In 2015, wearables are still just a bubble

At the Geek Park Innovation Conference two days ago, Huang Wang, the head of Xiaomi wristband, gave a speech, saying that the wristband will be a human ID in the future, as a mark of identification of the virtual world to the real world. We can see that he has not mentioned the particularly popular imaginations such as human data collection and health big data applications, because this road has hit a wall now. This is also Uncle Miao’s view on wearable devices in 2015, that is, it is still a bubble and there will be no breakthrough.

In January 2014, Cogobuy invited Uncle Miao to Shenzhen to walk along the industrial chain of wearable devices. Because his company is a chip portal and is very familiar with the entire industrial chain, many bosses also spoke the truth. In May last year, Intu organized some Internet entrepreneurs and start-ups to visit Israel to investigate the smart hardware industry and exchanged ideas with many top technology companies. In the second half of the year, he went to Shenzhen several times to communicate with production designers on the front line.

Through these investigations, as well as the usual observation of industry trends, and most importantly, product trials and opinion collection, Uncle Miao found that although wearable devices are in full swing, the current status is still unsatisfactory. Before the core technology and consumer concepts undergo qualitative changes, it is foreseeable that wearable devices will still remain at the stage of bubbles and concepts in 2015.

Let’s first look at the major problems with wearable devices.

There is a wearable device that everyone is familiar with, the Jawbone up bracelet. This product is considered a popular wearable device, but it has a nickname called whooping cough. Many users found that it broke after about 3 months of wearing. Because it needs to be plugged into the audio port of the mobile phone to synchronize data, no matter how good the hardware is, it can't withstand frequent plugging and unplugging. At the same time, there may be problems with the material stress design of the bracelet itself, so many people who bought it can't last more than 3 months.

Another wearable hardware is Fitbit, which has several models, and I have bought them. The counting is relatively accurate, but charging is very troublesome, and it takes one or two days to charge. The charging port is not designed to be user-friendly and universal. When this hardware appeared, there was a function to share your daily exercise volume on social networks, compare with friends, and friends can also supervise each other. This design was originally very unique, but when all hardware has such a function, your Weibo and WeChat Moments can no longer be seen. Zhang San ran five kilometers today, and Li Si climbed 20 floors. These are all information. This is like a phenomenon that everyone is familiar with, that is, square dancing, where grandpas and aunts get together to socialize, but sometimes it is inevitable to disturb people. This also shows that there are still problems with wearable hardware at present. In addition to social networking, are there no other selling points and no other things to increase user stickiness? Abuse of social networking may eventually lead to the device itself losing people's trust.

There are also some devices that collect data but don’t know what to do with it, or they show you some very professional data, such as body fat percentage and basal metabolism, but there is no interpretation at all. Users are confused and don’t know what use you are making of these data. We call this kind of device a selfie maniac. They are very happy with it, but others think they are crazy.

Whooping cough, square dancing, and selfie mania are three specific manifestations of the bubble in wearable devices.

So judging from the current situation, wearable devices actually have at least three hurdles to overcome before they can experience a large-scale explosion or become an industry with a stable business model.

The first threshold is why users want to wear you and what is the motivation for wearing you.

Everyone has to carry a mobile phone with them. The reason why they are irreplaceable is that they are practical. In the early days, people used them to communicate with each other, but now they use them to browse various Internet services. Is wearable hardware irreplaceable? No. Most wearable devices measure nothing more than heart rate and blood pressure, plus the vital capacity, exercise volume and calorie consumption calculated from them. These data may be important, but ordinary people do not have a hard demand for them. Some manufacturers in Shenzhen also told Uncle Miao that the core technology of wearable devices, namely sensor technology, has reached a bottleneck and can only collect the above data. The real core data, such as blood sugar, blood lipids and blood pressure, cannot be measured by sensors without loss (that is, without blood sampling). Before the breakthrough of sensor technology, wearable devices cannot be irreplaceable.

There is no irreplaceability. Another property that makes people wear these hardware is fashion. Fashion is actually the beauty of uselessness that is divorced from practicality. A typical successful case in this regard is a watch, which has no practicality at all, but can still be sold for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of yuan. This is fashion. Now that the living standard is improving rapidly, users are paying more and more attention to their dressing, and many men will talk about matching. Why should users wear a bracelet or watch with a mediocre appearance on their hands, which conflicts with their original clothes and accessories? According to the ideal model of future wearable development, the hardware may be free or zero profit, and the software service may be charged. But even if your hardware is free, users may not be willing to wear it without a good appearance. So Uncle Miao said that the prospects of smart bracelets in the future may not be as good as smart watches. After all, the latter still has a tradition to continue.

We visited a number of wearable device factories in Shenzhen, and one of them has been producing smart watches since 2009. I asked them what the future trend of this thing will be, and they said that to be honest, we don’t know. Everyone thinks that the current situation is not right, but no one knows what is right. We can only wait for Apple. After Apple’s smart watch comes out, with their strength, everyone will know more about what to do, and users will be educated, and this market will really start. But judging from the Apple watch, the prospects of the first generation are not good enough.

The second threshold is what you can bring to users even if they wear your device. I said at the beginning that if you show them how many miles they have walked every day, they will get bored after a few days. It is not enough to collect and display data. You have to tell them what the data represents, what it is used for, and what trends can be analyzed. In other words, what achievements it represents. 360 used to do very well in this regard. It not only records your boot time, but also tells you how many friends you have defeated in the country, creating a sense of vanity and achievement. Of course, this trick doesn't work now. Even if you say that you have walked 50% more miles than so many people in the country today, users will not feel anything. More professional analysis is needed at this time.

Some wearable device companies are doing this now. They have gathered a group of medical talents at the back end. Professional medical professionals analyze the collected data and ask what your data represents about your physical condition. Your heart rate is a bit high after running such a long distance. You should pay attention to slowing down your exercise. Your basal metabolic rate is much slower than your food intake, which will cause fat accumulation. So we say that at least your data should be analyzed, processed and presented.

However, this threshold does not exist in isolation. Doctors need to analyze your data and collect and provide some key data. However, due to the existence of the first threshold, most of this data cannot be collected at present. Therefore, the solution to the second threshold can only be a castle in the air.

The third barrier is data silos. Everyone collects their own data and processes their own data. This is understandable in an early stage industry because everyone wants to carve up their own territory. I collect data, analyze it, and present it to users. Users have to rely on me and they dare not take my bracelet away easily. If I share it with others, and other companies make more professional interpretations, I will only make a one-time profit from the hardware, and I will not do it.

But commercial interests can never beat user needs. Users need uniformity, need to know where their data is stored, and need to view the same batch of data on different interfaces. So Apple launched iHealth and Google launched Android Wear. They provide a unified data interface, allowing all kinds of wearable devices to aggregate their data. This is a good thing for the industry, because wearable devices can focus on making the devices small, fashionable, and accurate, and leave the backend work to these giants. Some companies with specialized medical resources can also extract data for interpretation and provide services for users. In this way, the industry chain will be sufficiently segmented and each link can be fully developed.

But it is not the case in China. Google is basically unusable in China. Apple can be used, but there are still relatively few people, although the average quality of users is very high. This will leave a huge gap. Who will provide unified storage, management and reuse of wearable data? Let's see, in terms of strength, there are basically only five TABLES companies at present: Tencent's cloud and WeChat, QQ, Alibaba's cloud, Baidu's computing power, Lei Jun's Xiaomi's device share, and 360's application distribution and aggregation capabilities. Which of these five companies is willing to build this platform and do it well will determine the development level of China's industrial chain. But the solution to this threshold must be after the first two thresholds are solved.

Therefore, with these three major hurdles in place, wearable devices will still have no chance in 2015.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.