as wearables tail you know it and other thing that’s sort of always crosses my mind is obviously not every company is going to get us all to where their device. So you know let’s say I have a lot of brand loyalty to you know for companies. Do each of those companies need to establish their own wearable for me. And how many could we be reasonably expected to sort of like how many brands do you keep these apps on your phone in the same way and besides watches which sort of are following the application model of phones. DC wearables actually crossing over brands more or they are standalone platforms for the most part and are people talking about being more universally useful. Does that make sense.

[00:16:46] I don’t know that question yes so since I think it makes sense. I think every time I go to a conference or anyone talks about either Internet of Things or wearables there’s always a graph that’s up into the right and there’s numbers like 20 billion or 50 billion or 100 billion devices by 2020. You want or whatever and that means that in the future right after we get our flying cars there’s going to be lots of devices and we’re not going to get them from a single manufacturer. That’s if it’s going to work if we actually are going to see that many devices come into play for us personally. There’s going to have to be some mixing and matching from maybe from an actual kind of a they’re going to have to sit next to each other and restore they’re going to have to not overdo the way they talk to your phone. Maybe they’re they’re going to see standardization or just common ways of of setting them up or extracting data into a common platform.

[00:17:36] We’re not there yet. We’re right now we’re at a place where there are a bunch of wearables and you could certainly fill up your rest but people there mostly duplicative in their application and so people may have one or maybe sometimes you run into somebody that has won on interest. But I think over time we’re going to see innovation in sensors. We’re going to see innovation in the types of information that can be collected from a variety of different devices and that’s going to mean that there will be multiple devices per user. And so you’ve got unique visitor type identification kinds of issues. Unfortunately unlike cookies you probably are going to have an account with many of these that even that could be cumbersome but anyway there’s some form of authentication so you can establish who are those users.

[00:18:13] So what’s what are the likely candidates for to be the 3C not that that has been fantastic for the web and marketing but is there likely are there already. I’m sure there are multiple mobile associations. Is there kind of a clear emerging when it comes to standards for data storage mobile collection sensor interoperability. Is that is that still 3 5 7 years down the road or is that kind of right on the media horizon.

[00:18:45] You know I think it’s down the road a bit. It will probably evolve with some industries in mind like healthcare you might see some standards emerge there and there is an organization came under the name offhand that is sort of encouraging the development of a common framework from a data perspective specifically for healthcare kind of a line in line with the patients should own their data.

[00:19:06] They should have access to their chart. I was at a conference not too long ago and a wearable tech conference. There are conferences besides digital marketing conferences. I was shocked to find out. And so I decided to go to one. And they they they have lobbied ours too. And somebody was saying they were talking about how important it is to have sort of devices that can fit together. And I thought that that sort of fit in terms of sort of use cases and they actually like fabrics like sometimes you’re going to have to make it so the connectors are following a common standard so I thought that was interesting. So I asked the question Well is there anybody out there who is sort of espousing standards and what they be for physical connectors or for data export. And they didn’t know where I worked. And they said you know what I’m not aware of anyone doing that. But you should talk to somebody at Intel because they’re really good about standards.

[00:19:57] And you’ve been wandering the halls for the last six months now trying to find that person trying to find out who’s standards are you’re going to find out it’s you. Apparently so.

[00:20:10] You know I don’t know if Antil is going to actually be at the center of this but I think one thing that Intel has done well in other parts of its business over the course of its history is to get groups together and create standards so that development can be fostered in other areas. So maybe we’ll end up playing a role here.

[00:20:25] I’m intrigued by the concept of yeah being able to wear my one device but choosing the brands that it interacts with. So if I walk into a retail store with my Fitbit on there can be sort of a back and forth of data that can be shared at that particular moment in time.

[00:20:41] Anyway just interesting that’s really interesting but that that one seems like you look at Apple and Google is kind of the two that have said we’ve had. And I think David you were saying oh it’s like the iPhone model when you’ve got this app world and brands can try to say oh they’ve got the hardware in their hands I’m going to try to be a brand and provide an app on this. This is kind of it requires sort of an openness on the front of the wearable physical hardware and software to some degree maker and a brand whereas struggle is at work with a lot of digital marker marketers. And there seems to be kind of a back a risk aversion combined with a lack of vision to say we’re going to jump on that up wagon or that Fitbit wagon or that insert wearable and we’re probably going to have to throw a few different things at the wall to see what sticks. But how. Like how does product management. We’re developing a product that does X and we’re one company developing that and trying to monetize it meet up with marketers at a brand that say we can interact with that. It just seems like it winds up with people having ideas that they connect and then make happen across multiple companies it seems hard to imagine pulling off.

[00:22:02] I think I think that’s right. I think if it’s going to happen it might have something to do with the device itself and maybe some wow factor around a device where someone who is a product manager might be wearing a wearable device and they’re working on marketing related projects and realized that their body odor and marketing has a similar device to have a conversation around it and maybe that unlocks some interaction. I think that you know I’ve observed over the course of my career people who are not data people per se they’re not an analysts or to analytics. Maybe there are more on the product side. They just want to build really good products and they know that data can help them do that better so they form good relationships with people on the athletics team. So they become very data stude and conversative are data analytical oriented people who realize that working in the product field is pretty fun. And so there’s this cross pollination over time. I think that if one side is going to drive it I think revenue for the company might be a great motivator. So you might see a device being a not necessarily a channel in the sense that it’s an iPhone screen but he’s got information about consumer behavior so that it becomes a bit of a channel maybe it feeds into the CRM system and you can tell how frequently or how long ago someone wore your product or interacted with your store or if it’s if it’s not even a product that brand made then you could market them appropriately because you know that that information is captured in the CRM system.

[00:23:24] That’s a very sophisticated view. I mean I’ve been trying to close a wearables company for a couple of years and I haven’t had access to the five companies and the friends I’ve been talking to the longtail the two things that I have learned about wearables companies. The first one is that most of them don’t use their product as a platform. It as a product. So Tim’s example earlier about you know what if you know Nike decided to push something to your Fitbit whenever you went into a shoe store. Let’s think back to the future. Compared to what most companies think of they go literally build a product that helps your posture and that’s what we do. It’s not a platform it’s a product. The other thing is that you know day that you’ve you’ve got to be at some of these conferences feeling like you’re shut up in a masters class full of 5 year olds. When you talk about data because you know most most wearables companies are in the pre web trends airier from a measurement perspective. So you get servers full of data. Yes. Why do you have it. Product availability did you know that you could make a shitload more money and get a competitive edge with it. Hadn’t thought about it and literally these are the conversations that I had been having with some of these companies because with the measurement protocols Michael is talking a lot earlier in google you could actually take an online acquisition and carry it right from cradle to grave through through usage with the product.

[00:24:38] And I brought that up with a few companies before and it wasn’t even like wow that’s cool it was like why would I want to do that. Right.

[00:24:45] So I don’t know if you find I guess I just wanted to talk for a while but it seems like you have a well platform versus product.

[00:24:54] I mean we’ve looked at it with social media came out and we looked at it and still do say Twitter Facebook and Google are all sitting just in there in their core search or social media function. Everybody says they are sitting on a massive amount of data that if they mine that data there is value in the data itself. And I think Jim earlier you were saying well you’re looking at a product how to monetize that how to sell more of my physical wearable that comes with some sort of software and have a business model that fits on top of that is there are there are companies out there saying are we can we can give away the wearable. Because if we get enough mass adoption the data that our wearables collecting is getting value for the consumer and we’re collecting anonymized data. And now we’ve got this rich dataset of what types of people of what types of blood pressure or physical activity or dietary intake or clothing preferences are doing when and where and that datasource we could become you know the next Nealson or what Facebook or Twitter could be. The people are kind of somehow terrified that they could be. Is there a model out there or are there companies right now that may be and say oh yes there are these three companies that are trying to do exactly that which is the wearable is just an investment to collect the data that’s delivering value that people will say Sure I’ll take this for free or next to nothing and in return it’s back to that whole what’s the value of my personal data. And that’s that’s the transaction.

[00:26:26] And now you’ve built that data repository you get my two cents as I’ve seen a few companies like that but you really need to think of the wearables market and David feel free to call bullshit on me. But it seems to me like the wearables market is where digital marketing and I know what you think you can make a giver and even let me finish just I’m just okay just in general I just didn’t like it.

[00:26:45] Everything you’ve said in the first 22 episodes are actually thing.

[00:26:49] Now you mention it I have a wearable that gets me unlimited free healthcare.

[00:26:53] It’s called a Canadian passport last year. So what I was what I was doing. But you might think you’re one of them. Can I finish. Can I finish. Can I finish.

[00:27:06] Oh really fine. But yeah go ahead.

[00:27:08] I can’t finish what are you going to say. Is that the majority of Internet of Things companies. The Internet piece is where the app lives. That’s the user interface piece but really most of the wearables companies that at least I’ve talked to are the equivalent of digital marketing organizations in 1997. And that’s not to say they’re like ass backwards or anything they’re just not a place organizationally where they want to even try and take advantage of the data five years from now. Everything Tim said is going to start to be how people think but I haven’t seen it. DAVID I don’t know if you agree.

[00:27:39] So I think that people are very data stupid now and so the concept of us being the you know the late 90s kind of era relative to digital marketing is I think accurate except for the fact that people now know that there is value in them their data hills they don’t know what it is but there is a bit of a data land grab going on and so they’re looking at a variety of business models and maybe they haven’t brought anything to market. Maybe they haven’t been able to execute on the concepts but I guarantee you there are whiteboard conversations going on all over the place saying you know what if we gave away the device and we harvested the data we could do it in a transparent way we could provide value point x y and z. The customer benefits consumer benefits we’ve got to. I think that’s like you say that’s a forward looking kind of thing and maybe that’s a vision that will never come into fruition but I think that given the variety of devices and sensors and software and business models means that eventually we’re going to see that I’m not aware of any of that are fully executing on that scale right now.

[00:28:39] I agree with your assessment that the primary focus is initially on the product and the hardware and selling the units and getting the cost down as low as possible so that you can compete getting as many features into the device or into the software so that you can you’ve got a differentiable offering but I don’t think we’re that far away from these sorts of data oriented business model innovations.

[00:29:00] Yeah in a certain sense you know you can get a quote unquote free wearable for your car because the insurance company gets a lot of really great data and that helps them understand your rate how your rate should be structured for insurance. So I mean that’s one example where there are quote unquote free products out there for your car for your car. Progressive will send you a little thing that measures all of your driving. You just plug it into your ODBC to connect to your car or whatever it’s called. I think that’s what it’s called. I don’t remember what it’s called. That might be wrong but there is a data connector in your car that if you plug it in then progressive gets all this data about how you drive how fast you go how fast you stop how fast you start. And they use that to generate your rate and you can just go and say hey I like one of those and I’ll mail it to you. The question also becomes as soon as we find out that there is a public good available how soon before some sort of wearable is almost mandatory we know that cell phones aren’t there.

[00:30:00] Well most of the stuff does cell phone count is not technically a wearable right.

[00:30:04] That’s not considered a word that’s too big because you can put it down. Got it. No I mean it’s just interesting because of the way you know the way that it trends. If it’s if it’s really good for you then it will give it away for free.

[00:30:15] But then if you still want to wear one maybe you should wear one anyway or at least your kid has to wear it while they’re in school or something like that to try to bring it back to data though about one of the original things Tim said is the danger to abuse the API in wearables. Data Capture like we generate some API as are personally identifiable information for somebody listening but we get a little bit of that as data analysts or web data analysts but we don’t have access to tons and tons of it at the wearable level it’s the opposite in a lot of cases it’s all deeply personal information. Like I just found it maybe you guys already know this but you can actually go to Google if you have an android phone and it’ll tell you a map of everywhere you’ve been as your phone’s been on.

[00:30:56] Oh yeah I remember that. Of course I’m not allowed to have an android phone because I work for an artist to mystified and I’d be a work things I’d be getting mercilessly ridiculed for six hours a day.

[00:31:07] I think it’s better that aggressively applied over a hamburger. Yeah.

[00:31:10] I mean you know I’ve seen that one for Google but that’s just an example. You know imagine if it was something that captured your heart rate your sleep habits and your diet habits and I mean that just seems deeply deeply personal and almost none of it is stuff that we would be able to do analysis on at least the way we do right now. It’s one of the things that I think is interesting about wearables. We get a little pie but then a lot of more like marketer information like we have a much better understanding of intent than than a wearable analyst would whereas a wearable analyst can literally say How well do people sleep what are their heart rates. I mean it doesn’t get more personal.

[00:31:45] You know what we have. We have mechanisms for you know you put in your credit card and that gets what is it. It gets hashed or what have you. More technical people like it seems like there’s technology has been around for a long time that has said we can take the stuff that could be really dangerous but that’s historically been your Social Security number and in the states or your credit card information and there is a way to shove that database where you can make it reason that we open to your internal analyst to manage that however they want and they’re not going to get to the to look it up with their next door neighbors you know bought on Amazon last week. Where is there. Is that going to be the model. I mean it’s going to be. We’re going to get old and die and our level of hey we’re analysts so we’re kind of cool with data collection I’ll give it mine because I think it’s cool what we can do with other people’s. But you take our kids and the people but the kids between our kids and us and there’s more and more comfort we’re saying you know what. There’s more upside than downside and it’s just kind of a waiting game before that becomes less of an issue.

[00:32:54] I mean the creepy factor notwithstanding and I do think it’s deeply creepy. I’m currently sitting inside a Farraday cage reading a manifesto on birchbark. But because Canadian I think it’s creepy but whether or not you’re comfortable giving up your P.I. the type of analysis that you can do as someone that’s doing Internet of Things data versus type of analysis you can do on someone who’s got Web site data.

[00:33:21] To me it’s literally two ends of the spectrum. One is looking at everyone in the store and the other one is looking at one person up really really close and you can do things in aggregate. But the real value is at the personal level.

[00:33:35] I think I don’t know what do you guys think this is for me a little bit of a session that I went to at Adobe summit. In fact I think it might have been the only session I actually went to the last Adobe summit that was around the topic of privacy. They had a stellar panel of people from government a couple of lawyers and one of the first slides they put up there was that when it relates to your privacy policy that transparency is very important that you need to state what you will do and then you need to do what you say you will do or not do what you say you won’t do and I haven’t if this was all there or not but the other component that came to mind was clear and your definitions. So all of those principles are going to apply here probably even more so because of sensitive personal nature of the day.

[00:34:25] Totally and I almost wonder now that we’re talking about it if you know one of the big next steps in Internet of Things data will be less around letting people like us do analysis and more about just plugging all that data into something like an X plus one or an individual level personalization engine like instead of analyzing everything I see everything you do individually. We’re going to just use it as an upset cross-sell engine in the app experience because why. Why do analysis. We’ve got we’ve got all your crap pointer point a robot.

[00:34:53] I for one welcome our robot overlords. Yeah. No I think we could go on for quite a while only because there’s so much and so many directions. Technology and the measurement can take. So one quick question. I think we probably should wrap up but what are some resources or what are some resources where people could learn more or understand better kind of what’s going on or what’s on the cutting edge of this. I don’t know David if you have any off the top of your head that you could mention for our listeners.

[00:35:25] There are a few people on Twitter who blog or tweet frequently about wearable devices and you see some interesting comments about wearable innovation scroll through my feed here and invariably one of them will come up and you know I go back to the maker thing.

[00:35:42] It’s fun to look at Kickstarter. I think it’s not at all difficult to find some interesting sensors. And if this then that is interesting to look at from a sort of a software component of aggregating that sort of thing and maker fairs are interesting. You know you’re going to find things that aren’t terribly professional. A lot of times that sometimes you will. It’s also pretty common to see companies like Intel be pretty vocal about what they’re doing in the space.

[00:36:13] Intel are Qualcomm.

[00:36:15] They’re all pretty active here. In addition to the obvious candidates like following Google Apple and jawbone and those guys the medium and medium ups create really interesting. In addition think about the MIT Media Lab that they’ve been doing this kind of stuff forever. We’re all kind of Johnny come lately here compared to how long they’ve been at it.

[00:36:34] Way to plug your alma mater there and walked to that building. They looked at me with scorn.

[00:36:40] Oh the guy who writes a lot of tweets coming across is Tom Amarin at T O N E R I C H. What does he do. I met him at one of his conferences.

[00:36:52] He’s kind of a wearable tech advocate and adviser. He was founded an entity called We Are wearables and he’s Canadian.

[00:37:01] What are we see lives in Canada. What is the link I’m already.

[00:37:06] What is kind of a superhigh obviously not trying to get anything proprietary but kind of what Intel’s role and where is it the providing the small enough with enough functionality hardware to enable other wearables. Is it actually building wearables on their own. Is it both. Is it hindered.

[00:37:27] So our strategy right now is twofold. On one hand we’re doing we’re creating custom devices for top notch high end brands. We created device last year with a fashion boutique called Opening Ceremony and it was a wrist worn bracelet that had its own cell phone contracts. But instead of being technically oriented it was very fashion oriented in its design and on the underside it was a curved screen that was touch sensitive where you could see your g mail and get updates on yelp and a variety of other things so that we’ve announced deals with tag coir together with Google for a watch. We got a deal announced with Luxottica with their Oakley division. So these are and fossil is a big one. And so do you get into it’s traditional traditional wearable non non wearable wearables partnering using the tech to actually introduce kind of the wearable technology aspect more broadly sort of advocate for what’s possible not just with a technically minded audience but with one that’s interested in fashion and how it looks because these devices are so personal they sort out your body they should look they should be an expression of who you are in your fashion sense. So that’s that’s one part. The other part of the world is embodied a small system on a ship called that we’ve codenamed Curie that our CEO showed to the world at siestas last January and we continue to talk about. So that’s a very small chip with a processor and a pattern recognition engine on it radio for communication out to a companion device a battery and you can envision that going into a variety of small products.

[00:39:08] And so the strategy is to get that into as many devices as possible.

[00:39:12] So just to be that potentially that’s going to have a price point of view than that you’re hoping shows up in a bunch of Kickstarter projects people say this is the underlying show but we’re hooking in the sensors and those sensors as well.

[00:39:29] We haven’t disclosed pricing on that yet. So you know obviously your example is just hypothetical but the concept could be could be for Kickstarter markets but it also could be for very large companies who are interested in building device device just like there’s a rich component.

[00:39:45] I mean yeah I wasn’t. I literally have no I it’s like it would be like the Raspberry Pi wearables right.

[00:39:52] The Raspberry Pi is is so so for that part. Kind of focus on the maker world. Yeah but this would be more like what it was traditionally done in the West. Oh yeah was like Lenovo or Adell. So our technology has been inside of these products that connect once assembled can go off into really exciting things.

[00:40:13] All right well this has been a really great conversation. I’d like to go around really quick and maybe get everybody. Tell the audience listening what are your favorite wearable is and maybe some of the things you took away from the conversation today. Maybe we’ll start with you Jim.

[00:40:28] I wish we covered more today and maybe we can get talking about it and the Facebook page and Twitter and measures slack which I log into once a month whether any Jew or not is again the overlap which we didn’t really touch on today between digital analysts do and how it extends into a wearable technology.

[00:40:46] I was hoping we cover a little bit more around again how how product managers are and want to use the data that they’re already generating and how we can find some of their direct connections between against someone who buys online and then uses a product like that both cradle to grave to me is very very interesting. And that’s something I think about. It’s something you know again as measured mentioned with the measurement protocol in GA is totally doable and I’d love to see some examples of it.

[00:41:14] If anybody had any that’s my revenue I’ll go a different route and something I meant to mention at the very beginning. And it’s a little bit of a question and it’s a little bit of a testament to my age and early onset dementia was a Fitbit One of the giveaways that UN summit this year.

[00:41:30] I don’t think we did that this year last year or the year before 2013. Pretty sure we gave away that K.

[00:41:36] I was at a conference maybe I just attend two mini conferences. I definitely scored a bad ass little remote helicopter with an HD camera and some it right before heading to Spring Break in Florida with my kids. So that was fantastic but at some conferences year I will end up with a Fitbit which my 13 year old war for about two weeks and like 12000 steps every day. You know I’m like I’ve been wearing it for three months and I’m about to hit 12000 steps total. But so it goes. No I enjoyed this. I feel like we talked sports which is a little off the beaten path. Not necessarily core on our last episode and we’re talking you know wearables which is also a little off the beaten path you know off the core and I fantastically enjoyed both conversations and it’s kind of interesting trying to wrap my head around all of the moving parts for something that on the one hand seems kind of simple. But it’s actually not. And I think to me going back to what David said early on about the business model meeting the product the hardware and the software those are kind of inherently bundled tightly tightly together is kind of most intriguing thing to me. And then kind the Jim to your point the how that matched how that meets up with marketing where it is where does marketing meet product in a deeper way in this space is going to be really interesting to watch.

[00:43:04] Yeah I concur. I think all of us in the digital analytics space will find more and more intersections with this as time goes on. We’re just getting started. So yeah I’m excited to see what happens I certainly think we know both the products the platforms and the measurement capabilities. We’re just starting to scratch the surface. So yeah very future bright.

[00:43:26] What about you David so you guys declined to mention your favorite wearables so I’ll put one out there and I’m going to bleed Intel blue here and cite a product that we launched earlier this year or last year done by S.A.S. audio and it’s a set of headphones that actually through the ear through that part that fits in your ear can measure your heartbeat your heart rate and then that feeds into your phone.

[00:43:52] It’s pretty cool right. M S audio audio. So I like that one.

[00:43:56] As far as takeaways you know it’s really interesting for me because I am swimming Nissy Day in and day out and to have a conversation with with you guys to hear you kind of hit on some of the key issues that we that we wrestle with it is really sort of validating for some of my pain where I wonder after a day of little progress.

[00:44:18] Now I know why because it’s there’s so many issues for us to reconcile and and figure out it’s just kind of a wider blind scale. What are the business model or sort of the relationships between data people and product people. I think that one thing we didn’t touch on too much but that is a common theme is the fact that these devices unless there’s a reason for the consumer to continue to use them they end up in the top drawer of the nightstand after a little while because I think largely because once you get used to your heart rate you kind of know the range that it’s in or maybe you don’t want to know the information. So for those of us in the business it’s incumbent upon us to come up with a product feature ecosystem whether that be from data or recommending Sions or something else that that keeps it fresh and exciting new and keeps it out of the top drawer and actually reminds me of Michelle kiss had heard you had a comment.

[00:45:07] So there’s some stat of like 50 percent of your fitness wearables are pretty much put in the drawer after within six months or within three months.

[00:45:15] And B OK you’ve confirmed that I’m fat and lazy. Thank you very much. You know the need you need to give me works on my phone. You know three times a day. Reaffirming that I’m still still fat lazy.

[00:45:27] Well and that’s the challenge I mean there’s ways to create communities around the Fitbit and things like that. So I think to the extent that people do that the more likely they are to kind of stick with it maybe anyway. What about you the listener. What do you think. We’d love to hear from you on our Facebook page or on Twitter or on the measure slack. Drop us a line. Hit David McBride up on Twitter. Now of course as soon as I say that I can’t roll his Twitter handle is. But I think it’s trance class yep at tranced class yes.

[00:45:59] And so check him out. Follow him on Twitter. David I mentioned at the top of the show the unsung man but anything else going on that you’d want our listeners to know about that’s happening in your world event wise or analytics wise.

[00:46:16] This is kind of like when Stephen Colbert hired Joe Biden on the other night and tried to get him to declare his candidacy for president. Yeah nice try cold beer.

[00:46:25] But I’m actually going to declare my candidacy for president. Are you going to get to get emotional about that. No I’m not. Michael knows.

[00:46:34] So I am excited to say that even though Adobe is moving to Las Vegas they can’t shake on summit or follow them to Las Vegas. We are going to have the UN summit.

[00:46:43] They’re still nailing down a venue and time and date and all that stuff as it has always been in the past the past. What we’ve done in five years now we are likely to do it the day of the first of its kind of a welcoming session. I think that’s actually scheduled for Tuesday so looks for that. It’s a great opportunity to get to know people and network with some kind of create a smaller cohort of people before you go to the bigness of the of the Adobe summit. So me more information there at our Web page. And you know my Twitter handle on stuff like that is there a bar there.

[00:47:16] We can do a live recording would be awesome for you.

[00:47:19] We will make one makeup and you’re going to come to your first Adobe marketing summit.

[00:47:24] Jim Kane if that’s what it takes.

[00:47:26] That’s what I want the summit and that focuses on short pithy succinct concise sessions so I think we might be entirely disqualified.

[00:47:36] We could do the UN summit in the barn next door for three days leading up to the 20 minute session.

[00:47:43] I think both Michael and Tim presented it as past years on. So that was a big coup. So Jim if we could get you there this year it would be the trifecta.

[00:47:51] The result was a coup for us the great trifecta. Well there’s nothing like following Tim Wilson to make me look at a conference. Wait who won.

[00:48:00] Who won. Who won that thing. The metrics the what was it called when they threw it a random topic and random slides and you had to talk.

[00:48:07] I won that yes but handily. Which presenter would I rather have. I was filed somewhere underneath the guide said lunches served.

[00:48:17] And will cut all our right. Well great. Well hey thanks everyone.

[00:48:21] It’s been a pleasure David. Thank you so much for taking the time and talking to us. I think this is a really interesting topic to Tim’s point. Our last episode being about analytics and sports in this episode being about wearables and analytics. We’re definitely you know taking on some of the fringes of the space. But I still think very interesting for all of our listeners. Again thank you. Thanks Tim and Jim. And for all of our listeners out there keep analyzing.

[00:48:53] Thanks for listening. And don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions. Facebook dot com slash now or I don’t know on Twitter. You want to meet up for.

[00:49:12] Work. And I’m like all these people. Can get a little weird. Now there is something really over to my tongue. It was really sharp. He proactively reached out and said hey I’ve been listening to the podcast. Why do you guys sound so terrible awful mercilessly ridiculed for six hours a day. We will neither confirm nor deny. When does it get serious again. We don’t even like doing this. Ted Millies there’s only so much Nickelback I can listen to on the way to work. Oh my. Because I love hearing the sound of my voice. I would rather be waterboarded. You’re and. I hope it’s the intermission music from the Holy Grail. Think back to the future to.

[00:50:01] Rock flag in wearables.

 

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