Connected devices, the "Internet of Things", smart watches, and all that jazz.

There have been a raft of articles posted recently that have trumpeted 2014 as the year of the connected device, and yes, this is another one.

Hopefully, however, this article has a slightly different take on things…

When we talk about “connected devices”, we are generally thinking of products that combine hardware, data, and digital services in new and interesting ways.

Unfortunately it’s also a pretty clunky term — no real human beings refer to those fancy bits of tech that they all lust after or fill their pockets, wrists, and homes with as “devices”, and they’re “connected” to what, exactly?

In some quarters it’s also referred to as the “Internet of Things”, which is (to my mind) similarly awful — “things” isn’t a particularly bad term, mostly due to its complete vagueness (and therefore inclusiveness), but as a collective term it is spectacularly difficult to give form to or get behind in any meaningful way (as evidenced by the fact that pretty much the only people who use this term are professional geeks).

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that we’re trying to talk concisely about things that don’t necessarily exist yet — it could include innovations like “wearable tech”, but it also includes new takes on traditional products and covers everything from home automation to medicine, health & fitness, music, and pretty much anything else that the enterprising geeks of the world can come up with.

What the hell do we call these “things” then?

If we look at the recent big-ticket tech successes in the real world we have two immediate examples to draw inspiration from: “smartphones” and “tablets”.

On the face of it they’re both pretty good names — smartphones are phones that are smart, and tablets are, well, kind of tablety — but smartphones aren’t really phones that got smart, they’re pocket-sized computers that can also occasionally be used to make old-school voice calls, and “tablet” is a bit… meh.

So why did they stick? In my opinion, it’s because they were easy to grasp — they might not be accurate enough to appease a pedant like me, but for the man on the street they’re basically “good enough”.

But what about other devices? How do you generically describe / categorise the Nike+ sensor? The Nike Fuelband or Jawbone Up? The Withings bathroom scales? The Nest thermostat?

Perhaps the answer is that we simply don’t try to group them all together and give the resulting big bucket o’ stuff a fancy name — “connected devices” is probably a good enough umbrella terms for geeks to use when talking to other geeks (or tech investors).

So the question remains: what the hell do we call this type of stuff so we can sell it to real people, or is each product going to have to create its own unique space in popular consciousness?

My view is that the devices themselves should just be marketed to consumers as whatever they actually are, and will be defined by whatever functionality they provide (or which hitherto undefined niche they fill) rather than trying to create a “connected devices” aisle in every store.

Originally posted on Medium