Creative Connectivity

Hearables sales could reach $45 billion in 2020

Back in 2014, when I reviewed the emerging wearables market, I suggested that the sector with the greatest potential would be hearables. Over the intervening two years it has seen intense activity. Over $45 million has been pledged in crowdfunding campaigns for earbuds and stereo headphones from almost a quarter a million backers. The value of sales of wireless headsets has overtaken that of wired headsets and now Apple has added momentum by removing the 3.5mm jack on the iPhone 7, as well as launching their own earbud – the Airpod.

One of the key reasons hearables are doing so well compared to other wearable sectors is because they don’t need to work out what to do with the data they generate. Every other wearable is a slave to the treadmill of quantitative feedback, where it needs to make the data it produces compelling, or else risk being consigned to the drawer of doom. Hearables are bought for consuming existing content in the form of music or videos, giving apps developers much more time and freedom to play with the accompanying data. That is a massive advantage over anything that you wear on your wrist.

I’ve just published a report on the hearables market which takes these new developments into account. It shows a growing opportunity, even greater than I’d suggested two years ago, which could rise to sales of almost $45 billion in 2020. You can download the report – The Market for Hearable Devices 2016-2020 here.

Trident – is Theresa May a better deterrent?

One of the first decisions Theresa May made on becoming Prime Minister after the Brexit referendum was to approve the manufacture of four replacement submarines for our Trident nuclear weapons system. She argued that it would be an “act of gross irresponsibility” for the UK to abandon the continuous-at-sea weapons system, continuing the logic that a submarine which cannot be traced is an invisible force for retribution which would deter an aggressor.

I’ll pass on the issue of whether or not we should have nuclear weapons. That’s a different and important point to argue. What I’d like to highlight here is that whilst the concept that a nuclear submarine was undetectable may have been valid in the 1960s, it’s no longer the case. The countries that signed up to the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction now have the technology to know exactly where each other’s submarines are. So what is Trident meant to be protecting us from?

Airpods – a Speculative Teardown

On 7^th September, Apple announced the demise of the 3.5mm audio jack. Alongside that, they introduced their Airpods, helping to stoke the momentum for a new world of hearable devices, The loss of the jack was a move which generated howls of anguish from the wireophile community, along with a flurry of speculation about how Airpods worked as well as what Apple’s new W1 wireless chip was doing.

Having been working with wireless standards and hearables for several years, much of that speculation seemed ill-informed. Once Airpods come to market in October, companies like iFixit and Chipworks will take them to pieces and we’ll have a better idea of exactly what Apple have done. But those first tear-downs are still a few months away. So I thought it would be interesting to try a speculative teardown, based on how I might have designed them, and on the limited information which is in the public domain. I also think I know what Apple’s second wireless chip will be, and it’s not the W2.

More reasons to halt UK Smart Meters

It’s been a quiet summer in Brexitland. After a vicious few weeks of back-stabbing and in-fighting, our politicians departed to calmer climes. While they holidayed, our glorious successes in Rio have provided ample news coverage to fill the gap, meaning that it’s been a great time for the Whitehall mandarins to bury any unfortunate information about the state of the GB Smart Metering project.

Healthcare at the Edinburgh Festival

Last year, the Wellcome Foundation inaugurated a programme at the Edinburgh Festival called The Sick of the Fringe (#TSOTF16) to explore some of the boundaries and synergies between the worlds of medicine and the arts. Healthcare is a major issue in Scotland; barely a day goes by without an article in the national press about the impending obesity, stroke or heart attack crisis and the effect it will have on healthcare provision. In the second year of TSOTF it was interesting to see whether it had started to have an effect. There certainly seemed to be some progress in the way new writing tackled healthcare issues.

Smart Meter Update

“Hello, this is the British Electricity Smart Meter hotline. You are number two million, four hundred and sixty eight thousand, two hundred and twenty three in a queue. We’re sorry your smart meter has disconnected you and that you have no electricity. We are working to upgrade the firmware in all of our smart meters and hope to have your power restored sometime in the next six months. Thank you for your call.”

It’s the scenario that no-one in the energy industry wants to talk about – the day that Britain’s smart meters go wrong or get hacked and millions of users lose power. It will probably never happen, but some things have such appalling consequences that we shouldn’t design and deploy something that makes even that small probability possible. But we have. And nobody appears to have thought about making sure it’s possible to recover from it.