Introduction

The iWatch will fill a gaping hole in the Apple ecosystem. It will facilitate and coordinate not only the activities of all the other computers and devices we use, but a wide array of devices to come. Like other breakthrough Apple products, its value will be underestimated at launch, then grow to have a profound impact on our lives and Apple’s fortunes.

What will follow is not based on insider information but a solid understanding of Apple, its products, the problem, and the opportunity. The Apple iWatch development team I expect exists is likely already well ahead of the ideas I’m suggesting here. (Should they draw any new ideas from what follows, they are free to use them.  I’ve already reached my lifetime goal of as many patents as Heinz has varieties.)

Before delving into what an Apple smartwatch might look like, we need to understand why, right now, people not only think they don’t need a smartwatch, they flat-out don’t want a smartwatch.

The Smartwatch

Traditional smartwatches are big and clunky.  They require charging. (I haven’t had to remove my “dumb” watch from my wrist in four years.) I can’t read a smartwatch at night without using my other hand to turn on the light.  I can’t read a digital watch at any time without the use of reading glasses, nor can most people over 45, which is why the big hand and the small hand continue to go around together on so many watches.  What’s worse, I’ve found a traditional smartwatch’s extra functions neatly divide into those I don’t need and those I can’t find. I can live without a smartwatch.

Recently, some startups have addressed a few of the smartwatch’s disadvantages.  They noticed that people are now carrying around a decent-sized screen with a whole bunch of virtual buttons—their smartphones—so smartwatches no longer need display everything and offer access to every option within the watch interface itself.  Bluetooth 4.0 enables low-power communication without draining the watch’s battery, making smaller size and longer running times possible.

The Cookoo watch, for example, will last for a year between battery changes. It doesn’t do a great deal, but what it does do is quite useful.

The Cookoo Watch

The Pebble, while it offers much more than the Cookoo in terms of functionality, lasts about a week before demanding removal for charging. That’s longer than smartwatches used to go, but hardly compares to what people expect in a modern watch.

The Pebble Watch

Martian has combined the large, somewhat clunky styling of the traditional smartwatch (albeit in a great many color variations) to offer the greatest pass-through power from the smartphone.  The result is Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio:  Ask Siri to call someone, and you can talk with them through the speaker and microphone in your watch, all handled via Bluetooth by your phone.

The Martian Watch

The Martian sports two hours of talk time, although the watch itself will keep running after that. You’ll certainly need to get in the habit of charging it every night.

These and others of the new generation of smartwatches are certainly very attractive to early adopters, but don’t expect them to smash the market open.  That’s going to require an entirely different level of both functionality and perfection, just the sort of thing for which Apple is famous.

Overcoming Smartwatch Drawbacks

The first thing Apple has to do is address traditional drawbacks in smartwatch design, something they are qualified to do.

Charging. If you think about it, there isn’t actually a charging problem at all.   Never has been.  Instead, there’s a having-to-remove-the-watch-from-your-arm problem. What if you held a patent on a charger that could charge an object that is several feet away through the air wirelessly? Apple holds such a patent.

The usual drawback to remote charging is that it is not efficient, but if the watch doesn’t require all that much power to begin with and will shut down the charger when it is full, the process can be relatively inefficient and still not cost you much money or the nation’s infrastructure much energy. (We spend lots of money/resources on inefficient power sources all the time: One AAA cell for your TV’s remote control costs around fifty cents.  It holds around 1.4 watt-hours of energy.  Not kwhs, whrs.  You would have to spend $25 to $50 on AAA cells to equal a penny’s worth of the power you get out of the wall.)

Clunky design.  Two reasons clunky design wouldn’t be a problem for Apple.  The first and foremost: Jonathan Ive.  Second:  Apple’s recent patent on a low-cost method for creating curved glass for screens. Apple can create a smartwatch with revolutionary functionality that is drop-dead gorgeous.  Is there any doubt they will do so?

Buttons & menu trees.  Won’t be any.  Why?  One good reason: Siri.  Whatever the watch can do, you’ll be able to put in place by commanding it (with your iPhone and the Siri back-end handling the actual mechanics, of course): “Set timer for 22 minutes.” “Wake me at 6:15,” etc. Whatever the watch can display, you’ll be able to bring up just by asking: “How long before my plane takes off?” “What’s the temperature right now in Dubai?”

Siri will be accompanied by touch, of course, with touch handling the lighter tasks, Siri the more complex. There will be overlap, so you can use more complex touch maneuvers when you can’t speak to your watch, during a meeting perhaps or when there’s a lot of ambient noise. Many people will never learn the more complex maneuvers, nor will they need to as the iPhone, iPad, and Mac will offer simple alternative interfaces to the more complex tasks.

The iWatch as Facilitator/Coordinator

The iWatch will have a few functions it performs entirely on its own, chief among them being telling you the time.  It’s chief role will be that of office manager, facilitating and coordinating your use of your other iDevices and the Internet by gathering data, delivering messages, storing and forwarding, coordinating tasks, and carrying out functions that extend the capabilities of your other devices. The iPhone or other primary device will be the executive in charge, making the decisions, setting the strategy, and apportioning tasks. The watch will have the least energy resources available, so the watch will be used sparingly.  Still, as time goes on, more uses will be found for it, and it will receive increasing amounts of traffic.

The Killer Applications

The iWatch can and should neatly fix the two most serious problems we have with our current mobile devices, ones we may not even realize we have. Only Apple holds the necessary keys to address the first of these, so only Apple will.

The first two killer applications are neither sexy nor fun, but they will make our lives so much more pleasant.

Passcodes & Passwords.  The watch can and should, for most of us, eliminate passcodes and passwords altogether on iPhones, and Macs and, if Apple’s smart, PCs: As long as my watch is in range, let me in! That, to me, would be the single-most compelling feature a smartwatch could offer: If the watch did nothing but release me from having to enter my passcode/password 10 to 20 times a day, I would buy it.  If the watch would just free me from having to enter pass codes, I would buy it even if it couldn’t tell the right time! I would happily strap it to my opposite wrist! This one is a must. Yes, Apple is working on adding fingerprint reading for iDevices, and that’s just wonderful, but it will still take time and trouble for the device to get an accurate read from the user. I want in now! Instantly! Let me in, let me in, let me in!

Apple must ensure, however, that, if you remove the watch, you must reestablish authenticity. (Reauthorizing would be an excellent place for biometrics.) Otherwise, we’ll have a spate of violent “watchjackings” replacing the non-violent iPhone-grabs going on today.

Individuals or companies that demand a higher level of security can require both the presence of the watch and a passcode, aka, two-factor authentication. Even that could be made a lot less onerous, again optionally, if, when at work or within your own house, the security software would be allowed to lift the requirement for the separate passcode, only applying it when you are out and about.

Find iPhone. The current “Find iPhone” is a well-implemented solution wherein you can find your iDevice no matter where it has wandered on the globe, as long as it is turned on and no one has messed with it.  However, it is not exactly as simple procedure:

1. Find yourself another iDevice or computer
2. Log in
3. Open Find iPhone or point a browser to www.icloud.com
4. Wait while signals are sent through the ether
5. Select the device you want from the map or list
6. Click “Play sound”
7. Find the device you’re looking for & dismiss alert
8. Delete the follow-up email

That’s a lot of steps! Better that your iDevices never get all that lost to begin with. Two additional capabilities, facilitated by the iWatch, can help ensure you never need that long-distance capability.

Local Find: As long as your device is close by, just scrawl a question mark on the top of your iWatch or perhaps ask Siri, “Where’s my phone?” and your phone will light up and start chiming. Of the eight steps above, you need perform only step seven. (You would find your iPod or iPad the same way, of course.)

Automatic Find: By the time you realize you have left your top-secret prototype iPhone sitting on the bar, Gizmodo will have probably already published an article on it. However, with the iWatch on your wrist, as soon as you move out of range, it will tell you that you’ve forgotten your phone, then help you locate it, as needed.  That’s a lot more useful than waking up the next morning to discover you seem to be missing something, only to then press Find iPhone into service. (The Cookoo watch already has at least the reminder part of this feature.)

Extending the range: Bluetooth Low Energy is supposed to have a range of 50 meters or 160 feet.  Presumably, that’s in an open field with a tailwind.  In your home or work place, your watch could end up driving you nuts if Apple doesn’t provide an intelligent means of expanding the virtual bubble so the alarm doesn’t go off anywhere in your safe environment. The system will need to “know” you’re in one of your secure areas, warning you only if you start to drive away without one of your devices. This could be handled, perhaps, by repeaters embedded in devices such as Apple Airports.  In homes and businesses with multiple repeaters, your watch could then also give you a local “read” on what repeater your device is near.

Near Field Communications for Payment.  The conventional, collective “vision” is that, soon, we will all pay our bills by simply reaching for our phone, a phone that, for around half of us, is lost somewhere deep in the recesses of a purse, retrievable in around one minute and thirty seconds. With luck. Think of the time those folks will save over paying with their wallet, a much bigger and more obvious object that they actually had to move out of the way in their effort to find their completely invisible black phone!

Oh, yeah, they won’t save any time at all.

Of course, we guys are a lot more clever. We’ll slide our phone right into our breast pocket where, heh, heh, we can get at it instantly. Or could have if we hadn’t then put on a turtleneck sweater before putting on and zipping up our jacket.

Next time, we’ll just pay cash.

And then there’s getting on the subway:  Instead of having to slide that paper card we buy once a month into the slot, all we’ll have to do is wave our $800 iPhone over the little sensor, except that nice gentleman we hadn’t noticed standing just to our side just grabbed our $800 iPhone and is now hot-footing it out of the station with us trapped on the wrong side of the turnstile.  Huh!  That didn’t work out so well!

Just last week, our kid had to struggle to get his phone out of his backpack to pay his bus fare using his marvelous NFC chip, only to have it stolen the same way! If only there were a better solution! Oh, yeah. There is.

The NFC chip belongs in the iWatch, not in the iPhone! That way we’ll know exactly where it is at all times, strapped to the end of an appendage expressly designed to be waved around at things.  How handy! Reach. Touch. Done.

Meanwhile, our iPhone, handling any necessary communication, will stay hidden safely away, and, if someone does manage to get ahold of our watch, it will require reauthorization, having been removed from our arm.  Net value to the thief: Zilch. Net loss to us: A whole lot less than an iPhone, with word on the street quickly making it clear there’s no point in stealing an iWatch.

Of course, not every merchant will accept NFC right away, so the watch, linked to Passport, will also display QR codes, etc.

Other Cool Capabilities

Phone call facilitator. Your iWatch vibrates. You glance at the watch and see who’s calling. You swipe up twice, indicating you want to answer (or some other standardized gesture). Your caller is asked to, “Wait one moment, please” while your watch instructs your phone to light up and start ringing to help you find it (or just lights up—your choice).

Many of us, of course, would like more, however, the iWatch as speakerphone peripheral for our iPhone is much less likely to happen. Of course, it would be cool: Let’s face it, Dick Tracy had a two-way wrist radio, and we want one, too! Imagine asking your imaginary friend, Siri, to call one of your real friends, Bill, then having a conversation, all without actually reaching into your pocket for your phone. However, the iWatch is going to be all about energy management. The Martian watch, for all its bulk, can squeeze only two hours of talk-time out of a charge. Martian will likely be left to pursue that market on its own.

Sensors. The iWatch will incorporate a variety of sensors. Certainly one thrust of these sensors will be sports/health data capture, inferring walking based on arm swing, detecting climbing or diving based on a pressure sensor, etc., etc. The more sensors, the better. A temperature and pressure sensor pressed against the skin could prove useful for medicine. A proximity sensor will let software “know” whether the watch is hidden in a sleeve or under a blanket. Whatever combination of sensors ultimately make their way into the product will inevitably lead to some very interesting new applications that people may have yet to consider. Other iDevices will combine the iWatch sensor data with data from their own sensors and from the outside world, such as weather data, to form a complete and complex picture.

Music. The Pebble is already handling music functions, which, of course, an iWatch would likewise be expected to do, just as the earlier generation iPod mini would do when embedded in an after-market watch-like case. The Pebble, however, is acting solely as a controller to—facilitator for—the user’s iPod or iPhone, rather than acting as a music device on its own, saving its battery life. The iWatch would be expected to follow this same path.

Telling the time. Yes, it will tell the time, likely offering a familiar Swiss Railroad watch face as an option, and it will tell the right time, too:  By communicating with the iPhone, it will update to changing time zones, etc., as the phone updates, eliminating—or at least reducing—the need for manual intervention, a major bother with current watches.

When Apple really gets serious about integrating Passbook, your watch will “know” when you’ve boarded that plane to London:  You were scheduled to board, the phone’s GPS locates you at the airport, and you just now turned off your phone.  Yesterday, the watch will have offered you an easy way to switch to split local/London time and, now that you’re aboard the plane, will be prepared for you to flip to just London time with a single touch.

The Apps

Most wearables to date have been dedicated devices.  The iWatch will be in the vanguard of devices that can work with 3rd party apps  There will be tens or hundreds of thousands of apps, few that either the designers of the iWatch (or I) will have anticipated. Almost all will actually run on the larger iDevices, extracting data from the iWatch, displaying data on the iWatch, or making use of the iWatch as facilitator.

Consider the iPhone, released on day-one with its handful of built-in apps.  Yes, it was exciting, but it was not nearly the tool that exact same phone had become three years later, as the breadth and depth of applications mounted and the system software matured.  We can expect the same curve to occur with the iWatch.

The Unexpected Apps

At least one or two evil apps will slip past the Apple watchdogs, launching a feeding frenzy in the press.  Apple will have already limited how much data a given app can access plus given us the power to offer and withdraw permissions. More steps will be taken once the breech occurs, and we’ll all soon get over it because the benefits we’re receiving will so far exceed the risks.

Then will come a different kind of unexpected apps. Consider SMS on cell phones. It’s a hack, a simple message system slipped in an underutilized space reserved for cell phones and towers to communicate with each other. It cost the cell phone companies nothing to offer it, and has made them billions of dollars, with total revenue expected to reach around one trillion dollars before the technology finally declines.  Grown-ups wouldn’t use it because you had to learn a secret code and phones are supposed to be talked into.  Kids took to it like ducks to water. (Only after Apple and its imitators made SMS accessible did the demographics creep upward.)

The iWatch, like every other Apple product, will have an interface made as simple as humanly possible.  However, human nature is such that, unless the designers work tirelessly to keep ahead or at least abreast of the users, it won’t stay that way forever.  Consider the following possibility:

KidCode. It might start out as an app designed with the best of intentions, to let people communicate via a brand-new gestural language-in, Morse-code vibration out, aimed, perhaps, at a few aging amateur radio operators. It it suddenly and unexpectedly taken over by school kids, sweeping the nation. No more being busted by teacher while intently tapping out text on phones. Instead, kids will be just innocently rubbing their watch faces. No more glancing at text screens, just feeling silent vibrations.  Tabloids and the evening news will simultaneously condemn it and  propagate it.  PTAsParent-Teacher Associations will decry it.  Civic leaders will condemn it.  Ultimately, teachers will learn to notice the trademark casually drooping arms of the senders, right hand over left wrist, along with the far-away stares of the recipients, and order will be restored.  However, by then, we’ll have an entire generation of kids that knows Morse code, just as an earlier generation learned that pressing the 4 button on a phone three times would get them an “K”.

YoungEmployeeCode. Kids grow up.  The young people you may be supervising in a few years will sit in your staff meeting strategizing against you in KidCode on their iWatches while looking at you with the most innocent of young, fresh faces.  You’ll learn to ply them with Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and coffee to force their hands above the tabletop, omitting napkins to ensure that, should they subsequently decide to engage in skullduggery, they’ll end up sliming their watches with syrupy glaze. (No, it won’t hurt the watch, but it will make you feel good anyway.)

This kind of utterly silent messaging will have benefit as well. Consider:

TheaterCode. Young people will be able to communicate in crowded theaters to their heart’s content without disturbing anyone.  No talking, whispering, ringing, buzzing, illuminated screens, no nothin’. If you are neither sender nor recipient, you will remain completely undisturbed except for the occasional seemingly random guffawA short explosion of laughter.

SalesCode. ExecCode. LawyerCode. A wide variety of people will communicate with collegues using KidCode in meetings and even open court, sending cues, cautions, etc., without fear of eavesdropping or censure, giving them a clear advantage over their less communicative opposition.

SilentMessage. Having learned the code, users will be able to receive notification of people calling, appointment reminders, etc., all in complete silence without even glancing at their phones.  Gestures can start, stop, pause, and replay messages, as well as set up replies, with coded responses offering the user feedback the the system understands. SilentMessage, as with most apps, would be primarily handled by the phone, with the watch accepting input and providing output, vibration in this case.  SilentMessage would also be an option.  Everything it could do could be done using either the iWatch display or the iPhone itself.

The Expected Apps

Many apps just belong out there. In some cases, they’re already being done by other companies in other forms, like the fitbit, or even in other watches, as with the companies mentioned above. In other cases, the iWatch

Golf. Baseball. Bowling. Tennis. Critique your form based on data gathered from the accelerometers in the watch. Get distance to the hole in golf and pertinent data for other sports delivered to the watch, rather than having to glance at your phone all the time.

Running/walking. Store and forward to your phone/computer data on jogging/walking time and distance based on arm swings, altitude changes based on pressure sensor, etc., to your phone or computer for the appropriate app to compute and display your running achievements. Lots of competition there already, but with the iWatch, it’s all built-in so you need not carry any additional hardware.

Swimming. Time your swimming laps retroactively.  Your “swim coach” app has instructed the watch to store and forward repetitive arm movement times and intervals when the watch is in a wet or high-pressure (under water) environment, so when your arm starts flailing for an extended period of time, that data gets stored and forwarded to the cloud via your phone.  Nothing for you to set beforehand. The app just simply has that data available to it to display the workout you did earlier today or a week ago Thursday if and when you become interested.

Health.  Having the watch facilitate a basic test like blood pressure monitoring would be a god-send, but probably at prohibitive cost in dollars, size, and energy.  However, people will write apps that will carry out other medical tests that will end up surprising us, such as tests for early detection of tremor, etc. The watch could also act as a store-and-forward data collector for other more specialized devices, cutting back the cost of specialized sensors that would then need be little more than a sensor, a Bluetooth chip, and a battery. Because the watch is always with us, it will be able to deliver a long-term data stream, rather than a limited snapshot, providing insight often missing from tests administered in a doctor’s office.

Find other stuff. Finding doesn’t have to be limited to only Apple products. The watch could also tell you that your car keys just went out of range, that your hand-carry luggage is no longer with you, etc. by communicating with simple Blue-Tooth-plus-battery transceivers designed as key fobs or luggage tags. They would then light up and/or emit chimes upon command to aid retrieval. These would likely not be Apple products, but would fit well into the Apple ecosystem.

Watching TV.  The iWatch will empower TV watching in at least two ways.  First, it can serve as the remote control:  Whisper to Siri what channel you want or what recorded show you want to watch. That information is then handled by a non-hobby version of AppleTV. Just double-tap to pause the screen.  Double-tap again to continue. (It could be some other gesture. They will choose one that you won’t perform by accident, but one that is much more lightweight than required, say, to unlock an iPhone.)

Second, because the iWatch eliminates the need for a passcode, IOS can be changed to enable your iPod/iPhone/iPad, in the presence of both iWatch and a nearby, running AppleTV, to turn on and default to the Remote app as soon as you pick it up, for the very first time making the Remote app practical to use on a passcode-protected iDevice.

The More Ambitious

Temperature Control. It wouldn’t take all that much to let the watch interface with a room’s thermostat. Local Bluetooth repeater information would determine what room you are in and provide the communications link, enabling you to raise or lower the current temperature from your wrist. However, if the watch can, through its array of sensors, accurately determine local ambient temperature where you are in the room, an HVAC system with an intelligent controller could provide a microclimate that would follow you around the building, making appropriate accomodation when two or more individuals with different thermal tastes occupy the same space.

Correcting Apple Maps. This is a good example of what could come about through crowdsourcing using iWatch data.

Contrary to press reports, Apple’s 2D roadmaps, supplied by TomTom, are pretty darned accurate.  However, because the initial Apple Maps presentation misled the world into believing that Apple Maps was the perfect app on its first day of release, it instantly became popular sport to point out every error anyone could find. Meanwhile, Google Maps has had a roadway literally running right through the middle of my living room since 2005, and no one has felt the need to send headlines screaming around the world about it. (Apple Maps, on Day One, moved that roadway off to the side of our property where it belongs.  I can’t tell you what a relief it has been to my wife and myself having reduced traffic passing between us and the telly these last months, with only Android users continuing to rumble past.)

What is less than stellar is Apple’s “3D View,” not “Flyover,” it’s quite wonderful. I’m talking about “3D View.” However, let’s start with “Flyover.”

“Flyover” is limited to the central portions of metropolitan areas within free and democratic countries.

This is not a photograph, but a texture-mapped model of San Francisco. The Flyover view, the envy of the computer world, covers far less than 1% of the globe and, because of its super-high cost, will never cover that much more.

Today’s “3D View,” seen below, superimposes a satellite photograph of the earth on a topographical map of the world. While the height of mountains, valleys, and lakes are accurately depicted, finer features, such as buildings and roadways, have no independent altitude information associated with them, resulting in buildings being uniformly flat and roadways being, at all times, assumed to hug the landscape, something that becomes quite comical when the “landscape” is a chasm dropping several hundred feet and the roadway is actually a bridge:

Note that both the actual bridge and virtual bridge, the semi-transparent broken segments of paving seen slightly lower and to the left of the bridge, are shown as melted into the river.

The Fix: Using pressure data from millions of watches, Apple could build a precision altitude map of the world. This map would indicate true altitudes everywhere that iWatch wearers travel. The granularity would be several orders of magnitude greater than ever before attempted for a wide-area map at a cost several orders of magnitude less than Flyover.

Because most of the time, most of the people’s arms will be within four feet of known roadways (or rail beds), one can, over time, correct for both local barometric pressure and current GPS error (the GPS, of course, being in the phone, not the iWatch—GPS requires significant power). Given that data, one can then look for where current map data and people’s actual locations consistently vary, specifically where people appear to be either diving below or floating above the surface of the earth. If everyone is dropping below nominal ground level, they must be in a cut.

The more interesting data will arise from where people appear to be floating. Consider the real results that would be detected on Highway 93 above: Motorists’ watches will consistently show no pressure change as they cross the river, ergo, they are staying at the same altitude, ergo there is a bridge. Apply that correcton and the roadways, both real and virtual, will no longer melt into the river.

The building-height problem would likewise be solved:  Data collected day-after-day might report four different pressure levels, spaced 12 feet apart at one given location, indicating that particular building has four occupied stories.

Would the resulting map look as good as Flyover?  No.  The image textures would be missing, perhaps to be applied through local effort.  The buildings would typically be rendered as extruded solids, based on their roof shapes, i. e., primarily clusters of rectangular solids. Would it be ahead of what’s there and way ahead of the competition?  Definitely. Such a world-wide micro-altitude map, applied to Apple’s current 3D View, would instantly correct millions of errors, turning Apple Maps into the map with the most finely-detailed vertical information ever.

Weather prediction. Sure, the watch will tell you the temperature outside and whether you’re going to get rained on, but I’m talking about another crowdsourcing application, one that can save lives. Once a true altitude map has been established, meteorologists will be able to gather barometric data at a granularity never before even considered.  That data, fed into supercomputers, has the potential to enable them to detect and correlate initial conditions very early in the process, predicting storm paths, strengths, and timing with considerably higher precision than today.

Turn-by-turn walking directions. The face of a smartwatch would be a poor place to display maps, but it can display an arrow just fine. As you approach an intersection, the arrow will become bent, etc., indicating a right or left turn, just as we’re used to with the arrows in our GPS. Except there’s one problem: As you rotate your arm, the arrow, fixed as it is on the display, rotates right with you. Or at least it would if you didn’t have a compass embedded in your watch.

Here’s how a compass-equipped iWatch would work: You start by asking Siri to guide you someplace in the city, and the Maps app on your iPhone works out the route.  The iPhone issues its first command to the watch:  “iWatch: Display a straight arrow pointing toward 22 degrees.” (Actual syntax more complex.) The iWatch “knows” which way is North from its compass, so it adds 22 degrees to that and displays the arrow pointing toward 22 degrees.  Then, it updates that image, say, 15 times a second, as necessary.  You can rotate your arm all you want, but the iWatch will always display that arrow just floating there, always pointing toward 22 degrees magnetic.

The watch might also display the remaining minutes until the bus you’re hoping to catch will arrive, along with an indicator letting you know if your pace is sufficient.

With people no longer needing to stare at their iPhones as they walk down the street, there will be fewer people run over and fewer people subjected to having their iPhones snatched from their hands.

“What’s That [thing]?” You’re standing in a forest clearing and a waterfall high on the mountain catches your eye.  You raise your hand, point your finger, and say, “What’s that waterfall?”  Your iPhone’s speaker responds, “That’s the upper level of Yosemite Falls.” Simple: The GPS (in the phone) establishes your position, the iWatch compass reports the direction your arm is pointing, its accelerometer reports declination, and triangulation in the app on the phone corrects for the offset between your eyes and shoulder joint. (Yes, finer resolution could be achieved by having the user start out by running a setup routine to determine each user’s dominant eye. A bit beyond the scope of this article, no?)

For just these last two apps alone, having a compass would be very cool, and I hope they’ll incorporate one in the first release.  If they don’t, then these last two apps will fall into the category of…

Future Releases

With subsequent product generations, the iWatch will take on more and more of a central role in your iLife.

Important papers. You know that sinking feeling when you realize you left your wallet at home?  It would be nice if having your NFC chip with you in the watch would, from day-one, remove most of that, enabling you to buy lunch, gas, and food for dinner, but how about if it also stored electronic copies of your driver’s license, your passport, etc., along with an access pathway to your medical records for emergency personnel?

Ubiquitous access.  Approach any Apple device, mobile or not when wearing your iWatch. Armed with the owner of that device’s approval and your passcode, make it temporarily yours.  If it’s a Mac, you will see your account just as you last left it.  If it’s a phone, it will, for as long as you’re holding it, be your phone, being billed to your account, showing your address book, etc. (This is a concept we showed in the opening scene of my 1993 film, Starfire.) To secure that kind of access, will require two-factor authentication, and, with the iWatch, that authentication will finally become available and simple.

First Release

So when will the iWatch come out? I need mine no later than a week from Tuesday, but Apple, when you look back, is never actually the first. They let a few others, sometimes many others, experiment first. (Tablets were out for more than a decade.) Then, they bring out the killer product. We may have to wait until next year, or around 7500 pass code/password entries from now.  Please, Apple, get a move on!

Postscript – One Week Later

It may seem like this watch has every bell and whistle imaginable, but if you carefully examine what I’ve proposed, I’ve really outlined proven technology that is here today, found in other wearable products.  It is packaged differently, to be sure, but that has always been Apple’s hallmark.  In fact, the iWatch I have outlined uses much simpler technology than products already out there.  It does not have a speaker, an earphone jack, or a camera. I do not anticipate that it will be a two-way wrist radio nor a two-way wrist videophone, at least not for a long, long time.

The reason that some reviewers have seen the article as extravagant is that it projects the iWatch into a mature future. Consider back in 2007 when you first heard that Apple was about to release a line of phones. At that time, sophisticated phones held perhaps a dozen apps, most of them simple games, all of them relatively difficult to use.  Suddenly, you read that this new phone would not only make calls, but soon users will be able to see geosynchronous satellites in orbit simply by raising the phone in the air, to deposit a check in their bank accounts just by aiming their phone at it, and to do, not another dozen things, but another 800,000 things that might interest them. People might have imagined the phone would have to be the size of a house and the complexity of an NSA supercomputer.

Visioneering is about looking at the way products will appear at maturity in order to design in the necessary elements that will enable that maturity to take place.  What sounds extravagant in this case arises from a conservative hardware design coupled with an open architecture heavily dependent on the existing Apple infrastructure.  It is the openness of the architecture and the ability of Apple to leverage its infrastructure that will offer Apple the advantage and make this vision possible. Don’t expect every feature and certainly not every app to be in circulation on day one, but they and many more will be there in a short order, much faster than with previous products.

Below, you will find extensive reader comments that include many good ideas for some of those future apps as well as follow-on designs.

출처: http://asktog.com/atc/apple-iwatch/

Bring Your Strategic Planning Process to Life

Most entrepreneurs avoid writing a definitive business or strategic plan until they are forced to create one by a bank, investor or the SBA. These types of plans are more of a sales document than a true roadmap.  Others, treat strategic planning as a stand-alone exercise that is finished, filed and forgotten. These periodic planning events can cause as much harm as good.

Certainly, there are benefits to occasionally focusing on creating or updating your strategic and business plans. You uncover new information about your customers and competitors. You listen to new points of view that shape your thinking. You interview your key employees, gather market intelligence and analyze stakeholder survey results. The process culminates with “three days at the Radisson” where you and your key employees meet to brainstorm and decide on your company’s new direction. The end result is a beautifully bound document that is likely sitting on your credenza collecting dust.

These planning exercises usually create a temporary boost in morale for those who participate in the process and long-term resentment for those who are excluded. Participants like to feel part of the conversation. They become temporarily refreshed and re-energized. Those who are excluded, feel discounted, disconnected and disrespected.

Other flaws in a periodic planning process prevent you from enjoying long term benefits. Within just a few months, circumstances change, memories fade and strategic discipline gives way to old habits. The following are typical mistakes experienced by many organizations:

• The plan is not communicated to rank and file employees who continue to lack strategic focus.
• Key elements of the plan are not implemented.
• Critical information was not identified and considered because too few employees were involved in the process.
• Strategic Planning is an occasional exercise that does not become part of your organizational culture.

A better approach is to make strategic planning an ongoing, organic process that involves all of your employees. It is especially important to include frontline employees in your planning process. Frontline employees are the eyes and ears of your company. They speak to your customers. They negotiate with your vendors. They meet your competitors at trade shows. They work with your expensive equipment. They know what works and what is broken. Not including them in your strategic planning process denies your company the wisdom and insight of your most connected employees.

The following is a simple 5-step strategic planning process that is based on the tools and methods provided in the Breakthrough Book. Download your free copy now. Use the five steps to initiate a self-sustaining strategic planning process that engages frontline employees to fuel a continuous strategic improvement process:

1. Complete the Employee SWOT Survey and Analysis Worksheet to identify areas of strength, weakness, opportunity and threats.
2. Complete the Value Proposition Template to gather competitive intelligence and assess your company’s current competitive position.
3. Complete the Business Model Map to create an aligned set of improvement objectives at your company, department, and process-team levels.
4. Initiate the Communication Switchboard to engage employees in an ongoing, continuous strategic improvement cycle that is tied back to department, process and employee performance.
5. Complete the CEO Scorecard to identify, prioritize and monitor implementation of  your company’s strategic plan and related improvement projects.

 Step One: Survey Your Employees

Your Company’s strategic planning process needs a starting point. It is often helpful to begin with a company-wide survey. Use the survey to identify all of the recurring problems, concerns, snafus, complaints, and inefficiencies that impact the growth, innovation, and customer satisfaction of your business. It is like a company-wide data-dump. In addition to operational issues, you should also identify the leadership, management and organizational issues that negatively impact your business.

A “Memo Template,” Employee Survey,” and “Analysis Worksheet”  are available for free download along with your free copy of theBreakthrough Book.

• The “Memo Template” explains the purpose of the survey to your employees and provides instructions.  Customize it to serve the needs of your company.
• The “Employee Survey Template” uses a familiar SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) format that asks your employees to identify opportunities for saving money, making money, operating more efficiently, resolving problems and growing sales.
• The “Analysis Worksheet” helps you aggregate, categorize, prioritize and report survey responses.

Alternatively, you can use the same SWOT format suggested above to structure face-to-face employee interviews. Ask your employees what recurring customer complaints frustrate them?  What operational problems result in waste, inefficiency and avoidable expense? What cultural, leadership and employee issues create a drag on growth, quality and innovation?

When analyzing your list of issues, you will likely be surprised by the quantity and consistency of your employee’s ideas and suggestions. Notice that the value of the reported issues grows the closer you come to your front-lines. Also, notice which employees complete their survey thoughtfully and enthusiastically. These employees will likely lend significant support to your stealthy business transformation initiative. Conversely, you will need to carefully manage those who resist or complain.

Step Two: Assess Your Company’s Value Proposition

Your company’s value proposition defines the worthiness of your product offering from your customers’ point-of-view. Traditionally, a value proposition is a one dimensional document. It simply identifies the reasons your customers value your products and services enough to make a purchase. However, to truly define the value of your business, it must be presented in the context of your competitive marketplace.

For example, think about the last time you went to a restaurant. You considered the unique mix of benefits offered by all available competitors: You thought about the types of food they offer, their location, their level of service, cost, atmosphere, consistency, etc. All this information flashed through your mind as you made your decision.

It is the same for your prospective customers. They choose the competitor who they perceive as being their best option at that moment in time. Your challenge is to make sure your customer’s perception leads them to your door.

Comparing your company’s value proposition with its competitors opens your eyes to bigger possibilities. If you operate locally or regionally, you may also find it helpful to include successful companies outside your marketplace who are living your dream. Although you may not directly compete with these companies, they may offer a wealth of creative ideas that will help you make your own big dreams happen. For example, if you own a hotel you can compare your business with your favorite boutique hotel in South Beach or the South of France.

The Value Proposition Worksheet is designed to visually depict all points of product differentiation related to your company and selected competitor. It is like a taste-test that compares your company’s secret sauce with the best companies in your marketplace. Bon Apatite.

Setup your worksheet by identifying your company and competitors across column headings. Dedicate the first column to your company. Then record the names of your competitors, in order of importance, in the columns to the right of your company column. Use rows to indicate the attributes you want to compare.

A copy of the Value Proposition Worksheet is available as a free download along with your free copy of the Breakthrough Book.

Step Three: Prepare Your Company’s “Business Model Map”

A “Business Model Map” is an improvement over the traditional organizational chart.  It defines lines of responsibility instead of lines of authority. It also provides a visual representation of your company’s aligned strategic plan by presenting improvement objectives at the company, department and process levels.

A Business Model Map template is available as a free download along with your free copy of theBreakthrough Book.

Your Business Model Map is a powerful management tool. Use your Business Model Map to:

• Review your company, department and process objectives and to make sure they are complementary and aligned.
• Configure your business for maximum efficiency.
• Identify operational gaps that need to be filled.
• Help your employees understand how all the moving parts of your company work together and how they fit into the bigger picture.
• Assign responsibility to frontline employees.
• Communicate your company’s strategic plan.

Share your Business Model Map with your employees. Use it to engage them in an ongoing dialogue. Use it to gather their insights and to make better strategic decisions.

Step Four: Engage Your Employees to Create a Self-Sustaining Strategic Planning Process

Steps one to three above are a good way to jump start your strategic planning process. However, your ultimate goal is to engage your employees in a self-sustaining strategic planning process.

To bring your strategic planning process to life you need to create an ongoing tradition of open communication between employees, process teams an leaders. You need your employees to feel comfortable reporting their ideas, issues, concerns, suggestions, competitive intelligence and any other information that can help improve your company’s strategic position. Establishing a communication “switchboard” will help.

Ask employees to report their ideas, suggestions, customer complaints and other issues directly to the switchboard. The switchboard operator will then direct the issue to the appropriate process team. The operator will maintain a communication log that you and other managers can use to hold process teams accountable for resolving the reported issues. You can also use the log to credit employees with the ideas they contribute.

In a very small company, the “switchboard” can be a spiral notebook hanging next to your water cooler. In a larger company the “switchboard” can be maintained by a receptionist, executive assistant or quality manager.

The switchboard logbook should have the following column headings:

• Open Date: The date the issue was first reported.
• Close Date: The date the issue was resolved.
• Reported By: The employee who reported the issue.
• Assigned Process Team: The process manager responsible for resolving the issue.
• Issue/Idea Description: A sound byte description of the issue .
• Resolution: A sound byte explanation of the issues resolution.
• Financial Impact: An estimate of the financial benefit of the resolved issue.

A copy of the Communication Switchboard Template is available as a free download along with your free copy of the Breakthrough Book.

Step Five: Use the CEO Scorecard to Create a One Page Strategic Plan

The CEO Scorecard is a one page strategic plan for your business. It is an easy-to-understand report that ties together key strategic information. It provides you with a high-level, 30,000 foot perspective of your business. It is designed to bring your strategic planning process to life by holding leaders and teams accountable for achieving measurable results.

A customizable CEO ScoreCard template is available as a free download along with your free copy of the Breakthrough Book.

The CEO Scorecard consists of the following sections:

• Mission Statement
• Vision Statement
• Values Alignment/Leadership Scorecard
• Strategic Themes
• Process Improvement Recap
• Improvement Projects Recap
• Key Issues/Trends Recap

Use the Scorecard to structure weekly, monthly or quarterly accountability and/or coaching sessions.

Share Your Success Stories

As you begin to put the above Breakthrough Tools to use, please share your Success Story.  We would like to feature your company.

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Please let us know if you would like to start a Breakthrough Chapter in your community. (Breakthrough chapters are CEO peer groups that are usually hosted by a local Chamber of Commerce, Small Business Development Center or community center.)