Episode Summary
In 1980, Bill Gates famously wanted a computer on every desk and in every home. Now perhaps Microsoft would like a fitness band on every wrist and all your health data in the cloud. With the release of its Health platform and fitness band into the already crowded fray, Microsoft is (again) staking a claim to your quantified self data, along with competitors Apple and Google. The battle for your body's health data has just begun.
On another front, the war for your living room is heating up, with Google Play now on Roku and the Amazon Fire TV stick premiering for a mere $19. Perhaps most significantly, even Walmart is getting in the game, with their Vudu spark streaming service. In this episode of the Digital Life, we discuss the future of design for ecosystems — be it your body, your living room, your car or even your bathroom — as designers begin to consider how digital and physical products come together with the Internet of Things.
Here are a few quotes from this week's discussion.
Jon on being tracked by IoT devices:
We’ve talked about the Quantified Self quite a bit on the show and we’ve also talked about health tracking and all of those sorts of things, ad nauseam; but I think it’s really interesting that in a lot of subsegments of our lives, we are now seeing this invasion of the giant tech company.
What I mean by that is, if you’ve got Amazon or Google or Walmart in your living room, you’ve now got Microsoft or your Apple watch or your Fitbit or whatever it is on your body when you’re exercising. All of a sudden you’re moving from your office desk to your exercise regimen to go home and watch some TV at the end of the day and all of those things are being tracked. Your data is all of a sudden being monitored in a lot of different ways and a lot of different systems.
Dirk on the battle for the living room:
The whole battle for the living room, because it’s such a long … the fight’s been going on for so long. Nobody is winning; it’s so protracted. I don’t find it interesting on that front, but then, even more than that, the content ownership is so dispersed, all of these idiots are just trying to get the power grab and get all of the control, so they’re going into it in ways that are entirely not user-friendly, so none of these solutions are going to work for me, so I’m like, “The hell with it!” I stopped caring.
