A year ago, I wrote a post about how I was trying to keep my phone away during meals--No Phone with Food. These days, we've got so much that can distract us, being present has become a rare feat. I've tried to stick to it, but it's hard. I run my own business and I try and make myself available whenever my entrepreneurs need me. I also have a lot of family responsibility--with parents getting older and my grandmother making her way ever closer to 100, there are a few important folks I always want to stay connected to.
The problem is that the phone is a rabbit hole. With just a few app installs, the notification screen quickly becomes short attention spam theater. Sometimes, I wind up in Twitter or Instagram on my phone without even remembering why I pulled the phone out in the first place.
For a guy, it's just too easy. With my phone in my pocket, it might as well come out of a holster.
For women, its worse. Either you dump your phone into the black hole known as your bag, never to be heard from again, or it sits right there on the table as the third wheel. There's nothing more distracting than having a phone buzz on your table or needing to walk around with it all the time.
It says a lot about the evolution of mobile technology. Cameras, for example, got smaller and better to the point where we didn't need a seperate device--and they just wound up in our phones. Same thing for GPS. Now, your phone is everything to everyone--a device you're always attached to. What's lost in that process, however, is matching right interaction with the right time and place. That's part of the promise of wearables, the connected home, and devices in cars. I don't need a phone to provide me every notification and every tool all the time, but different devices have their difference place in my life.
Ringly is a platform for fashionable wearables, enabling them to filter your world for what you care about. It's all about getting notifications in the right moment, without interrupting all of your other moments. Now, you can finally put the phone away over dinner without losing touch with the babysitter. They launched the pre-sale of their first set of rings today--their own design. You should check it out. I'm excited to see Christina and Logan's vision come to life and I'm excited to be on board as an investor.