Internet of Things: The Smartening

Somebody, get this, created a fitbit…but for dogs.

This is a real design pattern. Take any service that is starting to gain traction and just add “for dogs!” at the end of it.

Tinder…for dogs.

Airbnb…for dogs.

It’s a laugh line.

Facebook…for dogs.

Those are all real things. Dogs do love to chase tail lights. That’s just taking the taillight/fast-follow strategy a little bit too far.

Entrepreneurs are trying to reinvent things by making them smarter. This is well beyond the you know, “the data!”, style pitches you may have been subjected to.

I’m really optimistic, and excited, for the 2.5% of companies that will thrive, not by slapping a dashboard on an product or attacking a niche market, but by actually making the products and services they create, that much smarter.

And this beyond the McKinsey rhetoric about how Machine Learning will change middle management by enabling insights. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

This is about fundamentally making consumer experiences better by making either the consumer, the product, the service, and the experience, smarter.

And that’s going to require a combination of talents that, to date, don’t always get along perfectly. It means design thinkers and predictive thinkers are really going to have to talk to each other. The Internet of Things really does mean a mass smartening.

It’s inevitable. And we all of a role to play in it.