The Uncomfortable Middle Ground: Part 1

Call it what you will – the Internet of Things, enchanted objects, or the connected world – most of us have been plugged into the digital network for longer than we think.

This week I’ve been immersing myself in all things connected as IBM opened the doors to their stunning new Watson IoT Center Munich. Actually, IoT doesn’t go far enough – they call it the Genius of Things.

We live in a time when a connected kettle can sit on the same network as our telephone, television, baby monitor, washing machine and every light bulb in the house. In theory, a chain of events can occur when we pull into our smartwatch-sensing garage in our connected car, unlock our smart-door and enter our digital domain, or ‘home’ as it used to be known.

This networked utopia isn’t a new concept. 1950s visions of the future foretold just such a connected world where all these wondrous gadgets were living in harmony, alongside their human masters. But who’s really in control – us or the machines?

Currently, Artificial Intelligence isn’t that intelligent and we haven’t handed over the reigns just yet because they’re not all playing nice. With so much emerging technology trying to piggyback legacy systems, we’re living in the ‘Uncomfortable Middle Ground’.

The what? UMG is that awkward grey area between the creation of platforms and devices and realising their potential. With great arm-waving comes great responsibility and the need to deliver on a promise. In order to achieve this, our connected world needs to be truly connected.

Much of the public IoT fanfare comes from existing personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google, Apple, Samsung and Microsoft’s OS voice-botherers, but it’s what’s under the skin that really counts or you’re left with a pretty shallow experience.

I was invited to the Genius of Things Summit as a Futurist by WIRED Insider for Watson IoT. It was here that IBM and 20 clients showcased some of the stunning technology that interacts beautifully with the outside world, but does something meaningful with the data. Ricoh’s intelligent whiteboard, Panasonic’s interactive mirror and Bragi’s new Dash hearable for enterprise with built-in language translation were all perfect examples of effective IoT partnerships.

I may have an abnormal interest in future platforms and their potential impact on business and our lives as consumers, but the only time IBM has been on my radar since their early PCs is with a misinformed opinion of Watson, a chess and Jeopardy-playing super-brain. This week changed all that.

The huge glass towers project an impressive facade but the ‘FAB Lab’ and client ‘Collaboratory' inside Watson’s Head Office have a playful air about them. The work environment feels very much like a high tech college, where the IBM’ers and co-working clients all exude a genuine sense of child-like wonder and possibility.

IBM positions Watson as Cognitive Computing – a step above Artificial Intelligence, which is in turn a level above Machine Learning – and this is apparent in the Munich HQ. It’s like Stark Industries, but the Pepper and Nao robots aren’t weaponised.

The smart elevators really do talk to the smart doors, room and desk reservation system, the lights, windows and aircon. If you ever wondered what they say to each other, visit machineconversations.kone.com

We’re nudging closer to that connected vision of the future and we’ll see good (and plenty of bad) ideas fall by the wayside in the rush to offer a seamless experience. In order to be ground-breaking, you need to break a few heads, hearts and rules along the way. That top layer will always face the most criticism as it’s our first touch point but the rewards for perseverance are high when the information backbone delivers results. After my visit to Munich, I’m convinced the future’s in safe hands.

IoC: Internet of Cars

What’s the biggest auto show in the world? Geneva, Paris, Frankfurt, Detroit? Nope, with 180,000 attendees spread over 2.5 million sq ft, it’s CES in Las Vegas. Isn’t it full of robots, drones, augmented reality, touch screens and IoT? Yep, and so are the cars.

I’m not about to write a preachy outsider’s view of the automotive future or an insider’s defence of the industry – rather uniquely, I have feet placed firmly in both camps and a tattoo across my skull that reads ‘petrol head’.

OK, the tattoo’s on the inside and I actually like electric propulsion as well as exhaust sniffing. It’s a good job too as the main headlines at CES were all made by cars fuelled from the wall, not the pump.

Faraday Future made a triumphant return to the Nevada stage with their FF 91 at a glitzy live-streamed event. Last year they revealed a concept resembling the Batmobile, twelve months later, it was a far more practical SUV.

For all the glamour, slick branding and live theatre, the focus was on a record attempt – could the new FF 91 beat the Bentley Bentayga, Ferrari 488 GTB and Tesla Model X from 0-60mph? It did, by 0.01sec, hitting the mark in 2.39 sec. I’m not convinced many in the audience bought into the line that someone torn between the Ferrari and the FF 91 would choose the SUV over the supercar based on a straight line dash. Show them both a series of twisting corners and see who emerges at the other end with a smile on their face and who has their half-digested lunch in their lap.

Speaking of smiling faces, that’s exactly what I’d had earlier the same day as I spent quality time with the team from Lucid Motors – another EV startup focused on disrupting the automotive industry. Their forthcoming ‘Air’ also makes a fast dash from 0-60 but the story behind it is one of driving dynamics, rather than straight line bragging rights. Lucid’s CTO Peter Rawlinson, formerly Chief Engineer at Tesla and Lotus, put forward a strong case for his passionate team of 300+ employees and why they’re convinced driving and design appreciation will be just as important as battery range and autonomous tech to the Lucid audience.

Rawlinson believes their battery, developed in partnership with Samsung SDI, is a genuine differentiator in a new world of range anxiety. “It’s not just about distance, but sustained range. The breakthrough cell density is resistant to battery charge depletion usually experienced with repeated fast-charging.” The automotive industry faces many of the issues we already encounter with our personal technology, such as connectivity and mobile phone batteries caught in a recharging memory cycle of decreasing shelf life – not something we’ll tolerate when spending $100,000+ on a luxury car.

VP of Design, Derek Jenkins, former Director of Design at Mazda and VW told me he’d relished the creative challenges when starting with an automotive clean sheet. Sensors for autonomous driving need to be integrated, rather than added to a familiar silhouette and the interior design maximises the space around the electric drivetrain, rather than one inherited from the mechanical components of a traditional combustion engine.

It’s Rawlinson’s engineering appreciation and Jenkins’ design skills that brought the aforementioned smile to my face as we headed out onto the dusty Vegas roads in a development prototype. Peter eagerly hanging the back end out at every opportunity, putting that passion for driving into action!

Lucid now needs to start work on their $700M Arizona factory. This has been previously misreported as a similar model to Faraday Future’s, with funds coming from their own Chinese billionaire – not so, as Rawlinson stressed “this is an American company.” Despite their intentionally understated message, they seem to be heading in the right direction at the right speed as the Air is slated for production in 2019, with first year projections of 8-10k units, rising to 50-60k.

Although Lucid seems to be on track, Faraday’s FF 91 still lacks one important ingredient – money. Vital funds need to be released by Chinese backer, Founder and CEO of LeEco Jia Yueting so work can resume on their Nevada factory. Many keep referring to Faraday Future as the ‘Tesla killer’ as if this is a good thing. It’s not, and Elon Musk has frequently said the industry needs many EV-first players to shake up the competition, not kill it!

So where does this leave everyone else? Ford, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes and others had CES concepts to show off their latest vision for the future of vehicle connectivity – inside and out – and how they’ll all drive themselves, but BMW took out the most real estate.

Here I put my cards on the table as I drive a BMW, but it’s a petrol model and I haven’t made the jump to hybrid or electric yet as I’m still addicted to their turbocharged straight six. However, this doesn’t stop the Bavarians from trying to tempt me into an ‘i model’ every year at CES. In 2015, I piloted BMW’s petrol-electric supercar around the streets of Vegas. This year, they drove me to the ‘Speed Vegas’ desert racing circuit in an i3, then let me loose in an i8 around the track!

Compared to Faraday Future and Tesla’s unnatural obsession with straight line speed, this track session was a superb way to demonstrate the benefits of a car that is just as comfortable in the corners as the straights – and that’s a fun vision for the future!

And that future isn’t all about speed and performance. All manufacturers need to connect – with devices, the consumers that use them and the world around us. We already have a reasonable expectation that our phones will talk to our cars and in doing so, will add functionality. When our cars become fully autonomous, the safety restrictions fall away and we’ll demand entertainment, office functionality and more.

More? Well, I spoke at FutureFest in London last year and Cindy Gallop was on stage before me, talking about the statistics for sex in cars. It’s higher in countries where larger families share smaller houses as the car naturally presents an intimate space – but auto manufacturers continually fail to recognise this. Imagine the potential to relieve the boredom of a long autonomous journey with some connected sexy times. Auto brands take note, if the car is rockin’ time to come knockin’.

The very public message from the car companies at CES was “we’re in control”. This is true to a point, but it’s mostly tinged with an air of panic as they all know the future can’t be delivered overnight. Many believe their music and movie-streaming audience will no longer wish to drive or own cars and this is increasingly the message from industry analysts. But this is mostly educated guesswork and the future isn’t predetermined so the automotive business needs to give its customers a reason to love their products, want to drive them (when not having sex) and make them their own.

The only way to do this is to connect to the future audience – the ones who currently have no concept of car ownership and have never even gripped a steering wheel. Don’t neglect existing customers, but enlist their help as they’re the drivers, owners and brand advocates that can help to share the reasons we choose a Union Jack roof for a MINI, spec 20” alloys on an Audi, tick the box for red stitching with black leather on an Alfa, and take a deep breath of ‘new car smell’ when we drive away from a dealership.

I’m a petrol head for life, even if we replace the petrol with a plug socket, the dashboard with an iPhone and the dealership with a VR headset.

Now Listen Up

The next big revolution is gathering pace. No, not Virtual Reality – that’s the current revolution, the next battle for digital supremacy will take place in your ears. Say hello to Hearables.

OK, I admit I could have written about this last year, before everyone else, got in with the scoop and taken all the glory for shouting about the next digital platform. I chose not to because everyone wants me to have an opinion on VR. That’s no bad thing, with #StereocastVR about to launch and enough virtual reality projects to last us years at Brandwidth, but I’ve been speaking about IoT, Connected Cities, Wearables, FashTech, Movie Innovation, Retail and much more at events around the world. I’ll just stop briefly to add Hearables to that list…

I’m not going to review the current contenders, you can find that elsewhere but I will comment on the potential for this platform. I’ve just spent the last week in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Santa Clara and you can count on all the big players to join in with this audio revolution.

Hearables aren’t really standalone items (much like headphones are pretty useless without an input device), they offer an information layer on top of existing apps and operating systems. Push notifications, emails, Tweets and text messages read aloud and sat nav directions straight into your head. Hearables could allow you to leapfrog an entire platform, making smartwatches irrelevant and offering a more useful 1-2-1 voice communication with the smartphones in our pockets.

AI assistants such as Siri, Cortana and Google Now will make this process as seamless and friendly as possible, if we can all get over the social stigma of seemingly shouting at ourselves in public. This was never a good look for estate agents and city traders in the era of bluetooth headsets. Swipe gestures and heart rate monitors are likely to add extra hardware value but software is the main driving force.

I have a confession to make, I don’t like wearing headphones. This means adopting Hearables is a bigger leap for me than anyone already happy to plug themselves in on a daily basis. A smartwatch was an easier step as I’ve aways worn a ‘regular’ wristwatch – it’s just a shame most are crap at being watches.

I was one of the first to test a set of Here headphones and I was keen to realise their potential. Accurate audio selection, digital filtering and app control - sounds good, right? Actually I switched on the oversized in-ear wireless devices, pushed them in, blocking out all audio, then dialled up various preset filters via the app. The novelty of slightly quieter street or office noise or reverb added to voices or music wore off very quickly for me and I was relieved to remove the devices. It certainly made me appreciate ‘real’ sound, using my own ears rather than a bionic pair.

If you fancy a genuine glimpse into the future, put your money down for a pair of Pilot Hearables - a Smart Earpiece Language Translator on Indiegogo. They will translate a selection of languages live in-ear, fulfilling your secret agent fantasy, or just making you the ultimate global traveller - for business or pleasure. Now that will be genuinely useful, when they launch next year… probably.

With the growing popularity of VR and AR headsets, headphones are more useful than ever when attempting to add 3D audio to the 3D imaging. Unfortunately, we face a real problem when demonstrating the tech. It’s hard enough knowing what someone is viewing in a VR demo - try it with headphones, especially in-ear. Who wants to share someone else’s ear wax? 

You want my advice? Forget early adoption as the current crop of Hearables are expensive and attention is on features rather than audio quality. If you need new headphones right now, buy the best you can afford. If you don’t? Wait a little longer and the audio revolution will happen anyway.

Dawn of the DumbWatch 2.0

I’ve been living with the interactive wrist revolution for a few years and I first wrote about the state of the smartwatch market during my visit to CES 2015. For the following 12 months I found plenty of words but struggled to find the right ones. What went wrong?

I haven’t fallen out of love with smartwatches, but they haven’t made much of an effort to spice up our relationship. I’ve spent a year reviewing watches of all shapes and sizes, various operating systems with differing views on the future of the digital timepiece.

When I wrote my first Dawn of The DumbWatch (4 years after my HD3 SLYDE review), the Apple Watch still hadn’t arrived and all talk of smartwatches at CES 2015 was about Apple’s imminent entry into the market. We’d already been working with Cupertino’s timepiece prior to launch so I wasn’t as excited by it’s arrival as many. Was that through familiarity, or something else?

Apple sold more Watches in one day than the entire Android Wear market had in the previous year and as a standalone smartwatch, it’s the best of the best. The Retina screen is every bit as stunning as the iPhone’s and it’s beautifully made but I really wanted Apple to completely reinvent the watch, rather than evolve it.

Evolution or revolution, they couldn’t avoid the issue of battery life and to conserve energy, Apple ensured the screen only turned on with a finger tap or turn of the wrist. Both actions annoy me. I want to be able to glance at my watch (often subtly) to tell the time, not tap it or bend my wrist at an unnatural angle.

It’s as this traditional timepiece that the Apple Watch suffers. I’m not entirely comfortable wrapping something around my wrist that so many others are wearing, even if the $1,500 Hermès model is available online this week. I still wear a watch and think of it as an extension of my personality, as an accessory that says something about me – but that’s not the future market for this device, or smartwatches in general.

My 6 and 10 year old daughters think most of the watches I test are brilliant and would happily wear one. Their views of conventional watches haven’t been tarnished by obsolescence and they haven’t replaced watches with a smartphone screen. They like the shiny interactive stuff and they’re very much the future smartwatch audience.

What about the rest?

Will.i.am PULS

The year didn’t begin well… Will.i.am’s PULS didn’t arrive in stores but it had potentially the worst user experience of any device, ever. So that’s probably not a bad thing. Will get’s a point for trying, but loses the rest for making a mess of everything else.

Michael Bastion ChronoWing [Update]

Although I love the look of this watch, I gave this a pretty poor review last time. I felt I owed you all an update. Not only did the watch stop working altogether on several occasions, but the metal started to permanently scar my wrist. The strap finally came undone and it fell off! I have never lost a watch in my life, so at least the Chronowing has one first to its name. A slow hand clap for HP.

Cogito Classic (Black Metal)

I’ve always had a soft spot for this watch and tried a couple of earlier models with rubber straps. The main watch design looks great and the concept of analogue hands over a digital face makes perfect sense to maximise battery life. The metal strap boosts the perceived quality but the ‘smart’ part died on me, again. RIP Cogito.

Samsung Gear S2/S2 Classic and Moto 360 Sport

What a difference a year makes! Although Samsung have actually been in the smartwatch game for years, they’ve never really made an impression on consumers. The audience wasn’t ready for the Galaxy Gear and there certainly wasn’t any glamour surrounding the launch, but the Apple Watch changed all this. Samsung, like so many others are now basking in the halo effect of Apple’s range, fashion connections and interactivity.

I originally got my hands on both Samsung models (S2 and S2 Classic) at IFA in Berlin last year and I have to say I’m impressed – with the quality of materials and both the product and on-screen design. I prefer the regular model with its contemporary approach but the Classic is a much nicer conventional watch design than the heavy-handed LG Urbane or Huawei Watch.

Interaction is controlled by a mixture of touchscreen inputs and a rotating bezel. This outer ring essentially replicates the Apple Watch crown or pinch-zoom action and I quite like it.

Motorola’s new Moto 360 Sport needs very little description other than to say it’s similar to the S2 but lacks the outer ring and gains iOS support.

Fitbit Blaze

Another established player enters the battle for the wrist. Fitbit have followed Apple’s fashion/custom format with a variety of straps. The centre of the watch is actually removable so it can be used in activities that don’t require a watch - although a wrist worn strappy thing seems the obvious choice to me. I like the form factor and it gets points for that but it isn’t going to set the world alight.

TAG Heuer Connected

Not wishing to be left behind by all the Silicon Valley new money, TAG introduced its $1,500 high-end smartwatch last year, partnering with Intel and Google (the new money). It looks and feels great, then you turn it on and it runs Android Wear which in itself isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a cheap thing. Also, the standard watch faces all mimic TAG designs and they could have tried harder, or at least attempted something stylish AND contemporary. 

Casio WSD-F10

Let’s get one thing clear, I think this smartwatch has an awful name. Now that’s out of the way, it’s only good stuff. Casio are following their own path, rather than multiple models and styles, they offer 4 colours, all with the same tough rubber strap, running Android Wear but with bespoke faces displaying an array of action data. It looks tough and backs that up by playing tough. It's water and shock proof and connects to Casio’s action-camera to operate it remotely. I’d happily add this to my (albeit pretty shoddy) collection.

Olio Model One

I fell for this watch the first time I saw a photo. Ironically, I was sat in a secret Apple Watch development room in Cupertino with the Olio on my screen, so a slightly awkward moment!

When most viable competitors are striving to set up and control their own app stores, Olio has taken a different tack. They’ve dismissed the idea of a store, preferring instead to only offer the essentials.

Whether this strategy works or not remains to be seen but Olio expects to sell far fewer watches than its rivals anyway, adopting a more traditional approach to timepiece production. Mine arrives at the end of this month. Until then, I’m sporting an analogue watch. Crazy.

So, is there hope for Dawn of The DumbWatch 3.0? I’ll be talking about ‘Hearables' next time, when the info goes in-ear. But I can’t tell you about that yet…

If you want to fill in any more gaps, all the CES and smartwatch gossip is on The Digital Loop.