Digit talks to S.T. Liew about Acer’s roadmap for Smartwatches and beyond

Digit: How useful do you think smart watches really are? Is it a category where the use-case is only validated once you buy the product?
Liew: I feel that smart watches are used currently for a very targeted purpose. Also, smart watches come in two categories: one is the smart band and the other is smart wear like Apple and Android wear. I think that the market over the last two years has seen greater performance in the band area rather than in the wear area. There are technical as well as use reasons for this trend. 
On the band area, I see continuous growth and that is because the use case for the bands is already established. People know about the experience it provides – activity tracking, calorie monitoring and so on – and hence this is sold. But, how do we grow and expand the user experience in the band area is the challenge and that is where we come in. 
We are entering the market later than the FitBits and JawBones of the world and we recognize that. This is why we don’t only target the user experience on those type of offering only. We have a longer view of the world. The band that we have come up with is focusing on the sports and activity area of course, but the other thing we are focusing on is health and how to tie it all into our cloud and BYOC and IT services. From that perspective there is already a captured audience that will use the band. But on the smart wear area people still need to be convinced that it’s something worth doing. Apple watch seems to be successful – at least they report it to be – but we will see. 

Digit: Isn’t battery life a big impediment?
Liew: Yes it is and that is why I have a hesitation on the wear side. On the band side this thing lasts for 5 -7 days so it’s okay. That’s why when we define our band we are very careful about what features to include and exclude. And, also if you look at the display on our band there is no colour, it is black and white and very low light. The whole reason for this is to conserve the battery and do the key things. We carry this philosophy even with our sensors. 
For example, there are two sensors we are adding to our band this year. One is a heart rate sensor where we are using optical heart rate so that it consumes very little energy because of the LED. The other one is what we call ‘Galvanic Skin Detections’. The sensor itself has two gold-plated contacts touching your skin and it is very passive in current drain so that it will maintain the battery life to what we want it to be. In heavy usage it is about four days and in normal usage it is about seven days so we feel that is more acceptable. But, to your point on the battery life on the wear side – it continues to remain a challenge, yes.

Digit: Is Acer investing into the R&D side?
Liew: We are doing a lot of R&D. Not on battery per se, but on ways of conserving energy. The problem statement we try to work with is, ‘How do we make wearables with better longevity in battery life?’ So you have to do this in many areas. You have to look into batteries, how to use CPUs more effectively and also research into the user experience to see what to turn on and off. 
This is why I am not launching a smartwatch this year. Because we don’t think we can give our consumers the satisfaction in use case because they have to charge it every day and that gets very irritating.

Digit: Acer seems to be expanding the reach of its device categories – for example the desktop isn’t just a desktop you have cloud integration, apps etc. Do see that happening on the mobile phones front as well?
Liew: Absolutely. I think the cloud services are very important especially for small devices and portables like wearable’s, tablets and phones. But, having said that the vision we have in Acer is to connect all the devices together. 
The smartphone market is crazy! In Indonesia for instance you have all these companies selling smartphones for next to nothing. It’s the same trend in Malaysia, Vietnam and India. In India specifically you have Karbonn, Lava, Micromax. How do you win in such tough markets because we are new to smartphones as well. We are going to win because we have a very long-term outlook. We are not here for three or four years. We’re here for the next 50 years! And that vision means it is our job to see that the smartphone is only a key component of the entire ecosystem that Acer provides. 
So what does Acer provide? Acer’s major businesses are in the PC, laptop, tablet, monitor, desktop, projector and so forth. Smartphones, wearable’s and even tablets to an extent are a new business area for us. We need to provide our customers the total experience of all these products connected together. So even today you can take an Acer phone through what we call Acer Extend. You take your new Acer phone and come near an Acer PC and it will automatically sync up through Acer Extend and then they start talking to each other. 
We are absolutely connected to the cloud. In 2012 Acer smartphone launched the first product that had Acer Cloud pre-installed. You just buy one phone and you can use the Acer cloud for free and every photo you take is then shared everywhere. So to answer your question, this strategy is not only important to us but it is necessary for our survival. 

Digit: How do you see your cloud services as compared to others? A lot of the other cloud services just focus on how many terabytes they can offer. So how does Acer differ from that and fit into your entire ecosystem of services? 
Liew: First of all the AcerCloud is not a cloud that sits on other clouds. The major difference is that our cloud is your own cloud that actually sits at your home. It is your personal cloud. So for instance if you have a PC that has a 3TB or 6TB storage then that will be your cloud. And what our cloud services do is the job of indexing and storing. Like you take a picture, it goes up to our server and then gets stored in your PC. So to answer your question, AcerCloud is kind of limitless. Because the cloud, the server and the memory itself is with you and we believe that this is safer because it is in your home, or your office or somewhere you have full control. It is not in a public place.

Digit: But for data replication and mirroring isn’t the cloud better. Like if something on my computer gets destroyed then at least I have a copy on the cloud. And that’s not happening with Acer.
Liew: Well we keep a copy of your data for some time in our cache but at the same time the risk with the public cloud is that it can get hacked and then some company goes down as a result of this. So I think there are pros and cons with both. But the pro we see is that you save a lot of money because the AcerCloud is limitless. It is also very safe. Of course someone can hack into your PC but then they’d have to hack into millions of PCs for a large scale breach. In the central cloud if someone hacks in they immediately get a lot of data and multiple people are affected. So there are pros and cons with both but we see more pro than anything and that’s our differentiator. Its limitless, it’s free and it’s sharable to all your devices – once you take a picture you can share everywhere.

Digit: So the cloud is pretty much just limited to the amount of storage you have on your PC?
Liew: Generally speaking yes its limited to the storage on your PC. But it can be extended. You know the Revo you can just buy one. Or you can buy two so that it duplicates your data. So you just buy the Revo, leave it alone and it becomes your storage. And that is very cheap. It’s only $399 and you can buy five of them and then each one has 6 TB so you have 30 Tb of cloud storage and it’s completely synced to your devices and we can sync to 32 devices and buil your own cloud!. 
So, in the future you can do a lot more things. If you are a small or medium enterprise you can write your own software using the Acer Open Platforms. I can see our cloud to be different in the above ways but we are not stopping there. We are doing this thing called ‘Build Your Own Cloud’ (BYOC) because we want to enable third parties to develop things so you can utilize your cloud to do something meaningful. The cloud is a place where you keep all the data. But what do you do with all this Big Data? Right now not a lot of people are able to utilize their Big Data meaningfully and we hope that Acer Open Platform will allow such innovation to take place.

Digit: So open platform as in, its got open API’s?
Liew: Yes it will be open API’s. Imagine C++ or whatever software language and now imagine taking this to the cloud. We are enabling AOP (Acer Open Platforms) and in the future we will also enable it with the SDK software development kit so that people can use our AOB and this kit to use the data in the cloud. 
I’ll give you an example. A small business needs an HR system. You either hire an IT company; use a third party on the cloud or you just do it yourself. But to do it yourself your need time, storage and linkages to multiple PC’s and this is where we come in. This why we are extremely excited about BYOC because it will enable your PC, laptop, smartphone, wearable and so on to connect. 
One of the interviewers asked me what is the difference between your wearable and another company’s besides the things I already told you like command, control music etc. Well, my vision is that one day I go into the meeting room and my wearable will control the projector like turn it on or off and then through my wearable I will be able to pull my presentation file from my PC at home through the AcerCloud. This PowerPoint will basically get pulled up through the my wearable because the wearable will have already have told the monitor what the IP address is to access my data. All of these things happen automatically and I sit there and present to you without carrying my phone or PC. It is just my watch wearable talking to the projector, all through Wi-Fi. That is the kind of powerful vision we have. But of course that too has its limitations right, like a small screen etc. 
We don’t believe that in the future people will only use one device. They will use many devices with different settings and the BYOC will just enable the whole thing and that is very exciting for me.

Digit: So will this in the future connect with non-Acer products as well?
Liew: Yes absolutely. So right now, the AcerCloud is such that when you buy one of our phones, tablets or PC’s you are able to use AcerCloud free of charge. All you have to do is buy one Acer device and it’s cross platform. It even works on iOS – you can access your iTunes through this device too so its completely open platform.

Digit: I had a question about stress tracking – what does it do and what is its use case?
Liew: Our wearable strategy focuses on 3 pillars – fashion, lifestyle and health. 
The stress tracking helps you manage your health. It doesn’t solve you being stressful but it will help you manage your health, as it will provide you data throughout the day. For instance, the report I showed you will collect your heart rate throughout the day. It’s power consumption is so low, it can actually do that. Every day it will take 150 scans of your heart rate and then take another 150 scans of your skin, perspirations and all that – that’s what galvanic skin response is all about. And, through a fusion of these sensors and your activities we can tell you how stressful you are, relatively throughout the day. You can then do your review after a week to analyse what was you were doing on a particular day to be so stressful and then see how you can take corrective steps.
It is a lifestyle thing. It is a good starting point because once you have all these sensors and this data you can do many things with it. The stress indicator is simply an example of doing things with data like your heart rate, activities and temperature. How do we measure it? We work with a group of universities from MIT that calibrate and correlate the data and compare it with a $2000 stress detector device and then correlate and then we say that okay just buy this device that sort of tells you how to manage your health.

Digit: MIT? Is this Rosalind Picard's research? 
Liew: No, but then there are tons of research in this area. But the key thing is that with all this other data stress is not the only thing you can measure in the future. There are many indicative studies proving that this data can be used to project other things. The role is not to fix your health but to help you manage your health better. 

Digit: Acer phones are not popular in India?
Liew: We don’t sell them in India. We started selling in December but it was a very small volume. There are 3 key countries where we don’t sell – America, China and India.

Digit: Why?
Liew: We can’t deal with the situations there just yet because we are still growing. So, we are looking for a strategic way to enter these markets. There are many ways to enter the market. Most people enter the Indian market by just dumping the price and just selling it very cheap. 
We don’t want to do that, we can’t do that so we look for more strategic ways. For example, we started selling the Tri-Sim Card (phone) in India through SnapDeal and it’s doing very well. But we limited the volume because that phone was not designed for India. It was an experiment and it’s very different. Like, 3 sim cards sometimes makes sense because India has many different states and people may find it useful. This is an example of us fighting a competitive war in India in other ways rather than price. Because the Chinese (brands) are fighting with price and so is Lenovo and Asus.

Digit: But Lenovo and Asus – they’ve not dipped their price too much, they are still going with quality
Liew: Yes, but you compare them with Micromax and Karbonn and then see. The volume compared with Micromax is still much lower. But Asus Zen 5 is pretty attractive and is extremely low price for the specs offered – I know them because they are from Taiwan (laughs). So we have a different strategy and our strategy is about involving other products and bringing in other PCs and such. 
India is my next target. This year you are going to see a couple of new products going to India.

Digit: Smart watches?
Liew: Smart watches – we are thinking of bundling it along with our Microsoft M220 phone – what do you think (as an Indian person)? I am not sure that Indians have started paying attention to the smartwatches yet.

Digit: I know a few people who purchased the Nike fuel band
Liew: Yes, but overall its not a big market yet right? At least that’s my observation.

Digit: Yes true, but Windows Phones are very popular in India for some reason.
Liew: That’s what I heard as well. That’s why I am thinking that my M220 and next Microsoft Phone will go to India bundled with our Microsoft wearable. I think there are two markets where Microsoft has great potential. One of them is India and the other market is Australia. Other markets it is a bit tight. Like Malaysia for Microsoft phones? Not very big.

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Siddharth Parwatay

Siddharth a.k.a. staticsid is a bigger geek than he'd like to admit. Sometimes even to himself. View Full Profile