Music Streaming
Back when I was a senior in high school in 2013 mostly everyone had a smart phone. I started to notice that a lot of my friends where using Pandora. Pandora is basically internet radio but the most important difference is that you got to choose what kind of music it would play for you. You would select a certain artist or genre of your liking and it would play songs from that artist/genre or some similar to it. I was fascinated by Pandora because it meant that I didn’t have to search for a song on YouTube and wait for the music video to download. I would use pandora on a daily basis but I still couldn’t search for a specific song so I wasn’t totally invested it. The years passed and I saw that more and more of my friend were using Spotify. Which is sort of like Pandora but it’s more personalize.  Some of my friends were in the early majority group of the adapter categories. It wasn’t until 2016 that I finally got tired of buying CDs or looking songs on YouTube so I decided to get apple music. For the State of Adoption I see my self in the Product Adoption category. Streaming music has become part of my life..The reason I choose apple music was simply because I had an iPhone and I thought it was just going to be more compatible with it. This innovation started back in 1993. The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) wanted to create a way that independent artist could find a way to distribute their music and communicate with their audience. I don’t see myself discontinuing the use of streaming music (Dwivedi, 2017). The folks at IUMA were the innovators that saw the possibilities the internet had for music.  It has become part of my life. I listen to music at home, at the gym and at work. I can search for any artist that I want and discover new music. I consider my to be in the late majority of the adopter category. People still buy CDs and even vinyl made a come back however streaming is the major way people listen to music.
Smart Watches
The second innovation that I found myself attracted to were smart watches. Before I had my first smart watch I thought the product was silly. Why would I get watch when my phone would tell me time. I didn’t know the other things that smart could do for example track your hear rate. Send you notifications of the message you reactive and track your workouts.  In 2016 I got a Fitbit blaze for Christmas which was a gift I did not expect. I did not know how to feel about it at the time since I never wanted to get one but after a few weeks of using I was hooked. Being able to track the details of my runs and workouts thanks to the Fitbit made me realize that it was a device for more than just keeping track of time. Choosing in which adapter category I would place my self in for this innovation is difficult. To think that this sort of wearable technology started in the 1970s and evolved from there to the modern smart watches. Of course those early watches weren’t able to track your heart rate run application like the moderns ones do (Connor, 2020). I would place myself in the Early adopters of the smart watch innovation because I don’t see myself as an innovator. I think the innovator category is for those who had smart watches back in the early 1990s and early 2000s. Now there is a demand for the innovation. Out of all my friend only two of them have a smart watch. At the gym I see at least a hand full of people with smart watches and possibly only about 3 people at work.
Virtual Reality
As for the other examples of innovation where I would have fallen in a different category I think Virtual Reality gaming would be one of them. About a year ago one of my friend told me about the Oculus Quest 2. Which is a VR gaming System which multiple games that vary from shooters, Tetris and many sports. I tried the Oculus Quest 2 and it had fun playing it and getting used to the virtual reality technology. However I do not find my self buying the system until its has improved or until other companies like Microsoft and Sony release their own VR systems. Virtual Reality technology has been around since 1956. The very first virtual machine was able to stimulate almost all sense. The Sesorama allowed you to smell things, see 3D videos, hearing sounds, feel the vibrations and even wind (Barnard, 2019).  As for the modern virtual systems I think the graphics in the games need to be improved and the sensors for the hand held controls need more precision. I find the reality virtual technology to be very innovative and as soon as better systems are release I will purchase my very own.
References
Dwivedi, R. (2017, August 22). The Evolution of Online Audio Streaming. Muvi Blogs. https://www.muvi.com/blogs/evolution-online-audio-streaming.html.
Barnard, D. (2019, August 6). History of VR – Timeline of Events and Tech Development. VirtualSpeech. https://virtualspeech.com/blog/history-of-vr.
Connor, A. (2020, July 16). The History of the Smartwatch Goes Back Much Further Than You’d Think. Gear Patrol. https://www.gearpatrol.com/watches/a498479/smartwatch-history/.