Why might 2014 be the year of Wearables?

There has been a lot of tech chatter about how 2014 is meant to be the year of the wearable .  At the May Vancouvermobile.net meet-up the group came together to discuss trends and share their experiences of wearable technology.

Wearables is a subset of a much larger trend within industry to connect just about anything to the network.  The wider connected device landscape is what the large IT marketing machines are calling the Internet of Things (IoT), encapsulating the trend to connect more and more devices to the network.  By devices we are referring to a whole host of things that previously did not have a network presence, it started in earnest with smartphones but is increasingly involving just about any electronic device that has a processor and often a sensor connected to it, from; devices in the home such as refrigerators, televisions, heating systems, even light bulbs; to industrial SCADA devices such as meters and manufacturing sensors.  

Recently, at CISCO's 2014 annual technology conference, CISCO's CEO John Chambers opined that globally less than 1% of the devices that could be connected to the network are connected today.  Curious statistics aside, it goes without saying that there is an enormous market out there for devices and connectivity waiting to be tapped by whomever gets there first.

Wearables, as a concept, isn't something new, the idea has been around for quite some time, think of Bluetooth headsets, although not really active on the internet they did align with wearables principles; making use of network technology to provide a service, in this case telephone audio, more 'wearable'.  It is, however, curious to look at where the Bluetooth headset is today, they are certainly not perceived as desirable devices and are most often now seen being used by suits/professionals and taxi drivers.

It does appear that recently there have been a number of key factors that is driving a re-invigorated interest in wearables:

• Network ubiquity - not just WiFi, but cellular or Bluetooth.  The reach of connectivity is ever reaching and alongside coverage, the bandwidth is increasing, and the price of that connectivity is decreasing.  It is worth noting that the cost of cellular data is a point of much contention, but the increasing ease of accessing bandwidth through free WiFi can be argued to lower the overall costs.
• More processing power - nobody really argues the validity of Moore's law; however, when you couple the fact that processing power is being offered in smaller, more power efficient, and cheaper processors there is a net increase in the amount of processing power in just about everything.
• Miniaturization - this idea that things are getting smaller is often overlooked, but,  there is more stuff being squeezed into smaller packages.  Modern processors often include encryption on-board, commodity chips will often include networking capability, less bits of silicon are needed to do more things, it's now easier than it has been to make rich featured little things.
• Commoditization - to top it off, all of these advancements are now more accessible and cheaper to buy.  It is no longer a case of whether or not you can source a component, today the questions are; how many do you want and how much do you want to pay?

There is an interesting trend that is perhaps most apparent within the wearables space.  That is, the ecosystem that is required to deliver an end-to-end service to a consumer.  Looking at the layers of technology involved in a wearable service there is a a requirement for hardware, software and sometimes back-end analysis.  It is rare to see one single entity providing the end-to-end solution.  The hardware platform may require expensive research and development and prototyping, if an existing platform isn't already in the market.  Those hardware platform providers are increasingly looking to the software developer community for their software innovation; exposing a plethora of APIs for the community to write code to.  For those applications which have a dependence on back-end services there are a few established providers of cloud services that offer easy and affordable cloud services to provide, storage, processing and analytics capability that previously had to be in-house and expensive.  The model is still evolving with a number of parties investing in the success of an end-to-end wearables platform.

Whether or not the wearables market turns out to be the untapped gold mine that some opinion would lead you to believe, there are increasing numbers of devices on the network how many of those devices end up being wearables remains to be seen.