This week has been full of news on wearable devices: First the report from The Wall Street Journal that Microsoft is fabricating a smart watch (whether it’s just a prototype or an actual product is not confirmed); then Google’s release of guidelines for developers building apps (known as “Glassware”) for Glass; followed by the news on Wednesday that Google will start shipping Glass units to participants in its Explorers program.

(See also Google Glassware: How Developers Can Build Apps For Google Glass.)

To put these stories in perspective, Glass is a much, much more important story than any smart watch story — whether that watch is made by Microsoft, Samsung or even Apple. Smart watches could enable new “glanceable” experiences that we haven’t had on other devices, enhanced by body-generated data, like the Basis smartwatch does today. But they won’t fundamentally disrupt social norms in the way that Glass will. At best, they’ll reinforce existing ecosystems for smartphones — i.e., iPhone buyers might buy an iWatch; an iWatch might displace some phone usage, but wouldn’t replace a phone altogether.

Google Glass Could Be The Next Big App Platform

Smart watches are incremental steps forward toward the smart body future, but Glass is a giant leap forward in shoes propelled by rocket fuel. There is a very real chance that consumers will reject Glass, consigning it to the geeky niche of Bluetooth earpiece headsets. But if Glass succeeds, it could be the next iPhone: the next great platform for app development — not just for professional software developers but for non-tech companies like media, banks, retailers, hospitals and every other entity that wants to engage its customers or employees digitally.

Three initiatives in particular stack the deck in favor of the Glass success scenario.

First, Google’s transparent approach to product development gives Google insight into how consumers envision using Glass, identify concerns early and adapt its product and marketing accordingly, all while building buzz among socially connected early adopters. (Key fact: 68% of Glass Explorers have 1,000 or more followers on Twitter.)

Second, the new Glass Collective seed fund from Google Ventures, Andreeson Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins ensures that Glass-related apps, accessories and other products get the investmeent they need to feed the Glass ecosystem — just as iPhone app startups got in 2008.

The third initiative — Google placing restrictions on app developers in support of the user experience — takes on the biggest barrier to Glass adoption.

Wearing Glass creates a new experience not just for the person wearing the device, but also for everyone near someone wearing the device. Initial curiosity could quickly fade to annoyance when talking to someone seemingly distracted by a display you can’t see.

(See also 5 Socially Unacceptable Things You're Going To Do With Google Glass.)

And then, of course, there’s the anger and frustration you feel when your likeness is photographed or videoed, autotagged and shared without your consent or control.

(See also Google Glass: Our Lives Are Not Reality TV.)

We already live this every day on Facebook; Glass just accelerates the phenomenon. The hardest challenge for Glass to overcome is not making the technology work or attracting developers, but establishing social norms around the device that draw people in rather than making them want to run for un-surveillanced cover.

Google Can Influence How People Use Glass

Google can’t control consumers’ manners — if you’re rude enough to text on your phone at the dinner table, you’ll be rude enough to read texts on Glass in front of other people. Your rudeness is not Google’s fault any more than it is the phone manufacturer’s fault. Still, Google, Glass Collective investors and app developers can influence the degree to which Glass supports, rather than distracts from, human goals (see Adam Gazzaley’s research at UCSF to understand what I mean).

Google is moving Glass in a positive direction, forbidding apps with advertising on Glass, forbidding apps to access sensors on the device and forbidding apps to track and share user data for advertising purposes - at least to start. The New York Times Bits Blog quotes Google advising app developers to “make sure apps do not send updates too frequently and to be sure to avoid doing anything consumers do not expect,” and get users’ explicit permission to do things on the user’s behalf.

This is a smart move on Google’s part. It not only supports consumers’ interests but also makes it more likely that using Glass — and being around someone using Glass — will be a positive experience: The less intrusive and distracting the experience of using Glass is, the more Glass wearers can focus attention on the people they’re with or the task they’re trying to accomplish.

(See also Is There Any Way To Jam Google Glass?)

We will all play a role in shaping how Glass fits into our lives and our culture. Consumers must take ultimate responsibility for how they use the device, but it’s encouraging to see Google playing its part.

When I talk to marketing executives about the Smart Body, Smart World paradigm — how sensor-laden devices like wearables give us access to new domains of information and what we can do with that information — they always bring up the movie Minority Report.

The 2002 sci-fi crime thriller has become the reference point people imagine when they think about the future of advertising: specifically, the scene in which Jon Anderton (Tom Cruise) walks through the mall and billboards show him ads based on his mental state (stressed out) and context (on a journey).

This depiction of the future makes sense if you take the status quo of advertising in 2002 — delivering messages via screens to acquire new customers and persuade them to try your product — and bolt on new technology like biometric scanning. There are multiple examples of marketers today doing simplified versions of this, using billboards that adapt content based on gender and age.

A Dumb Vision Of The Smart Future

But this is a pretty dumb vision of the “smart” future. Smarter marketing goes far beyond advertising.

The Smart Body, Smart World paradigm requires a different approach to marketing, an approach focused on delivering services and utility rather than just advertising. Sensor devices collect data that’s intimate by nature, in contexts where marketers have never before had access. That intimacy lends itself to trust-based interactions, where trust is earned with utility.

The Nest home thermostat, for example, uses motion sensors and machine-learning algorithms to predict your schedule — but users don’t think it’s creepy because it saves them 20% on their heating and cooling bill. The Jawbone UP knows your daily commute and how well you slept — but its usefulness is quantifiable, helping wearers move, on average, 26% more per day.

Many sensor-laden devices don’t have displays; even the ones that do, like Google Glass, are better suited for “engagement marketing” or “relationship marketing” rather than advertising. For example, Glass might be an appropriate platform for a bank to show a user’s “safe to spend” balance - like financial services company Simple does on its mobile app - while the customer is out shopping. But that approach wouldn’t be well-suited to cross-selling a mortgage.

Sensors Change Everything

The Smart Body, Smart World paradigm accelerates transformations that are already occurring in marketing. In particular, sensor devices require marketers to:

Shift their priorities from acquisition to engagement. Today, marketers spend the majority of their budgets on the early stages of the customer journey, especially reaching new customers through channels like TV advertising and in-store displays. Smart Body, Smart World technologies lend themselves more toward engaging customers you already have, building on trust you’ve already earned. This shift from acquisition to engagement requires marketers to rethink their priorities and redistribute their spending accordingly.

Make better use of all the data they are collecting. Sensor devices produce an enormous amount of data — up to thousands of data points per minute per person. Making use of all this data is a new skill for marketers. Think about the Nike+ FuelBand, for example. In the past, Nike’s marketers would not have known much about their customers — they relied on what data they could get from retailers and whatever market research they commissioned. Now they know what time their customers wake up, whether they had a good day and how fit they are compared with their friends. Acting on this data in a way that benefits the user and the company requires an enormous shift from the way they used data in the past.

Reconfigure privacy practices to deliver contextually relevant services. Current privacy practices are woefully inadequate for the age of smartphones and sensors. Today, marketers routinely collect more data than they need for service delivery. In doing so, they are assuming unnecessary risk (as we see in the near-daily hacking of major enterprises), and they also make it harder to recognize business opportunities obscured by mountains of data. In Forrester’s research, we’ve found that many consumers would actually be willing to share more data if they knew it would be used to deliver genuinely useful services. But they object, with good reason, to sharing data without getting real value in return.

These shifts will transform marketing in a far deeper way than the superficial Minority Report vision. Imagine a future in which marketers influence products, pricing and branding based on deep insights of how people actually use their product. A future in which marketers anticipate customer needs before they’re expressed — while staying on the right side of the line separating useful from creepy.

A future in which marketers actually help customers change their own behavior to the benefit of the customer, not just the marketer. Marketers have this future within their grasp if they can recognize that the mall in Minority Report is not what we should be building.

I’ll be speaking more about how marketers make these transformations at Forrester’s Forum for Marketing Leaders on April 18 and 19 in Los Angeles. Join us if you can!

Google’s Project Glass deserves plaudits for innovation, not just for the device itself but also for the process by which Google is developing and marketing the product. Studying product strategy and marketing as a Forrester analyst for almost nine years, I have never seen a company do what Google is doing: launch an entirely new form factor in such a transparent, inclusive way.

The Google Glass Rollout

At Google I/O last June, Google demoed videos taken with Glass while skydiving and mountain biking (notably, the top comment on YouTube as I write this article is how Glass will revolutionize POV porn) and offered developers an opportunity to buy an “Explorer Edition” for $1,500.

Google Glass In The Real World

Fast forward to 2013, and real developers, reporters and consumers are using Glass and talking about their experiences. The latest development in the Glass rollout is the #ifihadglass campaign: a contest for consumers to say on Twitter or Google Plus what they’d do with Glass and win an opportunity to participate in the Explorer program.

Glass is still months or even a year away from launching as a consumer product, but its transparent product strategy — exposing the evolution of the product to developers, reporters and consumers — will help Google avoid the pitfalls of its past product launches. Google TV has been an expensive flop. Android tablets took two years to catch on. Chromebooks have not yet been a commercial success.

Google released both of those products (Android for tablets and ChromeOS) and iterated post-launch; with Glass, it is opening the kimono before launch, and that will make a world of difference.

Marketing Hardware Like Software

This is software product strategy applied to hardware. In the software world, it’s common to release a beta version internally and then externally, improving the product before general release. In hardware, some small companies like Pebble are doing this but before Glass, there was no precedent for a major hardware launch to be so transparent. Secrecy is the norm in hardware, lest competitors get wind of what you’re doing and race to Taiwan to copy you.

Apple is the best example of pre-launch product secrecy. Google’s transparent Glass strategy not only helps Google avoid the mistakes of its own past, it’s also Google’s best weapon to compete against Apple. Rather than compete on Apple’s terms, Google invents its own terms. It’s not just “Google-level design,” it’s Google-level marketing. And it’s working. Google received thousands of responses over a weeklong period to the #ifihadglass campaign; tech blogs - including ReadWrite - and mainstream media like The Today Show amplified the story.

Social Market Research

The insights Google gathers from #ifihadglass submissions can help shape product development, app development and product marketing. For example, if you read the #ifihadglass tweets, you see that most of the submissions relate to sharing a point of view literally from someone’s own eyes, whether that’s for charity or sport or shopping. That’s what’s getting people really excited — Glass is tapping into a deep human need to be understood and share experiences with other people. A smaller number of posts relate to augmented reality — having data overlaid on physical space, whether that’s for entertainment or navigation or fixing something. Google product strategists and marketers don’t have to guess what excites people about their product — they already know.

There are several important implications of Google’s transparent product strategy for Glass. First, I think the company will see unprecedented success for launching a pretty futuristic product — Glass will succeed at scale where similar products like MyVu and Looxcie have not. The success of Glass — and the marketing leading up to its launch — will have a halo effect for Google Plus, which Google is using as the hub for Glass conversation. (And I imagine, the default place to share photos and videos taken with Glass will be your Google Plus page.) The bottom line: Glass will be the next great platform to innovate for, and should be on every company’s radar. Glass will be the next Pinterest, Facebook, Amazon and iPhone all rolled into one.

I am not looking forward to Google Glass POV porn, though.

Image courtesy of Google. 

As part of my research at Forrester, I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know companies developing technology solutions for K-12 and higher education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) like Coursera and Udacity give students around the world access to high-quality courses for free or at a fraction of the cost of a traditional university. Platforms like Inkling, Kno, and CourseSmart make distributing, purchasing, and consuming digital textbooks more convenient and engaging. Supplemental content sources like Khan Academy and TenMarks give students resources to learn at their own pace.

It’s worth thinking seriously about how these solutions will change the nature of education. Many of the changes are positive. We expand access to education across the globe. At the same time we increase scale, we also enable more individualized, self-paced learning, presumably at a reduced cost. For example, millions of students can dissect a cow’s eye in a virtual biology lab without the incremental cost of buying more cow’s eyes or scalpels or formaldehyde - and they could do it again if they miss something the first time. Through analytics embedded in texts, apps, and diagnostic tools, teachers will get real-time feedback and can make more-informed decisions about how to teach.

Education ≠ Screen Time

But they also make me think that the future of education is a lot of screen time.

We all love screens, but physiologically, they’re not that good for us. They come with tradeoffs of eye strain, bad posture and sleep interference; they’re so immersive that it takes us longer than we think to recover and engage with the physical world, even to the detriment of our and others’ health and safety.

Marshall McLuhan is long passé, but it’s worth considering that if “the medium is the message,” the message we are sending to students is that engaging with content and people via screens is a more valuable use of their time than engaging with the physical world and the people in their physical presence. (We also embrace that message as information workers, but that’s a topic for another day.) K-12 students are in a physical school building for 7 hours or more per day, and college students are on campus together in physical space for most of the year. That may not be the case forever, but today, those are the physical realities of education, and they deserve attention, too.

We need to complement the digital tools we’re developing by strengthening students’:

* Social relationships. Helping answer questions in a MOOC forum is great, but it’s not the sum total of what students need to learn about how to relate to peers and teachers. The flipped classroom concept is one solution - the idea is that students absorb the lecture or course materials online outside of class, and when they arrive to the physical classroom their time is used for discussion or group activities.

* Physical activity. A major downside of screen time is sedentariness, and the research is pretty clear that sitting kills. Intriguingly, wearable devices could actually play a role in increasing students’ activity levels - and could be applied to cross-disciplinary lessons, not just gym class. For example, wearable activity trackers could be used to integrate physical education and math curricula (students move and then analyze the data); add GPS and you get a geography lesson; add heartrate tracking and you move into biology territory.

* Hands-on experimentation. Many research studies show that hands-on experimentation helps students learn better. I’ve experienced this myself recently as a student in a workshop hosted by the software company Intuit, where the company shared its design-thinking approach to innovation with customers and partners - and the participants tested out the methodology with our own hands-on experiments. A new startup high school in San Mateo, Calif., wants to apply this kind of design thinking, influenced by Stanford’s d.school, to its own curriculum.

Technology Is Only Part Of The Education Equation

Technology is just a tool; it’s how we apply it that will determine the future of education. We need to pay attention to what problems we aren’t solving with the current crop of technology innovations - and what gaps these solutions create - so that we can figure out where to innovate next. In particular, we need to complement these tools with innovation in how we use the physical space of learning environments, and how we engage with the people in them.

Organizations like The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, technology companies like Apple and Intel, numerous software startups, our government, universities, every teacher and every parent actively invest in the future of education. Increasing access, improving outcomes and cutting costs absolutely deserve investment - but so too does the physical experience of learning.

Wearable devices like the Nike+ FuelBand, Jawbone UP, larklife, and future products like the Misfit Shine and Google Glass have been the subject of much discussion, for good reason: They give us access to information about our physical bodies and the physical environment we inhabit, a phenomenon we call Smart Body, Smart World. (Self-proclaimed quantified self-ers have been early adopters of tracking sensors, but they're new to most consumers.)

Though at Forrester we think the market for fitness wearables is relatively small, the broader potential for wearables is huge. Body-generated data could be applied to any domain, such as relationships, productivity, gaming, shopping, personal safety and identity validation, just to name a few possibilities.

I recently participated in a panel in San Francisco hosted by service design agency Fjord, along with Adam Gazzaley, Director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF); Bill Geiser, CEO of MetaWatch; Sonny Vu, CEO of Misfit Wearables; and Olof Schybergson, CEO of Fjord. With perspectives from science, research, product and design all represented, we had diverse points of view but all saw the same challenges ahead for wearables: designing for the human brain.

No, I'm not talking about sensors implanted in your brain (although that's certainly possible, and already happening in research and medical settings). I'm talking about designing for the nuanced way our brains process the experience of wearing a device.

In particular, we all saw a need for wearables that:

Support rather than distract from goal-oriented behavior. Dr. Gazzaley’s research at UCSF explicitly focuses on this topic: how goal-oriented behavior is affected by distraction. On the panel, he joked, “I’m the guy reporters call when they want someone to say distraction is bad.”

But it’s not that simple: Dr. Gazzaley noted that if devices are designed with the brain’s limitations in mind, they could be used to support rather than distract from goal-oriented behavior. For example, he said, we know that humans are not very good at staying alert while driving. If a wearable could be designed to detect when we’re falling asleep at the wheel and alert us before we do, that could literally save lives.

Increase self-awareness, but not to the point of self-consciousness. As I’ve tested various wearable devices, I’ve found that wearing an activity tracker like the UP does have a positive effect on my activity during the day - I’m more aware of my sedentary behavior and more likely to walk when I can, like pacing the platform while waiting for the train instead of standing still.

But I’ve found that wearing a tracker to sleep introduces an unwelcome element of self-consciousness into my bedroom: I’m paying attention (and not in a good way) to how long it takes me to fall asleep.

And what about sex? Should some elements of our lives remain untracked? (I argue yes; others may disagree.)

Fjord CEO Olof Schybergson predicted that we’ll need new rules of engagement when wearables like Google Glass allow us to record our surroundings invisibly. In business meetings or on dates, for example, self-consciousness could detract from trust in our relationships.

Give feedback, but avoid “chart fatigue.” All the panelists agreed that feedback is an important element of why wearables work: That’s why the Misfit Shine has LEDs that light up to show your progress toward your daily activity goal. In Dr. Gazzaley’s lab experiments, he often uses gamification strategies precisely for this reason - achievements, progression, and competition are powerful and addictive incentives to keep doing something.

But Schybergson noted that the novelty of data quickly wears off and erodes into “chart fatigue.” For wearables to keep our attention over the long term, they need to be “living services,” evolving as we evolve.

Lead image by Dane Frederiksen, picturing Bill Geiser, Sonny Vu and Olof Schybergson (left to right).

Guest author Sarah Rotman Epps is a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research.

One of the most delightful product features I saw at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this month came from an unexpected source: the new BlackBerry 10 operating system from Research In Motion (RIM).

While RIM is battling from behind with BB10, there’s a lot to like about this product, from the super-smart contextual prediction keyboard to the super-efficient BlackBerry Hub. The feature of BB10 that I like best is called “BlackBerry Balance,” which allows users to selectively turn off work-related email and apps for specified periods of time. BlackBerry Balance is significant for three reasons:

1. It’s designed for consumers (workers), not IT administrators. This is a big, big deal for RIM, a company known for making products that were favorites of IT shops. In the past, IT administrators had all the power over corporate BlackBerrys -they could not only kill a user's device remotely but also could limit access to features like the app store.

With BB10, it’s IT admins who are in a box - they can give users access to corporate email and applications, but those are siloed on the device, and BlackBerry Balance lets workers decide when to turn work off while still using their devices for fun stuff.

2. It puts workers in control of their work-life balance. The BlackBerry Hub, which unifies communications and alerts from text messages, calls, email and social networks, makes communicating very efficient (for example, you can reply to tweets and Facebook messages directly from the Hub without opening separate applications), but it could easily be overwhelming too. With BlackBerry Balance, consumers don't have to fear they’ll be bombarded with work-related messages when they use the Hub on personal time.

3. It’s a model for other mobile OSes to follow. Other than Apple’s “Do Not Disturb” feature on iOS, there are very few features I’ve seen on mobile operating systems that do anything to assuage the pains of the perpetually connected consumer. It’s great to see RIM leading here, and I hope to see other companies follow with their own innovative features.

Smartphones enable perpetual connectivity, but they should also empower consumers to set their own demands for how and when they want to be connected.

Image from BlackBerry YouTube video.

Guest author Sarah Rotman Epps is a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research.

Computing is permeating domains that were previously not connected. That theme was readily observable at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week, where sensor-powered devices for your plants, pets, posture and dining utensils were all on display, not to mention the numerous devices for tracking your sleep and exercise.

Enhance? Or Replace?

These devices are undoubtedly useful, but do we really need devices to replace our basic powers of observation?

For example, the Flower Power plant sensor by Parrot tells you when your plant needs more or less sunshine, water or fertilizer. Now, I am the first to admit failure in gardening - usually, my plants get eaten by critters before they can die of over- or under-watering - and if Flower Power brings success to more would-be gardeners, fine.

However, it’s worth considering what we might be missing by outsourcing our powers of observation to a sensor and a smartphone.

Will these tools, over time, enhance our powers of observation (i.e., would we eventually recognize the signs of a light-starved plant with our own eyes, and decrease our dependence on the device)? Or would looking at plants and understanding what they’re telling us become a skill we replace with another skill? (We don’t need to remember phone numbers anymore, for example, but we do need to discern spam emails from real ones. Evolution never ceases!)

We should push sensor-laden devices - and our use of them - to enhance, not outsource, our cognitive experience.

Spidey-Sense Superpowers!

An example (also from CES) of a product that does this is the Lapka: an elegantly designed “personal environment monitor” that senses humidity, pesticides (via a small block you "plug in" to a fruit or vegetable via a headphone jack), electromagnetic fields and radiation, through a tactile interface of wooden and plastic blocks that tether to your smartphone for data display. I like this product because it makes accessible data about our physical environment that we previously could not get to unaided. That data lets us make better-informed decisions.

Basically, I want superpowers: I want devices and applications to help us achieve more as humans than we could without them.

Sometimes this might be about automating tasks, like the app EasilyDo does, that don’t add value to our lives, such as merging duplicate contacts in our address book.

Other times it might be about giving us access to information about our circadian rhythm, like the larklife does, so we can optimize our energy for the things we care about most, like being creative at work or being with our families.

As computing permeates more domains of our existence, we have the opportunity to demand more of our devices, and our use of them. As we plug in our plants and our forks, let’s just stop for a moment to evaluate the capabilities these new tools give us... and what jobs our old tools (and often our own senses) do just fine.