New Fav: Connected Hardware rocks!
Although I didn't see it as a trend at the time, to me, Lark was the beginning of the so called Mobile Hardware boom that we are seeing this past 12 months or so. That device, which keeps track of your sleep pattern to help you get a better sleep, had existed in the past as well, but with the smartphones we now carry, it became less obnoxious/geeky/ugly and became little more hip&cool.
True, if someone were to call the biggest splash of the connected hardware revolution, you have to go with Square, but it took awhile for more folks came in waves (from 2009 to now).
So obvious questions are, what has brought this phenomena to full wave? I am not going to take credit for thinking about these reasons, but here they are. (mental note for myself - try to bookmark all articles that inspired your thoughts!)
1. It's much easier (and cheaper) to ACTUALLY make stuff on your own from having ideas.
2. It's much easier to fund your projects that required much more capital than software
3. Smartphone and "always on" connectivity provides provides medium for hardware to be smarter, more convenient and easier to interact with!
4. Self-Awareness of this generation
1. Easier to make stuff! - I listend to this NPR story few weeks ago where a speaker talked about design lab in the silicon valley where you can actually get an excess to equipments that used to cost you tens of thousands or millions of dollars in the past. Now, you can use software for design at home and bring that design to the shop to create stuff on your own! Not only that, there are multitudes of factories that are taking individual OEM orders over Internet in Asia. So, if you have the will and idea, you can even borrow engineering talents to help building the stuff, purely by crowdsourcing of a way
2. Kickstarter, Indiegogo - Crowdfunding is amazing. enough said.
3. At first, it was the beepers and then text messages, then came phones that can send emails (palm), now we have smartphones (with crazy broadband speed). Our connectivity with the world and others have been evolving and it has finally peaked with the broader broadband connection with gadgets with large enough real estate to provide enough level of insightful information/engagements.
4. Who could have thought that you can actually be your own mechanic? (Automatic) or your own health professional, or anything! We now have an access to our own data at our fingertip as it had never been! The currency of the game is Awareness. We are now empowering ourselves with more knowledge that we can act upon to do something more.
Cools stuff. Now, let me go back to my pebble
