Wearables, IoT and Smart Spaces Converge in 2016

 The advent of IoT, wearables & smart spaces promises to be exciting in the next 5 years in Montreal, as a wide range of solutions hit the market, the streets and enable more interactive environments at work, at play and at events. 

Montreal has a special relationship with BLE tech and IoT, with solutions for 1) smart spaces with contextual awareness, 2) wearable tech with mods and 3) smartphone-cloud chain solution sensors that go in parcels for the pharma industry.

Wearables, IoT and Smart Spaces Converge in Montreal

As an amateur evangelist for startups & a futurist enthusiast, these are home-grown companies that I want to support. To experience responsive environments with hyper-local context is something I've been waiting for and I'm going to write an article in the future about apps that are location based. In 2016, I predict, location based software, tools and apps are going to improve in their intelligence dramatically. Geo-targeting Twitter tools are going to become more sophisticated. But #IoT promises more significant changes in mobile and wearable tech meshing with intelligent spaces. 

IoT just doesn't bring Big Data into the mix with advanced analytics about people, it create innovation around new location apps and mods and brings social media to places, real-time interactions with wearables and physical spaces that are tuned better to us, the user and the customer experience. This has major implications for retail, community spaces and urban connectivity to our surroundings. 

An Intelligent Universe Comes Alive 

Environments with sensors and more powerful location based apps will facilitate the digital evolution of space-time, creating digital representations of device recognition in real-time that enable new interfaces on how we interact with our environments. This has powerful implications towards the emergence of smart cities and technology that truly empowers fast-paced social interactions that are customizable. I anticipate this  will create new synergies of our identification, location and time in a new layer of the web, a new layer of mobile responsiveness. In 2016, the web is mobile, while physical locations will start to behave as such, coming "online" and on the grid. 

These technologies bring an unparalleled freedom of experience, to the confines of the web, which traditionally we see as something outside of ourselves and not directly related to our physical spaces. The web is not then, something we connect to, but something which connects us. Hyper-local context is then, not an increasing digitization of our lives, but rather, a new layer of intelligence in our physical universe. 

This has incredible implications to the retail and customer experience in all facets of how we search, shop and receive promotions in real-time. BLE (Bluetooth low energy) has a range of 100 feet or so, and this implies as we stroll our city streets, our favorite neighborhoods, meet our friends and go to events, there will be new experience to be enjoyed, new ways of interacting with shops, people, products, places, promotions, events, festivals, our companies, our employees, our friends, new friends and new opportunities to be found around every corner. 

Advent of Gamified Spaces & DIY Internet of Things Starter-Kit

This implies our spatial experience in the near future, will be gamified. There will be incentives to adopt these technologies, commercial and experiential. Another thing I really like about these developments in Montreal, is there is a huge DIY component, with starter kits that give you the tools to create contextual awareness in your environments. Millennials and iGeni, are more apt to learn things on YouTube and do it themselves, more apt to adopt technologies that have a learning component. If as an individual, I can buy the hardware I need and use the open-source software, this facilitates my expression of what IoT can mean in 2016. 

Wearbles Bring a New Social Experience 

Social media in 2015 hit a bottleneck, apart from some visual marketing innovation channels getting more traction like Instagram & Pinterest and some live-streaming apps (Periscipe, Babble.Im, Meerkat), the evolution of social showed signs of needing more authenticity in relatedness. In 2016, we are going to see social interact with location in novel and new ways. For the user experience, it's new smart wearables that will probably bring the most tactile innovation.

Mighty Cast, promises a wearable band that has mods, utilizing BLE for bi-directional fashion with its Nexband. I believe, notification bracelet accessories are going to become more popular in 2016, as people get tired of being hooked to their smartphones and will crave new digitally immersive experiences. It won't hurt if the product is social, has an embedded gamification layer (mods, levels, requires sharing) and looks good, either. 

The problem of course with Montreal brands competing with the world is simple, marketing. How do you differentiate yourself in an emerging fields such as IoT and wearables against the big US corporations that will seek to dominate their fields? You have to offer more unique products that embody values that will appeal to Millennials and young people at large. You will have to do visual marketing and have video content & demos that embodies and captures your target audience encapsulating how fun it would be for them to augment their social experience (B2C) and how their business could profit from smarter BLE interactions for their SMBs & retail spaces & employee mobile-virtual ergonomics. 

The Smart Cafe; the Smart Gallery, Smart Workplace 

So IoT doesn't just mean devices that are online, it means a whole new social experience of space, I think reelyActive demonstrates this well, imagine a smart gallery experience & the smart cafe: 

I can then go online and connect with the artists, the cafe's promotions, the people in the space in real-time and learn about them on a whole new level. This would be like a new interface to their social channels where they could share the works, bios, daily specials in a better way.

So as I interact with the smart cafe or the smart gallery space, I'm also experiencing them via my wearable devices, for instance with my Nexband I'm earning points, badges and getting access to mods while doing this. This has the potential to make Montreal a smart-city unlike any other. We already have a cultural richness that is tough to beat, imagine these technologies embedded in our infrastructure. There are literally dozens of Montreal based apps and tools that could integrate into this infrastructure. 

Bright Future for Internet of Things

Cisco assures us that the advent of IoT is right around the corner, but what shape will it take that impacts the human and customer experience, and even the corporate culture experience? By supporting Montreal startups, that have implications in defining our IoT landscape that are local, we have the opportunity to participate in this directly. 

 This article was originally posted on November 9th, 2015 on via LinkedIn Pulse.