Wearable Market Continues to Expand

One of the largest growing markets in the “internet of things” is wearables. A recent Venture Beat article notes a sizable increase in wearables sales. It’s still a relatively small market, but for the second quarter of 2017, 26.3 million wearables were sold worldwide.  The leader is the Chinese company Xiaomi, with Apple and Fitbit close behind.  Almost all of the sales are driven by smartwatches, which are growing in popularity and utility.  Xiaomi is reportedly a leader in low-cost manufacturing.

Perhaps the most important sentence in the article comes at the very end, when mention is made of the vast amounts of data these wearables are generating. These are essentially complex sensors consumers are choosing to wear on their wrists.  Which means that in addition to developing, designing, and maintaining vast IT networks to support all of those wearables, there’s also a demand to manage the networked databases needed to store and analyze all of that smartwatch data.  These are the jobs of the future.

For an article comparing Apple to Fitbit, please visit here.