Category: Thoughts

People buy smartwatches like the Apple Watch and cannot even tell you why they did it. They spend their time coming up with ridiculous justifications why that gadget was worth buying and what it does for them – while, in fact, they only use it as a simple watch and let themselves be annoyed by email notifications that they don’t even need.

There simply is no convincing use case for smartwatches and nobody has come up with a killer application for them yet.

Gadgets like Microsoft HoloLens or Google Glass are a completely different story.

Google, unfortunately, has burned too much time turning Glass into yet another consumer-compatible thing that serves no purpose that a smartphone couldn’t already do for you. Except for the usual notification annoyances, all they came up with was using the thing as yet another camera or navigational system.

Microsoft at least is looking a lot into medical and industrial use cases for their gadget and is trying to come up with innovations that help people in work environments. They don’t position it as a useless consumer gadget, and that is a good strategy.

However, I’m missing some of the more obvious things here: Where’s the subtitles app for the hearing impaired?

I’m in the unfortunate situation that I need hearing aids. According to recent tests, the “speech recognition software” that nature has implanted into my brain is down to 60% comprehension. It has become real work for me to follow a vocal conversation, meetings are extremely tough and conversations in open places have become something of a punishment. When I watch movies in the original language, I never had a problem with the vocabulary – but understanding a spoken word was a challenge, so I only watch movies with subtitles in the same language.

Now what I would willingly pay money for is a product like HoloLens that translates spoken language – or even lip-reading – into subtitles displayed near the person that is speaking.

That would be a real killer app for a wearable gadget.

I once posted that I officially love WordPress. I also like blogs and blogging and while discussion forums are usually only an entertaining way to burn some time, even forums can sometimes be useful and a source of information that is hard to find elsewhere.

But there are a couple of things on the “social” Internet that I officially hate: Twitter and Facebook and everything else that can be described as a “Social Network”.

I already thought that SMS is an unworthy form of human communication, so ever using Twitter was entirely out of the question for me.

But several years ago, I was somehow talked into opening a LinkedIn account and since LinkedIn aims a “professional” audience, I gave it a shot and fed the LinkedIn servers with my data and “connected” with other people that I knew through my various jobs.

Yet, over all those years, I wondered what this thing actually did for me. The answer was simple: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’m pretty sure that LinkedIn gained some useful information from my data and the data of the people that I connected with and could create valuable profiles that they could sell to advertisers or use otherwise. After all, that is what Facebook does for a living – and most Facebook users don’t realize at all that they are the product that Facebook sells to its real customers, which are advertisers.

All other social networks pretty much have the same business model as Facebook. The thing for me is that I hate ads and being treated like consumer cattle. So, a few days ago, I finally closed the only social network account that I ever owned.

I don’t mind when people want to use stuff like Facebook, Google+, WKW (a German Facebook-ripoff), Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing or the like. I mean, it’s the year 2012 and billions of people are still watching TV, too. So how could actively using “social networks” on the Internet be any worse than being passively brainwashed by mass media?

Me, I’ve just read too much “Fahrenheit 451” and other dystopian literature and don’t like the idea of being somebody’s product. So please don’t expect me to accept an invitation to join such a network. I’ve already left enough traces of me on the web that are there for all to see, and that ought to be enough.