John Sculley Sings Of The Possibilities Presented By Wearable Technology

John Sculley, former Apple AAPL CEO and current CEO of Misfit Wearables, appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box on Monday morning to talk about the future of technology, and his company's new wearable sensor the Shine. He started by citing one of John Chambers', CEO and Chairman of the Board of Cisco Systems CSCO, technological predictions. "John Chambers has forecasted that by 2020 that there'll be 30 billion connected devices. Now, there are only seven billion people on the planet. So 30 billion connected devices means that most of them are going to be machine to machine, and the really interesting thing is what's going on in big data analytics. For most of my business life, we've had structured data, which is relationship. In other words, ah, 80 percent of women make most of the financial decisions for healthcare. Now we've moved into predictive analytics, which means we take massive amounts of data. It can be coming from social, it can be coming from location-based services, and it can be coming from sensors, and I think we're at the beginning of the sensor revolution," said Sculley "So when you look at Wearables, Wearables is about the passive ability of sensors to be able to monitor lots of different kinds of things. In the case of, ah, healthcare, it can have a huge impact of monitoring everything from your activity, and people being able to set goals for wellness, to being able to monitor proteins, to monitoring all kinds of things. So a lot of the future of medicine, I'm not a doctor obviously, ah, is going to be able to take advantage of what you can do with sensory." He predicted that within five years to a decade, wearable sensors will have a huge impact, noting that companies like Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft MSFT are all working on wearable technology. Sculley said that they won't really start to become important for another year or two, but that this is just the beginning. He said that he thinks watches, or sensors on wristbands, will be a favorite at the starting line. According to Sculley, the biggest thing to look forward to 10 years down the road is predictive analytics. He said that if you think about the ability to be able to take massive amounts of data, and then apply probability math to it, which is practical for massive computing, you could use sensors for all kinds of things that can be statically-based. "With sensors it's all passive. They are doing something, which is monitoring, and then the predictive analytics is saying: What's the likelihood that you might have a stroke in the next 24 days? Well it can make predictions based on you individually, not you as a broad class of a population," said Sculley. He said that for now, his company is focused on the iPhone, which has complete compatibility with the Shine. Currently, the Shine is not Google's GOOG Android compatible. They will follow with Android compatibility later on, Sculley said.