Brave New Connected World - How Wearable Tech is Transforming IoT

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Okay everyone, so today we are going to talk a little bit about wearable, which is quite, quite the buzzword. But the people that we have on stage today are actually pioneers in the space and they're going to talk a lot about their journey. So I'd like to welcome first of all Monisha Parkesh, who is the founder and CEO

[00:00:27] Speaker A: of of Lumo Bodytech. Thank you, Manisha. We also have here Martin Källström, who is the co-founder and CEO at Get Narrative, Narrative camera right there. And finally, please welcome Brent Blum, who is the global director of wearable technology at Accenture. So

[00:00:53] Speaker A: without further ado, let's jump in. We have a little bit of time to go through how wearable has evolved over the past few years. I'm not sure when was the first time actually we've heard of the word wearable. Maybe, actually, do you know, Brent? It's like 4 years, 5 years when this came up, or?

[00:01:12] Speaker B: I wasn't thinking about it too heavily before, until Google Glass. And before that, it was like quantified self. That was the— That was the other thing.

[00:01:20] Speaker A: That resonated. And so, We're going to figure out what is a wearable. And maybe I'd like you guys to introduce yourselves a bit and your product in particular, what it does today. We'll come back to the past and how you got there a little bit later. But maybe, Monisha, you can tell us a bit more about what Lumo Tech

[00:01:45] Speaker A: is about.

[00:01:47] Speaker D: Sure. Hi, I'm Monisha Prakash. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Lumo Body Tech. Our vision is to give the body a voice, and we do that using smart sensors and algorithms to track the body's movements to a very high resolution. We have a few products that demonstrate that capability. So Lumo Lift is one of our products. I'm wearing it now. It's this tiny

[00:02:13] Speaker D: little jewelry clasp that is also a posture and activity tracker. So when you slouch, the sensor on the Lumo Lift will vibrate to remind you to straighten up. And it also tracks steps, calories, and distance. And we provide the clasp in a variety of designs and colors for men and women alike. We can also put corporate logos on there. We

[00:02:38] Speaker D: also integrate our technology for running, so we're able to provide lab-quality feedback on running efficiency. Things like hip stability, ground contact time, bounce, a variety of lab-quality metrics. And so we feel very passionate about using these technologies to help people to perform better and to avoid the risk of injury.

[00:03:02] Speaker A: And the company got started how long ago?

[00:03:05] Speaker D: We founded in 2011.

[00:03:08] Speaker A: Okay. And you guys, just to set the scene, you guys have raised raised some money that you have disclosed in the past?

[00:03:14] Speaker D: That's right. We closed our Series B a couple of months ago.

[00:03:17] Speaker A: Okay, excellent. Martin, what's Narrative about?

[00:03:23] Speaker C: Hi everyone, I'm Martin Källström. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Narrative. We are makers of the Narrative Clip, which is a wearable camera. You basically wear this thing when, when you want to capture photos and video, but you want to use your hands for something else. the same time. So that might be you're doing sports or you're just being social with friends or you're playing with your kids and you wanna capture

[00:03:48] Speaker C: those memories without having to think about it at the same time. Put yourself in the moment instead of behind a camera. And we've been doing this for a bit more than 3 years now. We're based out of Sweden actually, but with an office here in SF.

[00:04:07] Speaker A: Okay, cool. And you guys have raised a Series A a little bit, a few months back, right?

[00:04:12] Speaker B: Right.

[00:04:14] Speaker A: Anybody actually has played with any of those products, the Memoto and Narrative? We have one over there, 2, excellent. Happy customers? Yes, very much. And Brent, tell us about what Accenture is about in the wearable space.

[00:04:33] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. I'm Brent Blum, Director of Wearable Technology for Accenture. And Accenture is the world's largest computer consulting firm and a global systems integrator. So most of the time, we're doing things like connecting a warehouse management system to an accounting system. But we also have an R&D lab and a team that works on emerging technologies, such as myself. And so our wearables practice

[00:04:59] Speaker B: develops wearable technology solutions for the Fortune 500. Most of our clients, most of our use cases are individuals who use their hands to do their job. Engineers, physicians, warehouse employees. And so when mobile phones came out, they helped most of us who have desk jobs to access our email and be kind of constantly tethered to our work. But that didn't help, you

[00:05:24] Speaker B: know, the guy that's got to take off his safety gloves and go across the shop floor to access the single computer terminal. And so now with wearables, he can get SAP data, PeopleSoft data, other legacy information on his or her wrist or up here within your field of view on a pair of smart glasses. And so Accenture offers kind of end-to-end solutions. You know, we don't have a favorite hardware package or software

[00:05:50] Speaker B: package, but we customize our solutions to our clients' needs and help them understand how wearables will impact their business in the years to come.

[00:05:59] Speaker A: Cool. So we have a few aspects here between the B2C and the B2B, which we will cover a little bit. But when we talk about wearable, everybody will have actually a kind of a different definition. And I don't know if for an entrepreneur, what you had in your head at the beginning was, hey, I want to build a wearable. It doesn't seem right. So I'm very curious about

[00:06:25] Speaker A: what led you to build one, and how did you get there from your very first prototypes, and how did it become a wearable? Was it a wearable originally, Manisha?

[00:06:38] Speaker D: We never set out to say we're gonna start a wearables company. We set out to say we wanna start a company that solves important problems. But my co-founders and I didn't at the time know what that company would be. So we went through a 6-month journey where we looked at a lot of different problems that intrigued us. with the idea of, you know, maybe we can come up with a solution for one and we could launch it into a business. It was during that 6-month journey that my co-founder,

[00:07:04] Speaker D: who has back pain, started taking posture classes. And these posture classes significantly reduced his back pain. And in the process, we learned that back pain is a $50 billion a year problem. It's the second most common reason why people go to the doctor. It's outnumbered only by the common cold. And that back pain and posture are scientifically linked. And so we thought, wow, well, here's an opportunity to help millions of

[00:07:29] Speaker D: people the way that this posture class helped Andrew, my co-founder. So that was the beginning of the company. We've since evolved to address a variety of movement problems beyond posture. But with everything that we do, we're— we start with the problem first, the need first, and build around it rather than trying to be a technology chasing a problem.

[00:07:52] Speaker A: So what other ways to solve the problem have you considered?

[00:07:58] Speaker D: We evaluated things like sensors on your chair or using the video cam on your desktop or your laptop. But what we realized in a lot of our testing and prototyping is people are mobile. And if you want to provide a solution that helps them regardless of where they're sitting or standing, The solution also needs to be mobile. But

[00:08:23] Speaker D: at the same time, you can't expect them to put their smartphones on their bodies to track things like posture. And so that's what led us down the path of what kind of form factor can we develop that people could comfortably wear on their bodies to do constant monitoring and real-time feedback.

[00:08:42] Speaker A: And so originally you had some kind of belt, if I can remember, and then you have Evolved from there, or what happened?

[00:08:49] Speaker D: That's right. Even before the belt, we prototyped adhesive. And what we learned was that adhesives have a very medical feel to them. They kind of have this icky sticky component. And, you know—

[00:09:01] Speaker A: I'm sure it hurts if you have hairs on the back or something.

[00:09:03] Speaker D: We found that to be very true. A lot of our subjects felt like it was very uncomfortable. So then we scrapped that, and we tried a clip that clipped onto the waistband of your underwear. Because we were trying to get readings from that part of your body, and then we realized that just had a social acceptance problem. And then we realized, okay, well, you know, people wear heart rate monitors. What if we had them

[00:09:28] Speaker D: wear it lower? And we tested that as a form factor and found it to be quite comfortable. We launched that in the market, and what we found is that people who have back pain were willing and readily happy to wear that form factor because the alternative could be contemplating surgery or just doing debilitating back pain. But what we also learned is there are a lot of people in the market who wanted a more casual form factor, something a lot easier to put on. And so that's how

[00:09:53] Speaker D: we— and also something that captured the role of the shoulder. And so that's when we designed Lumo Lift, because it's worn higher, it can capture the upper body posture, and it's very easy to put on.

[00:10:08] Speaker A: Cool. So it's very interesting on the customer journey and acceptance that there are things that you can and can't do with wearable technology. And I guess, Martin, you've always been facing that from day one, right? We're having a camera on you, it's like, what's going on?

[00:10:24] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. I think that my best definition of wearable technology has become that that's what you're making if you're— one of your main R&D challenges is to figure out how the heck are people actually going to wear this thing. And when you do iterations on how to attach something on people and it falls off or they are annoyed or those kind of challenges arises. If

[00:10:49] Speaker C: that's not happening, maybe it's not wearable technology you're developing. But from the start, we actually perceived ourselves as a wearable camera company. We defined ourselves from the technology. And the camera is a very open-ended product. You can use it for a wide variety of things. And we have now dozens and

[00:11:14] Speaker C: dozens of universities doing research projects on ways to actually use this in medical research or medical treatment. And there are numerous security—

[00:11:29] Speaker A: Security.

[00:11:31] Speaker C: applications and a lot of consumer applications. So we have created a solution. We have 1,000 or so problems now chasing us to get their attention from our R&D team. So we're opening up a platform to make sure that everyone can get their needs fulfilled.

[00:11:55] Speaker A: It sounds like, you know, In terms of markets, so of course, all the humans are the same. But in a corporate environment, they could actually react differently. And we were having this discussion earlier with someone in the back over there about the sales cycle for B2C and B2B for

[00:12:22] Speaker A: any hardware, but in particular also for wearables, actually.

[00:12:24] Speaker D: Yeah.

[00:12:25] Speaker A: something that is sometimes overlooked. And maybe, we were discussing this with Brent earlier on the enterprise side of things. So you participated to the rollout of massive systems, and I guess through Google Glass maybe and other things. Do you see Narrative and the Lumo technologies actually be able to also participate

[00:12:50] Speaker A: to the corporate environment? And I'm curious to understand what do you think will be different about the product, if anything, actually?

[00:12:59] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. I mean, I think both these devices have enterprise application. Certainly, there are workers out there every day who suffer from fatigue, who have back pain, who need to maintain proper posture and perform repetitive movements. And just as well, you know, there's so many scenarios where we need to do hands-free video conferencing or capture pictures. document work for the purposes of auditing or training.

[00:13:26] Speaker B: There's great applicability. Now, would they look any different? They very well may, because the enterprise has the— I will call it, I guess, the advantage that aesthetics aren't as important. You know, there's no one— the miners and the welders and the engineers of the world are not complaining that their uniforms aren't cool enough. That's a tool to do your job. And so I think these would be seen as tools

[00:13:51] Speaker B: to do the job, and some of the resources may have been prioritized differently and perhaps away from the aesthetic of it.

[00:13:59] Speaker A: So for example, for Narrative, I don't know, if police decided tomorrow to want such a technology, what would be different?

[00:14:08] Speaker C: Yeah, so police are a good example of this because they have very specific requirements on their body cameras. They now want not only one camera, but 2 in one, where one is on the chest and one is like on a wire and goes up on the side of your head. So they have 2 cameras and both are streaming over LTE into a

[00:14:34] Speaker C: central hub. So it's a very specific set of requirements on that product, but it's a great example of what you're talking about with—

[00:14:42] Speaker E: Yeah.

[00:14:44] Speaker C: one kind of technology having enterprise applications, but then being much more specialized. The design aesthetics of a wearable camera, as it turns out, has very much to do with privacy, because one of the big successes that we've had is actually to make a device that people are— that can, be happy with even if

[00:15:09] Speaker C: they are not wearing it, if they are just around it. Because we did a lot of focus group testing on how to make a camera that doesn't look like it's hiding itself, but actually being honest with its purpose. And I think that's very important for when you develop a product. The semantics of the product design is important to think about. And

[00:15:35] Speaker C: we've seen some articles comparing Narrative to Google Glass that failed to convey the same feeling of honesty in their audience.

[00:15:46] Speaker A: And so you guys have been on the journey for 3 to 4 years, which is both short and very long. And it sounds like that you went through a usual phase about discovery, Getting your product to market, having people actually play with it. I'm curious about the volume of people that play

[00:16:11] Speaker A: with your first versions, and when did you actually decide to scale a product? And it sounds like that you kind of went to product number 2 because product number 1 was not going to be the one that scaled in distribution.

[00:16:27] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:16:27] Speaker A: It's actually something that we observed across lots of the hack startups that, you know, sometimes you may think that the first product is kind of, you know, it's your baby, but it's actually something that needs to get killed very early in order to actually reach a better product-market fit with the second one. So, I don't know, Monisha, can you tell us a bit more about what's in the middle of a hardware

[00:16:52] Speaker A: startup? And then the wearable one here.

[00:16:56] Speaker D: I think that's exactly right. You have to have the willingness to pivot and the willingness to just put yourself out there and fail. And we have this mantra in our office, which is fail early and fail often, but fail forward, meaning constantly learn with your failures. Because having failures earlier on is actually much cheaper. Because it gives you a chance

[00:17:21] Speaker D: to course correct. And you don't truly learn until you put the product out there. I mean, when we did prototyping and beta testing all day long, oh, great, great product. Tell us when it's ready. Wanna buy it. But it's not until you actually get somebody to commit through money whether or not it's, first of all, has some market appeal. Even beyond that, you have to keep testing

[00:17:46] Speaker D: and keep iterating and keep questioning, is this right? Could it be better? Is it meeting the needs of our customers? And listen to them. Right? And so that's how we learned that a lot of our customers cared about upper shoulder rolling and cared about having something that was more fashionable and wearable.

[00:18:05] Speaker A: So you developed something like 20 different versions of the wearable, right?

[00:18:10] Speaker D: Yeah. I mean, in the history of the company, we've probably had 20 different prototypes.

[00:18:14] Speaker A: And sorry, 20 SKUs just for this one?

[00:18:17] Speaker D: That's right, that's right.

[00:18:18] Speaker A: Different formats for men, for women, for all tastes.

[00:18:21] Speaker D: That's right. Yes, you can customize it with company logos. There's different designs, colors, things like that. But I want to go back to your question about scalability. And I think the future of wearables, to achieve scalability, is for the technology to become invisible. So I respect your point about— not hiding the camera. But conversely, we

[00:18:47] Speaker D: believe that technology should be invisible. It should seamlessly integrate into your everyday life. And that means integrating with your everyday habits, whether it's putting on clothes or glasses or belts or safety belts for the industrial worker or uniform. We think that's where the future of wearables is going, is, is for the sensors to be embedded within form factors that you're already used to wearing.

[00:19:11] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess everybody will get used to everyone having a camera on them pretty soon. And did you actually go through, just on the customization side of things, and did you have other colors and other ways to customize the Narrative?

[00:19:28] Speaker C: Yeah, so we sell this right now in 3 colors: white, red, and black. And then we have skins to customize even further if you want to change the appearance completely.

[00:19:40] Speaker A: And you had a first product that you launched on Kickstarter that you delivered, then you kind of went where from there?

[00:19:48] Speaker C: Exactly. So the first product was manufactured in 25,000 units before we closed it down. And so we, as we talked about, a startup In hardware, pretty much goes from, at some point, being an R&D company to becoming more of a sales-oriented company. And perhaps that happens in succession. If we sold 25,000

[00:20:13] Speaker C: of the first generation, a preferable number would be 250,000 of the second generation and 2.5 million of the third, perhaps. And then it's hard to say exactly when is the transition. It's more of a succession.

[00:20:27] Speaker B: OK.

[00:20:28] Speaker A: Yes, the road is pretty long. Brent, have you experienced actually startups going to be integrated into enterprise in the wearable space? And is it possible for a startup, and I don't know of what size, and that would be very interesting to know, you know, how big you need to be to experience pilots, I guess. This is where it could start as a means to an end.

[00:20:52] Speaker E: Yeah.

[00:20:53] Speaker B: Yeah, and to be clear, some of the projects that we're launching are not yet enormous in scale. We start with very small proofs of concept and pilots with 5 users, 10 users. Our largest production deployment to date is 140. So there's very much— there's a great deal of opportunity to work with startups. And in fact, we do work with both enterprise and consumer startups

[00:21:18] Speaker B: in the wearable space.

[00:21:21] Speaker A: Manisha, you had a great perspective about where the future of wearable lies and in general how technology is going to become seamless. So that does mean that things will start to get embedded into fabrics, right, and into objects. And of course, some companies are working

[00:21:47] Speaker A: on all those technologies.

[00:21:48] Speaker C: Yeah.

[00:21:49] Speaker A: Does that mean that you keep on going also on the R&D side and on the testing side? And you want to— what things will you continue to explore there? And yeah, how do you think this is going to shape the future of your company?

[00:22:07] Speaker D: So it's constant work, constant R&D, constant changing market, right? As the technology gets smaller, more flexible, washable, hopefully one day dryable. That is the future. And we see it. In terms of how we position our company for the future, we've built our technology to be a platform that can be flexible to work with

[00:22:32] Speaker D: a variety of form factors. And so that— and the products that we've built thus far, they're really reference products for what our underlying technology is capable of. Of. And our vision going forward is that any company that wants to integrate real-time motion tracking of human body movements into their products would work with Lumo because we have so much expertise and IP around that. So

[00:22:57] Speaker D: whether it's an apparel company or shoe company or, you know, eyewear, any, any use case where tracking human biomechanics matters for either performance or injury prevention, that we would be the ingredient to work with.

[00:23:15] Speaker A: Linked to that, I'm actually very curious about the future of this, right? The mobile phone. And so, you know, I'd love to listen how you are using it today and what place do you think it will have in the future of wearables in general?

[00:23:31] Speaker D: So the smartphone, it's a great interface for providing data feedback, coaching, interpretation of insights, and the enduring value, right? So wearing the sensors in whatever form factor is how the data is collected, and the smartphone or any device is the interface for how it can be shared. So I think they really go hand in hand. But at the end of the day,

[00:23:57] Speaker D: wearables have to be wearable. And that means it has to be something that's appealing to put on your body, Because if you can't at least get through that step, then you're not going to be able to collect the valuable data.

[00:24:08] Speaker A: Oh, data. What about data, Martin? You have issues with that?

[00:24:13] Speaker C: It's expensive. When you capture a lot of photos, maybe 1,000 photos a day for the average user, for us it gets fairly complex to handle. There's also, like the talk we heard before the panel, there are very serious privacy concerns that you need to address when you deal with private

[00:24:38] Speaker C: data and the ownership of that as well. And it's also a big part of the R&D effort to make sure that everything has an appeal to the user but also works for the user even in ways that they wouldn't require or request.

[00:25:01] Speaker A: Yeah, so Brent, actually data is probably what you live for almost, I guess.

[00:25:06] Speaker B: Certainly.

[00:25:07] Speaker A: And there has been a great, you know, both promises and also, I guess, concerns about big data, you know, for IoT, but even for wearable, obviously there are, you know, right on you, and so it's possible to know everything that you do. What's— how does Accenture in general see that big data play for, you know, all those

[00:25:32] Speaker A: hardware devices, and how does it think that enterprises will leverage it, or is a market for big data coming, and what do you see?

[00:25:41] Speaker B: Well, when you think about wearables, there are wearables that collect data, and then there are wearables that display And so on the collection side, when it— when you're collecting work-relevant information, I think there's tremendous opportunity and value, and it's just a matter of explaining to the workforce, you know, here's exactly what we're collecting. We're collecting nothing more. Here's exactly how it will be used in this work-appropriate context,

[00:26:07] Speaker B: and here's how it makes your job better. There shouldn't be anything else that is collected, and that should be pretty clear. And so— That's a great point. There's a tremendous opportunity for big data today, and wearables are just kind of the next evolution of that, and certainly IoT as well. And our enterprise clients are doing a tremendous amount of things with IoT, wearables just being a small subset of that.

[00:26:31] Speaker A: Did you see other kinds of companies interested by this field, like insurance companies, for example?

[00:26:37] Speaker B: Within— so for insurance companies in particular, the ability to go out and do Claims and see in real time what's happened to then do a hands-free video conference to a remote site to pull up that claim on a pair of glasses, etc. That can be tremendously valuable.

[00:26:56] Speaker A: Because we already— I think I've read the other day that the insurance companies were actually checking the Facebook profile of everybody. So, and that influences, you know, when you are online and follow up with cookies and whatnot. So I don't know. Did you actually have any issue from your customers about the data that you were collecting and generating, or not so much?

[00:27:19] Speaker D: Well, we go out of our way to protect our customers' data. We would obviously never sell or rent it. And we let them control their data. We have had a number of employers and insurance companies that really love the product, because back pain is a leading cause of disability claims in the workplace. It's the second most common reason why people go to the doctor. But in all of those instances, the user is in control of

[00:27:45] Speaker D: their data, and we feel quite passionate about that.

[00:27:49] Speaker A: Excellent. What about, what's next for you guys? You are now planning to grow the company and go bigger. Of course, competition is everywhere for every other companies.

[00:28:12] Speaker B: What—

[00:28:12] Speaker A: where do you think the competition is at in the wearable space for you? I know that, Martin, you mentioned that there are a couple of other companies that are coming to market, some of which entered retail agreements at the same time as as you are, how will wearable technologies in general differentiate from each other? What

[00:28:38] Speaker A: are the tricks that you can all pull off essentially to make yourself or any company special in the wearable space?

[00:28:49] Speaker C: I think that we have the possibility to provide value not only in technology and the function of a device, but in the self-image that you, that you create when you use it.

[00:29:06] Speaker A: Mm-hm.

[00:29:07] Speaker C: For— if you buy a Fitbit activity tracker, the same functionality is now probably in your phone, but to buy the actual device and put it on every morning means that you're thinking about yourself as changing your lifestyle to something better. So you can fill your brand and fill your devices with meaningfulness that comes not only from

[00:29:32] Speaker C: the functionality, but from how you describe it and how that then applies to the user.

[00:29:41] Speaker A: And Manisha, do you— so obviously fashion became a statement, or because of the necessity, and do you Do you think wearable in general will have to be fashionable? So you mentioned they have to disappear in a way. So what kind of company is a wearable company today?

[00:29:59] Speaker D: I think it has to be a combination of fashion and function. Function because it has to solve a problem, like otherwise why wear it? But when you ask people where to put things on their bodies, it has to feel comfortable, it has to feel seamless integrated, it has to be an expression of who they are. And whether— but it's not about the technology, right? Like, people don't want to wear technology. They want to wear

[00:30:25] Speaker D: fashion. And so it has to integrate in a fashionable way. And that might mean that the technology completely disappears.

[00:30:32] Speaker A: Brent, what is the number one wearable you've seen that is like, this is cool, and this is going to be great in an enterprise environment, or not, actually?

[00:30:44] Speaker B: That's a great question. We're seeing bio-authentication bands for the wrist now that monitor the variability of your heart rate and then uniquely identify you. So today, if I were to lose my key card that lets me in the office, anyone could pick it up, anyone could get in. But with these bands, they can now say, well, this is Brent, and he is authorized to go through that door, to unlock that laptop, to start that forklift.

[00:31:11] Speaker B: When you combine that with technology that monitors fatigue and alertness, things like EEG monitors that are being baked into hard hats and baseball caps, you could really start to get a picture of which employees in your workforce are focused, which are stressed, which are fatigued. And you think about maybe like the airlines industry today, they ground pilots if they haven't had enough rest. But what if I need 10 hours of sleep

[00:31:36] Speaker B: and you need 6? So who knows if we'll get there, but I dream of a future where work is better assigned based on people's actual levels of alertness and their actual mental and physical capability to perform the work.

[00:31:51] Speaker D: I think there's an analog for that in sports, right? In understanding if you have a team, which of the team players are really ready to perform, which ones are at the edge of fatigue. And how to put your team out there.

[00:32:05] Speaker A: So do you see— so step 1, wearable. Step 2, embedded into fabrics. Step 3, we've seen there was recently a tattoo, right, that was conducive electricity, some kind of PCB tattoo, right? That I don't know what it was monitoring, but let's say it monitors something. So step 3 gets into the body, or

[00:32:31] Speaker A: how far do you think your companies will have to go to have the edge?

[00:32:35] Speaker D: Well, I think Proteus is on the panel after this. They're all about the ingestible sensor, right? And man, I mean, the things you could learn by being inside the body, it's probably limitless. But I think regardless of what the form factor is, I think the future of wearables is about solving specific problems within deep verticals. Right? It's not so much about being a very general activity tracker. It's about

[00:33:01] Speaker D: whether it's for the industrial worker, or for the athlete, or for somebody recovering from surgery, right? It's using wearables to solve very specific but deep pain points for people.

[00:33:18] Speaker B: And I would say that the 2 things wearables do well are Enable your hands to be free, and to provide advanced levels of context about situations because they are gathering this rich biometric data. So whether they become extra wearable or ingestible or, you know, who knows? I think that trend will continue, that their advantage is this very special deep level of context and data collection that you

[00:33:44] Speaker B: can't quite get out of this.

[00:33:46] Speaker A: So yeah. Everybody gets ready to ingest technology pretty soon in a way or another. Excellent. I guess we have just 5 minutes left. Is there a question you guys would like to ask to each other that could be interesting to everyone?

[00:34:10] Speaker D: You're supposed to put the audience on the spot, not us.

[00:34:14] Speaker E: We have one there. Yeah, question. It seems like many wearables are purchased and sometimes left in a drawer. How big of an issue do you think that is for the industry? What are you doing about it specifically?

[00:34:28] Speaker D: So I think, again, it boils down to the problem you're trying to solve. We're not trying to be a 360— 24/7, 365-day-a-year solution. We think that there are times where you need our products, whether it's because you're working on your posture, or with the running product when you're running, or, you know, for proper ergonomics for lifting and bending of

[00:34:53] Speaker D: the warehouse worker when he puts on his uniform or puts on the belt. So I think it's more— and again, I think that's why integration with everyday habits really matters. And success for wearables is being able to solve specific problems within that use case. that the wearable was designed for.

[00:35:11] Speaker B: So abandonment is a problem in the enterprise as well, and that point of integration with lifestyle is something— or work habit, as it would be— is something that we've keyed into. We're developing a wearable gas sensor with Marathon Oil that is worn in the uniform, and so it's like a digital canary in the coal mine, right? It alerts you if the air conditions are poor in your at risk, you can't forget it. It's part of

[00:35:36] Speaker B: your uniform. And I think otherwise it could be a victim of just being another tool that helps you do your job. In this case, you can't abandon it because it's built into everything you do.

[00:35:49] Speaker C: And I think that if you look at the level that our houses actually used to store stuff that we purchased at some point in the past and no longer use, What we see now is that with wearable, we can actually track abandonment or retention. So I don't think that it's something, a new problem that comes with wearables or IoT. I

[00:36:14] Speaker C: think it's something that we can now discover and address with connectivity.

[00:36:21] Speaker A: One more question, yeah. Questions are manufacturers, or sorry, can you repeat if you do?

[00:36:40] Speaker C: I understand correctly. You how to how to select hardware platforms for yeah. I think what what Monisha. As I said before, with wearables being used for specific use cases goes back to the hardware inside as well, that you want, you want to have technology in your product that is geared towards your, your desired functionality.

[00:37:06] Speaker C: So we use not a generic ARM processor, we use the Ambarella variety, which has a video pipeline of the highest quality available in the market. And so you want to use— but then again, the connectivity with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is a generic Broadcom module. But you look at factors like power

[00:37:31] Speaker C: efficiency, physical size, and the support you can get specifically as a small company, as a startup, is a very large factor in selecting technology.

[00:37:45] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:37:45] Speaker C: And it's actually very limited, just what technology you can get your hands on. When we started designing the first product in— the first generation product in 2012, we— the camera sensor that we had to use was, I believe, maybe 5 years old. And when we launched, it was 6 and a half years old. Now,

[00:38:11] Speaker C: when we are a known brand, we can work with sort of the next-generation technology instead when we start designing a product.

[00:38:21] Speaker D: Cyril, you asked if we had any questions of each other. I want to ask you. You know, you're an investor. What gets you excited about opportunities in wearables? Where are you looking?

[00:38:33] Speaker A: I guess what's pretty exciting is actually on the brand side. I think there is a whole whole enterprise cell that is completely overlooked by startups for decent reasons, mainly time and money. But what that means is that there is a tremendous amount of technology that hasn't been experienced by

[00:38:59] Speaker A: people today, including on the consumer side. But a lot of the technology adoption, I think, will come from the workplace. And that's going to take a little bit of time, but maybe not that much. If Brent is not working over Christmas, we'll get there faster. So yeah, there is, from an investment perspective in the hardware space and wearable at large, there

[00:39:25] Speaker A: are tremendous opportunities ahead that haven't been yet captured by anybody. So I'd say the future is quite bright. quite bright, but there are numerous battles ahead. But it's great that we've seen, obviously the Fitbit IPO has been instrumental in showing that there was something there. So, you know, it's good for you.

[00:39:47] Speaker D: But how do you solve for that? I mean, for startups, time is not on our side. We would love to work with enterprises in the corporate and industrial settings. But the pace at which those conversations move, like, we will go bankrupt by the time those opportunities come to fruition. And so we find, okay, we're better off focusing

[00:40:12] Speaker D: on the consumer because that is a very short sales cycle and we can iterate quickly. So help us solve that. How do we figure that out?

[00:40:21] Speaker B: There's 2 sides to that. I guess in terms of the conversations taking place, We're a 10-person team. That is very much a startup in the same way that you guys are a startup. But yes, sales cycles are longer. Working between us and a multinational, multimillion-dollar client is at times difficult. But I think by starting with proofs of concept and pilots, we're able to prove that these devices

[00:40:46] Speaker B: have value. And I'd say half of the wearable devices And the software platforms that we work with are small startups. And those that have proven that they can scale with the needs of our clients are still hanging in there.

[00:41:03] Speaker A: How do you guys select those startups and how do we contact you?

[00:41:09] Speaker D: So, brent.r.bloom@accenture.com.

[00:41:13] Speaker B: And we have an open innovation group at Accenture. part of our Accenture Technology Lab that does nothing but scan the market for startups and try and help incubate them into the mothership and probably has a much better answer to your question than I do. But yeah, in particular, that's one investment that we've made in the last year to help try and bridge the gap.

[00:41:37] Speaker A: All right. Well, we'll wrap up now. So thanks to Monisha, Martin, Brent. Lumo Body Tech and, and get Narrative at retail stores pretty soon. Are you there yet or almost there?

[00:41:55] Speaker D: We're online and on Amazon.

[00:41:57] Speaker A: Okay, excellent. Amazon soon, probably soon in bigger retail spaces. So when you see them, you know, they were here today and don't hesitate to contact them. Thanks a lot. Have a great end of today.