Promise of connected devices.

Needless to say, I'm a big fan of Kindle (and Amazon).

Kindle fills two very basic needs (at-least from my perspective).

1. Get books when you need them, where-ever you are.
2. Save valuable real-estate at home - you no longer need those big bulky book-shelves. I can carry 100's of books with me in a very nice form factor.

The key is "downloading where ever you are" (not everywhere on this planet, but in most parts). If someone had told be about this 10-15 years back, it would have sounded as science fiction, but not anymore.

Kindle is in essence a connected device which fulfills a single customer need (i.e download your book anywhere) over cellular network. Amazon has also built a profitable business model around it, which is also the key behind its success. I've articulated the advantages of Kindle and how it might catch on in the education space in one of my previous blog posts.

Bigger picture, one of the successes behind Kindle is the concept of connected devices. It opens up more and more opportunities in the future. Classic example is the smart refrigerator - Can I program my refrigerator to work in a auto-mode. Fill in the list of items I usually buy, set a threshold and when items fall behind the threshold, contact my favorite grocery store and order my items (charge my credit card). So, I really don't have to bother about what happens behind the scenes. Sci-fi ? Maybe not, the technology is available right now. The key is getting business model right i.e building a profitable business model where all the stake holders have an advantage.

There is another advantage with connected devices and that is it brings the customer and the producer nearer. Before Kindle, we used to buy books at a book-store - which served as a middle man in the transaction. With Kindle, I really don;t need a book store - I can talk with Amazon directly and in essence I'm closer to the producer (in this case, the author). I no longer have to visit multiple book stores to check out if they carry a book I need or it makes searching a lot easier etc etc.

If you look at the world around us, we see a lot of example where these connected devices would help us if there is a business model which helps everyone.

What triggered this post was this company (Vitality) which launched Connected Pill Bottle, so that your pill bottle can pre-order your tablets when you run out of them. Is this a business model that will work ? It is easy to laugh at them right now. Would I pay $15 for this service, hell no. But then the technology is cool, my guess is that these folks would branch off into related fields (built on the same underlying technology) - remote health monitoring maybe. 

More importantly, it just signals the advent of 'smarter devices' at home :-)