Most people know the news that Google has bought Fitbit.  It is clearly their way of taking on Apple, in particular, taking on the Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch is superb in terms of being able to make phone calls to people, monitoring your heart and ECG rate, etc, but it is not as great when it comes to automatically tracking steps and your sleep patterns, not to mention the fact that you need to charge it a lot more than you would have to charge a Fitbit.  I am not sure what Google will be able to do, but I do think that we will see Fitbit come out with some dramatically different products in about a year’s time.  It will obviously take time to implement and get whatever it is they plan running, but it will be exciting to see some competition for the Apple Watch because as we always learn in life, competition inspires companies to make better products and to improve existing products, so at the end of the day we all win from competition and we don’t win when two companies largely have the market to themselves.  In that respect, I am talking about Vodacom and MTN with Cell C running a very distant third.