But they largely remain a balkanized mess, without a single platform or two that can create a cogent dashboard for us, our health care providers and payers. Technology that can measure our health is all around us, from biometric wearables to smart speakers that can detect nuances of our being, facial recognition cameras and even millimeter wave radar that can monitor us from afar. That recipe might be no better applied than toĬonvergence, raised in urgency by the COVID-19 pandemic. With slight tuning, those are still where you might look for the next big thing in tech convergence. The recipe for convergence success was well stated in a 2008 CNET column by tech industry exec and advisor Steve Tobak: intellectual capital, content and great marketing. Not quite convergence: The Compaq iPaq handheld had a BackPaq add-on camera module. And by 2008, when both the iPhone and Android had arrived with those attributes, 3G data, amazing cameras and cloud computing were powerful winds at their backs. Just as General Magic was done in by its blind spots, its inability to see the power of a pure touchscreen device with a vast apps universe would mean the end end for Palm, BlackBerry and Microsoft's mobile effort. The add-on modules were both the essence and antithesis of convergence: They made the phone something more, but in far fewer ways and with far greater friction than apps would soon do. Shrinking a PC turned out to be a flawed design idea."Ĭompaq developed the best of the flawed bunch with its once-hot iPaq line and series of interesting hardware modules that could expand the device to be a barcode scanner or GPS device. "They were not just smaller versions of bigger things. "One of the big breakthroughs in our thinking was the notion that these devices needed to be their own design center," Dubinsky said. Do the same with your BlackBerry and you had to apologize for being a slave to the office.įive years before the iPhone, the Treo was the first to crack the code of converged personal devices. Was what you wanted to carry: Pull it out at the dinner table with friends and you were cool. The BlackBerry had the corporate market sewn up, but the But we also realized that a device could do more tomorrow than it does today, thanks to its convergence with the mobile web. We had entered the era of persistent partial attention and become used to walking around looking down at our phones. In 2002 the Handspring Treo married the Palm Pilot with a cellphone, wireless internet data and a rudimentary apps universe. "But after the first four or five months, the line just went straight up." And the buzz came almost entirely on word of mouth from early adopters. "We had no idea how it would do," recalled Dubinksy. It converged essential apps with a more human interface and synchronization with the then-dominant personal computer. The Palm Pilot's combination of contacts, notes, calendar and a to-do list wasn't unique, but putting them in a small package with a purpose-built handwriting interface and syncing to your PC with the push of a button was transformative.
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