When I first met the Metawatch  —  possibly the most revolutionary and disruptive device since the mobile phone  —  I fell in love.

What’s Metawatch?  Metawatch is a handsome timepiece (analog and digital versions are available from the Texas Instruments Store) that receives alerts and notifications from your mobile phone over Bluetooth –providing at-a-glance awareness of what’s happening on the phone.

Why Metawatch? If you’re an average smartphone user, you check your phone 34 times per day, according to a July 2010 study from Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. “Checking behavior” increases when rewards such as an email, text message, or shopping offer is waiting on the phone.

Besides being interruptive, checking notifications on a smartphone is a pain:

• touch to wake
• swipe to unlock
• view notifications
• open notifications with swipe
• then tap a specific event.

Checking notifications this way engages both hands:  one to hold the phone, the other to touch it.  So you can’t really do anything else while you’re at it.  Metawatch provides “Hands Freedom” by providing glanceable information so you can quickly decide whether you need to stop what you’re doing and pick up the phone.  Proclaiming “Glance is the new touch” on its website, Metawatch.org’s goal is to “simplify how we live within this connected world.”

Learn more about the Metawatch and what creative mobile designers are cooking up to exploit its many charms in my March/April 2012 column in Connected World Magazine:  A New World With Metawatch

Connected Hearing Aids. The Metawatch.

Cool, connected devices are coming at us these days faster than ever. Listen to me chat with Connected World Magazine’s publisher, Peggy Smedley, about how these new devices make it easier to deal with the torrent of incoming alerts, notifications, and interruptions streaming at us from our various connected devices.  You’ll enjoy this short, entertaining interview recorded on February 21, 2012.

Listen here: Peggy Smedley Show Episode 178, Segment 3:  Cool Connected Tech

I’ve finally located the embed code so that I can share the video of the Internet of Things panel session I moderated at last fall’s GigaOm Mobilize 2011 conference.  The panel featured some of America’s Internet of Things heavyweights:

• Bill Geiser, CEO, Metawatch – leads development community connecting smartphones to beautiful, intelligent wrist watches
• Bo Begole, Principal Scientist, Xerox PARC – leads Ubiquitous Computing group
• Ted Ladd, Ecosystem Director, WIMM Labs – makers of wrist-worn computers
• David Rose, CEO Vitality, Inc. – makers of the Glo-Cap smart pill bottle & Instructor, MIT Media Lab

In this 40 minute discussion, we explore these questions:

• What applications will drive adoption of the Internet of Things?
• Tech barriers:  What needs to be developed or enhanced?
• Non-Tech barriers:  What business and social issues stand in the way?
• Crystal Ball:  In five years, what can we assume and what will that enable?

Enjoy!

Move over, Jack Bauer.  You’re not the only one with high-tech, in-ear communications.  My granny’s got them too.  Hearing aids, long the domain of seniors, are newly hip.  Not only are today’s digital hearing aids terrific tools for correcting hearing deficiencies, they also connect wirelessly to mobile phones, TVs, media players … virtually any entertainment source with Bluetooth or an audio jack.

My January/February 2012 column for Connected World explores digital hearing aids and how they have become one of the hottest must-have digital media accessories on the planet.

Check it out: Say What?! Hearing Aids are Cool?

You or a family member will likely unwrap a cool, wireless holiday gift this year.  It could be anything:  a new cell phone, a game console, a wireless door lock set, an eReader or a tablet computer.  A wireless BBQ thermometer can tell me when the meat’s perfectly done, and Granny can rest assured that if she falls down, someone will come to help.

For these wonders to happen, consumer devices must connect to a network, or some other device that’s connected to a network such as a smartphone, router or base station.  Wireless technologies used for these connections today include cellular, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, two-way paging and various proprietary technologies.  Soon, devices will also use TV “white space” to connect.

What’s TV white space?  In general, white spaces are empty patches of wireless spectrum that protect channels from interfering with each other or just aren’t being used, and there’s gobs of it.  Unlicensed access to TV white spaces may spur a technology innovation tide similar to wi-fi – indeed, the U.S. Congress has taken to calling this spectrum “Wi-Fi on steroids” or “Super Wi-Fi,” even though white space devices don’t use the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard.

Learn about what TV white spaces can do, and why they’re important for the Internet of Things, in my November/December Unplugged column in Connected World Magazine:  A White (Spaces) Christmas.

If this fall’s CTIA Entertainment & Applications show (San Diego October 11-13) had a theme, it would be “Let’s Make a Deal.”  With U.S. mobile penetration swelling above 100%, the U.S. wireless industry is weathering the economic downturn with grace and in some cases, newfound humility. The companies still standing have made the adjustments to staffing levels, product lines, and business models needed to survive, and are anxious to return to growth. Entrepreneurial start-ups want to ride the wave.

The U.S. wireless industry is open to new ideas, alliances, business models, and markets.  Mergers, strategic partnerships, global expansion and the blending  of wireless/non-wireless business models are among the ways the U.S. mobile sector is creating new growth opportunities.

The M2M community is on the leading edge of this tide.  Mergers announced or celebrated at the show include  u-Blox’s acquisition of Fusion Wireless and Broadsoft’s buyout of Movial Applications.  Aeris Communications and Raco Wireless, competing M2M service providers, announced a strategic partnership that leverages Raco’s long-term deal with T-Mobile to stabilize Aeris’s GSM service supply. KORE Telematics and SensorLogic are both aggressively expanding outside the U.S.

Read the full story, including my observations on the show itself (well done, CTIA!)  in my blog post over at Connected World:  http://bit.ly/qR4iJs

mSolve Partners is a mobile-focused merchant banking firm that I joined earlier this year as an Executive Advisor.  mSolve offers corporate and business development advice to companies mostly in the mobile sector — particularly buy-side support for mergers and acquisitions.

In May, I encouraged the mSolve community to “Think Big About the Internet of Things” in mSolve’s monthly newsletter, and this month I followed up with a piece about “White Spaces and the Internet of Things.”  The Twitter condensed version of those pieces would read:

Internet of Things changes it all. Hockey stick growth oppty for Cloud,wireless. Challenges=size,battery life,coverage,privacy,biz model.

mSolve has recently fielded a global M2M team that includes prominent experts in wireless access networks, device development, semiconductors, ICT and the smart grid.

Learn more about mSolve

May’s mSolve Newsletter:  Thinking Big about the Internet of Things

September’s mSolve newsletter:  White Space and the Internet of Things

Mobile. Opportunity. Everywhere.

That’s the theme of Mobilize 2011, and why, this year, GigaOm’s Mobilize event is doubling in scope, providing two days of insight and analysis from the leading minds in the Mobile Web — including me!

The conjunction of mobile computing and cloud-based services will unleash an entire new wave of product and market growth. At this year’s Mobilize 2011, we’ll show discuss and demonstrate how Cloud Computing and Mobile Web are creating a hockey-stick growth opportunity.

I’ll be moderating a  session on “Infrastructure for the Internet of Things” Tuesday Sept 27  (right before lunch at 12:05 pm), during which executives from Xerox PARC, WIMM Labs, Vitality and just-formed Meta Devices will share their insights about the technological innovations needed to accelerate the growth of the Internet of Things.

Join us!  Details and registration here:  http://bit.ly/mobilize_bQW2

The Connected World Conference is the premier event for networking visionaries and bringing together business leaders and upwardly mobile professionals seeking to drive tomorrow’s technology initiatives today.  Connected devices are replacing many traditional hard-wired tasks that use M2M (machine-to-machine technology). Consumers already use mobile devices to perform a host of duties. Toss in enabling social networking, as well as giving mobile workers the ability to access and manage corporate data, and you have the perfect mix for the emergence of many new products.

The Connected World Conference delivers insight into the emerging technology trends shaping the future of connected devices technology. This event gives attendees a chance to explore the strategic shifts that new technologies will have now and into the future in the, U.S. and across the globe.

Check here for details about the 2012 Connected World Conference:  http://bit.ly/ra4oEU

I was so excited when my local utility installed my smart meter last July.  I even took pictures!

A flyer from my utility promised an an energy portal “after the first of the year”  through which I could view my home’s electrical consumption patterns and find ways to conserve.  That portal still hasn’t come online, so I have zero visibility into my electrical usage except what I can gain my occasionally observing my meter and reading my monthly bill.

In February, somewhat disillusioned with my experience, I decided to ask the people who are building the Smart Grid what they thought it should look like from the customer’s perspective.  From conversations with people throughout the distribution sector of the electrical grid, where most of the “Smart Grid action” is happening, I gleaned “Seven Lessons on the Smart Grid” — the topic of my Unplugged column in the July/August issue of Connected World Magazine.

In fact, Lesson One is:  The smart grid will be mostly invisible to consumers.

Read the full article:  http://bit.ly/mmIsVk