Body Data

Phillip: [00:00:23] Welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast about cutting edge and next generation commerce. I'm Phillip.

Brian: [00:00:29] And I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:00:30] And today we are talking about body data.

Brian: [00:00:37] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:00:37] This is where we cue. {music} Let's get physical, physical. That's where we have to cue it. Anyway. We want you to give us feedback about today's show, just like we always tell you. We need your feedback to make the show a success. And so we want you to leave us some feedback. If you're listening on FutureCommerce.fm right now, scroll to the very bottom of the page and hit the Disqus comment box below. And we want you to subscribe as well. So hit the iTunes link there on FutureCommerce.fm and subscribe on iTunes or on Google Play. And you can even listen from your Amazon Echo on TuneIn radio with the phrase "Alexa, play Future Commerce." And if you say it real sultry like that, she doesn't pick it up.

Brian: [00:01:18] That's not true. You just turned it down.

Phillip: [00:01:20] I was trying to duck it. I know. I tried to get duck it. Well, she didn't even pop up. But anyway, how's it going, man?

Brian: [00:01:26] It's going well, man. It's going well. How are you doing, man?

Phillip: [00:01:28] Really good. This is our eighth episode.

Brian: [00:01:30] I know. We're getting up there. We're recording like maniacs, which is good.

Phillip: [00:01:35] Yeah. I'm actually really impressed with us. And we're maturing a little bit, I feel.

Brian: [00:01:40] Yeah. Oh, you know, in life and on the podcast.

Phillip: [00:01:44] {laughter} A little bit. A little bit. Actually, it's been a couple of weeks in real life since we've recorded. And a few really interesting things have sort of developed, at least in my space. I've started developing my very first Facebook Messenger bot, which I'm really excited about.

Brian: [00:02:02] Yeah. {clapping}

Phillip: [00:02:02] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'll take the golf clap. It's been interesting. It's been interesting. It's easy, first of all. Very easy. The developer tools are pretty well realized. I do still feel like it's actually the things that make it easy nowadays are it's just a little too simple to find preexisting like packages or plug ins for other like development frameworks. So if you're a developer, you may know what I'm talking about, but something like no-js or Laravel on the PHP side. But it's a little bit too easy now because you can find these pre-built packages that sort of make it easy to interact with Facebook or Slack or even, you know, like an Alexa skill, something like that. They make it so darn simple. I don't actually feel like I'm doing much work as a programmer. So I certainly wouldn't complain that it's too easy. But so far so good. It's pretty interesting. And all of this is really just for prep for a talk. So I'm going to be speaking about conversational commerce as ZendCon 2016 in October in Las Vegas.

Brian: [00:03:18] And will that be available after the conference?

Phillip: [00:03:21] Yes, they will make all the all the recordings available, which I'm really excited about.

Brian: [00:03:26] That's awesome. We'll have to link to that.

Phillip: [00:03:28] Yeah. And so I you know, I'm not sure which talk I actually got picked up for. They're actually having me speak on two subjects. And so I'll be speaking about PCI compliance, which is like a thing I speak on a lot now, not because I want to, but because people keep asking me to do so. I have a really sort of a well...

Brian: [00:03:49] It's a hot button.

Phillip: [00:03:50] It is kind of a hot button topic. And it's interesting because people keep asking me if it's even necessary anymore with so many payment providers moving to like, you know, iFrame or hosted fields payment, you know, methods. But anyway, that's a horse of a different color. So I'll be giving that talk and I'll also be introducing a new conversational commerce talk, which I'm really excited about. So there you go.

Brian: [00:04:17] So look forward to that once it's up.

Phillip: [00:04:20] Yeah.

Brian: [00:04:21] When is ZendCon? I can't remember.

Phillip: [00:04:23] Thank you for catching me off guard. October 18th through 21st. And ZendCon.com has all the information. Actually Zend, if you're not familiar, is actually owned by a company called Rogue Wave Software. And they are it's a PHP development company, and they make enterprise PHP software and tools. So kind of interesting stuff. Anyway, I'm pretty stoked. It'll be at the Hard Rock Hotel, so let's hope that that's cool. The last time I was there it was not the greatest hotel I've ever been in.

Brian: [00:05:06] I remember when the last one was at the Hard Rock.

Phillip: [00:05:06] {laughter} Not my favorite. But anyway, actually, you know, it might be interesting for a little bit of body data kind of getting on to our topic here today, but school has started here in the United States.

Brian: [00:05:21] For you. Not for my kids.

Phillip: [00:05:23] Your kids haven't started school?

Brian: [00:05:25] Now, not until September.

Phillip: [00:05:27] Holy cow. OK, so we start early because we have hurricanes in Florida. So we must start a little bit earlier than the rest of you folks. But, yeah, we've started school and my daughter, actually, my oldest daughter, her elementary school where we live now is about a mile away. It's like one point one miles. So I've actually been walking to take her to school and pick her up in the afternoon. So I'm doing a little over four miles a day just walking. And I'm sort of like superficially I've been sort of clocking it on my watch, getting a little faster, like started out it was like 15 minute walk, and now it's about an eleven and a half, 12 minute walk.

Brian: [00:06:11] Nice.

Phillip: [00:06:11] But here's the crazy thing. I have all these body data tracker things that I've purchased over the years. I have a Fitbit and I have a... What was the thing before the Fitbit? Like the Jawbone.

Brian: [00:06:23] Jawbone. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:06:24] Jawbone. And I have a really old. Jabra was the Jawbone company right? No Jabra. I don't know, I had another before that.

Brian: [00:06:37] I don't know. I can't remember.

Phillip: [00:06:37] It was like a long time ago. It doesn't matter. But I have all these trackers and I'm not wearing them anymore.

Brian: [00:06:44] Yeah of course not. You don't need to.

Phillip: [00:06:47] Exactly. My phone actually knows when I'm walking, which is creepy, which is a totally separate topic that I bring up in a little bit. But very interesting stuff. It's got me thinking a lot about body data recently.

Brian: [00:07:00] Speaking of those trackers, did you see that McDonald's was giving them out in Happy Meals, and they had to recall them? They recalled them.

Phillip: [00:07:06] Ok, so I don't I saw this like on Twitter, but I don't know anything about it. For the uninitiated, can you fill us in?

Brian: [00:07:14] Yeah, they were just giving out a bunch of fitness trackers in Happy Meals...

Phillip: [00:07:17] But what did they do? They're just like pedometers or what?

Brian: [00:07:21] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. I think it was just step trackers or something to that effect.

Phillip: [00:07:25] What's, what's the point. Was it just because it's hypocritical. Is that why people were upset about it or?

Brian: [00:07:30] No, no, no, no. Well they might have been upset about that. No doubt. I don't doubt that. That's not the interesting part to me. Well, I guess that is interesting. {laughter} But no the funny part is they had to recall them all because they were like rubbing people's wrists the wrong way and creating a bunch of irritation on these all these children's wrists.

Phillip: [00:07:51] The American children's wrist is too fat now... That's terrible. And I shouldn't say that.

Brian: [00:08:01] Oh, that's too close to home.

Phillip: [00:08:04] Oh, my gosh, that's phenomenal. I would think it's just creepy that you're kind of handing out something that sort of tracks a child inherently.

Brian: [00:08:18] That idea like handing these out in Happy Meals, like of all the places in the world to be handing out a pedometer is just I like my boggling to me.

Phillip: [00:08:26] Right. Oh, well, it's you know, it feels like it's in the right spirit, like it's... I don't know. You know, actually listen, from our Pokemon episode, I'm the last one to like sit here and try to defend McDonald's. But at the same time they've actually they give a lot of healthier options now. Not all obviously not all parents would take it. But, you know, you don't have to have... It doesn't have to be french fries and soda pop for your kids at McDonald's.

Brian: [00:09:03] Absolutely. So it's interesting, I heard about something not too long ago about how fast food companies actually in some ways have the best opportunity to really sort of influence the health of sort of lower middle class America.

Phillip: [00:09:24] Oh sure.

Brian: [00:09:24] Because people eat there so often and kind of eat whatever is available because it's convenient, you know, it's available, it's affordable. And so, you know, by introducing healthier options and helping people keep track of their fitness, actually fast food companies can have a really positive impact. If they were actually doing it properly. Now, like you said, McDonald's has introduced a few things. They also still have some pretty horrible stuff on their menu, like the McGriddle. I mean...

Phillip: [00:10:00] Oh, come on, but it's so delicious.

Brian: [00:10:02] Oh, don't get me wrong, you know, syrup in your bread, you know, in your sandwich. Right. That makes it makes sense. But good heavens, that is not healthy.

Phillip: [00:10:13] All right. Well, enough McDonald's talk.

Brian: [00:10:15] Alright. Enough McDonald's talk. That's right. So, body data. Yeah. You've been thinking about it. I've been kind of... This has been an idea I've been kind of playing with and researching for a while because, well, first of all, you know, let's talk about the current state. We kind of talk about fitness trackers.

Phillip: [00:10:34] Oh, sure. Yeah. And that's old tech.

Brian: [00:10:39] That's old tech. That's what we've been doing. Where are we going with this? So there's a few companies that I kind of want to point out that are doing some really cool stuff that are out there. There's a company called Size Stream, which is basically an app for scanning your body and gathering data on it.

Phillip: [00:11:01] Yeah the first two of these are kind of new to me. I'd never heard of this before. And this is so cool. So could you kind of explain that for everybody?

Brian: [00:11:11] Yeah. So essentially you're able to... it's an app for scanning your body to make a 3D model and measure a specific body pretty easily. And they have a tablet application that I think they are in the middle of releasing or have just released.

Phillip: [00:11:35] And it's kind of like what you would have like from an Xbox Kinect, right?

Brian: [00:11:38] Right, exactly

Phillip: [00:11:40] Right. So it'll do like it's like a topographical... It generates a 3D image from a 2D picture from different angles.

Brian: [00:11:48] Exactly. Yes.

Phillip: [00:11:49] And then what does it do? You sort of just track the scan? Like you track your measurements or you track like key data points over time?

Brian: [00:12:01] Yeah. Well your neck, your chest, your stomach...

Phillip: [00:12:06] Bicep changes is what I see here.

Brian: [00:12:08] All of the above. You can keep track of everything.

Phillip: [00:12:11] Here's a video. I love in podcasts do this. Hold on. Here's a video.

Brian: [00:12:16] {laughter} No.

Phillip: [00:12:16] We're going to do the video.

Brian: [00:12:17] No. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:12:17] Oh this is the world's worst logo. So their old logo on their YouTube is just terrible. This is... OK. So things have definitely progressed from this YouTube video. Yeah, Size Stream needed a little bit of help from their engineering side. And then they have this lady who's sort of creepily half dressed, getting into like the perv at home DIY version of the TSA's photon scanning booth. And then it generates a 3D model of you and you can take it with you on your smartphone. Wow, they needed a lot of help. I like their new site SizeStream.com. It's kind of cool. Yeah, it's kind of neat. I feel like my scatterplot of my human body would be a little bit plumpier than I'd like, but yeah. Interesting. It's very, very cool

Brian: [00:13:08] Yeah. Very interesting. So that's cutting edge stuff that's happening.

Phillip: [00:13:11] And this is like a license thing that would happen like that other people would make use of? Like this is not a consumer app, right?

Brian: [00:13:18] I don't really know what their end game is. I'm sure that it's a lot bigger than just their current app. I will tell you right now, I did a little digging on this, and actually the way I came across this was via Shoptalk. But Joe Dixon is their CEO. He is from Brooks Brothers.

Phillip: [00:13:36] Yeah. Ok.

Brian: [00:13:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, a little LinkedIn creeping there, but I can't help but think that Brooks Brothers has some amount of stake in this potentially.

Phillip: [00:13:54] Right. Yeah, yeah. So he was Senior Vice President of Sourcing Technical Design, product development at Brooks Brothers for fifteen years.

Brian: [00:14:03] Exactly. Actually it's longer than that. He worked for, it looks like he worked for Brooks Brothers almost for twenty years.

Phillip: [00:14:10] Oh yeah. Yeah. Twenty years. Twenty. Twenty years.

Brian: [00:14:12] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:14:14] Yeah. He was at Brooks Brothers for twenty years, which is incredible. And then now he's CEO and Strategy Advisor at Size Stream.

Brian: [00:14:24] Right.

Phillip: [00:14:25] Crazy.

Brian: [00:14:25] So interesting. You can't help but think that this is going to relate back to something that I definitely want to talk about, which is body data and clothing.

Phillip: [00:14:34] Yeah, sure. Which is like I think which is the natural progression into the commerce space.

Brian: [00:14:39] Super natural progression. Right? And there's a bunch of other companies out there that are kind of focused on this as well. Memory Mirror, Neomi or whatever it's called.

Phillip: [00:14:49] Yep. Yep.

Brian: [00:14:52] So that's a MemoryMirror.com. They're doing some really cool stuff with Neiman Marcus, where you can do some smart mirror...

Phillip: [00:15:00] Smart mirror stuff, yeah.

Brian: [00:15:01] Personal try on in the dressing room. And so that's really cool stuff. Also Oak Labs...

Phillip: [00:15:11] Let's talk about Oak for a second. OK?

Brian: [00:15:13] OK. OK.

Phillip: [00:15:14] You know I want to talk about Oak.

Brian: [00:15:15] You want to talk about Oak. Because obviously in the Magento world there's a pretty big case study with Rebecca Minkoff that Oak is a part of.

Phillip: [00:15:23] Yeah it is the case study. Rebecca Minkoff. Right. So Rebecca Minkoff engaged with the PayPal Innovation Lab as part of eBay and then the Magento team somehow was involved, and they sort of unveiled this whole Skunkworks project inside of eBay to create this really interesting, like smart mirror in-store experience, which the video was kind of very... The video to me just felt like when they unveiled it, it felt very like... I don't know, Duke Nukem 3D comes to mind. Like it's vaporware, like the mother of all demos, that just is a thing that will never actually come to pass. So I don't know if this is like a real thing. Obviously, it is a real thing. I don't know if it's actually being used in their stores or what. Probably.

Brian: [00:16:20] I think it is because I think Nordstrom is doing some stuff too. Not with the Oaks Labs necessarily. I remember if it's with Oak or not.

Phillip: [00:16:26] But so I'm super into these tiny little computers called Raspberry Pi. They're the size of a credit card. They're super thin. They're extremely like low power devices. And there are people every day who make smart mirror projects for like fifty dollars with the Raspberry Pi.

Phillip: [00:16:45] Yup.

Brian: [00:16:46] It doesn't really take a tremendous amount of engineering prowess or money to craft these smart mirror things. But what's interesting here is the application is that you have a huge fashion name like Rebecca Minkoff or Uri, who, you know, is the actual CEO of Rebecca Minkoff as a brand. And then you have a bunch of capital advisors and you have I don't know, it's like a tremendous amount of venture capital that's behind Oak. Anyway, you should check it out. OakLabs.is. They've got this great full screen video thing that you know of this like very obviously CGI overlay. I'm just kidding. I want to be super excited about this. But it's hard for me, Brian. It's very hard for me.

Brian: [00:17:36] Just wait. No, we're getting there. There's a lot more ahead here.

Phillip: [00:17:39] But here's the problem. Here's the problem that I have in this thing is that it's very much focused on the in-store experience and connecting that in-store experience to a not in experience like, I don't know, to the digital, instead of commerce as a destination, you know, commerce coming to your destination. And so it's yes, it's a more digital experience and store, which I think is interesting. Yeah. Anyway, help me.

Brian: [00:18:16] Don't get me wrong. I agree. There's this is just the start. I think is so you know, it is a little bit gimmicky. No doubt. But that's what you're driving at. I think let's hit a couple of these other companies, then I'll get into where I think this is going. And I think, you know, there's definitely a couple of companies out there that I think can see this future for it as well, pretty quickly. The two other companies I want to call out, actually three other companies. I think there's also something called the Naked Mirror, which is actually related back to health even more, but also scanning your body and and determine its size. And it's similar to the Size Stream. Fits.me, which is another...

Phillip: [00:19:02] Which is awesome. I love it's Fits.me. Super awesome idea. I love customization and personalization, which are two different things, by the way. Customization. Personalization. I love customization, which is what I think Fits.me really sets, which is its custom fit.

Brian: [00:19:24] Right.

Phillip: [00:19:24] And I kind of love the idea that you know what they call fit engineering, which is I think super nice. There are so many brands and so many startups in the fashion space that are doing something like this now where you take that body data, which would be generated either by an app from some of the previous vendors that we just talked about or just inputting plain old measurements. And then you kind of go through a series of questionnaires and try to figure out what your optimal style is or what your fit and feel is. And then maybe you kind of tell them, well, this is my favorite pair of jeans and this is how they look on me. And then they kind of, you know, create the perfect jean. I think Distilled is a jean...

Brian: [00:20:05] Distilled. That's right. Yep. I think you're right. They did that. Something similar at least. Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's way cool. Again, I think it's still actually very much in its infancy. This whole industry. The one last company I'm going to call out real quick is Body Labs. BodyLabs.com. This is the one that I'm probably most excited about because I feel like they have the broadest vision for what can be done with body data. So all the ones we've talked about before have been really focused on fashion because it's such a natural outflow. Or fitness. You know, fitness and fashion are such natural outflows of body data. But these guys, I think they look at the body, I think they way they say it is, as a platform. And they're going to be taking body data and doing a lot more with it including gaming, production design, research, development and, you know, virtual health, which is beyond fitness. And so I think this is where I definitely want to get. But let's talk about... Let's go back to fashion for a second, because I think... You mentioned that you think that the current state of things are kind of gimmicky. You go in, you try things in a mirror and, you know, you can order different sizes or colors while you're standing in front of that mirror or see what different things will look like on you. Right? We've all seen the demos. Sometimes it even doesn't look like it works very well. Sometimes it does. But I think the key here is eventually, as soon as VR takes a hold, it's not going to be about an in-store experience anymore. It's going to be about trying clothes online in VR. Because if you can create a 3D model of your body and then you've got that data down to every single aspect of your body, you're going to be able to see what tailor fit clothing or not tailored clothing looks like you all you in virtual reality. The other thing is, even before virtual reality, I think there's going to be a certain amount of just being able to see clothes on you in a video or very simple browser based...

Phillip: [00:22:36] Yeah, just imaging or...

Brian: [00:22:38] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's not just an offline experience. This is definitely going to be online as well. I can tell you right now I am not 100 percent sure on this, but I have heard rumors that certain major retailers, a lot of their models, they're not even necessarily having poses for all of the different poses, they're actually manipulating their body and sort of putting the clothes on them using their body data.

Phillip: [00:23:10] OK, now that's interesting. That's super interesting.

Brian: [00:23:14] Yes. Now, granted, that's not confirmed, but that is sort of the rumor that I've heard around when I've talked to some of these guys. So it'll be interesting to find out if that's true or not. So eventually... Here's my kind of theory around this. Eventually, because you're going to be able to perfectly sized clothes to yourself, a lot of clothing is going to go to OnDemand. That's where I see this going.

Phillip: [00:23:41] Yeah.

Brian: [00:23:42] You know, it's going to be perfectly tailored. You're not going to be trying on sizes. You're just going to be simply seeing different designs or colors or patterns or whatever it is on yourself, perfectly tailored. So you're not going to be purchasing off of a specific fit. You don't have to go through sizing guides.

Phillip: [00:24:00] Right.

Brian: [00:24:01] You're not going to have to go in a store to know if it's going to fit you well, because ultimately the clothes are just going to get made directly to your specifications and shipped to your door. Now, that model is you know, there's a few companies out there that have tried to do this with, like sort of fit tools where you go through like this really involved process for fitting yourself into putting your measurements in. And that's all well and good, but it never seems to work perfectly. This is going to be your body contoured down to every last detail.

Phillip: [00:24:35] Well, what's really interesting is like I just actually went... So Distilled is the one that sticks in my mind of the custom made to order jeans. And maybe this kind of speaks volumes. If you go to Distilled's website right now, which is, you know, they were the big VC backed custom jean company. And now their whole pitch is while you go to the men's section and you go down to the jean, this is basically every other... This has become every single other jean manufacturer. You select your size and you select your color and you select your inseam and done. They actually literally have sizes out of stock. What happened to custom made to order? It's gone.

Brian: [00:25:25] Right.

Phillip: [00:25:26] And then there's this big invest in Distilled, become a partner in progress button at the top, which is like a complete joke to me. So maybe they've abandoned their whole personalization, or I'm sorry, customization model of custom made to order. Who knows?

Brian: [00:25:41] Because it was really, really like it was most of them, and I don't even remember Distilled. I don't even know if they necessarily even had one of those, but I have tried other ones that have been incredibly clunky.

Phillip: [00:25:54] Right.

Brian: [00:25:55] And so if I recall, doesn't Bonobo's even potentially have an option for full custom?

Phillip: [00:26:04] Oh, I don't know. I can't remember.

Brian: [00:26:07] I think they do.

Phillip: [00:26:08] Possibly.

Brian: [00:26:09] Yeah. But again, it's still really clunky. This is going to be instantaneous. You're just going to have a version of you. Now that we've kind of talked about this. And I could go a little further and I probably will come back to this a little bit about how I see this playing out even further. But let's talk about something for a second, because I think this is really interesting. Obviously, you're going to have a version of you that sort of created by your body data, you know, your Size Stream scan or whoever else scans you.

Phillip: [00:26:44] Sure.

Brian: [00:26:45] I think there's a ton of other applications for this body data beyond just trying on clothes.

Phillip: [00:26:51] Yeah, sure.

Brian: [00:26:53] Obviously, you can keep track of your health and fitness. That's a pretty easy one. But what about taking it and putting it into a game. I mean, I think this is kind of the next natural progression that my mind goes to. I would love to be able to play Madden as myself in a specific position with a backyard squad of guys that we come together as a team.

Phillip: [00:27:23] I love it. Yeah.

Brian: [00:27:23] And we play against other backyard squads of Madden players out there. And, you know, you build your credit. And as you improve your physical fitness, your Madden squad actually improves and you're able to like actually like build up better stamina. You can get your data from your health tracker. You can get your body scan updated. And every time you go into the game, if you made some, you know, you've got some games going on, then you update your data and all of a sudden your team gets better, your character gets better. Obviously, that's one example. There's a lot of other games. And so this is going to be beautiful because it's also going to game-ify fitness.

Phillip: [00:28:05] But this reminds me. This reminds me. So this brings up such a great... So hold on, let's hold on, hold on. Hold on.

Brian: [00:28:14] There's so much here, right?

Phillip: [00:28:16] Right. But this brings up something really interesting that I hadn't thought about before, which is you remember back when, you know, 10 years ago when everyone's super excited about the Nintendo Wii and the Wii Fit came out, which is a balance board. What's interesting is I had a me, you know, like a little me dude who looked like me and he had, you know, spiky hair. And listen, I'm a big guy. I'm tall, but I'm big boned. My butt bones pretty big. And I step on this balance board and it does its whole thing and it does this whole, like, little measuring deal. And it's like lean to the left a little bit, lean to the right, whatever. And it figures it out. And then all of a sudden, like out of nowhere. My little me dude, who I had had for like a year and a half, who was like my idealized version of myself all of a sudden plumped up into this big fat lard of a me, and he had this like he was a big fat dude now. And I'm like, oh, man, that kind of sucks because that's not who I want to be in the virtual world. Like, I could take that back, but I actually I know exactly who I am I guess in real life. I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes people buy clothes that are a little bit too small for them because it's aspirational. Sometimes people want to have an avatar that doesn't perfectly represent them. And maybe those are all good things as starting points. But for me, it kind of makes me feel a little bit more like we sort of we've only scratched the surface. I feel like we need to understand that people sometimes people, you know, sometimes that...

Brian: [00:29:56] They want to hide the...

Phillip: [00:29:57] The truth is just painful for some people.

Brian: [00:29:58] A little bit. Yeah. They want to hide behind the technology and projected image.

Phillip: [00:30:01] Sure, sure. Yeah.

Brian: [00:30:03] And I think there would definitely be a certain part of that. And actually, I think you inadvertently kind of brought me to another thing that I think body data is going to go into which is dating sites, no doubt.

Phillip: [00:30:15] Oh wow. Oh dude. Oh OK. So yeah. What if you pay a little extra and you can see people with people's verified body dimensions.

Brian: [00:30:25] Verified body data. That's right.

Phillip: [00:30:27] Oh my gosh. Yeah. Oh that blows my mind.

Brian: [00:30:30] All of a sudden, the only the dating sites that are legit will have body data. Ones that don't have body data will not be legit anymore.

Phillip: [00:30:42] Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian: [00:30:44] Yeah, yeah, so that's another big spot where it's going to fit in.

Phillip: [00:30:46] That's huge. But you know what's interesting, too? OK, so this is... Because this is delving into territory where I think Facebook and some other social media sites have struggled in the past few years, which is there's been a real push back against companies that are wanting to use real name, real identity, one to one matches because some people don't want to use the real identity. So when you when you start pushing people more towards having to be themselves, their real lives, who they really are in person online, I think you start to cross the line. You start to get some pushback from people. I know that when Facebook instituted its real name policy, that people definitely had a lot of privacy concerns around that.

Brian: [00:31:40] Certainly again, I think you're going to start to see the web split where you're going to have sort of like a verified web and unverified web and each is going to have its place. Like the unverified web will be a watchdog where people will be able to write anonymously, sort of call things out. There also be a lot more mob mentality, I think in the unverified web, which happens a lot right now, even on the verified web, I should say. But no, it's a really good question and actually brings up another fantastic point. And this is huge, which is this data, some of this data, is going to be classified underneath Hippa.

Phillip: [00:32:24] Oh for sure.

Brian: [00:32:25] Or actually a lot of it.

Phillip: [00:32:25] All of it.

Brian: [00:32:26] Yeah, all of it will be classified under Hippa. The question is what parts are going to be like sensitive? What parts are not? Like what is the security around this? There's going to be a ton of security concerns and privacy concerns around this. I will tell you this, I think once this catches on and people start of see the use for it, you're going to give companies access to your body data all the time and not think twice about it.

Phillip: [00:32:54] Well, this is well, hopefully. So, you know, it's interesting because people have tried to do this in the past. And so this is it's interesting that we sort of open the show with me talking about, you know, conversational commerce and also, hey, guess what? I'm giving this PCI compliance talk.

Brian: [00:33:10] Yes.

Phillip: [00:33:11] What's really interesting is if you think what people face in in traditional digital retail right now around compliance regulation, if you think that compliance with PCI, which is pretty onerous, depending on what you're trying to do, but if you think that's onerous, well, that's not even a government like mandated standard. That is not a an actual law that was ever passed. And Hippa is. Hippa is a government set of of legalities and requirements around dealing with your personal health information. And if there's anybody in the world who could have done this and done it well, who would that have been? Google, right?

Brian: [00:34:08] Sure.

Phillip: [00:34:08] If anybody could have centralized health care information, and have complied with government regulation, and done everything necessary to make that happen and make it broadly available, it would have been Google and Google tried. In 2008, Google announced Google Health, which was going to be a centralized place for people to be able to opt in and transfer their records, their medical records, into digital identity records to be stored with your Google account. They shuttered the thing in three years, mostly citing that government regulation is just too onerous for them to be able to continue to keep the service going. And it's kind of fractured. There's so many different... Like the whole move to digital medical records is still it's like this long, you know, over decade long process. It's not all there yet. There's just so many parties interested. Anyway...

Brian: [00:35:07] Absolutely. This is going to be a big mess when it comes to legal.

Phillip: [00:35:08] Not to poo poo on it too much. We're such a long way out, in my opinion, from us being able to just hand over like some body data. We're going to see a big fracture, or there's going to be a lot of different silos where you're going to have a lot of the same information from a lot of different apps or a lot of different services and companies. I'm sure that Nintendo has a data center somewhere with my big fat me on it somewhere still. And Google Health, you know, Google knows from the fitness tracker how fast I'm walking recently. So all these things... And so does Fitbit. They all sort of have little bits and pieces of information. But for me to be able to just sort of, you know, use that as a one identity thing for me to just share and handoff to a new app that's a long, long way away, I think.

Brian: [00:35:58] Yeah, I think that is a ways away. I totally agree with you there.

Phillip: [00:36:01] That was a very long rant for me to say that, but I felt like it was necessary.

Brian: [00:36:05] No, absolutely. I think it's absolutely correct. And I think that there's going to be some interesting legal battles that come up here pretty quickly, because I think the usefulness of data is actually going to outweigh that the privacy concerns.

Phillip: [00:36:22] Yeah.

Brian: [00:36:22] And so eventually we're going to get to a point where certain pieces of data, it's going to be tokenized. It's going to be stored in a secure area. I think Body Labs is already thinking about this pretty actively.

Phillip: [00:36:36] Right.

Brian: [00:36:38] We're going to store the data. We're going to create some sort of secure API and and allow people to access this data in some sort of like tokenized fashion. Obviously, that's not probably what will happen. But the idea being there's going to be a secure repository, and it's going to push out the data or have secure requests come in of some sort. And it's going to be a very difficult process to ensure that it's up to the standard. And I'm sure that there will be lawsuits at some point. Of some sort.

Phillip: [00:37:14] Oh, for sure. In the meantime, we've seen companies like Apple... Kind of skipping down to some of these things that you've sort of pointed out, which I think, you know, we've skipped around a little bit. This is so cool though. You make a point about body scans, like comprehensive body scans, being able to be covered by health insurance in the future.

Brian: [00:37:34] Yup.

Phillip: [00:37:35] And I think we're sort of seeing this to some degree where insurance companies, the more information that you give them or the more you sort of buy into their way of doing preventative health will actually have large financial incentives. For instance, if you go to the gym. On my health insurance membership, if I go to the gym and I go for three to four days a week consistently for six months, I will get a reduction in premium.

Brian: [00:38:11] Exactly.

Phillip: [00:38:11] And I think that we'll see that companies, insurance companies, will see a benefit to being able to give insight.

Brian: [00:38:19] And incentivizing.

Phillip: [00:38:19] And incentivizing people to be able to give them a window into your personal health every single day. Everything from blood pressure to glucose and all those things. But those things exist now.

Brian: [00:38:31] Now. That is right.

Phillip: [00:38:32] That is happening right now. In fact, you have a great link which will probably wind its way into the show notes. Accenture actually has a whole landing page about this, about virtual health and insight. In fact, they have a whole PDF that you can check out.

Brian: [00:38:48] There are several major VC backed companies right now that are out there that are in the virtual health space. And I wish I had gone and grabbed some of those names. I don't have any off the top of my head right now, but several VC companies that are doing some seriously cool stuff. The virtual health arena to the point where, like, it's crazy right now. You know, we kind of have this crazy system, our health system is so broken right now,

Phillip: [00:39:15] Yeah in the United States, we have a very broken health care system.

Brian: [00:39:16] Very broken health system. Right. And what I absolutely love is that eventually we're going to be able to do a lot of On-Demand stuff. I mean, you can already. You can do virtual health visits.

Phillip: [00:39:28] Yeah.

Brian: [00:39:30] University of Washington medicine out here has a way to do virtual health visits that are fixed price virtual health visits.

Phillip: [00:39:36] Yeah.

Brian: [00:39:36] They can solve a very specific variety of issues or diagnose them with prescription or whatever. Otherwise they'll refer you to an in-office visit. But eventually people all over the world will be able to queue up. Like it's not just the US. We're going to be able to provide unbelievable care to Third World nations via virtual health because scheduling is also going to be a lot easier. And then ultimately, eventually, you know, as this technology develops, and I guarantee you we will see an influx of devices to monitor bodies and push real time health updates to your personal health profile that will probably be managed by your insurance company, like we talked about before.

Phillip: [00:40:28] Remember Google filed for a patent not so long ago, which was like a contact lens that can detect diabetes and blood sugar. Did you see this?

Brian: [00:40:40] Exactly. Yes, I did. I did briefly see that. You should pull that up, and we can post the link in the show notes. But that is just unbelievable.

Phillip: [00:40:48] Yeah.

Brian: [00:40:48] And you're going to continue to see more of these body tracking and body scanning devices appear in your home or as a wearable or whatever it is.

Phillip: [00:40:58] I kind of want to get down to these things that you're talking about that like... I'm sorry to cut you off. I always do this.

Brian: [00:41:02] Oh, wait, wait. Let me just mention one more thing. Eventually, eventually, our health care will be pushing visits to us and pushing... They'll see...

Phillip: [00:41:13] {laughter} Wouldn't that be great?

Brian: [00:41:15] Yeah, instead of us ever scheduling appointments, it's like we have a constant checkup going on.

Phillip: [00:41:20] I want nothing more in my life than for some external entity that I have no control over to be telling me I have to do things. I know that sounds terrible and very big brother-ish, but...

Brian: [00:41:32] Yes, I hear what you're saying.

Phillip: [00:41:32] You know, I feel terrible that, and I know I shouldn't, but I feel terrible when I tell my boss, I'm like, oh, I have to take Thursday. I have to take an hour and a half on Thursday and go to the dentist. And it's like, you just went to the dentist. I'm like, yeah, they've got this whole plan of things that I have to do. And it's like, you know, wow, what a terrible inconvenience. I'm like, I would love for it to be like, I'm sorry. You know, the deal. The app tells me, I got to go. I got to go to this like... The app told me, my health app told me. I have to go to the doctor. That's what it told me to do. I'm so sorry.

Brian: [00:42:04] You'll just probably do the visit in office. Like in your office. You'll be in your office, you'll be like, hey, I'm checking out for thirty minutes to talk to the doctor.

Phillip: [00:42:13] That's not helping me at all though. I guess I got to be able to go to the doctor. That's where it's going to really help. Now I got you.

Brian: [00:42:21] Wink, wink, wink. Right.

Phillip: [00:42:23] Well, the doctor's right next to this place called Jupiter Donuts, which is just insane. Great donuts. They have Maple Bacon Donut. Bacon and maple. I mean...

Brian: [00:42:32] I have to come visit.

Phillip: [00:42:34] How much better can you get?

Brian: [00:42:35] So, sorry. Keep going.

Phillip: [00:42:37] No, here's the thing. OK, this is so when you're talking about commerce, OK, when you're talking about future commerce. What is one of the biggest commercial entities in the world that has made the most valuable companies and most valuable publicly traded companies in the world? It's advertising. And advertising is a way that connects potential consumers with merchants. It's a way for people to promote their product and get it in front of people. And advertising I think hooked up to body data is something that should be here if it's not already. But I think you have a very futuristic utopian view here, which is that we'll be able to control that and sell it to companies for advertising or collective analysis. And my take is or at least that's what it says in the doc. I'll let you defend that point yourself. But my take is a very not utopian view. My take is I don't have control over my data today, so why would I have control over my body data in the future?

Brian: [00:43:43] So you're saying like you think that companies will be able to use your body data to advertise and use to show off their clothing or whatever it is?

Phillip: [00:43:56] I'm trying to say if Google knows that I'm walking a lot recently, why can't Google manipulate that? And use that data point to show me more walking and running shoes in its search results. Google already has the information today.

Brian: [00:44:13] So advertising to you? You're not going to have control of that. I'm talking about digital body in terms of like companies ability to use your body data to do things.

Phillip: [00:44:24] But that's what they're doing. That's exactly what I'm just saying.

Brian: [00:44:27] That's true. They are advertising to you. That's a good point.

Phillip: [00:44:29] There is some ULA somewhere that I didn't read, which reminds me of that whole South Park episode with the iPad, the Human CentiPad. Did you ever see that episode?

Brian: [00:44:40] I don't know if I saw that one.

Phillip: [00:44:41] It's this incredible episode, which is a take on the Human Centipede, which is this incredible piece of pop culture.

Brian: [00:44:47] Those guys are always spot on.

Phillip: [00:44:49] Yeah. And so South Park did this thing where Apple comes into the town of South Park and basically takes all the kids and sews their butts and their mouths to iPads. And there was nothing nobody could do legally because you agreed to it in the iTunes ULA, that nobody ever reads. It's like it's right there. It says we can totally come to your house and so your butt in your mouth to an iPad. Anyway.

Brian: [00:45:14] Oh my gosh. That would have been... I might have to go watch that one.

Phillip: [00:45:16] There is a ULA that I have agreed to somewhere in the Google terms of service that allows them to see how often I'm walking from the Google Fit app and use that for advertising. I'm 100 percent sure of it, but I'm not feeling like I'm ever going to have control over that. I'm telling you.

Brian: [00:45:37] And that is why I resisted going to a Google device for so long.

Phillip: [00:45:43] Yeah.

Brian: [00:45:44] And ridicule me all you want, Microsoft didn't do that to me.

Phillip: [00:45:49] Yeah, but Microsoft didn't do very much for you, period.

Brian: [00:45:51] They didn't do much for me either way. Yeah, that's a good point. But, you know... {laughter}

Phillip: [00:45:56] I would really like... I think so there's a couple of things that sort of worry me here, because at some point this has to start to be used against you. For instance, Google should be able to predict some... There are things that Google should be able to know and predict, for instance, and this is a very Freakonomics overview and like world view, but I'm pretty sure when I'm Googling for barbecue all the time and then I'm Googling for larger pants and I'm Googling for medical terms like shortness of breath or excessive sweating... When I'm Googling things like that. And it's a trend over a sustained period of time, Google should be able to figure out that there's something that could go... Like I now fall into a risk category that just based on my search history and just based on what they know about other people. Right? And then based on my health and Google fit and all this, like Google should be able to know. There should be some risk factors that Google should be able to say, like you're heading for heart disease. Right? Like, I don't know. Yeah.

Brian: [00:47:14] Yes. That is so true. And I think to your point, like we're going to and to my point earlier, we're going to give away this data pretty quickly.

Phillip: [00:47:25] Yeah.

Brian: [00:47:26] It's not going to be something that we have trouble giving away because it's going to benefit us to do it.

Phillip: [00:47:34] Yeah. And that's the thing. It always has to benefit... The yes. The utility has to outweigh the cost of giving up the private information.

Brian: [00:47:43] Absolutely. Now, I do think there are certain things where, like if someone takes your likeness and starts using it to advertise Coca-Cola... Right? You're going to go sue them. Right?

Phillip: [00:48:01] Right.

Brian: [00:48:01] So there will be certain things about this where there will be a production. And yes, let's say that Coca-Cola actually ends up becoming a technology company. And in order to accomplish something that you want to accomplish, you sign a ULA that allows them to use your body data to advertise their Coca-Cola, then, yeah, you're kind of screwed. But until you do that, I think that there's going to be a certain amount of rights. And so actually, I'm going to flip this around and turn it into a positive in that I'm going to say your body data is actually something that you will be able to to sell and leverage. Instagram stars of today.

Phillip: [00:48:43] Right.

Brian: [00:48:44] They're going to be able to take their body data, sell to a company for one time use, for forever use, but at a specific point in time in your body data. Or Kim Kardashian is going to go sell herself now and herself in the future so that people can advertise clothes with old Kim Kardashian and young Kim Kardashian into the future forever and ever more.

Phillip: [00:49:12] Yeah, yeah, that's the whole posthumus sort of thing, right?

Brian: [00:49:17] Yes, exactly.

Phillip: [00:49:18] In perpetuity. Forever.

Brian: [00:49:20] In perpetuity. Forever. Maybe not forever. There's probably going to be some sort of copyright law or whatever, not copyright. But, you know, there's going to be some sort of after seventy five years, anyone shall be able to use this person's body data for whatever they want. You know, but it will be very interesting to see how that unfolds. I think, you know, there's going to be a lot of opportunities for advertisers both to use more people to advertise their products and also to advertise to more people based on their body data.

Phillip: [00:49:55] Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Right. There's kind of reminds me for some reason, I don't know why, it reminds me of this story that I read a few months ago of some kid, 12 or 13 years old, just broke the Super Mario Brothers world record, the speed run world record. And he broke it. I believe he broke it while streaming on Twitch, but people didn't believe that it was actually him. Number one, there's this whole thing about...

Brian: [00:50:27] I saw this.

Phillip: [00:50:27] You have to break the record not in an emulator, number one. And number two. It's very easy to break or set a record with apparently with a bot or some sort of control, some emulation of the input that would be perfect and not necessarily human. And so you could have a trainer that would basically play back a perfect run. Well, the kid to prove that it was actually him, wore a heart monitor and broadcast his heart rate on Twitch at the same time as he was playing and his heart rate got up to like one hundred and fifty BPM toward the end where his heart was just banging out of his chest, you know, and I think...

Brian: [00:51:12] That adrenaline, man.

Phillip: [00:51:12] Yeah, exactly. And I mean, it's really hard to argue that...

Brian: [00:51:16] Dude peaked at 172.

Phillip: [00:51:21] So but here's the thing. How can you argue with that? Once, you know, like how can you argue with his achievement? Because you could obviously see just from the his body data that he was invested and he was the one who is actually executing. And I think that that is the beginning of a brave new world for us, because it's like taking the polygraph and applying it to most things in your life. And this is what I wanted to kind of... I hinted at it at the very top of the show. And I really want everyone to do this right now. I want you to go to Maps.Google.com. If you have an Android device, this is going to be really fun and very scary for you,

Brian: [00:52:02] Isn't it, Google.com/maps?

Phillip: [00:52:04] No, it's both. I don't know. Whatever.

Brian: [00:52:06] You can do both.

Phillip: [00:52:07] Fine. Fine, fine. Thank you. OK, in the top left, you should have the hamburger menu. And when you pop that out, a little sidebar flips out to the left. There is a thing that I noticed the other day called your timeline. It's on the left. Click on that. This is not a thing that I've ever heard about or seen anywhere until the other day when I happened to be screwing around in Google Maps. And I want you to... It's going to go to a world view of everywhere that you have ever been, which is terrifying. And I want you to click on year. And for me, it goes all the way back to 2009. 2009 is when I got my very first smartphone and the very first install of Google Maps, as far as I can remember back. And this is what's terrifying. It doesn't matter what year, what month, or what day you go to, you can go to today. There's a button that says Today. And if you click on Today, it will show you a timeline, a graph line of everywhere you went today in Google Maps. And this is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen in my life, which is great for expense reports, for me to generate expense reports, for me to figure out how far I drove to that one place. And I couldn't remember. Terrible for privacy and data. At some point I agreed to this. I don't remember when. But this is insane. This is insane that this is the level of data that they have and they go all the way back to, for me, they go back seven years. Seven years they go back and they have data from that far back and it's down to the day and hour.

Brian: [00:53:57] It is a brave new world. I mean, in fact, this is beyond a brave new world. I mean, I've read several of those dystopian future books. 1984. Fahrenheit 451. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there are things that are happening right now where if they had predicted them in the past, people would have been like, oh, that'll never happen.

Phillip: [00:54:21] Yeah. I mean, like nobody could even... Nobody would even be able to like they wouldn't even believe you. Like, for instance, I'll just divulge a little bit for me. From yesterday or yeah, from yesterday. I left my house at 7:46 a.m. and then I was driving for fifty five minutes fighting traffic to take my daughter to school. I got to her school at 8:41, dropped her off. I was out at 8:46, and I was driving for six more minutes to where? Starbucks. It tells me I was at Starbucks. I never checked in. I never told it. I never said, hey, guess what, I'm at Starbucks. But for some reason it knows that I was at Starbucks from 8:53 a.m. to 10:28 a.m.. It knows. You know, then it knows I was driving again, then it tells me where I went after. This is Psycho.

Brian: [00:55:09] Everyone right now sign up for two factor auth.

Phillip: [00:55:12] Yes.

Brian: [00:55:13] Because if your account is hacked, game over, baby.

Phillip: [00:55:15] Exactly. So exactly. And listen, not everybody is Edward Snowden, but I want you to think about this. I want you to think about this, the level of data that's being collected on maps from as far back as I can remember. Now, my history goes back to 2009. Think about how far back it goes, and I want you to think about how they're steadily amassing information about your activity right now. In fact, it has different color lines for me on my Google Maps of when I'm driving versus when I'm walking. So I'm telling you, there's data that's being collected right now, our body data that is going to be put to use in a commercial means and we should be the benefactors of that, you and I. It's our data.

Brian: [00:56:02] Totally agree.

Phillip: [00:56:02] And so we should be the ones that are benefiting from that and bringing it back to commerce. Not for me to go all dystopian all the time on this stuff and always be the privacy guy. But I want to be the benefactor of all of that data that's being generated. If I'm going to be marketed to, there better be something in it for me. Right? Not just that I found a company that will make a jean as large as my butt can handle. It's that I need some incentive. That's what I need.

Brian: [00:56:34] Totally agree, man. And the thing is this I believe this has been talked about quite a bit by...

Phillip: [00:56:42] By people much smarter than me.

Brian: [00:56:43] Well I don't know about smarter. But there are groups out there right now that I know that are talking about PII quite a bit and other types of information. And really, what does it mean for us? How can we control it? And ultimately, how are we going to rein this in? It's kind of like when we first got the Internet, we didn't understand that people could track all of our website clicking, right?

Phillip: [00:57:14] Yeah.

Brian: [00:57:15] That was all getting tracked. We didn't know.

Phillip: [00:57:16] We didn't know.

Brian: [00:57:17] Now we're a lot more aware. Everyone's a lot more aware that their website, you know, their websites that they click on are being tracked. We just all of a sudden, though, we went from having our websites that we visited tracked to having every store and every place and everywhere and how long we spent doing something and what we're doing tracked.

Phillip: [00:57:37] Yup.

Brian: [00:57:38] And so we need to figure out how, you know, figure out, like Phillip said, start looking into this and start figuring out how you want to control your data and what you want people tracking and what you don't want them tracking.

Phillip: [00:57:53] Yeah. And that's what it comes down to. And by the way, if there's a benefit for you, then great. If it's something that you're consciously signing up for. Like I have I have the Fitbit Aria. I have the scale that is Wi-Fi connected. Those things benefit me because it helps me, you know, it keeps me, you know, honest. And I have got competitive groups with friends and stuff. Like those things have benefits. But I think in the future when we get into like real body scanning and we have verified identities via our body's information, that I want tighter control over.

Brian: [00:58:33] Right. Yeah, definitely. A couple more notes, I think back to commerce really quickly.

Phillip: [00:58:40] Yeah. Please.

Brian: [00:58:40] We strayed kind of far from there. I kind of expected to on this episode.

Phillip: [00:58:44] That's ok.

Brian: [00:58:44] Because it's such a big topic and it's still pretty much in its infancy.

Phillip: [00:58:48] Listen, nobody's doing this stuff because it's fun. Right? There's a commercial benefit to somebody, right?

Brian: [00:58:56] Exactly. I want to pull this back to something, just what you were talking about regarding tracking and the massive data that Google is collecting. Back to something we were talking about on an earlier episode. We've come back to this a couple of times. And I feel like it must be imminent because it's every, all signs are pointing to this being something that happens. It's going to happen on a much larger scale, in ways that we're not thinking about right now. And that is vicinity based commerce. That is going to be built out and worked on even more than it has now, and being able to call people on demand in a spot to be able to advertise to people that are in specific vicinities, going in and out of specific stores, having offers from those stores, get your phone or whatever device you have. That's all very, very close to reality. And so, you know, business owners that are listening to this show, started looking into that. Start figuring out how do we leverage technology to actually be able to, you know, work with my customers? If you have anything around vicinity based product or service.

Phillip: [01:00:14] Yeah.

Brian: [01:00:15] Start thinking about how to market to people using that technology.

Phillip: [01:00:19] Yeah, there's actually there's a whole host of businesses that are hyper local, which is a word that I've used now I think twice in this episode. And I'm kind of sick to my stomach that I said it that way. But there are businesses that really have a very finite amount of distance that they can actually sell to. Flower shop is a great example. Most people only buy from the flower shop that's in the direct vicinity of the place where it's going to be delivered to because delivery area is kind of a big deal. You know, the local auto shop is a great example, too. These are usually services businesses and even I guess to some degree, you know, your local supermarket or something like that. It's a traditional brick and mortar. But these are all, I think, ripe for vicinity based commerce. And when you're kind of thinking about where you are, I think digital presence is another topic that we could probably cover at some point. And maybe we could get someone on who actually knows the story. But Foursquare is a very interesting... Foursquare is an incredible case study into like why digital presence is a in a huge frontier. But how you execute and what the value proposition is, is the key.

Brian: [01:01:47] Absolutely.

Phillip: [01:01:47] And so that's that's kind of an interesting topic for another show. But yeah, I think that that stuff is really interesting. And there's actually a company who I know of that just from the Magento space who's actually innovating in the realm of flower shops, as a company called Bloom Nation, which is trying to compete with the FTDs of the world, which is like a traditional wire service. But they're trying to, you know, democratize the affiliate and referral commission based networks of flower shops, but I feel like there's local bakeries and other types of local businesses that I think could benefit dramatically from a digital overhaul. Yeah, from vicinity. Again, you know, it's right here right now. If you go and look...

Brian: [01:02:42] Right, it's right here, right now.

Phillip: [01:02:43] You can go look at Google.com/maps. Thank you, Brian. And click on Timeline because that'll show you right now. It'll tell you right where you were. And that's all vicinity based.

Brian: [01:02:58] Yeah. And Google is definitely doing this more and more. I mean, again, we've talked about this before. We're both on Google Fi. And I feel like Google is more and more pushing like local products and menus, like if I'm in a store, I can view their menu in just via Google assistant right there.

Phillip: [01:03:18] Yeah.

Brian: [01:03:20] In my phone, immediately. Like this is I feel like this is happening more and more. I should start keeping track of it so that I can see, like, how often it's actually happening. But I feel like it's happening more and more. They are actually doing a lot more pushing to me.

Phillip: [01:03:34] Yeah that's great. Well, do you have anything else? Any closing thoughts? Anything you want...

Brian: [01:03:41] I didn't hit on some of the stuff around fashion that I wanted to hit on.

Phillip: [01:03:44] Oh, hit it. Hit it. We've got a couple of minutes.

Brian: [01:03:46] Really cool stuff going on there. Yeah. Just a couple final notes on that. Just again this is sort of protective stuff. I know some of the stuff that we talk about is sort of like kind of like here and now stuff. Some of it's like a sort of guessing about the future a little bit. But I can't you know, I can't help but think that once we're trying goes on in VR, we're getting clothing on demand. Eventually our clothing is just going to get 3D printed. There's actually like Electroloom.com. Check that out. 3D printed printed clothes are still kind of in its infancy. I feel like, you know, as that technology advances, I think that people are going to be really into that because now we're not you know, we as America typically are purchasing clothes that are not very appropriately manufactured. And so I think that this is going to be a great way to get away from using that kind of labor.

Phillip: [01:04:45] Yeah, yeah. And something I'm very passionate about, too, as well.

Brian: [01:04:49] Yeah. And so eventually we're going to be buying our clothes based off of, you know, quality of clothing, the speed of printing. We're going to have maybe local 3D printer centers that can ship close to us or we can pick them up or whatever, or maybe we'll own them, you know, certain people might on them or maybe we'll crowdsource them. I don't really know exactly how it's going to look, but in short, we're going to make our clothing purchasing decisions based off of different factors than we make them now. In fact, I would go so far as to say the clothing design may develop into more of an almost open source community and people are going to be iterating off of each other. The way the designers make their way, it's going to sort of change. Individual people, like you or I even, might tweak designs to match what things that we like. We're going to have our little flair.

Phillip: [01:05:58] Yeah, sure. Yeah, I love that idea. Oh, yeah.

Brian: [01:06:01] And match our design sensibilities. So, you know, of course, you'd still be able to purchase specific designs and have those printed. No doubt. But I think that there's going to be a lot more, the design aspect is going to be a lot more about the kind of the sharing economy type situation. So it won't be like, you know, Ralph Lauren, the brand. They're not creating the clothes and then bringing them into stores. And then, you know, there's going to be... There's definitely going to still be in-store experiences. No doubt. They'll be in-store experiences, but a lot of clothing purchasing will be like this, I click on my custom design, have it perfectly fitted to my body, make a couple of tweaks to it, hit print, and either have it, you know, pick it up on my way to the grocery store (unless I'm having my groceries delivered or whatever) or having shipped directly to my house. And it's just going to be a completely different model. It's going to upend existing, traditional retailers like crazy. And it's not that far away. I don't think this aspect of this... I'm not talking twenty years. I'm talking like five, five years this is going to start happening.

Phillip: [01:07:17] Hey, I love it. Wow. You sound really passionate about this.

Brian: [01:07:20] Oh, yeah.

Phillip: [01:07:21] I think it can be great. I think the thing I'd be concerned about is the the access to these things. Like when we talk about the future, we typically talk about... We don't talk about the access that people have to things like that. And so as long as it's democratized and it's affordable for a mass market and to down market where maybe people don't have such, you know, aspirations to customize every little piece. I think as long as that functionality is there, then I think it's a very bright future. Indeed. So closing off today, I do want to make sure that we hit on two things that I think that I discovered this week, which are really, really cool. So I'm going to do an Alexa skill of the day. Is that OK?

Brian: [01:08:13] Oh, yes. We skipped it like last two episodes.

Phillip: [01:08:15] Yeah, but it's ok.

Brian: [01:08:16] We're bringing it back, baby.

Phillip: [01:08:17] We're bringing it back. So today's Alexa skill is something called Mosaic from I guess it's called Say Mosaic, which is an app. And Say Mosaic is sort of actually a text and chat app first that's integrated with Facebook Messenger, SMS, Slack, that sort of thing. And Mosaic is actually also integrated with Alexa to connect all kinds of things together. So it's like a very simplified if this, then that, which I found very difficult. I am sort of a techie guy, and I found it very difficult for me to set up some really comprehensive if this, then that rules and recipes that would automate a bunch of the home automation stuff in my home that was accessible to my wife and other people that use all that stuff. So Mosaic is actually really cool because you could do things like you can actually have it turn on my lights or warm up the house or something like that. And you can set recipes that are then accessible not just from the Alexa app, but from anywhere. From Slack. From Facebook Messenger. From text. So it's very, very cool.

Brian: [01:09:32] This is sick.

Phillip: [01:09:32] So Mosaic is really cool. SayMosaic.com, and you can install it I believe... Actually, you know what's really cool? I figured this out as well. If you click, if you actually go to Alexa.Amazon.com and click on Skills, you can from within your web browser, actually do all this now from directly within your web browser. Click on Enable Skill on the Mosaic app and that should, you can search for it by just the word Mosaic in search all skills. Just type in Mosaic. Click on the Say Mosaic and enable the skill. A little bit of set up. Yeah. And then all that stuff. So very, very cool. Also, it's a tremendously updated app. This is the one thing I found out is very... You know, most people create these skills and they abandon them. Their blog has a post from nine, sorry, six days ago that they're giving back to the Alexa open source community. And so they're actually contributing a lot of skills and a lot of things like that on the developer forums and on GitHub. So anyway, they're totally crushing it, these guys. And I wanted to give them some props, so check them out. Also... And that was another freebie. Alexa.Amazon.com is available within your web browser, which I did not know, which I should have known, but I did not know. So very, very cool. And you want to check that out, Brian, will you close this out? Close out the show.

Brian: [01:10:59] Sure. Yes. Well, thanks for listening to Future Commerce. We want you to give us feedback, as much feedback as you possibly can, about today's show. So please leave some down in our Disqus comment box below. If you subscribe on iTunes, leave us a five star review because we can always use more of those.

Phillip: [01:11:20] Five stars. Yay.

Brian: [01:11:20] And you can always subscribe to listen to Future Commerce on iTunes or Google Play or listen right from your Amazon Echo with the phrase, "Alexa, play Future Commerce."

Phillip: [01:11:30] Boom. Boom.

Brian: [01:11:30] So don't forget about us. Talk to us. Let us know what you think. We want to know what you guys want us to talk about or comments you have. So we'd love to have a dialog. So with that, I think that's it for today.

Phillip: [01:11:47] All right. And we need like a sign off. We should think of one.

Brian: [01:11:52] Oh, we can have something really like epic. The future of today tomorrow,

Phillip: [01:12:00] Future of today, tomorrow. The future of tomorrow is today.

Brian: [01:12:04] Tomorrow, today. Whatever.

Phillip: [01:12:05] Well, this is terrible. We'll figure it out for next time.

Brian: [01:12:07] No, we'll come up with something awesome because, you know, it's actually the potential there.

Phillip: [01:12:13] {laughter} This is the best ending ever.

Brian: [01:12:16] Oh no.

Phillip: [01:12:16] Thanks for listening in. Go make some good stuff. Make the future. Make the future yours. The future is yours, make it today.

Brian: [01:12:25] Just stop. We've got to talk about this off line, man. {laughter}

Phillip: [01:12:27] {laughter} All right. Later, guys. Bye.

Brian: [01:12:29] Bye.

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