Hey HuffPost, my name is Kirill, I'm a 20 y.o. Russian entrepreneur based in Belfast, NI now.
Started my very first company when I was 14, my first venture funded project at 17. Now working on Chill with my lads Greg and Ilia.
I personally am in wearables for more than 3 years- on my previous company we were one of the first to build a Google Glass app in Russia which got me to speak to a lot of wearable device owners (GoogleGlass and Pebble back then) and discover what their biggest pains were.
Before reading any further please ask yourself: When does a generation change happen from your perspective? (seriously, let me know in comments)
From my perspective I saw several generations change through my life: the laptop gen, the mobile gen and now the wearable gen.
Every time a screen changes its size we see a certain group of people change their behaviour dramatically. So for me a driver for a generation to change in the 21 century is the screen size.
The easiest way to identify one is to look at you family (lets look at mine):
My granny -- totally laptop gen. Uses email over her 15 inch Sony (just don't forget I'm 20 so my granny is a 20 year old's granny, haha). Probably a lot of your grannies (assuming you are bit older than me) are pen&paper gen.
My mom -- mobile gen. Uses Twitter over the screen of her phone and uses the same format to communicate over her laptop.
Twitter brought a new communication experience to the mobile gen. Now 140 symbol messages are pretty much normal.
Please get me right- I'm not telling that mobile gen uses "smartphones only". A generation is not about a device- it's about the pattern new screens bring to our lives. For instance not only communication changed with the introduction of smaller smartphone screens. News consumption also evaluated. Many people just rush through headlines to stay in the context of what's going on without reading the article itself. Pretty much what we do on Twitter, right?
The wearable generation is here and Twitter's 140 symbols is just too much for a Millennial to handle (lets assume they are the early wearable tech adopters).
Don't get confused: Millennilas and the wearable gen are different people. Millennials are in the middle of generations. Lets say, I (guess a Millennial) still think of wearables as of the future. The kids who are 13 year old now will think of wearables same as we think about iPhones -- normal.
Never the less Millennials are the ones who will be forming the wearable culture in its first stages.
A lot of patterns these guys create for wearables- will be brought to the smartphone screens and change our online behaviour in the next few years.
For the wearable generation, lockscreen-- is the new interface.
Communication, news, apps- all that is going to be happening mainly without your app getting opened.
We are moving to a "at a glance" communication format where 140 symbols -- is a long read. The one who creates a language to optimise wearable communication- gets it all.
--
Hope you enjoyed the read. This is one of a series of posts I am planning to share with you where I will be digging more into the wearable generation and its' cultural aspects.