It’s easier to design an useless product than to a create good one. It’s part of any innovation process, your chances to succeed are small. Regarding Internet of Things, how many connected umbrellas or connected flip flops will meet their audience?
I haven’t seen a connected fridge at my friends place, the years go by and Internet of Things does not seem to be not about objects anymore. Besides, Google, Apple and Amazon are installing their connected machines in our houses, focusing their effort on service and assistance.
Stranger Internet of Things
Each year, the CES Las Vegas opens a dimensional door to monstrous artefacts created by humanity. All those artefacts are contamined by the same desease: a chipset in the head. Let’s look at them:
Those inventions are not bad or good, they are just incomplete and expensive for a poor user value. And worse, they depend of an app. Smart objects look way useful when they do not need an app. Each smart device should be conceptualised without an app, smartphones break the enchantment.
Besides smart objects industry health is precarious: Withings, Fitbit and GoPro are suffering from their asiatic copy even if they sell best quality product.
How I met meaning
One of the famous connected object is the Amazon Dash button, in the UK, between 2016 and 2017, customers used the button to order 160 000 coffee pods and 300 000 rolls of toilet tissue.
And here is coming the Magic Wand, which is supposed to lead us to a shopping without screens: user scans items with the wand and Amazon adds it to its basket. But user still needs to confirm its order on the Website (or the app).
Amazon is experimenting so many shopping solutions and is learning so fast, that all competitors seem forced to copy but 2 or 3 years later.
Thanks to these tests, Amazon doesn’t hide its objective and is preparing the fertile ground for a new generation of Internet of Things: enhanced your home, like in Harry Potter, we will be surrounded by magical/connected objects and less and less boring and time consuming screens.
Harry Potter Marauder Map is like a smart device we could have when looking for friends in town:
Magic is the new experience
Stop selling objects, start offering services. June is closer than ever to a Harry Potter Magic Artefact: this oven recognises the food you are cooking, set time and temperature so you will never miss a recipe.
Few compagnies own genius able to revolution an industry by pure intuition, the path to innovate is by testing and iterate fast. And these experiences can be created without any functional prototype: imagination and passion are enough to cast the first spell :)
