Not too long ago, trendwatching. com looked at the POINT-KNOW-BUY trend, saying the following: “With textual search and information now abundantly available to most people most of the time, the race is on to make instant visual search and information ubiquitous too. Any real world object (if not person) will soon be able to be ‘known’ by on-the-go consumers equipped with smartphones, which can be pointed at anything to retrieve/ find related information on a whim.

And yes, some commerce may follow from that as well. ” Now With the advent of wearable technologies (from Google Glass to Apple’s rumored Smart Watch, not to mention countless other similar initiatives, from Sony to start-ups on Kickstarter), this is one trend that is subject to massive acceleration.

Indeed, expect smartphones to face ever-stronger competition from devices that are increasingly worn – if not seamlessly integrated – into consumers’ vision, clothes or bodies. Next While much of the current discussion about wearables revolves around privacy implications and the challenges of social acceptance, past evidence suggests wearables will be completely mainstream sooner than most people can or like to imagine, perhaps even in a matter of years.

And behaviour change will happen very quickly, once brands stop getting excited about simply being able to push alerts literally into people’s faces (no, ‘better’ ads won’t be the killer app), and start thinking about the new potential capabilities, behaviours, interactions, platforms, tools and services that will be unlocked by wearable devices, fueled by everything from ubiquitous data streams to hyper-contextual awareness to anticipatory computing.

Just look at the new behaviours and expectations unlocked since the iPhone’s touchscreen & App Store platform broke the ‘simply more-convenient-email-on-the-go’ paradigm of pre-2007 ‘smart’ phones. Examples It took Shazam, one of the pioneers of POINT & KNOW technologies, over 10 years to create 1 billion audio ‘tags’, but it announced in February 2013 that its 300 million users were now generating 1 billion tags in 3 months.

The service updated its iPad app in May 2013 to offer automatic tagging, enabling viewers to seamlessly access additional digital information on TV shows, ads or when listening to music. Google’s wearable computing project, ‘Glass’, is currently only available to developers, but that hasn’t stopped feverish speculation as to potential uses. Already, current features include navigation (to allow users to see turn-by-turn directions as they walk around), a camera (able to capture point-of-view images and video), alerts (from social networks or publishers such as the NYT).

More creative proposed uses include Insight, a ‘visual fingerprinting’ app that allows users to find friends in a crowd by tagging their clothes, the ability to check on and control connected objects (such as the Nest thermostat) via voice controls, healthier living via real-time product information, on-the-fly translation, the list goes on and on…