By Christopher Mims
I've seen some of the applications that will launch for the
Apple Watch when it makes its debut as early as March, albeit in
simulation, and some are extraordinary. Along with the details
Apple has already released about how the watch will work, it's
convinced me Apple Watch will be a launching pad for the next wave
of billion-dollar consumer-tech startups.
Contrast that with the predictions of many pundits that the
watch will flop, or sell only modestly. Others, like the analysts
behind a Morgan Stanley note from November, are so optimistic they
project the watch will sell 30 million units in its first year,
increasing Apple's value by more than 10% and adding more than $50
billion to its market cap.
Apple has already revealed the sleek, customizable watch itself,
and this being Apple, it's safe to assume the company is going to
release hardware that's best in class.
Much more important to the success or failure of the watch,
however, are the apps. And Apple already has the world's deepest
bench of happy, well-paid mobile-app developers, who collectively
generated $10 billion in revenue at the App Store in 2014,
according to Apple.
So it should be no surprise that hundreds of companies,
including giants like Facebook and Twitter, are racing to have
watch apps ready from the first day of launch. This is only
possible because in November Apple gave developers advance access
to the so-called software development kit used to create apps for
Apple Watch.
Imagine walking into a grocery store with a shopping list on
your watch, which knows your location so precisely that it can plot
a route through the store, saving you the frustration of wandering
from aisle to aisle, wondering where that one particular item
is.
Or imagine having all of Wikipedia in an app, one that
unobtrusively alerts you to points of interest as you walk around a
city.
Both of these are examples of technology that's already possible
on your phone. But what matters for adoption of a technology isn't
what's possible for the user--what matters is what's easy.
To use a historical analogy, the shift to mobile is one reason
messaging supplanted email. Email was a product of a particular set
of behaviors, including sitting down at a computer at a designated
time and putting a certain amount of thought into responses.
BlackBerry turned email into something like messaging, and
touch-screen smartphones made it apparent that email was itself an
anachronism, merely one conduit among many for what has become
real-time communication.
Consider the same sequence of events for contextual
information--that is, alerts delivered at a particular time and
place, such as reminders. Our phones buzz, we pull them out of our
pockets or purses, read a push alert, swipe to unlock, wait a split
second for an app to load, then perform an action that might have
been designed with more free time and attention in mind than we
have at that moment, if we're on the go or preoccupied. All that
friction is one reason, I suspect, why location-based social
networks like Foursquare never took off.
But, like Google's Android Wear software, Apple Watch compresses
all of those actions into what Apple calls a "short look." The
watch vibrates, and when we look at it a single short message is
visible. Apple goes even further than Android Wear by providing a
"long look" that is activated when the watch detects that we're
looking at it for more than a moment.
The long look can display content, including photos and text,
plus buttons allowing us to take further action. Separately, simply
tapping the screen can bring up any other card or
state-of-the-watch app, taking us deep into its contents. In this
way, contextually appropriate information can be available on our
wrist in an instant, and its depth can scale with the wearer's
attention, from a session lasting a second through one lasting many
minutes, as we scroll through the contents of a card within a watch
app.
Thus, wearables have the potential to make the entire
push-notification-based interaction model truly convenient,
increasing both the number of contexts in which we'll want to
receive push notifications and the rate at which we can consume
them.
The result, based on what I've seen, is technology that allows
you to both communicate with and consume not merely the Web, but
physical space. Long the dream of computer scientists, this
"augmented reality" is what Google was aiming for when it conceived
its ill-fated Google Glass project.
Abetting this change in behavior is a new technology called
iBeacon, which allows an Apple Watch in an appropriately equipped
building to triangulate its location to within centimeters.
InMarket, which was first to market in getting Apple's iBeacon
technology into stores, already reaches 32 million monthly active
users, according to comScore. Its initial application in stores is
pretty tame--imagine rewards programs and the digital equivalent of
in-store circulars--but inMarket also has store-mapping technology
of the sort I described above, says Chief Executive and founder
Todd Dipaola.
Already, inMarket's technology can show retailers precisely
where in a store you went. Connecting that to what they know about
what you bought gives retailers something like the real-world
version of the Web analytics Amazon uses to sell us more stuff.
Meanwhile at Esri, a mapping-software company, developer Amber
Case is thinking about an interface for Wikipedia driven by your
location, as well as a new product that would be a "Twitter for
location-based data."
While many have highlighted Apple Watch's payments software and
health-monitoring capabilities, its ability to connect us to what
our phones already know about where we are and what we're
doing--augmenting our reality with a new layer of data--makes me
think it could bring about profound behavioral change in its users.
As Apple illustrated with the iPhone, it's changes in what we find
it easy and enjoyable to do that beget changes in our habits and
social norms. And those are the shifts that create real
opportunities for the next billion-dollar startup.
Follow Christopher Mims on Twitter @Mims or write to him at
christopher.mims@wsj.com
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