The Third Wave (Life and Tech with Robert Scoble #1)

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How can I be of service with a new technology newsletter?

You are working on building your company, or maybe trying to keep up to date on technology. Me? I’m a futurist at Rackspace. Rackspace asks me to go around the world to see the latest in tech and innovation and bring that learning back to the company, so we can stay ahead of the key trends, and pass it along to you. As I write this newsletter I’m on the way to a DJI press conference in New York to see its latest in drones. Last week I visited Make Magazine and Wearable World. More on those two in a bit.
 
The technology world sure is changing fast. In the two months I took off of social media to focus on my personal life a bit lots in the industry has changed. YouTube hadn’t turned on 360-degree video. Meerkat wasn’t out yet. Periscope hadn’t been released. CoreOS hadn’t implemented Docker support. Apple didn’t have a watch (you can order that tonight, by the way). Y Combinator’s latest batch of 120 companies hadn’t graduated. 120! Wow. Tinder was free. Shall I go on?
 
Just look at my Flipboard at https://www.flipboard.com/@Scobleizer where I curate the best from the tech world via 16 different magazines.
 
It might be too daunting to look at that and see that I’ve posted  nearly 17,000 articles there over the past few years (more than 2,000 in just the past two months), but that’s how fast the world is moving. It shows just how much we all have to pay attention to keep on top of our careers and track disruptions to our products and services.
 
What am I learning?
That’s what this newsletter will do every week. Wrap it all up.
 
For one, Redg Snodgrass, who runs Wearable World (where dozens of Internet of Things-focused startups, like Skully Motorcycle Helmets, are forming) and is now the owner of ReadWrite Web, told me that his millennial employees (40% female) have pointed to a third-wave of technology: ones we will wear.
 
His employees are excited by having even more mobile services, like Uber or Tapingo, but are increasingly looking forward to a world where we walk through, and wear, our technology.
 
This third wave needs to be much more empathetic, he says, than the previous two waves (wave one was desktop and laptops, wave two mobile phones). It also, he says, needs to be much more personal. Contextually aware. No longer will this generation put up with a simple red line on a map. No, this is the Waze generation where you can see how long you’ll be delayed and hear about an accident up ahead, all brought to you by other smartphone users.
 
He’s helping a range of companies, from Ringly (jewelry that has smarts embedded inside) to Tzoa (an environmental sensor you can wear). Let’s talk about Tzoahttps://www.mytzoa.com/ for a minute. Founder Kevin Hart told me that in the 1990s the sensor technology he’s using wouldn’t be small enough to wear and cost more than $10,000. Today it’s smaller than a deck of cards and runs less than $100 retail. The rapid declines in sensor prices are opening up opportunities for small companies and big alike. If you aren’t keeping up to date on the latest sensors, you will be blindsided by a competitor who is. Drone companies like Skycatch are using sensors in many ways to capture data about our world and build new features in. They aren’t alone. Tzoa is using its sensors to help asthmatics and people with allergies and sees new markets opening up.
 
Head over to Make Magazine and they have a raft of drones. Most of which are home built in with 3D printers and at workspaces that have more sophisticated manufacturing equipment, like TechShop. These hand-made drones are getting so cheap that new drone fight clubs and racing clubs are sprouting up. But don’t miss the innovation in 3D printing that first saw the light of day at TED.
 
Printers are getting both cheaper and faster. We’ll visit Brick Simple, Anometal, and Autodesk in the near future to get a look at how manufacturing is changing due to new innovations.
 
Being of service in a third wave media world.
It isn’t lost on me that Meerkat and Periscope have a lot of people’s attention. Just yesterday Madonna announced she would release her new video on Meerkat. This morning I used it and Periscope to discuss DJI’s new drone. Why should you pay attention? Because we’re now expecting to share our world in real time, and be able to join in everyone else’s world too — all from our mobile phones.
 
Yeah, I was an innovator here, doing live media on Nokia mobile phones on services like Kyte and Qik back in the days before the iPhone came out of Steve Jobs’ labs.
 
The was the early days. It wasn’t ready for prime time. Now the cell phone networks are resilient enough, and mobile phone cameras are good enough, that this is important enough not to miss.
 
Why didn’t Hang W/ or YouNow, or StringWire (all other systems that can be used live from mobile phones) capture the cool kids’ attention? Because their UIs often weren’t as focused or as clean on mobile phones, they didn’t have the immediacy of being able to click through video stream after video stream to find something fun to watch, and they didn’t use Twitter’s social graph to grab audiences. Most importantly the newer services let your audiences talk with you, and “heart” you, while streaming. This feedback makes doing these much more fun. When I was watching Guy Kawasaki was on Periscope (Twitter owned), he had about 1,000 watching. Gary Vaynerchuk brought his audience at SXSW back stage on Meerkat and had 3,000 watching. Even cooler, everyone could  chat back with him.
 
If your marketing departments aren’t focused on both live video, while thinking about 360-degree video (we’re actively playing with both at Rackspace to serve you better, more on our learning in a future newsletter), you’re missing out on important new audiences and ways to reach ever hard to reach potential customers.
 
Frictionless will rule in the third wave and in being of service. 
One of the entrepreneurs behind the Downtown App, Phil Buckendorf, told me his new service increased sales at Coupa Cafe 20% the first week it was put in place at this famous Silicon Valley meeting place. Why? Well, it reduces friction. How? A small box on each table includes a Bluetooth Smart Beacon from Estimote. This little radio, also known as an iBeacon, emits a signal that your phone can sense to tell what table you are sitting at. This lets you order food that will be brought right to your table. All without waiting in line or waiting for serving staff to come around.
 
There’s a revolution happening at retail, or, really, anywhere people are moving around. This weekend I’ll be hanging out with the geek who runs the IT at Coachella, probably the most influential music festival in the world right now. More on how he uses technology to reduce friction and increase sales next week.
 
Why Apple Watch matters and why I’ll buy one to be of service.
The Apple Watch goes on sale on Apple’s Website at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time this Friday. I’ll be there, and will report on what I learn after I get it. In preparation I met with Flipboard’s Apple Watch Team to get a sense of how good the API is and what’s possible. Right now, they tell me, it’s fairly limited. Input is from touching the screen. Both with a tap and a longer tap. There is a device underneath the watch that “touches” your skin and lets you know when a new notification comes in. There is a sensor underneath that watches your heart rate, among other things, that will be reported to Apple’s HealthKit service. Screen display is pretty limited. Your logo needs to be visible when your app is running and there aren’t ways to do Ken Burns-style scrolling around images. Apple has locked down developers pretty tightly, in an attempt to make sure that privacy and battery life problems stay in control as much as possible. Anyway, much more fun to come on the watch side of things. My friend, Andy Grignon, who was one of the 12 people who built the first iPhone, is wearing a Pebble Watch. He’s getting ready to give me feedback on that platform’s progress too.
 
Which gets us to this newsletter and how we’ll be of service. See, Rackspace has lots of services, from helping companies transition to a DevOps model, to running email on Exchange, to helping innovators, like Tinder, make their mobile services run fast on our Mongo-based database services, er, Object Rocket. Many of our customers are pushing the bleeding edge into wearables, virtual reality, and new collaborative services. I’ll bring you commentary from customers who are building these things (here Tinder’s CTO talks about the challenges building that famous dating service at https://solve.rackspace.com/sfo2/03.html ) to Rackers (that’s what we call employees) who are expert on various technologies (they write on our developer blog at https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/ ). If we reduce your friction, if we are of service, we both win.
 
This is only the beginning and it’s a two way street. I read all my email at[email protected] and anything done in response to this newsletter goes to the top of my inbox. I’m also at +1-425-205-1921 or on Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble and let me know how I can be of service to you. Thanks too to Hugh Macleod and team for helping me do art each week for this. We love his work!

Thank you!