10 Before the new year, we couldn't have imagined life as it is today.

　　2006 Year, 3G The mobile network is just being piloted. iPhone The phone hasn't been released yet—car-mounted. GPS Still a big guy, and the computer is still a Pentium. 4 Processors and electronic tickets hadn't yet been implemented, Sina Weibo hadn't even been born yet, while blogs were already sweeping the world; Lei Jun had just figured out the lesson of the “pig riding the wind”; and text messages remained the most important app on mobile phones. ......

　　Today, mobile internet applications and digitalization have quietly permeated most aspects of daily life. Cloud computing can deliver services anytime, anywhere; big data is beginning to predict the future; machines have already defeated humans at Go; robots can now sit, stand, and even run just like humans; and virtual reality technology can create experiences so realistic they’re virtually indistinguishable from reality...

　　Now, we similarly can't imagine. 10 Life after the Chinese New Year.

　　But there’s one thing we can be certain of: we’ve already entered the age of information. The protagonist of this era is information technology—a stark contrast to the agricultural and industrial ages. In the past, development was linear; today, it’s exponential. Yet our way of thinking remains stuck in a linear paradigm.

　　 Intel The founder, Gordon, the originator of Moore's Law. ? Moore said, “Apart from information technology, no other technology has had such a profound impact on the world. If automotive technology were to develop in the same way, today’s cars could reach speeds of—” 30 Ten thousand pulses—enough to drive a car for every liter of gasoline. 85 Ten thousand kilometers. I’m full of anticipation for the future of information technology...”

　　The traditional jewelry industry has embraced information technology several times in the past. Over the past few years, we’ve experienced the “mouse”... + Cement's PC Mobile e-commerce on e-commerce platforms and WeChat, O2O Combining online and offline approaches, we’re now encountering smart jewelry.

　　However, smart jewelry is different from anything we’ve seen before. Information technology is no longer just a supporting business tool or merely a means to enhance efficiency—it has become an integral part of the product itself. Against the backdrop of cloud computing, big data, wireless transmission, and low power consumption, information technology has quietly infiltrated the jewelry industry and entered people’s daily lives. This is smart jewelry—or, rather, digital jewelry. By merging the fashion industry with the digital sector, it has the potential to transform our future everyday lives and create unprecedented value.

　　So, how can we go along with this trend? And when we decide to start developing a smart piece of jewelry, where should we begin?

　　When I’ve been talking with some friends from the Shuibei circle, many of them have shared their views on the smart jewelry products currently available on the market. They believe that at its core, smart jewelry should first and foremost be a piece of jewelry itself—its technological components should be downplayed, allowing it to return to the “natural” state that jewelry ought to have.

　　This argument may seem quite reasonable at first glance, but if you think about it more carefully, you’ll realize that this viewpoint stems from the perspective of traditional jewelry—a market that relies heavily on marketing and distribution channels. Sales in this market are driven by the “push” of robust marketing systems. For traditional jewelry, its customer value lies in emotional connections and the appreciation of the materials themselves.

　　Over the past year or two, we’ve seen an increasing number of smart jewelry products appearing on the market: Linli ( Ringly ) Smart reminder rings and wristbands, the Jin Yi heart-rate ring, the “Mind-Reading” UV pendant, the Chow Tai Seng smart step-counting pendant, and ZTE’s smart reminder ring—among these, aside from Lin Li’s impressive performance, most have yet to deliver outstanding results in the market.

　　Drawing on the experiences of numerous companies that have already tested the waters, I believe the following smart jewelry products have the potential to become star products:

　　I. Smart jewelry for health monitoring.

　　Jin Yi’s heart rate ring Acare This is a product with excellent positioning, as heart rate is one of the most fundamental indicators of human health. If we can collect and store users’ heart rate data continuously over the long term, it’s tantamount to digitizing a single-dimensional measure of their health—a type of data that’s currently unavailable in clinical hospitals. Hospitals lack the resources and infrastructure to conduct long-term, continuous monitoring of users’ heart rates, and obtaining such data clinically would come at an extremely high cost. Once users’ health metrics are digitized, they can be used for calculations, generating valuable secondary data such as analytical insights and predictive models. This, in turn, provides consumers with the essential information they need.

　　However, this product is highly challenging. Before we can start collecting data, we first need to address the issue of whether customers are willing to wear it. Only if consumers are willing to wear it every single day can we gather daily data. The challenge lies in the fact that, for jewelry to become smart jewelry, the user experience will inevitably suffer.

　　Smart jewelry tends to become bulkier, requiring daily or every two-to-three-day charging sessions. Quality issues arising from its waterproof performance—and other factors like these—can all detract from the user experience. That’s why the smart heart-rate ring represents a truly challenging feat. To achieve perfection in this device, it demands seamless coordination across multiple dimensions: not only must the technical foundation be exceptionally robust, but the team must also boast extensive experience in engineering and project management, and the design and structural aspects must be nothing short of outstanding.

　　We’ve seen that Jin Yi has been investing heavily in products—this can be described as an adjustment following a major marketing push.

　　II. Smart jewelry products for personal digital identity verification.

　　Traditional jewelry is all about status—specifically, the upper echelons of society. First and foremost, it’s for the wealthy; secondly, it requires a certain level of discernment and appreciation. Thus, when one wears a product bearing a particular brand’s signature symbol, it instantly signals that one belongs to a certain social class. Selling high-end jewelry, in essence, means selling high-status symbols. When consumers purchase luxury jewelry, their underlying desire is to project their social standing and prestige. In fact, this desire to project status isn’t limited solely to luxury jewelry—it can also be satisfied through other “toys” of the affluent, such as high-end cars, opulent mansions, yachts, private clubs, and the like.

　　Smart jewelry, in the context of our increasingly digital lives, is all about identity—specifically, identity recognition and verification. It serves as a unique identifier that distinguishes one individual from others—a digital piece of information, much like the code mentioned in "The Matrix." Over the past several decades, people have been continuously exploring new tools for personal identity recognition. Initially, it was the password entered via keyboard; later came fingerprints, used in fingerprint recognition systems; then there was the iris of the human eye. In recent years, facial recognition technology has also made significant breakthroughs. Additionally, there’s voice recognition—and countless other methods—all of which rely on extracting a unique identifier that sets one person apart from everyone else.

　　The reason we’re constantly exploring new identity recognition and verification methods is twofold: first, to enable people to complete verification with an increasingly convenient experience; and second, to enhance the security of the verification process. For example, compared to fingerprints, password-based verification requires users to remember passwords over the long term and enter them whenever verification is needed—often multiple times. Sometimes, entering a complex password even demands switching between different input modes, such as numbers, uppercase letters, and lowercase letters. Moreover, password security is relatively low—if a password is leaked, it’s tantamount to exposing everything else. In contrast, fingerprint recognition has significantly improved both user experience and security. It’s far simpler to use—just a light touch is all it takes—and its security level far surpasses that of keyboard-based passwords.

　　After digitizing personal physical characteristics, these features become genuine information that can be transmitted over the internet and stored in a smart piece of jewelry—or generated dynamically by the sensors embedded in such jewelry. This smart jewelry product would then serve as an extension of the individual in the digital world, with a wide range of applications, such as password verification for payments, membership identity authentication, and access codes for services.

　　The essence of a product lies in its user value. For smart jewelry, the user value resides in the users themselves. Of course, we can leverage the jewelry industry’s robust channel network to “boost” a product—but if the product isn’t genuinely what consumers need, or if it doesn’t truly deliver value to them, even if marketing efforts temporarily boost sales, such gains will only be fleeting.

　　So, when we set out to develop a smart jewelry product, let’s return to the product itself and focus on its user value and the insights it generates. After all, if a product lacks user value, it will also lack commercial value. In the digital age, a product that fails to generate user data cannot give rise to data-driven insights, nor can it create future value.