Technology. I love technology. I am always excited when I find new technology in use. It never really occurred to me to be afraid of technology, until I was telling someone something I thought was really cool, and they said to me, "that scares me".
How do you feel about technology and where the world has come with it? There is a ton of technology in use all around us that you may not even be aware of - a lot of people are not.
When I worked for JCP, there were several things from a store perspective that we could do already and this was 9 years ago almost:
- Facial recognition when you came through the door. While this was never implemented in all of the stores due to cost at the time, and an inability to use it effectively without some other components - we had it in a couple of stores and used it primarily to count people as they came in and out. In a mall it helped us not count people twice - once when they came in from the car and again when they came in from the mall. Facial recognition has been used for years in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Many big cities have invested in it as well.
- Digital Signs - the cost of changing paper signs on sales racks multiple times a week was enormous. JCP looked long and hard at digital signage. They played around with signs that could watch YOU and INTERACT with you. It was determined that was just too scary for the every-day consumer. Turns out Digital Signs equated to a bad shopping experience as people felt distrustful that prices were not changing "as they shopped". So while our competitors had them, we opted to keep paper in alot of the stores even though it was costly.
- Portable checkout person - a huge and costly attempt to bring Apple Store Like Capabilities to the JCP consumer. Huge Failure! Too many people paid with cash. Went back quickly to centralized Cash Registers. People actually like decentralized better, but was cheaper to make people all come to one place.
Another fascinating area that is growing by leaps and bounds is the Internet of Things. You can read more about it on it's Wikipedia Page, where you will find this graphic.
But basically, the internet of things is the whole arena of common everyday objects that we have imbedded technology into.
Some examples are:
- Smart Lights and Outlets in your Home
- Entire Smart Homes
- Smart Appliances
- Digital Cameras that can talk to the internet directly
- Pill bottles that can log if you opened them and if a pill is missing
- Tools, of all sorts with intelligence built into them
- Healthcare devices, some that we imbed in our bodies, that can log things and report things about our heart-rate, etc.
- Email of course, and the myriad of other programs you may use
- Cell phones
- Video Games
- Military Uses
- And the list goes on and on
Almost every facet of our lives involves one or more objects that is part of the internet of things.
After almost losing my computer data, I started uploading everything I have to the cloud. While it seems scary to some, cloud technology is what I work with, so it is just common to me at this point. The world is moving in this direction and it will not be long before all media content is cloud based in some way.
At any rate, I chose for numerous reasons to go with Amazon Drive for my storage solution. After uploading 12 thousand photos (yeah, this is why the whales have to wait), I was astounded at what their system can do. They apply recognition technology to my stack of photos and viola I can now browse them by:
1. Date - well that is just way cool since they still "live" in the folders I had them in - but I can go to a timeline and just follow it all the way back to 2002
2. Person - Just click on the person and see all photos they are in
3. Subject (Pets, Animals, Water, Sea, Trees, Flowers, Birds, etc.) - again, click on the topic and see all the pictures of that
4. Geographic place - if you have geotags turned on is how I think this works
Now, do I care that they give me that space for free so that they can look at my photos (I am sure it is in the fine print somewhere). No - not really - half of these are in Facebook and Instagram already. It is the cost of being able to do cool things with them on the internet. And I am ok with that.
Some of you may have heard of "Big Data", some of you may not have (I use the term loosely and all inclusively for the tech in this domain). But all of you have experienced "Big Data" in action - it is that freaky experience where you go on the internet and look something up... next thing you know you are seeing adds for it inside of Facebook. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. They all share information about you with each other (at a cost) and with retailers (at a cost). You can be cross marketed for almost any interest that you show electronically. And don't think that what you are seeing is impossible. Technology was invented to allow this to now happen almost real time. This is some truly astounding stuff.
At the end of the day, I guess I am not worried that our lives get digitally invaded ALL OF THE TIME. If I was, the first thing I would need to get rid of is my cell phone. You and I allow this invasion for the trade-off of convenience. We cannot imagine life without our smart-phones. My take on it is that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. If you want to decry your invasion of privacy, then cancel your smart-phone first. It is the biggest culprit an enables a lot of the others. But if you are going to keep it, then embrace all the amazing things that can be done. Things that makes our lives easier, safer, and less lonely (While at the same time maybe more of each of these...). Governance is key. Disconnecting every now and then is key.
What do you think about it all??
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