Basis CEO says wearables won’t have a single killer app

Wearable computers were a big trend at our MobileBeat 2013 conference last month, but the trend may not unfold the way we’re expecting. Jef Holove, the chief executive of Basis Science, sees them invading our lives in a different way. He doesn’t think we’ll have a single killer app that all of us will use.

Holove wears his own company’s entry in the field: the Basis Health Tracker, a wristwatch which measures your heart rate, steps taken during the day, and calories burned. You can use a mobile app or computer to upload that data to the Basis cloud service. Then you can log in on the web and view your stats for the month and learn things about yourself like how much sleep you’re getting.

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This kind of wearable computer isn’t the only thing we’ll carry. Holove believes we’re going to use our phones a lot, but we’ll have a proliferation of other types of gadgets too. Citing a story by Reuters, he said, “We’re in the Palm Pilot stage of wearables.” That means we have a long way to go in the roadmap toward ideal, iconic devices, just as the Palm Pilot was the rather distant forerunner of Apple’s iPhone. Could it be Google Glass?

“The question is whether we’re looking for the iconic product that really makes the wearables category the way that the iPhone made the smartphones category,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “My perspective is the wearables is already very fragmented, already very diverse. I think there may be several products that make different parts of the wearable category.”

He hopes that Basis will be the device that makes the health and fitness category of wearables.

Check out our interview with Holove below.