What Would Google Do -- with Consumer Electronics today?

If Google were designing consumer electronics (CE) today, what would the CE industry look like? Google is reported to be the fastest growing company in the history of the world. Jeff Jarvis, author of the book What Would Google Do says in his presentation:

"I think the most important lesson of Google to me is that Google did not grow big by borrowing huge amounts of capital to make huge acquisitions, to own and control a huge amount of the world. Google instead grew huge by building platforms upon which others can succeed. And the fact that Google managed to help others succeed and others create is a really important lesson." And this is not how businesses used to operate.

In the past Consumer Electronics companies succeeded by creating products that were proprietary and closed systems.

The Widgetization of Our World

Thanks Mike, I could not have said it better than Mike Kuniavsky on the coming of smart devices, the widgetization of our world  He writes:

* Moore's Law makes computation cheap.

* This makes incorporating information processing into devices a cost-effective way to create a competitive advantage by creating user experiences that would be otherwise impossible, or prohibitively expensive.

* This, in turn, has contributed to a proliferation of computer form factors in the last couple of years (laptops, then phones, then connected TVs and netbooks) that shows an increasing specialization in computer-based devices. This, I feel, represent the early stages of a trend that will lead to high degrees of specialization in devices that use information processing, and the end of the general-purpose computer.

* Simultaneously, we're entering an era of Widgetization, where large blobs of monolithic functionality (think "productivity software suite") are similarly fragmenting into clusters of network-connected widgets.

* Some of these widgets exist as software (as in Yahoo's connected TV widgets), but some (think Nike+iPod) as hardware.

* This round-trip sensing-processing-outputting cycle leads to a fundamental erosion of what we consider to be an object and what we think of as a service. Vitality's Glowcaps are a prime example.

CE2.0 is about to widgetize us!

A Billion, Or Trillion Smart Web Connected Devices

To paraphrase Dr. Evil, there will be ONE MILLION . . . sorry, ONE HUNDRED BILLION, devices on the internet in the coming years. Some call this trend "machine to machine", or "M2M" because these machines will talk to each other, and they will. Others call it ubiquitous computing or "ubicomp" for short. Others say its "the internet of things" or "ambient intelligence." Predictions run from 75 billion (with a "b"!) devices to as many as 7 trillion (with a "t"!) devices, connected to the internet within the next few years. This not counting computers, and not counting cell phones. Here is a video from MAYA Design about this very thing.

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Today electronic gadget devices touch us all, like our light timers and garage door openers. Most refer to all this as "consumer electronics" or CE, (think of the annual Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, CES). I call this trend of smart, wireless, personal consumer electronics, consumer electronics version and release 2.0. And these new devices will soon change everything about the US$350 billion dollar global consumer electronics industry.

This Is Not Your Father's Light Timer

In the 1980's GM came out with a campaign to revitalize their Oldsmobile brand with the slogan "This Is Not Your Father's Oldsmobile"  Well this is about the next generation of consumer electronics which are not your father's light timer.  And this is not your father's garage door opener, I know because it was my father's light timer and garage door opener. He designed both and as much as these consumer devices made our lives easier, they are what I name Consumer Electronics "Release 1.0."

My blog and related companies are dedicated to the next generation, Consumer Electronics 2.0 or CE20 for short.

My dad, Richard Goldstein pictured here shortly after college, was born in 1923.  He is an electronics engineer, inventor and entrepreneur. He is considered the "father" of the residential garage door opener. In 1955