Google shows why 2014 will be Year of Convenience (and wearables)

Just to prove me wrong in what I said won’t happen in 2014, Google bought Nest and then introduced perhaps the coolest wearable concept yet — the smart contact lens. A very cool concept, the lens measures the glucose level in tears to help diabetics manage their health better. By making the monitoring of blood sugar level so convenient, the odds that dangerous fluctuations will occur goes down significantly.

Nothing gets our attention faster than convenience. Google’s self-driving cars, Google Wallet, Google Glass and now this concept are all perfect examples of what’s driving innovation today and why consumerization is so important: convenience.

Convenience and innovation

There’s an unbreakable connection between innovation and convenience. In our history, innovation has taken place for survival, cost cutting, and competition. In fact, computerization has followed a similar hierarchy of need to the point we’ve reached today, where there’s enough computational power, data storage and connectivity to allows us to focus on convenience. Steve Jobs figured that out with the iPhone and the app, and now Google is showing us what Jobs started.

Disguised as convenience

While things like online banking or grocery self-checkout look like consumer convenience concepts, they’re actually convenient for a banks and markets that want to cut cost and train the customer to self-serve. Convenience can certainly be the front man for cost cutting and there’s nothing wrong with that if it serves all parties.

In similar fashion, we give away our data for convenience in ways that are highly valuable to the app, website or brand that collect our information. Convenience is an excellent lure to drive behavior and we’re getting more accustomed to it every day, regardless of privacy concerns.

Getting back to convenience

Let’s get back to convenience for convenience sake. The Google Smart Contact is an early version of wearables that can monitor our health condition, which is at the middle level of our hierarchy of needs. It’s only a matter of time before we’re getting messages from our feet that bacteria are building up, our armpits that things are getting damp, and from other parts of our anatomy to tell us things that will help us exercise, socialize and be more comfortable in general.

2014 will be a year of convenience-driven sensors and applications, it’s clear. Forces have been aligning to deliver enormous capabilities over the past several years and it appears we’re arriving at a crossroads of rapid innovation. This is getting interesting.