CES 2015, Platform Edition (Part 2): The Internet of Things and Wearables

(This is part 2 of a two part review of CES)

In part one of our review of CES 2015, we discussed the Internet of Things and wearables. We now pick up where we left off with wearables apps in health and wellness.

Health, Wellness, Fitness, Sports

Under Armour made one of the more important platform announcements at this year’s CES. The sports apparel and footwear company launched UA Record, an app built off the same platform as MapMyFitness, which Under Armour acquired a year earlier. UA Record will link users in a fitness-minded digital community and link devices from brands such as HTC – announced at CES – and by all accounts, Samsung.

With Samsung controlling the nascent wearables market, a Samsung alliance with Under Armour makes a lot of sense in their battles against Apple and Nike. For smaller wearables brands and other hardware makers, the question of whether to simply plug into one of these platforms or if not, how to invest in a competing platform, will become increasingly urgent.

In the Mobile keynote, Philips Healthcare Informatics CEO Jeroen Tas predicted that in five years, a large part of the population will have some kind of wearable monitor and that products will have evolved from basic tracking to intervention. Chronic conditions and the elderly will drive this change. (We wonder, as did he, how data certification, with proper security and permissions, will evolve to support this.) In the near term, the greatest opportunity for startups will be helping people with specific conditions, such as “integrating glucometers with what [people] eat.

Beyond smart wristwear, one exciting wearable was the Muse headband by InteraXon, launched in August. The CES demo focused on meditation, but the quantified-self potential is bigger, especially after the launch of the Muse SDK last July. The promise of intervening to help prevent epileptic seizures based on early brain-signal detection would certainly fulfill Tas’s prediction.

Outside of health and wellness, our favorite wearable was Sony’s Action Cam 4k. The $500 model matches GoPro’s Hero 4 Black on specs and was launched with a lot of fanfare, including a test video by skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. Expect Sony’s Action Cam to anchor a new platform for sports enthusiasts and others using livestream video. Add to that Apple’s patent for what appears to be its own action cam, and it hasn’t been a good month for GoPro.

Finally, although not a wearable per se, the 94Fifty smart sensor basketball (with app) by InfoMotion was super cool and a much-deserved award winner. The Powered by InfoMotion software suite is full of potential as a platform for smaller, smarter connected fitness products, not to mention possible integrations with other categories such as augmented reality.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Speaking of augmented reality, AR and its cousin Virtual Reality (VR) were highlighted in CNET’s “Next Big Thing” SuperSession. AR continues to hold vague promise – despite the limited impact of Google Glass and Amazon Flow – and VR has gained momentum since Oculus’s quick rise from founding to acquisition by Facebook. But it’s still early days for both.

VR gets the buzz these days, with VR headsets (Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Sony Morpheus) slated for consumer launch in 2015. However, content creation in the early-adopter phase will be driven by gaming applications, and there will also be important limitations. These include price as well as technical challenges like dealing with streaming video or constraining equipment.

The equipment point is not a trivial one. As Jaunt VR CEO Jens Christensen pointed out, “Mobile is an amazing platform for VR. People are already walking around with $700 devices in their pockets. Mobile plays video very well. Over the next two years, most people will experience VR over mobile.” Meanwhile many important changes are happening in gesture recognition, including Apple’s late-2013 acquisition of PrimeSense (the company behind MicroSoft’s Kinect) and recent advances in precise, yet camera- and chip-agnostic gesture technology at Pebbles Interfaces.

These advances raise the possibility of gesture as a new computing platform to support VR (and AR). With Google Cardboard already costing less than $25, you should keep a close eye on this market.

Media

Last, but certainly not least, we come to Media. The biggest media-related news from CES 2015 was undoubtedly the announcement of Sling Television by Dish. Unbundling is officially here.

Sling managed to snag ESPN, and it will offer it along with ESPN2, CNN and another nine channels as part of a $20 per month live TV package. Sling’s over-the-top (OTT) TV app will be available just about everywhere except for Apple TV and Sony Playstation. What is the potential for other OTT platforms? What does this mean for others in the content ecosystem? Don’t touch that dial!

CES 2015 came and went in a hurry, and the innovation isn’t slowing. In the last week alone, we have seen the launch of Samsung’s first Tizen-powered phone, the Z1, the launch of Xiaomi’s Mi Note phablet to compete with the iPhone 6 Plus and Apple’s patent for a mountable camera designed for sports equipment.

It’s going to be a fun year. See you at MWC and SXSW…

Filed under: Platform Innovation | Topics: CES 2015, internet of things, platforms, Wearables