An athlete with sensors stuck to his body prepares to play football in the new Ajax miCoach... [+]
More likely it is to explore the extension of the Apple brand, or its platform technology, into clothing and fashion. I suggested it back in March and the real surprise it has taken Apple so long to be more public.
Apple must extend the application range of computing - that is its mission and we have reached, or we are fast approaching, the peak attraction of the smartphone slab. Computers, meanwhile, are being distributed around the body and in physical space. If you don't extend your platform, you are left with today's technologies and applications.
Digital technology is in fact extending its reach to every aspect of life, including clothing and other wearables like glasses, and into objects (hence iBeacons). Yesterday I talked with Bryan Kirschner of the Apigee Institute, a research group that studies digital transformation. He told me: "What we're surprised by is not that so many areas of business are being transformed by digital but by the pace of change." Digital is like a virus.
But first the iWatch argument. The feeling in some tech circles is that Deneve will enable Apple to fetch a premium price for the iWatch device, and help raise pricing on the Mac line. Here's why it is unlikely, apart from the absurdity of Apple needing advice on pricing or branding.
At YSL, or Saint Laurent Paris, Deneve was a radical. He initiated the complete rebranding of YSL's retail operations, for example, and a revamp of the ready-to-wear range, bringing in photographer and designer Hedi Slimane to rebrand the ready-to-wear line and retail stores:
With Slimane, he (Deneve) has high ambitions for the brand, like catapulting it to the scale of Chanel and Dior. “We’re preparing to revolutionize fashion again, as Mr. Saint Laurent did in the Sixties.”
That included a rapid store opening program. According to fashionista.com he also took YSL in a younger, cooler, and sleeker direction–"which is very much in line with Apple’s branding."
In fact Slimane and Deneve did a retro number on YSL's rebellious past, echoing the street protests of 1968 Paris, which is not so in line with Apple. This is not a man you hire for pricing advice. But it is a man with a big contacts book in fashion who knows how to take big, bold moves in the fashion market.
And smart clothing, or computational fashion, is no longer a pipe dream. There isn't a major sports team anywhere now that doesn't use computational clothing in their training sessions, to assess the fitness and recovery levels of athletes. In the consumer market that same driver - quantified self - is helping companies like Fitband and Mapmyfitness to grow their ecosystems. Future wearables can even include smart tattoos. The extension of computing to the body has already arrived.
In a recent GiagOm report on wearables analyst Jody Rank gives several examples of computational clothing that began in niche markets like elite sports, where compression shirts already include GPS and accelerometry. The Adidas miCoach is now offered to a broader market:
The Adidas miCoach was developed to monitor athletic performance and has sensors that measure speed, pace and distance as well as a heart-rate monitor that measures cardio performance. Adidas also collaborates with Polar on technologies such as the adiSTAR Fusion, which is a computer connected to a range of wearables such as shirts and sports bras designed for running. The miCoach Speed_Cell is a tracking device that fits into a line of Adidas shoes and tracks running speed, acceleration, distance and space. So far it has been used most extensively in soccer.
He also describes the Under Armor product range developed with military suppliers Zephyr Technology (measure life, anywhere).
Sports-clothing company Under Armour has developed the E39, a shirt embedded with integrated sensors, an accelerometer and 2 gigabytes of storage. This wearable computer can monitor heart rate, breathing rate, skin surface temperature and acceleration.
In fact that item is very difficult to track down. Here's a Gizmodo piece on it. Zephyr, a biometrics fabrics' specialist, recently collected investments from 3M and Motorola Solutions VC.
Distributing sensors and computer processing in clothes is an established technology with plenty of fragmentation in the market with start-ups and early stage companies like Zephyr, full of smart ideas, sat alongside apparel makers like Adidas and Nike. Wearables are already here - who better to unite a fragmented market?
The market is perfect for Apple to mainstream. It advances contextual computing. And it has the added virtue of being a bigger potential market than smartphones, an essential component in radical adjacencies. In fact if you are Apple and you are ignoring apparel, then you are dumb. This is just the kind of radical adjacency you need.
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