Apple Watch is coming, and it's going to have a big impact on brands.  

The Apple Watch, available on April 24, 2015, has been praised, vilified, and dissected by a wide-ranging audience, including everyday consumers, technology geeks, Apple fans, and fashionistas. The new product has also injected some strong style mojo into the Apple brand. But should businesses care about the Watch? Absolutely. Apple Watch will have far-reaching impacts on several industries, from healthcare to automotive and retail. The Watch, which blurs the line between mobile and wearables, will pressure brands across the board to make mobile experiences more personal and less intrusive. 

Yesterday your customers loved Facebook, but now they love Snapchat, too. How do you make sure your products and experiences adapt to your customers' changing habits, especially when your customers live all over the digital world? The question arose recently when BeyondCurious CTO Vishal Agarwal and I were interviewed for a recently published Gigaom report, “Enticing The Everywhere Customer.” When asked about Customer Journey mapping (a tool in which a brand literally creates a map of its customers' touch points with the brand), I was quoted as saying, “I think less about taking a flat snapshot of a customer’s journey and more about creating a living story that morphs along with the customer’s experience. I added, “You need to be able to adapt when you discover that your customers are using Snapchat to look at branded content that disappears.” 

How does a major automotive brand empower both its customers and its sales associates with the technology to create a consistent experience online and offline? Lexus, a division of Toyota Motor Sales (TMS), embraced that opportunity by working with BeyondCurious to develop mobile applications that supported the launch of the all-new Lexus 2015 NX and RC models. A key to success was Lexus utilizing a BeyondCurious methodology, Innovation@Speed, that disrupts traditional product development approaches.

Redg Snodgrass and Kyle Ellicott on the emerging business of wearable tech 

The second annual Glazed conference is set to take place June 3-4 in San Francisco at the Regency Center. I spoke to Wearble World and Glazed Conference founders Redg Snodgrass and Kyle Ellicott about the burgeoning wearable economy, and their thoughts on what it will take for the wearable era to truly come into its own. 

Apps get a lot of press and attention. But new technologies are about to change mobile as we know it. 

Remember what dating was like in Junior High? I do. Full disclosure: I didn't do a lot of it. Nevertheless, I have keen memories of the extensive negotiations that went on before people actually started "going out." Conversations went something like this: "Do you like him? He likes you." Self-appointed matchmakers served as go-betweens, ensuring that there was mutual interest before anyone ever publicly announced anything -- a primitive but effective form of double opt-in.