The answer is yes, no, and better get used to it. Microsoft hasn’t actually said how many aspects of the Xbox One are going to work, but the demo it gave at its campus in Redmond, Wash. Tuesday contained some solid hints on the particulars of its voice control. To wake up the device and launch live TV, play a game or do anything at all with it, users will first have to say “Xbox on.”

That’s what people who work on speech recognition call “hot words” – easily recognizable phrases that can be detected by a system without too much effort. Once a user says that magic word or phrase, the actual speech recognition kicks into high gear.

That means that the Xbox One continuously listens for someone to say “Xbox on,” and that everything else that’s spoken is automatically disregarded. Listening for these hot words is done locally and doesn’t require much in terms of system resources. For example, there’s no need to record anything, since all that matters are the hot words. But once those words are uttered, the Xbox One is going to use advanced speech recognition to figure out what users are actually talking about.

Again, Microsoft hasn’t said exactly how this is going to work, but a spokesperson told me that some of the personalization offered by the device is “one of the benefits of Xbox One being connected to and powered by the cloud.” I’d expect that the same is true for speech recognition, much in the same way that Google uploads everything you say to its servers when you use voice search on your Android phone.

The use of hot wording to wake up technology from a state of low-level listening to launch active speech recognition isn’t new. It’s also at work in Google Glass, where users get the device’s attention by saying “okay glass.” Google Now simply uses “Google” as a hot word to launch voice input. And the Xbox 360 starts to accept voice commands once users yell “Xbox” at the device’s Kinect sensor.

The difference between how the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One approach voice recognition isn’t so much about technology, even though Xbox users probably hope that the new iteration is going to work better. What makes people feel uncomfortable is that the Xbox One, and with it its microphone, are meant to be always on.

However, the always-on microphone of the Xbox One is just a sign of things to come. Voice input is going to become a key component of a growing number of internet-connected devices and appliances in your home, car and office, and many of them will use hot words to switch from low-level listening to active speech recognition.

In fact, you are likely looking at one of those devices right now: Laptops, tablets and mobile phones all contain microphones, and they’re all waiting to become hot words-aware any day now. Google just demonstrated how it is going to add hot wording to search on the desktop at last week’s Google I/O conference, allowing users to start a voice search query by simply saying “okay Google” without touching a single button.

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that there are no privacy issues around hot wording and always-on microphones. Companies should make it clear how exactly they’re using the technology as it is becoming more widely distributed, and there should always be a way to opt out and rely on alternative input methods. It may also be a good idea to indicate to users  when exactly a device is reverting back from active speech recognition to a state of passive listening. But I’d expect that most consumers quickly get used to the constantly running mic, always listening for those magic words.

Image courtesy of Flickr user visual.dichotomy.

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In a blog post, Twitter said you can now tweet photos from Glass to your feed — the update will include the hashtag “#throughglass” — and see your other tweets by turning on in-Glass notifications. The service is now available and users can activate the Twitter app on Google’s MyGlass portal.

Facebook’s Glass implementation is also live, though for now you can only share photos, not post status updates or view your newsfeed. You can, however, set privacy levels and add descriptions to photos you post using Glass’s speech recognition features.

Evernote doesn’t yet have an app per se, but it is integrating with Glass’s sharing menu, allowing you to capture a picture or short video and save it as a note in your Evernote account. It is also giving users the option of sending notes (from its web app) to the Glass timeline so your grocery list or crib notes are right in your line of vision.

At I/O Google revealed three other companies taking up shop on Glass. CNN’s app will put news alerts in front of your retinas. Elle is providing content from its magazines that can be viewed in the Glass display or read aloud. Tumblr lets you post content to your personal blog and get updates from Tumblrs you follow.

These companies join Path and the New York Times as the only official third-party apps on the Glass. For now Google is being rather conservative in its Glassware efforts, placing restrictions on the level of access to platform and banning ads or any other monetization scheme.

Still, once Google fully opens up Glass, it likely won’t have any shortage of interest. Smaller developers are already clamoring to get on board. For instance, Open Garden wants Google to expose Glass’s networking functions so it can link the headgear to its crowdsourced mesh network.

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Yet Vigano, who is the CEO of Heapsylon, a startup based out of Redmond, Wash. and wears Armani shirts (casual Armani, but still Armani), thinks he has a solution to wearable computing that people will find, well … wearable.

At first glance Heapslylon makes a pair of smart socks that mimic many of the data gathering functions of any other fitness tracker on the market. Except that they are socks. And it’s tough to imagine one wearing the same pair of sensor-packed socks each day or even wearing socks every day. How is this a good idea? How is this the future of fashion and technology?

The Sensoria smart sock and anklet.

But just as the Kindle Fire is merely a vehicle for Amazon’s real ambitions, as opposed to the sum of them, Heapsylon isn’t really in the sock business. The socks are made of a special material that the company developed — it is reportedly comfortable, washable and packed with sensors. And that material is the crux of what Heapslyson has developed. The socks are both an effort to put the new material through its paces with the hardest-working piece of clothing in a person’s wardrobe, as well as an application to showcase what the material can do.

Heapsylon was started in October 2010 by three former Microsoft employees: Davide Vigano, Mario Esposito, who is the CTO at Heapsylon, and Maurizio Macagno, the VP of development at the company. Both Macagno and Esposito worked on the Kinect, but all three left Microsoft to pursue this vision of combining technology and fashion in a way that could advance both industries.

“The outfit is the computer,” said Vigano of their vision. But after they quit, and started playing around with tiny sensors and conductive fabrics they realized that there was a gap between what they wanted and what technology could provide. So they set about researching materials. The result of that is the fabric that they have since turned into socks.

“Quite frankly we thought it would easier,” said Vigano. “The materials research has been challenging to say the least.”

The anklet for the Sensoria smart sock.

The sock and they accompanying hardware that tracks the data from the sock’s sensors are called the Sensoria Fitness smart socks. There will be two or maybe three pressure sensors in the sock that will share exact data on how many steps a person takes, their stride, whether they tend to turn in or out when they run, and maybe even weight change. The socks come with an ankle bracelet that gathers the data from the sock and transmits it (see above.) It will eventually be possible to use the socks as a scale to track your weight once Heaspylon gets the algorithms down.

Vigano said the company plans to launch the package of the socks and the hardware via a crowd-funding platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo within the next month or two. While at first it will be targeted at the hard-core running market, the socks might find a home in other sports such as golf, where tracking the weight on the ball or heel of the foot can help improve performance. The price for the package is yet to be determined. And he declined to share the cost of the sensor-rich fabric.

But perhaps most important for the future of Heapsylon, and the future of fashion-forward wearables, is that Vigano aims to license the fabric technology and the data it gathers from its socks for other uses. For example, the material could be used in football helmets to measure the incidence of concussions, or the exact footfall data from the sock might supplant the general data provided by a pedometer for a person’s run. And other companies might use the socks to develop data profiles around other sports, like the golf example above.

The Heapsylon employees and founders.

There’s also no reason to stick only with pressure sensors. Other sensors could be embedded into the Heapsylon fabric, although the company hasn’t focused on that as a small startup with a relatively small and undisclosed amount of angel funding. Vigano hopes to seek a formal venture round after the crowd-funding campaign proves (or disproves) the market opportunity.

For now, the five-person startup is heading toward a production version of the Sensoria Sock hoping that it will be the launch of a revolution in wearable computing that goes far beyond the smart watches and accessories available today. If Heapsylon’s vision of making technology disappear into fabric gains ground, then perhaps Vigano’s future Armani shirts might not just look good, but they could do good by sharing relevant data that monitors his health or his whereabouts for loved ones.

Of course, such data could also be used for less-then-noble causes, or the market may never buy into the idea of smart socks. But as someone who looks at the intersection between technology and fashion, I welcome anyone who wants to develop a product that emphasizes the form, the function and the feel of the wearable tech as opposed to just the tech.

Not everyone wants to look like they just got off the Caltrain at Mountain View.

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But this morning when I was walking through downtown San Francisco before Google’s I/O conference, I was crossing a street when I saw a particularly pretty scene of the sun rising between two buildings. Hoping I’d have enough time before the walk signal ended, I dug my iPhone out of my bag, swiped to open the camera, snapped a photo, and then jogged to the curb to avoid getting hit by cars. (Mom, I hope you’re not reading this.)

So a few hours later, when I tried on Google Glass for the first time and said the command “take photo,” instantly capturing a photo of my colleague Kevin Tofel standing in front of me without moving either my head or my hands, I started to see the appeal of Glass.

I’d read a decent amount about the technology since Sergey Brin dropped from a helicopter at last year’s Google I/O, and not only was I sort of confused by the specifics of how Glass works (A camera on your face? Facebook on top of everyday life? How do people see when they’re wearing them?), I was turned off by the severely dorky appearance and the idea of constantly monitoring the things around you. They seemed vaguely creepy and intrusive. I was not attracted to the idea of wearing them as a normal person walking around town.

But even though I only got a short spin with the technology on Wednesday, it only took a few seconds for me to understand why people are so jazzed about Glass.

I put them on my face and was immediately impressed with how lightweight they felt. Despite their futuristic, clunkly-on-one-side appearance, they didn’t feel very bulky or heavy on my face, and it was easy to see the room around me while wearing them. (Even though they weren’t fitted specifically for my face the way they would be if I purchased them.) The screen felt much smaller and unobtrusive than I’d imagined, and it wasn’t hard to swipe the side of the glasses to navigate the screen. But it was the voice commands, and the “take photo” command, that changed my perspective on the technology.

Would I spend $1,500 on them right now? Definitely not. If you need prescription glasses of any kind, it would be hard to combine those with Glass. While Google has launched them in some jazzy new colors, you still look absurd wearing them (whether you’re in the shower or not). This probably makes me somewhat vain, but I’d want them to look cooler and less futuristic before I wore them in everyday life (seriously, embed them in some Warby Parker frames, and I’d be way more down with the idea.)

And once apps start streaming into the glasses, I can’t imagine how seeing New York Times headlines and tweets wouldn’t be distracting while you’re doing things like walking or driving. Of course, none of this even gets into the new etiquette that would have to arise from the spread of Glass.

But despite all the drawbacks, speaking the words for the “take photo” command made me realize that even if wearable computing has a pretty dorky image right now, the potential practical applications for real-life people who don’t consider themselves nerds are endless — once the technology gets a little more refined, and we figure out how to use them in public.

I talked to one Google employee who said she sat in her sister’s graduation and streamed video through Glass to family members from afar, and another who said she uses it to take photos of her little kids when her hands are full. I would imagine it could be huge for people with disabilities, or people doing outdoor sports (Kevin mentioned you could take photos of mile markers while running a marathon.)

“Every time we’ve tried to do something crazy we’ve made progress,” Larry Page said on stage today. So does Google Glass seem a little nuts right now? Sure. But if a few years from now I can snap a photo of a sunrise without having a near-miss with traffic, I’m open to the possibilities.

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While it might not feature anything as crazy as last year’s Google Glass-streamed skydive over downtown San Francisco, if you love (or love to hate) Google’s world, here’s what you can expect this week. We’ll update this post as new stories are posted.

Day 3:

• The GigaOM Show: Google I/O themes and takeways that affect you
• The future, according to Google
• Some of the best articles you need to read about Google I/O
• A sneak peek at YouTube’s future as it rolls out new channel design for everyone
• Redbox Instant is coming to Google TV soon, Roku up next

Day 2:

• So Google Compute Engine is out, your move Amazon
• Google, NASA quantum computing project could bring stronger machine learning to the masses
• SMS integration coming to Google Hangouts. Will Google Voice follow?
• Google CEO Larry Page: Do as I say, not as I do
• How Google Music wants to take on Spotify, Rdio and Rhapsody
• Google jumpstarts Glass development with apps form Twitter, Facebook and Evernote
• What do good shoes, Google+ and Facebook have in common?
• How Google cleverly improved Android without releasing Android 4.3 at Google I/O
• The road less traveled: How Google does Streetview for the world’s oceans
• Why Google thinks the GPU is the engine for the web of the future

Day 1:

• Live blog: Google I/O 2013 showcases Android, Chrome, YouTube and more
• Google I/O statshot: 900 million Android devices activated
• Google Apps set for a communication upgrade with deeper Google+ integration
• Google officially launches its music subscription service at Google I/O
• Google turns up location data usage on Android apps
• What Google was thinking when redesigning the new Google+
• Prepaid gives Google a huge Android boost (and Apple has noticed)
• Eight years later, Google reinvents its Maps for a data rich web
• Coming to a school near you: Google launches Android app store for education
• How Google is setting the new search standard with voice and knowledge graph
• Google TV will receive Android 4.2.2 update as well as latest version of Chrome
• And, bam! Here’s Google Compute Engine
• Google’s growing cloud just got a NoSQL database
• Here’s the real theme of Google I/O: Service unification between Chrome and Android
• Why the snap of a photo changed my mind about Google Glass
• Google gains appeal for cloud services, but there’s this company called Amazon

Pre-show expectations:

• Why the time has come for Android @Home to finally make a splash
• Google I/O: Arming for the battle of the public cloud stars
• What to expect for Chrome and Android at Google I/O 2013
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I recently met up with my friend and one-time business partner, Steve Lee, who is product director on the Google Glass project, and before that, ran product management on Google Maps for Mobile. Other than a quick tour of the device, Steve basically let me dive in, so as to experience Glass with a beginner’s mind. I won’t bother reviewing the basic capabilities and specs, which have been covered exhaustively already. Instead I want to focus on some of the points that are in debate, and whether I believe that Glass is destined to succeed.

Glass is translucent; designed to be invisible

In “Waves of Power,” David Moschella shows how new disruptive industries begin as verticals, since the complete product solution requires one provider to deliver the whole enchilada. The new industry continues on this path until the solutions finally reach the “good enough” stage, when the larger trend becomes horizontal orientation, so as to achieve ubiquity, commoditization and the broadest possible ecosystem. (In passing, one can see the battle between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android in this light.) The endgame, so to speak, is that the technology becomes persistent, embedded and ever-present to the point of being “invisible.”

It’s a paradoxical concept to be sure. On the one hand, the technology is everywhere; how can it be invisible? On the other, it’s because it’s everywhere that we no longer think about it as exceptional – and, equally, grand solutions can anticipate and incorporate its ever-presence.

Take for instance the evolution of social mores around cellphones. Every day on my morning bus ride to work, virtually everyone is peering into some device, immersed in another world – a concept that once would have been considered rude and shocking. Similarly, I recently endured a ride near a phone-yapping lawyer who was advising a prospective client on their legal rights – casually and unconcerned, within full earshot of others. This is the new normal.

I think that in the not very distant future, the new forms of interactions that come from using Google Glass – or a very close version of them – will not only be accepted, but commonplace. Google Glass is going to be the NEW, new normal.

Designing a new kind of native experience

To further the point, many have suggested that wearing Google Glass out in public will carry a negative stigma, implying rudeness at a minimum, and privacy invasion at worst. My gut tells me that those people are flat out wrong for two reasons. One, that particular cow has already left the barn (my morning bus ride is emblematic of this truth.)

Two, Google got the design ethos exactly right. It’s a device that is designed for everyday use, but also an adornment that is designed to look good when worn as an accessory. For instance, I never post pictures of myself in my articles, yet I specifically wanted to post a picture of myself wearing Glass:

Why? I think it looks good in the same way a merino wool Zegna sweater looks good.

That in itself is a key narrative: Google has taken the ultimate in geekery and made it feel cool.

The hard technical problems solved

In the age of mobility, connectivity and apps, native experiences will flower and bloom prodigiously. Seen in this light, Google Glass is a credible new flower, growing a little bit every day. So is it ready for prime time? In the continuum from alpha to beta to mass-consumer ready, I’d call it a pretty advanced beta.

The bottom line is that it’s clear Google has solved the hard technical problems, the way they think about the complete solution is well thought out, and I can see a clear segmentation path for how they will take this to market.

As such, if you believe that using your voice, simplified touch actions and augmented visuals is a logical native modality for being social, creative, curious or communicative, then Glass is worth a look.

That brings me to the screen, which is neither obtrusive nor ineffective. It’s there when you need it, and it works. That’s analogous to being embedded to the point of invisibility – until, you have a native moment, and then Glass is at the ready. That in itself is a triumph.  Moreover, its voice-directed interface, interaction with smartphones (for 3G service) and touch controls are mightily impressive.

What is a bit pedestrian, though, is the experiential richness of the actual services that you can access through the system’s card like screens – both Google’s and third party ones. For the device to evolve from missionary to mission-critical, this is the area needing the greatest improvement (although, to be fair, we are at the earliest of days of Glass as a developer platform).

The road to mainstream

For me, the key variables start with pricing. The Explorer release is $1500, which obviously targets a very select niche. I can easily see such a device going for $600-800, since there is no carrier subsidy to lean on. Positioned as a fashion accessory at that price point, Glass should grab a Louis Vuitton-esque slice of the market. That’s single-digit millions of units annually. It’s not until such a device gets to $300 or less when one can expect tens of millions of devices selling annually. But in a five-year horizon, that scenario is not hard to see playing out.

I haven’t yet decided if Glass is a device that I would use everyday all the time, or on spot occasions. Then again, who says I need to? This is more about viability and heartbeat, and the fact that there are lots of jobs for such a device in personal, interpersonal, and industry vertical job categories.

On this front, my eyes don’t lie.

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Google debuted Google Glasses to developers back in June 2012 at its Google I/O conference, and companies have already started thinking about how they could build a more connected internet of things and roll out specific apps for the technology. And on Wednesday, some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investors declared their financial support.

Bill Maris, managing partner at Google Ventures, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins announced Wednesday that they’re together launching The Glass Collective, an effort to provide seed funding for people who are developing interesting uses for the technology.

Maris explained in a blog post why the investors think it’s important to support the idea:

“So what will the future be with Glass? Well, the truth is, no one can honestly predict where this new technology will take us. Not yet. And that’s exactly what’s exciting. We do know that smart entrepreneurs and engineers are going to develop amazing experiences through Glass. Glass will evolve quickly, just as the cell phone grew from this to this.”

However, with Google Glass not even in stores, it’s hard to imagine how normal people would use the technology every day, let alone what types of companies might emerge from a Glass-like ecosystem or how venture capitalists could profit from those companies. It’s a long-term bet on a very uncertain product, but if Glass does take off, it could be a profitable one, similar to Kleiner Perkin’s early investment in people building for the iPhone that was called the iFund.

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But the story of the year and half-old venture capital-backed Misfit isn’t just a tale about a startup building a coveted Apple-inspired gadget. Though it certainly is that — the company was founded on the day that Steve Jobs died, “Misfit” is a tribute to Jobs and Apple’s ads to think differently, and one of the company’s co-founders is Apple’s former CEO John Sculley (who was instrumental in pushing out Jobs in the 80′s).

Misfit has emerged at the intersection of a few key trends in 2013 that are shaping wearable computing, data, and design. These trends include the emergence of next-generation wearables that have more mainstream appeal, the development of the lean hardware movement that is using crowd funding to experiment, the collection of data that uses narrative and emotion to create an impact, and, most importantly, the introduction of a new type of user interface, which Misfit CEO Sonny Vu has coined as “the glanceable UI.”

Next-gen wearables

Accelerometers and sensors have been around for years. One of the pioneers of the space, Fitbit (see disclosure), is already a five-year-old company. Back in 2008, it was novel to just have a device that could track your movements, count your steps and calories, and sync with your laptop or smart phone.

But in 2013 the hardware for wearable devices has become a commodity, and the success of companies creating wearable computing will depend on the design of the device, the functionality of the software, and how the software and the gadget work together to provide value to the user’s life.

Misfit is part of this second wave of design-centric wearable computing. “We’re very focused on the packaging,” Vu told me with a smile during an interview last week at Misfit’s modest office in Daly City, California. Misfit was founded by Vu, Sculley, and Sridhar Iyengar, who was a co-founder with Vu at his former company AgaMatrix. AgaMatrix created the first FDA-approved glucose meter to work with the iPhone, giving Vu and Iyengar years of rare experience building wearable devices.

While crowd-funding helped fund Misfit’s first run of the Shine, Misfit is actually backed by some of the most well-known investors in the Valley, including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. Along with its team in Daly City, it has a group of software developers in Vietnam, and makes its gadget in Japan and South Korea.

Think differently

For Misfit, design innovation has been fundamental to creating its hardware. The company doesn’t use words like sensors, or accelerometers on its website, and is trying to look far beyond the niche, early-adopter “quantified self” community.

The first aspect of its design innovation is in the materials. While most wearables on the market are made of rubber or plastic, Misfit’s Shine is almost completely made out of metal — a first in the industry. The metal is part of what makes the device so beautiful and also gives the feeling of value to the user. The metal also makes it very durable; the Shine is fully water proof.

There are reasons why competitors haven’t used metal for pint-sized wearables. The Shine might look awesome, but it takes four different factories just to make the various pieces of the shell and the metal also has created some usability restrictions. The Shine has to be placed directly onto (actually touching) the face of the mobile phone to sync it; the wireless signals wouldn’t escape the metal casing without that.

“The next time I think of doing an entirely metal product, someone shoot me,” laughed Vu.

Steve Jobs also famously went to great lengths for hardware design, like the iPhone’s unscratchable glass screen, and the handle on top of the original iMac.

Another unusual design element that Misfit deemed necessary is that the Shine isn’t chargeable. It’s got a coin battery, which lasts 4 to 6 months before it needs to be replaced. Pretty much every other wearable on the market is chargeable and requires weekly, or even daily, charging. “We had an almost religious belief that wearables should not be charged. You don’t charge the buttons on your jacket, or the backpack on your back,” Vu said.

The decision to forgo charging also created usability restrictions, namely power management. The Shine needed bright LED lights on its display, the LEDs needed to shine through the metal casing, and the battery had to run the processor and keep time for up to 6 months. Pairing it with a wireless charging dock would have been far easier and would have enabled far more functionality.

A third counterintuitive design choice is that the Shine is a circle, but uses an inverted edge to connect with various accessories — there’s a sports and leather wristband accessory, a magnet clip for clothing, and a necklace that hangs it from your neck. Vu said that quintessential form choice will make the Shine more accessible for people’s various needs.

For example, many women won’t put anything on their wrist, which means wrist-only devices like the FuelBand or Jawbone’s UP are neglecting a good portion of potential users. From a business perspective, accessories can also add substantially to margins, which, for Misfit, could be tight given the Shine is a higher-end device made completely of metal that is trying to hit the price point of the Fitbit.

These types of design decisions have created a device that is substantially different from Misfit’s larger and older competitors. Vu said before founding the company and designing the Shine, the team read every single negative review of the Fitbit, the Nike Fuelband, and the Jawbone products.

Glanceable UI

Beyond the hardware, Misfit is also innovating around the UI and how the user experiences feedback from the Shine. The design team made the decision to remove a digital screen interface entirely and replace it with a halo of tiny LED lights. They also removed an on/off button. Part of the reason they made these changes was because of the power management issue — there’s no way the device could power a brightly-lit screen and not be a chargeable device.

But the move was also a decision to head in the direction of what Vu called a “glanceable UI.” Designers have for years been focused on UIs for the laptop and cell phone screens, but are more recently just beginning to create interfaces for the very quick glance that is needed for a wearable device.

The Shine takes what the Nike Fuelband started with its colored-LED display and basically pares it down. Shine users can check to see how complete the circle of lights is around the gizmo to determine if they’re meeting their daily fitness goal. By briefly touching the center of the Shine, the lights can quickly configure into a clock to tell the time, meaning the Shine is also a smart watch, too.

If you hear wearable designers and developers talk about user experience, they’ll commonly talk about truncating content. Google’s Glass advocate Timothy Jordan explained recently at SXSW that an app built for Glass, like the New York Times app, has to show enough of a snippet of information to be conveyed in just a look. The New York Times Glass app shows headlines and images, but not full articles.

Likewise, health and body information on a wearable device like the Shine should be able to be conveyed in a second or two. The cell phone app that syncs with the Shine houses the rest of the functionality.

A glanceable UI is about creating a second’s worth of meaning out of important and impactful data. Whether that’s a moment to convey how well you’re doing toward your daily fitness goal or a single blinking light to encourage more movement. As Om wrote recently, as data becomes the world’s currency, data without emotion, empathy or narrative is meaningless. Wearable gadgets can track as much data as they want, but if the user isn’t exposed to the data in a way that impacts their lives, and in a time frame that they can work with, then the device has failed.

Getting to market

Some of Misfit’s design decisions were controversial even within the company, which is why Misfit decided to test out to see if customers would be interested in a metal, non-rechargeable, no-screen, wearable gadget. Turns out, at least on Indiegogo, they are. The company raised over $800,000 from almost 8,000 funders who wanted to buy the Shine early.

Crowd-funding was a way for Misfit to experiment. It’s actually gotten millions from traditional Valley investors to launch its products more commercially. But crowd-funding is becoming a common way for the so-called lean hardware movement to operate. Hardware innovation was front and center at SXSW this year.

Misfit is shipping its first 5,000 Shines to customers in early June and another 7,000 or 8,000 in the second half of June. Shortly after that the Shine will go on sale at retail outlets for around the same price point as the Fitbit, which is around $99.

The Shine is only Misfit’s first product, which Vu calls Product Zero. They’re also working on a device called Mars, or Project One, which will be launched early next year. On the topic of Mars, Vu would only say that it would be a wearable but one that has a longer battery, makes more use of data, and has a different material and different shape.

While Misfit is just a young company, and has yet to deliver its gadgets to its first customers, it’s operating at that the intersection of some of the Valley’s most interesting trends, including the power of design, the next-generation of more mainstream wearables, the importance of impactful data, and a coming era that will feature the glanceable UI.

I look forward to hearing about the first Shine users’ experiences this Summer. In November we’ll be talking more about these issues of design, connectedness and experience at our third annual RoadMap event in San Francisco. Tickets will go on sale this summer, but you can sign up to be one of the first to access tickets.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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This week the folks at Engadget dug up a patent around Google Glass using wireless connectivity to control connected devices in your home. The glasses could use any number of wireless methods — from RFID, to infrared, to Bluetooth to QR codes — to identify a connected device that could be manipulated, and then, presumably, to manipulate it.

Picture arriving home from work, and the door of your house automatically unlocks to let you in as you walk up to it. Inside, your NPR app comes on the glasses screen and you can tune in or change the channel while you fiddle with turning on the connected sprinkler system for your lawn. Your Nest thermostat app then pops up on your Google Glass screen to let you know that you’ve been good this week and saved a lot of energy, but with a wink you override the conservation mode and crank up the heat.

The scenario isn’t as crazy as it sounds and all the basic technology is there. There are mobile apps that already do all of these things. Essentially you’d just be moving the control function from the cell phone touch screen and your fingertips to the screen in front of your eye and either a facial gesture or hand movement. All devices in the home that would benefit from having connectivity and control are getting it, and there will be a variety of remotes that will control them — why not one on your face?

Move outside of the home, and the world filled with the internet of things could be controlled, too. You could unlock your Zipcar with your Google Glass app, or start warming up your Tesla Model S electric car remotely before you take it for a spin.

As Om suggested in his recent data Darwinism post, the biggest changes coming for the connected world won’t be about technology; they’ll be more about how philosophical, legislative, and political norms evolve in response to this new world. And using Google Glass as a way to be the master of the internet of things would have interesting implications for all of these areas.

Getting the design, interface, architecture and ecosystem right for such a vision will no doubt be difficult. Mark Rolston, the chief creative officer at Frog Design, has noted the challenges inherent in designing interfaces in a world where devices are both trying to understand a user’s intent, and also test out new ways to interact with them, such as motion.

But ultimately these are design issues, and designers will spend the next several years trying to humanize such an experience.

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I call this trend divergence; let’s look at a few factors that are driving it.

Increasing complexity

Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of components in integrated circuit chips doubles every 18 months, made it possible to drive more power from a small footprint of electronics. With Moore’s Law on their side and users demanding to carry more with less, entrepreneurs seized the opportunity, and began fitting more functions into a single device, thus paving the way to convergence.

However, as newer functions get bundled into a single device, the interface often (but certainly not always) becomes more complex. Therefore a need arises to extract certain functions in a separate device in a form factor that makes more sense for that function.

As an example, Google Glass is arguably a better form factor to capture a video while taking a roller coaster ride than trying to hold onto your phablet. And a Pebble Watch provides a simpler and easier interface to view and control music while on the go. Ironically, Moore’s Law is also playing a big role in divergence of devices: The ability to fit more power in limited space is crucial for these new form factors to work.

Horizontal solutions

Clayton Christensen explains in the Innovator’s Solution that when interfaces between components aren’t well-defined, vertically integrated products tend to do very well. For instance, the Mac did very well in the early years of personal computing in part because of the tight integration between its hardware and operating system.

Similarly, when Apple introduced the iPhone six years ago, the smartphone industry was still in a relatively early phase. Apple was able to take advantage of a lack of well-defined interfaces by joining together computing, telephony, and music in a vertically integrated device. It would have been extremely hard for a small startup to come up with a converged device like an iPhone at that time: Apple not only had expertise in both software and hardware, it also benefited strongly from its partnerships (music labels, movie studios, app developers large and small) all along the value chain.

Yet, coming on six years from when the first iPhone launched, I believe that the industry has now entered a stage where the tight coupling of mobile hardware and software, while beneficial, is not the only winning strategy. APIs and interfaces such as WiFi, Bluetooth and location platforms are well established, consistent and understood. Therefore smaller independent players such as Fitbit (disclosure: see below) and its many competitors, along with the many smart watches, credit card readers, security beacons coming out every day, can succeed by leveraging these popular interfaces and platforms to deliver new applications that function better on their own.

There’s no doubt that vertically integrated players like Apple will still have some advantages – Apple’s rumored iWatch for one would presumably provide native iOS support to do many things that something like the Pebble Watch cannot do (for example, selectively turn on app notifications; similarly it can only preview emails from Gmail on an Android device).

But thanks to these well-established platforms, we will have no shortage of newer companies venturing into the digital devices arena.

Master of one

Now that smartphones and tablets offer several functions quite satisfactorily, there is an emerging trend to solve very specific problems very well. As Nokia’s Marko Ahtisaari said in an interview with Slashgear, “there’ll be room for more and more dedicated devices that do a few things really well again.” Already Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite remains  the device of choice for those who are hardcore e-book readers, especially those who read in sunlight. Users could easily opt to read the same Kindle book on their smartphone or tablet but choose the device that does this one task best.

And I will not be shocked if specialized music players that only stream music from popular services, such as Spotify, Pandora, Rdio and the like start appearing in the market. Of course, feasibility of such devices will also require newer business models that can enable affordable data plans.

While convergence will continue to move forward in certain areas – such as in the home entertainment space, where a single TV will compress several functions offered by separate set-top boxes into one device – newer form factors, horizontal solutions, specialization, and above all human ingenuity will ensure that we never run out of the need to carry multiple devices. At least not until advancements in materials science and technology enable a single device to take multiple forms.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Saad Fazil writes about emerging trends in the high-tech industry, especially in the areas of social, location and mobile. He writes at itval.e. Follow him on Twitter @ sfrocks.

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