Why Should I Care about Wearable Devices? - Gmm quick question

JUSTIN SMITH: Hi. Welcome to Good Morning Marketers Quick Question. My name is Justin Smith. I'm the manager of user experience at thunder::tech. Today we're talking about wearables. We've gotten a lot of questions recently about wearable technology. Why should I care about it? What does it have to do with marketing? And these are really great questions. But to start, we need to talk a little bit about what wearable technology is. So I have on my head here Google Glass, which is the poster child I think right now for wearable technology. It's a heads-up display for taking photos and videos, getting messages and emails pushed up right in front of my face here on a screen so that I can see all of my news in real-time right in front of me. Some other technologies that you may be familiar with are watches. So smartwatches have really hit the scene and become a little bit more mainstream recently. The Pebble smartwatch is kind of the big one. Recently Samsung announced their Gear smartwatch. And there are rumors about an Apple iWatch. Smartwatches really have a big opportunity not just for push notifications and announcements, but there's a lot of discussion about the opportunities for mobile payments with smartwatches. So being able to scan your wrist at a point of purchase and instantly make a sale is a really exciting opportunity. So why does this matter to marketers? Right now it feels really futuristic and cutting edge talking into your wristwatch or sending an email from a display on your face. We were really critical of smartphones though too at the start. We always said that nobody wanted to look at a tiny little screen to read the content on your website, or even to send an email. But that has totally changed. Now we develop websites mobile first. That is, for the smartphone and then the desktop. So we need to consider these devices and how they're going to impact the future of the way that we do things. If you haven't had a chance to check out any wearable devices, I urge you to do so. There are so many that you can get your hands on now, and we have some really cutting-edge ones in our mobile testing lab. So connect with us on Twitter @thundertech. Set up a time to come in and check some of these things out. Thanks a lot.