Macro Buttons

In our conversation, I told him that so little information could be displayed on the watch's face - there is a small, scrollable window at the top and another one at the bottom - that it seemed nearly useless. But he said it would be enough for alerts, able to notify the wearer, for example, "when you've got 4 more e-mails, 3 Facebook updates and 10 Tweets." He said buttons on the watch could be programmed to dispatch canned responses. Mr. McKinney, who is 50, said that young consumers who are unaccustomed to wearing watches would still find the MetaWatch appealing. They'd use it, he said, for purposes other than timekeeping. "I hit a button and - boom - I'm checked in at Foursquare," he offered as an example.

I started this article totally skeptical, but the one touch button, to perform certain well-defined functions is an interesting concept. I've written before about the need for a physical button to perform macro-like functions.