Samsung recently posted a video highlighting their vision of the future and the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT).
The movie highlights their tagline ‘In Sync with Life’
While certain of the benefits highlighted in Samsung’s IOT video might be interesting, I found myself left with more questions than answers, including:
How necessary is this?
Would this really improve my life?
Is it simplifying anything or in reality, more likely to add complexity and configuration frustration?
Would this create a future that’s more human or less human?
Could I live without this?
What are the health effects of increasing the amount of unnatural frequencies being transmitted through the air?
Does this look like a better or worse future to you?
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I wrote a couple of months ago about the Amazon Echo, the latest piece of hardware to emerge from the South Lake Union headquarters of one my city’s largest employers. A piece of hardware that follows in the wake of the successful Amazon Kindle and the failed Amazon Fire Phone.
The Amazon Echo aims to get you to put a computer in the center of your living room and to talk to it as if it were a person, building on the increasing comfort we have in talking to Siri, or Cortana, or Google. My previous article highlighted how this growing area of technology in phones, and increasingly in what is apparently a new wave of consumer devices, has the potential to disrupt the business model of Google and Bing, and potentially change our relationship with our devices.
Where Amazon Echo invites you to name their new computing device and speak to it, another rival technology (that was actually announced BEFORE the Amazon Echo) has recently come to my attention that is being positioned almost like a pet or a new member of the family. It’s called Jibo, and it was launched as an IndieGogo campaign and it quickly hit its $100,000 goal in four days, and raised $1 million in its first seven days. To date they’ve raised $2.3 million (pre-selling about 4,800 units) according to their myjibo.com web site, but as of yet they are still not shipping the device.
By comparison, according to Amazon’s web site, the Amazon Echo will be in stock on January 17, 2015.
Rather than trying to explain what the Jibo is, I’ve embedded their promotional video below (8 million views and counting):
So, what do you think, are you ready for Jibo (or the Amazon Echo) to become part of your family?
And you believe this new class of devices (and our increasing reliance on Siri and Cortana) have the potential to disrupt Google and Bing’s ability to make money?
Innovation or Not?
Sound off in the comments.
UPDATE to banner: You can now access a free recording of this webinar using PASSCODE 1515 here (link expired)
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Today Amazon launched the Echo – an internet appliance with voice recognition and response designed to be to your living room what Siri and Cortana are to your pocket (you ask, it answers).
It is a bold move for Amazon in the wake of their disastrous market entry into the phone market with the Amazon Fire phone, and whether by luck or by design represents more of what customers are likely to give Amazon permission to do in the marketplace. And even though the Amazon Fire phone may be a failure, Amazon no doubt has learned a lot from the experience and from their experience with the Kindle e-reader and Kindle Fire tablets that will help them with the Echo.
The Echo is one reason that Google is worried about Amazon in the search market, because what would do Echo (Amazon), Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Microsoft) truly represent for Google but a direction in the search business that represents a huge revenue threat for Google.
When you ask Echo, Siri, or Cortana a question instead of typing it into a Google (or Bing) search box, Google (or Microsoft) make zero dollars, not even a single cent.
People may forget (or not even know) that Amazon has a search engine company, and owns other search related assets like iMDb and Alexa. Don’t think Amazon sees search as a new frontier for them?
Check out the A9 web site (which years ago used to look just like Google with a simple search box) to get a better sense of how Amazon thinks about search,
So what does nirvana look like in a world with Echo in the center?
Check out Amazon’s promotional video, which has already received 500,000 views at the time I wrote this article:
So, does echo fit into your life? Do you want it to?
I for one have signed up for an invitation to buy one (though it is not actually worth $99 to me – the Amazon Prime member discounted price – down from $199) hoping that Amazon in its infinite wisdom will send me one for free so that I can check it out and report back on it here on the world’s most popular innovation web site.
Oh, and by the way, if you didn’t already know Google now lets you search with your voice on your desktop too, but of course that it’s in the browser so they can still show you ads and make money.
I can’t help thinking that Amazon is behind schedule with this product though. I’m sure they probably wanted to be by invitation only over the summer and shipping in volume for the Christmas, Chanukkah and Kwanza gift giving season, but what are you going to do, invention is hard, unpredictable work. Whether this invention will turn into an innovation, only the consumer market can decide.
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