The IT decision-maker that really matters? Your pet Forget lines of business, et cetera – it is people's pets that are shaping the future of tech. That's according to Samsung, which has done a 2022 Pet Living Study that apparently shows pet owners are guided by their furbabies' needs when buying devices as much as by those of their offspring. Vendors looking to refine their …
A VR headset for your cat to let it catch virtual birds and mice. It can also follow the virtual dot on the virtual floor and try to catch the virtual string being virtually waved.
A VR headset for your dog to let the virtual dog walker walk your dog virtually in virtual town. Pampers available as a subscription to be delivered virtually instantaneous before shitting the virtual house.
It is so far out insane that some venture capitalist will invest...
At one time it was common "knowledge" that dog food adverts included a high pitched tone to attract Rover's attention. To be beyond human hearing it would have been far above the TV speakers capability. I suppose some clever heterodyne mixing could work, by accident or design?
That's not it. The video vantage point from wherever a pet chooses to be isn't a great one, and our lives aren't interesting enough to justify the processing required to get anything from that. The amount of useful advertising information to be gained from the effort is too minimal.
The people making this product available aren't supervillains planning to sneakily bug your house. They're people saying things like "Hey sales, do you think you could convince someone rich who has a cat that they need extra sensors to indicate that their cat is sleeping on a soft surface in a sunbeam? How much do you think we can charge, and how quickly could we break it and have the customer want to come buy another one?". It works.
"What the hell has happened to humanity?"
Two part reply:
[1] it's not humanity - it's actually a quite small section of humanity (the over-wealthy, over-urbanised folk of the "consumer economies");
[2] they've been persuaded to turn their brains off (as predicted in "Brave New World" and "The Machine Stops").
The first is fortunate for the species as a whole right now. The second is likely to lead to the eventual demise of the group so affected (which is fortunate in the long run for the species as a whole).
Some owners said they would reduce their spending on everything from necessities such as utilities (27 percent) and socializing with friends (40 percent) before cutting back their spend on their animal companions, the survey went on to say.
Yes, because pet related expenses come in three varieties.
1) Healthcare from the vets if they are ill. (which you can't cut back on)
2) Food. (which you can't cut back on, with the exception of treats etc which is such a small expense that it's not worth cutting back on)
3) Toys. (of which your pets tend to have their favourites and ignore most other things so the ongoing cost other than replacements is near zero)
So yes, most pet owners would put feeding and treating their pets at the vets above spending money socialising at the pub, and more than a quarter would happily turn down the heating by a few pips to manage if they were desperate. (Probably more than a quarter would do that, but don't need to.)
Quite how they got from there to "pet owners will go out and buy technological tat they neither need nor want" will no doubt make an interesting management case study when this product/division fails because the above does not mean that pet owners will go and increase spending on solutions in desperate search of a problem.
Signed, a pet owner.
If your pet looks like an expensive breed something connected to their collar won’t protect them from being stolen. You have to go deeper than that. Literally. The track-you-using-nano-something-in-the-vaccine doesn’t work unfortunately. Samsung should try to create something like AirTags small enough to be implanted and somehow chargeable through the skin.
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