“My <blank> is in the cloud,” announced the woman at the adjacent table to her friends. Cue hysterical, tipsy laughter from her friends, and the occasional raised eyebrow from people nearby. You can fill in the <blank> with anything you want. I suspect that a) you won’t get close and b) it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that consumers of a particular age expect everything to be in the cloud… even – or perhaps especially – photos taken when one is perhaps a tad too inebriated to avoid morning-after remorse. Perhaps.
The problem is, while we like to talk about “the cloud” in the singular, the reality is that there are nearly as many virtual clouds as there are rain clouds hovering over New York on any given day. Successfully navigating all of these clouds to get to the data is a mess, and only getting messier by the moment. It’s also a fairly amorphous term: what exactly is a “cloud?” Some of these things are straightforward: Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive and other backup sites are pretty clearly clouds. Does Facebook qualify? It is, after all, another place where you can upload your photos and – if sharing is the name of the game – is clearly a good bet. Take that to the next level: is any website that allows you to store anything a “cloud?” Indeed, aren’t the websites themselves sitting in their own – or someone’s – cloud?
But then we get to the next generation of cloud: the healthy, fitness cloud. This is the one that your personal connectivity device likes to share your innermost health facts with. And it is, right now, rather proprietary. Many of today’s wearable products only talk to their own cloud: they all have a different interface, with different ways to represent the data as part of each brand’s differentiation. It makes sense as part of each brand’s larger plan to tie the wearable into a social environment: the so-called gamification of personal connectivity demands a social cloud where we can all compete together and the manufacturer who has the largest social gathering wins - at least for now.
But with the personal connectivity market rapidly fragmenting beyond the initial handful of products, consumers are being forced to make a purchase decision based not only on what the product does and how it looks (fashion being a key component), but increasingly on whether the data can be shared with friends. This appears to be the realization that Nike has come to: why build a fitness device when, instead, perhaps you can build the ultimate fitness destination – or at least those products that embrace Nike’s API.
Such an approach enables the consumer to use multiple personal connectivity devices, if they so desire, leveraging the best one for a specific activity. This could be the connected socks for running, a shirt optimized for ball sports, and the mundane fitness band for the rest of the day. The net result for the consumer is that all data will be tracked in one location. A Facebook for fitness, as it were.