Is Apple Watch a platform... and what does it mean for news media companies? Or is it merely a milestone in the development of reader-focussed content delivery?

What is certain is that it can't be ignored, given the impact other offerings from One Infinite Loop have had. Around the world, media companies are trying to second guess the answers, many having underestimated the role tablets, smartphones or even the web would have.

As GXpress goes to press following the company's live briefing, the fuss over Apple Watch seems to be over how costly a piece of bling it might become, with prices as high as $17,000 being mentioned. And while the capability is pretty much known, its potential will be driven by the imagination of those writing apps for it.

As will Google Glass, since public antipathy drove it underground in January; just because its Explorers programme has been shut down, developers haven't stopped working on business applications and you can imagine that like so many products that have appeared 'before their time' Glass will also re-emerge in a consumer context.

Nothing remotely new about wearables of course, just because they are about to receive the Apple imprimateur: major sports brands and fitness specialists have been at it for a long time.

Makers of fitness kit such as running shoes and treadmills have been developing levels of connectivity for several years, as of course have those in the heartrate and footfall measurement business. One of the segment leaders, Suunto has a Bluetooth-enabled smart GPS watch which connects with sensors in your bra or teeshirt - and of course, your smartphone - and elsewhere there's even a gem-set ring that rings, or rather flashes to advise a Tweet.

Our MPC colleagues on the Sportslink desk (www.sportslink.biz) tell us the hot technologies in Munich at the Wearables Week which was part of the ISPO sporting goods fair last month were fabric sensors and sticky-plasters, with a top global award made for festival wristbands which cope with the communication bottlenecks routine at huge events.

Car makers have discovered that connectivity is a driver to new vehicle purchase, and the trend towards the Internet of Things has even spawned a high-tech motorcycle helmet with a heads-up display.

Research by IDTech - which is the organiser of an expo event in Berlin next month - says the wearable technology market will rise from $24.2 billion in 2015 to what seems a very modest $64.3 billion in 2025. As electronics move from bulky devices to ones that can conform to the wearer, the value of sensors in wearable technology devices is expected to rise from $700 million to $5.8 billion alone in that period.



So many ways to keep in touch: But if you can expect such developments to keep flowing with ever-greater frequency, what's a publisher to do about it?

Already some are doing - like The Guardian, which is updating its app to deliver glancing Moments of news - and some are talking about it.

For the benefit of the latter, the Danish parent of CCI/Escenic, Stibo is pushing the topic along, through its own Accelerator initiative and through half-day workshops partnered with WAN-Ifra.

Already a workshop organised by WAN-Ifra's Global Alliance for Media Innovation has been held at Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung in Germany's Lower Saxony, and others are planned including at Digital Media Europe next month.

Kim Svendsen, who shares time as Stibo Accelerator director and a 'day job' as marketing manager of CCI Europe and Escenic believes the Apple Watch launch will be a game changer and - "learning from the experiences with the news industry being late in both the smartphone and the tablet publishing game" - there will be a demand for an introduction workshop that moves leaders in a news organisation from 'no knowledge about wearables' to 'we know enough to be able to decide our strategy'.

"That's significantly better than the usual, 'there's a trend out there, but we'll wait and see what happens'," he says.

All of which is on top of the role of the Accelerator itself. Late last year, Stibo brought five masters students from Aarhus University and the Danish School of Journalism into an incubator environment at its Højbjerg headquarters. Two of these, Jonas Skytte and Ganesh Ram are working specifically on the role of smartwatches in news delivery.

"New mobile and wearable technology holds great promises, but there are big challenges to keep in mind with users being always available, always connected," says Svendsen. "The research project we are conducting aims to define a set of design guidelines with recommendations for both visual appearance and interactivity models news publishers should consider when designing for wearables.

"Even minor design flaws can push the users away from the news brand and have a negative impact because notifications on watches demands our attention and distracts us from the real world. But if publishers make the right design choices when embracing wearables in their offering, the device itself fades into the background and will actually enhance the everyday life of the consumer."

Among mentors is news media design guru Mario Garcia, who has been following developments for some time. "As a visual storyteller, I am fascinated by the prospects smart watches offer," he told GXpress, "especially for design aspects of presenting information on the face of a watch.

"The role of design will be extremely important. I have done my own sketches of how I would envision elements for a wearable platform.

The word wearable resonates with me as I think of possibilities. Anything we wear we want to look good, right? The smart watches are not going to be different, and the models already shown by Apple are stylish enough that any of us would be happy to carry them on our wrists.

"The question will be how much intrusion we will want for a platform that will be so close to our skin, so totally connected with us. Editors and designers are already mapping out strategies. A new era for news consumption opens.

"The media quintet is here."



Copenhagen-based Berlingske Media - which last month became part of Dutch-owned Persgroep, acquired from David Montgomery's UK-based Mecom Group - is among those 'mapping out strategies'... and taking advantage of its proximity to Stibo to participate in a workshop as a partner.

Head of Berlingske Media Lab, Anders Kring thinks publishers can't go on adding dedicated content teams. "Fifteen years ago, nobody would have imagined a team just writing for web, or five years ago one just for mobile," he says, "but we can't go on like that with a roomful of journalists just writing for smart watches or the next thing.

"The focus has got to be on context."

A former games producer who moved through Newscorp's NDS and Zmags, before coming in on Berlingske Media as head of digital development and lately a brief to hunt down projects with potential.

Fired up by Jawbone's Hosain Rahman at SXSW in 2013, he's been fulltime on wearables since December, and increasingly focussed on Watch: "It's funny to look back to the way people talked about tablets - asking 'why do we need it' - until the iPad tablet came out and it suddenly became part of everyday life," he says. "That's where I see us right now."

Apple's involvement can make or break this as a news media platform, and I'm extremely excited about what can happen, how people will adapt to it." Notably, he says aspects of the Apple vision are "quite different to Google's"... which could be critical in its relationship with publishers.

One way or another, devices know where you are and how fast you've moving (up, down or along), how well you slept and what your pulse and temperature is, and Kring says new teams need to be related to that: "We need to think about what situation they are in, how much time they have, what mood they're in, at work, at home, with their lover...

"Much more than teams for each platform, we need a unified team that focusses on context; we mustn't allow ourselves to be limited to just platform. The introduction of Apple Watch is a good point to do that."

While data fed back - with consent - from a user's smartwatch provides the basis to speculate what they're doing, it doesn't (yet) provide insights into what is going on in their brain.

So there have been surprises from research so far. That people would be willing to read long-form journalism on the smartwatch, for example, alongside tiny micro-interactions of news and information. Aarhus University students Jonas Skytte and Ganesh Ram are already convinced that personalisation is also extremely important to ensure that matched content is pushed to users.

This, says Kring, is the hard bit: "It's not like they're on a laptop or phone; if we're disturbing them time and time again, it's got to be with the right stuff," he says.

After seeing the "emotional" Watch launch event - with the personal connection of being able to send your heartbeat to another watch - Kring told us he was thrilled by the potential of what he saw: "Apple will once again take a nerdy technology and move it into a mainstream 'commodity', and make the transition from a tool towards a lifestyle."

Although there was nothing "new and shiny" in Watch - and its 18 hours of mixed use battery life "will limit usage" - he says Apple is doing exactly what he expected them to do: "It is only when a platform or a technology is getting mainstream, we see the true potential of it, as providers for the particular tech or platform needs to be even more innovative, concrete and raise the bar even more, in order to stand out from the rest of the providers. It is in this magical spot that we truly see the potential of the platform."

Looking back to his days in the games business, he cites the example of Sony's PS2: "It was only in the last days of the PS2 (even after the PS3 had come out), when there was 150 million devices out there, that the true great games came out, that really pushed the platform to the max.

"I'm so much looking forward to what marketers are going to come up with, not only for Apple Watch, but all smart watches once we reach the magical number of 100 million sold copies."



Among typical early movers, Australia's Fairfax Media had "nothing to announce" on apps for Watch, despite its involvement with Google's Glass last year. But mobile director Stefan Savva told us the publisher was "extremely interested in the emergence of post-smartphone platforms such as wearables."

While not expanding on this at present, he was quoted last year saying content available in cars would rival wearable devices like Glass "when it comes to the next big platform for mobile content discovery".

After launching a Google Glass app for the Sydney Morning Herald last year "out of our desire to experiment with new platforms and new user interfaces to consume news."

But while it was a really interesting experiment - with a lot more future thinking like this to do over the coming year - he says Google is "clearly taking the long term view on Glass so we don't expect anything material to change in the short term."

He told GXpress this month that while Fairfax is witnessing incredible mobile growth across all its digital brands, "it is becoming clear that mobile publishing is altogether a completely new proposition with a lot more complexity to execute than desktop.

"The growing number of different user experiences will force a staggering amount of product choices onto publishers. The mobile web is just one way to consume content - Watch is another.

"How people interact with Watch and what content they find valuable is still to be seen but we expect the content utility of Watch will be in short interactions. So publishers already familiar with the unbundling power of the Internet are now looking at wearables and wondering how much further they can unbundle their content to provide value."

At "a really exciting time to be working in news", and with so many mobile opportunities, he says the tough questions all publishers face is "not what to do, but what not to do".

Therein lies the dilemma

... and Guardian app update takes a Moment to glance

The Guardian says its app is being updated to provide a brand-new experience created specially for Apple Watch and the result of a couple of months of "discussing, designing, experimenting, testing and building".

Team member Tom Grinsted says the Moments feature will be simple, glanceable and instantly personal. "Instead of generic lists of content that aren't well suited to a watch, it recommends a single moment - a tailored experience at any given time - combining insight from editorial teams with the customisable homepage of the Guardian app," he says.

"So in the morning you can expect a quick briefing to catch up with the news, a beautiful gallery to distract you while the kettle boils for your afternoon tea, a match update if your favourite football (soccer) team is playing, or a reminder in the evening for an article you saved to read later."

Subhajit Banerjee says that along with the top news story of the moment and push alerts for breaking news, there will also be the best photos of the day, glimpses of feature content such as recipes, life and relationship advice, music and film reviews, science and technology podcasts: "The tone for the weekend will be different from the week, matching the pace and variations of the two."

Notifications will be a richer version of alerts, giving updates on breaking news, or anything else they follow in the app. A glance feature offers a snapshot of the Moment available, with the option to tap through for more on the Watch app itself, or handoff to their phone for "the full iPhone app experience".

Petr Krojzl says the app make use of "use of all the technology available" while trying to push it right to the limit. Team members emphasise that it's a first pass and are urging feedback to be embraced in future updates.