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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• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Google doesn’t like walled gardens — except its own

Rich Miner, partner, Google Ventures (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

The rise of Google’s venture capital arm is an interesting one, because unlike a lot of emerging VC firms, Google Ventures isn’t lacking in capital. Instead, the firm has to prove that it’s not just an offshoot of Google, but rather a VC firm in its own right that can compete with other top-tier firms for access to the best — and potentially most profitable — founders.

“We are not your typical strategic corporate fund,” the firm’s enterprise partner Karim Faris told Forbes, in a mantra you hear often from the group.

One way Google Ventures is working to attract young founders is the addition of young, visible partners like former Digg founder Kevin Rose and blogger-turned-VC MG Siegler. While it boasts Android founder Rich Miner as a partner, Miner is based in Boston, and the addition of Rose and Siegler can help Google Ventures build up its local presence and visibility. So far, Google Ventures has invested in a large number of companies including Nest, DocuSign, HomeAway, and Nextdoor.

Digg founder Kevin Rose, now a Google Ventures partner.

One way Google Ventures is trying to distinguish itself from its Valley peers is by preaching a more hands-on approach to investing. Unlike the traditional model, where partners dispense advice to portfolio companies at board meetings or when the companies ask for it, Google Ventures has set up more of a lab-like atmosphere in Mountain View. It has designers, marketers, engineers and other staff on hand to assist and advise the portfolio companies however they need it.

This strategy has worked for firms like Andreessen Horowitz, which also launched around the same time as Google Ventures in 2009 and was originally derided for its flashy, PR-powered operation. But it has quickly become a top-tier firm in a short period of time, investing in companies like Facebook, Instagram, Github, Pinterest, and Twitter.

In November, Google Ventures announced that it now plans to invest $300 million a year, compared to more typical VC firms that invest about $200 million to $500 million over the course of several years. There’s no question that having the resources and support of Google behind the firm has an impact.

“We were lucky. Larry and I, we just wrote up the check,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told GigaOM in an interview at the time.

When Google Ventures announced plans to increase the size of its fund, managing partner Bill Maris said Page had asked him what he would do with $1 billion. But with the firm already investing in about 80 companies a year and providing resources like engineering, design, and marketing guidance, he worried more about how to scale that kind of operation and provide enough partner attention for the companies that need it. So adding some new partners is a step in that direction.

Building a VC firm that can compete at the highest levels with the likes of Sequoia and Greylock only four years after launch isn’t an easy task, even if the firm had one of the hottest names in technology as partners. But if Google’s forays into driverless cars and Glass are any indication, the company has no problem setting its sights high.

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Some companies are actually opting for prominent devices as a way to show off your connectedness, or at least not lose your gadget in the wash. But as batteries get smaller, wearables could become less of a fashion statement and more about a new wave of immersive computing.

Either way, there will be a lot of competition. ABI Research predicts that the global market for wearable computing devices in health and fitness could reach 170 million devices by 2017.

At the end of the day, the design of the wearable and how it feels on your body is only half the battle. Wearable makers are hard at work making sure their gadgets can collect the right data and deliver a service to users that makes the data important and useful in their daily lives. If the body data isn’t helpful, then really, what’s the point?

We created this “bare-bones” infographic of wearable devices that are currently available and that fit the mold for what we see as the future of the connected you: data-driven services, and unobtrusive design. Which ones do you own or want to own? Click on each body section to read more about the companies and devices available.

Google Glass

Google’s “augmented reality” glasses allow you to do anything you’d normally do on your phone or laptop — record video, find directions, message your friends — but without your hands. It’s currently available only to select “creative individuals” in colors Charcoal, Tangerine, Shale, Cotton and Sky and perhaps soon in more attractive styles. ($1,500)

Watches

A number of companies including Motorola, Pebble and Basis Science have all thrown their hats in the connected watch arena. Adding new purpose to a time-warn accessory, these smart watches read texts out loud, play music, and track your exercise and health — in addition to telling time. Apple is even working on a watch that could run iOS. ($115-$300) 

Bracelets

Companies like Jawbone  and Fitbit are marrying data and design for a wearable computing experience that’s seamless and attractive. Their wristbands and bracelets are being used to track fitness, sleep and calories but look like a simple accessory.  ($99-$129)

Jewelry

Sensors are the essential part of all wearable devices. Companies like Misfit and its Shine device use sensors that can also function as jewelry for a seamless way to track your activity. A recent Apple filing shows the company might have even broader ambitions for wearable sensors, too. ($59-$99)

Shoes

Thinkstock

From connected shoes to connected clips and inserts, feet are often the preferred place for activity trackers that show where and how far you’ve run. ($ price varies on technology)

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, 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.

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• Analyzing the wearable computing market

Facebook’s news feed design was the big news of the week. Here is what we think about the new colorful icons and sorting of the feed into categories like events and music. By the way, why couldn’t they couldn’t come up with a better analogy than a newspaper?

Talking about Facebook, one has to wonder what raw nerve Nick Bilton’s piece hit that the social web giant had to come back with all its PR guns blazing. Bilton pointed out that the engagement on his posts had gone down drastically but when he paid to promote those same links, it shot up. We have a sneaking suspicion that we have not heard the last of this debate, but if you want to get a good handle on the situation, try reading this analysis by Nick O’Neill.

Mark Zuckerberg responds to press questions and photos after announcing the new Facebook News Feed redesign on March 7 in Menlo Park.

Billionaire Boys Club: Facebook and Google have one thing in common: the co-founders of both companies are among the richest people in the world. Not much of a surprise. As technology becomes a part of our everyday lives, it’s also no surprise that tech leaders dominated the top of the annual Forbes Billionaires list this year.

Though they were dubbed “underperformers” by Forbes (technology-based billionaires on the list saw their net worth rise by only 8%, while the entire list combined rose 15%), it’s hard to find fault in a collective fortune of $272.6 billion. But in a time of massive income inequality – 80% of Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are — are these lists still relevant?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google were ranked at number four and five, respectively, while Mark Zuckerberg dropped to the ninth top earner (from sixth in 2012) with $13.3 billion in his coffers. That’s a lot of 747s and James Perse hoodies.

Fortune doesn’t favor the print: Print may be on the decline, but will it die a slow death? Time Warner decided to spin off its magazine publishing arm this week instead of trying to pass off the job to Meredith Corporation, creating a new standalone company for its top mags. This further perpetuates the belief that the broken print model will be ushered into the retirement home sooner rather than later as the web produces endless amounts of content, and technology makes consuming it easier than ever.

But print does have its fans — Warren Buffett invested $344 million in newspapers last year. Does he know something we don’t? We are worried about Fortune, the magazine, for we do think they have some great pieces.

VC vs VC: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venerable venture capital firm that had funded companies such as Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Genentech, Compaq, Amazon and Google, had a pretty forgettable decade. They apologized to their backers. VC Georges van Hoegaerden, writing for industry publication PE Hub, argues that the issues plaguing them and many haloed investing names are much deeper. Our colleague Katie Fehrenbacher writes a thoughtful piece on perils of righteous investing. By the way, have you read that piece about Ellen Pao and her hubby in Vanity Fair?

Mobile-palooza: You have to be really brave to pack your bags and go to Barcelona and attend Mobile World Congress. Our team members David Meyer and Kevin Fitchard did just that and both fell sick after getting back. Chetan Sharma was lucky, and that gave him a chance to recap the mobilepalooza — it is worth reading.

Freedom to Roam: If you’re dreading spending the rest of your mobile life (or at least the next 24 months) tied to one carrier, there’s good news: The White House has your back when it comes to unlocking your phone. A petition that raised over 100,000 signatures in a month has the support of the White House and a number of state senators, one of which has already drafted the Wireless Device Independence Act of 2013, which promises to legally free your devices from carrier restriction. But will it really change anything? Andrew Couts unlocks the truth.

Taking a Bow: Pop music is filled with flash-in-the-pan tunes, but the classics never fade. Unless you’re the CEO of Pandora, Joe Kennedy, who announced this week that he needed a “recharge” after his long 10-year tenure, and will be stepping aside as soon as a replacement can be found. Does this open the door for other up-and-coming music services to make their move?

As it so happens, Apple is said to be seeking a harmonious collaboration with the “Daisy Project,” backed by Beats Electronics, while  Google has partnered with Warner Music for a Google Play subscription service and is setting the stage a YouTube-Spotify throwdown. It will be interesting to see how these companies build and structure their streaming services, especially since this will be yet another effort by Apple to get music right after Ping failed to take off.

Mapping Your Innards: Google has enabled us to visit distant locations, thanks to Street View, and gets us from A to B without much difficulty. But a team of researchers has been able to one-up those achievements by successfully mapping the human metabolism. Why should you care? Well, in the future, we might actually be able to predict how our fragile bodies will react to disease, drugs and foods, which can help make the painful experience of allergy testing and trial-by-elimination a thing of the past.

Here are some stories we recommend for this weekend.

• Let’s save great ideas from the ideas industry, argues Umair Haque, over on Harvard Business Review website. His column is an argument against conferences such as the recently concluded TED.
• The printed travel guidebook is dead. Put a fork in it, says Skift’s Jason Clampet.
• The WatchMen: There’s a high tech team inside the Milwaukee PD trained to monitor the city and fight crime before it happens. This is their story.
• A LEED-certified city built on algorithms? It’s happening in South Korea, and it might give us a little glimpse of what future cities can (should?) look like.
• If you think Google Glass is futuristic, check out the computerized eyewear Steve Mann has been working on for the past decade.
• Upgrade or die, says George Packer in the New Yorker. He argues “that obsessive upgrading and chronic stagnation are intimately related, in the same way that erotic fantasies are related to sexual repression.”
• What sex can teach us about energy efficiency? Great headline, better article.

Read this and other in-depth articles on GigaOM’s Flipboard channel

Groupon’s 2-for-1 CEO deal: Groupon, decidedly the most non-tech company pretending to be a tech company fired Andrew Mason, founder & CEO, and replaced him with not one but two CEOs — Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis, who are taking over as co-CEOs. Not to poop on their parade, but weren’t these two gentlemen supposed to prevent the current state of chaos at the company as board members? Something stinks, and it is not kielbasa. In what seems to be a perfect exit interview, Mason had some choice things to say:

“I think in the first phase of our company, we were a glorified mailing list. We had a completely unintelligent email that we sent out once a day and we had a human sales force that was going around and procuring the deals.”

As for Mason, he is looking for a fat farm to lose what he adorably calls “Groupon 40.” I am going to miss his nonsensical utterances.

Everybody hates (or loves) Marissa Mayer & loves(or hates) Sheryl Sandberg: Well, at least everyone in media has something to say about two of the brightest and more powerful women in Silicon Valley, Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg. They were both making headlines this week for what seems to be all the wrong (or right) reasons.

Mayer wants her remote-working Yahoos to come back to the office, and while some claimed that this was the worst decision possible for the company (and its working parents), others argue that maybe we could all use more separation between work and life. Even we couldn’t decide with Mayer’s idea that the best ideas come from “hallway and cafeteria collaboration,” the fact remains — people are talking about Yahoo again.

Hoping to recreate a Betty Friedian-like social movement empowering women in the workplace, Sheryl Sandberg’s individualized take on feminism outlined in her new book, Lean In, may not strike the cord she had hoped. In fact, prominent entrepreneurial women have denounced the cause as unrealistic, while others insist that men must also become passionate change agents  in order for the business world to become more balanced.

By the way, those two news items sparked a lively thread on our internal messaging system.

Technology’s worst dressed guy is emasculated by phones: Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who is not exactly Bernard Arnault (CEO of LVMH, if you must ask), feels that smartphones are “emasculating.” He was speaking at the TED conference and his comments resulted in a flurry of commentary around gender issues.

The general body language of your average smartphone user aside, his comments indicate that Glass could evolve to include cellular phone service, but the truth is that health concerns might hinder adoption by the masses. One thing that might help make Google Glass cool? Its rumored partnership with hipster darling Warby Parker. But those are minor issues, as author Mark Hurst rightfully argues. The real issue is how we as human beings will interact with people with Google glasses and how that will change our daily experiences, he said.

“Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it. And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.” [Mark Hurst]

Does that future scare you? Then you should read Joel Hladeck’s amusing letter from the future that talks about why Google glasses kinda went the way of AltaVista.

Getty Images

Oscars & Hard times at CGI Corral: Darlings of the big screen and red carpet took home their golden statues at the Oscars last Sunday, but not all is well for the behind-the-scenes crew. The visual effects industry is facing hard times due to foreign outsourcing and subsidies, with large and small studios alike facing layoffs and closures. You may have caught Bill Westenhofer attempting to broach the subject after winning the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for Life of Pi before being ushered off the stage to the theme of Jaws, which now seems oddly appropriate given that thousands of jobs are dead in the water.

Talking about Oscars, congrats to PopSugar for launching PopSugar Live. Their live red carpet show from the Oscars got about a million views, putting them in the cable television territory. Who needs cable (TV) when you have broadband?

Getty Images

Fashion and tech in one place! What could go wrong: Conde Nast rolled out the red carpet for geeks during this years’ New York Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week by hosting a first-of-its-kind fashion and tech hackathon to create new ideas around how to use technology in the industry. We do admit that does sound kinda crazy and, well, Conde Nast isn’t who we turn to for innovation tips. But then again, the fashion industry is so far behind that they need to start somewhere. We would also recommend watching out for a whole new breed of fashion media upstarts that are frankly more fun and engaging than perusing dowdy Conde Nast.

Beyond Fashion Week, a handful of forward-thinking companies are already capitalizing on the use of technology in fashion, and creating a brand new way to shop, and find the perfect fit online

It is now the Internet of things:

“We are beginning to learn what it is like to use the Internet to communicate with things that are not humans.” — Vint Cerf at TED2013 (via Twitter)

We at GigaOM have been on it for a while, writing about the topic for a few years now. But now we are taking the show on the road and are hosting a series of meetups like the most recent one in San Francisco and the next one in Boulder, Colorado. Our belief: Ideally, the internet of things should fade into the background; what matters is what it allows people to do.

And what here are some stories from this week you might have missed.

1. Battle of the campuses: Google told Vanity Fair that it would soon be breaking ground on a new 1.1-million square foot campus, and it’s quite the contrast from Apple’s upcoming futuristic spaceship-like HQ coming in 2016. Richie King at Quartz explored what these vastly opposing architectural footprints say about the personality of each company.
2. Jimmy Iovine needs to make up his mind: He can’t undermine music curation without undermining Music by Beats, the company he owns and will disown soon.
3. Microsoft wants to be cool: And it will never be cool, according to a former Apple guy and a former Microsoft guy.
4. Tim Cook & Apple versus Wall Street: The New Yorker’s John Cassidy rightfully argued that we shouldn’t pity the hedgies.
5. The problem with Facebook data: Well, there is a lot to dislike about Facebook’s “Like” argued Alan Wolk.

Read this and other in-depth articles on GigaOM’s Flipboard channel

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• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

For our newest ebook, The Battle for the Books: Inside Google’s Gambit to Create the World’s Biggest Library, GigaOM’s Jeff John Roberts describes the technological and legal twists and turns of the story through the people affected by it: the authors who feared losing rights to their work, publishers facing lost revenue, technologists pushing for a world where all written knowledge is digital, and librarians who believe in open access to information. 

As the fight brewed over who owned the rights to the books Google was busily digitizing, one question in particular came to mind: Why was Google doing this? In this excerpt, Roberts travels to the Stanford University campus to find an answer. Buy the book today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

By definition, there is no market for millions of forgotten, out-of-print books; their contents offer endless opportunities for personal enrichment, but no equivalent financial richness. Scanning the world’s books presented, at best, a negligible business opportunity along with some very foreseeable legal headaches. So why did Google bother?

A good source on why Google does what it does is Stanford professor Terry Winograd, who supervised Larry Page’s doctoral studies and worked with both Google founders on the school’s Digital Library Project. Inside Winograd’s office in Stanford’s computer science building, shelves groaned with books, which, according to Winograd, are a technological obsolescence for others in the department.

Winograd is a quiet, mustached man with fluffy hair and a kind demeanor who is renowned for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence. There was little romantic in Winograd’s description of the genesis of the audacious book-scanning plan. He portrayed a project born equally of scholarly idealism and a cold, futuristic determinism. “It’s an idea Larry and Sergey had from the very beginning. It’s an idea that there’s knowledge out there,” he recalled. “It’s the intellectual, technological imperative.” Winograd would later repeat this phrase several times when describing how the Google founders see the world.

Multiple sources directly involved in the project confirmed that the push to scan the world’s books was not just one of the myriad eccentric projects (from driverless cars to a Mars map website) that constantly spring up all over Google. The book project was special.

“It came straight from Larry and Sergey,” said an author who took part in the negotiations between Google and the Authors Guild. “This is a project top management stayed close to and made clear that they wanted it done.”

While the Google founders’ determination to scan books is apparent, the personal motives of Brin and Page were less clear. Critics have pointed to the book scheme as proof the founders are greedy or power-hungry. New Yorker writer Ken Auletta and author of the book Googled, for instance, suggested the book scanning was simply pathological. In a 2010 phone interview, he explained to me, “They were just thinking as engineers do — Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do that? They’re not businessmen. They’re cold engineers.”

Others have been harsher, suggesting that the Google founders’ decision to scan books without permission amounts to a type of technological barbarism rooted in a lack of culture or literary savoir faire.

Such caricatures are neither fair nor accurate. Winograd dismissed them by pointing out that both Page and Brin were raised in academic families that valued books and libraries.

As for Page and Brin themselves, they don’t seem to have cared whether the world thought they were visionaries or villains. They had a task to accomplish. As Winograd said, “I think if you ask them, [they’d say] this is going to get done, even in five years. This is the technological imperative — information must be searchable. They’re often more in tune to the technological imperative than to social barriers. To them, social barriers are transient.”

The authors and publishers who eventually sued Google over the book scanning would likely chafe at the notion that they are “transient social barriers,” but the Google founders’ attitude was not altogether unreasonable. A new technology had made it possible to create a vast library of the world’s books, so what was everyone waiting for?

With this mix of insouciance and technological urgency, Brin and Page began to put their grand plan into place.

Buy The Battle for the Books ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or iTunes. For more information on this and other GigaOM Books, go to pro.gigaom.com/books.

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Watch this Google concept video for a better idea (or to be utterly terrified):

While they were deemed stylish enough by legendary designer Diane Von Fürstenburg to put them on the catwalk, there’s still a very big split between those who instantly shout in horror and crow about security risks and those who instead envision a new dawn in computing. Perhaps they both have a point: For some they will be the ultimate intrusion yet for others they could revolutionize business or the way we interact with the world. The truth is, we just don’t know yet. One thing is for sure, however: Some have more to gain than others

Generally, I am pro Glass: After all, technology is rarely evil (technology doesn’t harm people – people harm people!) But plainly speaking, this is the first piece of tech I have seen in a long time that has the potential to truly change everything. Forget tablets, forget smartphones, the technology behind Glass is not an extension of you, it literally becomes part of you. (Crucially, unlike other tech to-date, it also leaves your hands free – a facet you can see the porn barons already dreaming about.) What is most curious, though, is that I’ve yet to see the media jump on Glass and champion it during this embryonic period. Why are we not hearing about landmark partnerships being done between Google and media powerhouses? (Or is it that Google is not playing ball with them?) Why,  as with tablets, mobile and so many developments before, is the media industry so timid that they wait to be involved before leading the discussion?

Let’s take a look at a few reasons why Google Glass is poised to change everything:

Zero setup = perfection

The idea from the start is that you pop them on and truly just carry on being you – they’ll take care of the rest. This is the ultimate device that can not only benefit from contextual information but also demonstrated behavior, such as time of reading, likes, dislikes and so on. The system will quickly pick up on those variables (among many others) and soon enough take care of it automatically: no need anymore for RSS feeds, no circling, no preferences. Just read as you normally would, and it will get smarter and more precise and better at predicting your needs and wants. This fixes my main issues with the way we get news today, which still requires too much input from the user; instead Glass just gets out of the way.

Multivariate testing

Or, in other words, testing lots of variables to see which produce the best results then upweighting that combination. Adaptive marketing will be a heavily used term next year and in subsequent years as we react to the myriad devices giving agencies, planners and publishers oodles of delicious data to crunch. News should be making huge efforts to tailor their product to the individual based on their social and interest graphs (groups, likes, shares, purchases). Imagine a layout that could be tested and then updated because a different layout led to greater consumption. Currently this could really exist only on smartphones via apps, but has not been hugely raved about because of tracking issues.

Think beyond the device

Imagine an army of reporters all using these devices. It makes true real-time, breaking news very possible – in fact, it will redefine the very notion of what news is: no longer organized but reactive. Are the days of phone footage, or images being sent via email as news breaks numbered?  Imagine how ordinary people could become live reporters simply because they happen to be right by the action. When an incident occurs, a quick mobile ping and you’ll know who is around to turn their head and broadcast live images and video. I’d certainly watch more of that than fuzzy, ultra-zoomed snapshots grabbed off Twitter.

Advertising ROI

While Google has been less than clear when talking about built-in advertising opportunities, it’s obvious that with the advances in augmented technologies like BlippAR, Aurasma and Obvious Engine image recognition is still sexy and – when used correctly – the results are good. The eye-tracking capabilities Google Glass poses should make not only media agencies and advertisers salivate but editorial departments as well. Shouldn’t better measurement, placement, contextualization, optimization of editorial (not to mention ads) be what we’re all fighting for?  Now we might have something that can do it! What’s the holdup?

This is just a taste of what’s going to possible from what my tiny noodle can dream up. The implications of these technologies are pretty staggering when you think about the big bad data wolf that’s smiling sweetly at us in the distance. Whether we like or know it, we’re going to be wearing more and more technology. When you consider the quickly expanding wearable tech trend – not just sensors in bracelets and shoes but actual things – the future looks clear.  We’ve already got Nike wristbands, headphones in hats, T-shirts that tweet, bras that help with fitness (?!), sleeptrackers, watches with emergency communication systems and about 50 prototype products from Nokia. Suddenly Project Glass doesn’t look like a crazy leap so much as a solid step in the right direction.

As with most new technologies, there are still old problems to address: namely privacy, connectivity and, of course, battery life. The last two are relatively easy to solve but the first is a deep concern for most people. Even at a surface level there are major issues here that could affect adoption (while Google has stated it has no plans to integrate facial recognition elements, it’s clearly inevitable). But personally I suspect these will be overcome with the gadget-lust/cool factor and general usability the device will inevitably enable.

Then you have the other P-word, piracy. If you think cellphones were an issue for copyright and IP theft, imagine how quickly these bad boys could destroy an industry. Taking that idea further, how would you protect your important documents in a business? What about customer service? Or will they just force us all to be in better control of these things? Ultimately, though, the deciding factor for most issues will be a lot like the success of the Nike Band: the Glass-style technology that eventually takes off will be the one that doesn’t need to be taken off by users.

Right now, this isn’t likely Project Glass for the majority of folks out there, but it does leave me hopeful that future incarnations are close by  (without surgery). Whatever way this technology goes, and I believe it will go far if the marketing continues to be as slick as it has been, it’s clear the nerds – and more importantly the cultural influencers – love Project Glass.

So, media folk, I say this:  Start making connections and beefing up your technology departments. Google I/O (Google’s Developer Conference) attendees were able to sign up for a beta, and they’ll start getting their units very soon. This technology or a version of it is coming, the only question is how soon.

Paul Armstrong is Head of Social for Mindshare; follow him at www.paularmstrong.net or on Twitter @TheMediaIsDying.

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“We were lucky. Larry and I, we just wrote up the check,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in an interview. “This is a really exciting way to be really impactful on the world.”

We've increased our fund by 50% to $300MM a year. We plan to invest $1.5B in startups over the next 5 years. #gvsummit—
Google Ventures (@GoogleVentures) November 08, 2012

Founded in 2009, Google Ventures is the venture capital arm of its parent company Google, and does a wide variety of deals, from 40-50 seed-stage investments under $250,000 to a few deals under $10 million. So far, the firm has invested in companies like Nest, which makes connected thermostats, HomeAway, a popular vacation rental site, and RelayRides, the ride-sharing company.

The additional funding will allow the firm to do more deals and especially to do follow-on rounds for companies that are expanding rapidly, but managing partner Bill Maris said the growth in fund size isn’t just about the number of deals they want to do.

“It’s a further affirmation of what we set out to do, which is to find and invest in the most disruptive and interesting founders we could find,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to do a lot more deals, or that we’re going to do a lot bigger deals.”

But Maris said it gives the firm the ability to invest in the right people at the right time, with fewer restrictions on their deal size and scope. He said co-founder Larry Page asked him what he would do with $1 billion, but that it was important to the partners to scale responsibility — just like their startups do — and take on the right amount of funding they could handle for the size of the team.

“A billion a year is not something we can reasonably do,” Maris said. “300 was picked because it was an increment above 200 million.”

Maris said they’re especially interested in investing in mobile, cloud services, and big data. But like most investors, he said they’re betting on smart founders.

“Sergey and Larry are what made Google different from every other search engine out there,” he said. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

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Their descent was streamed in real time and culminated in them landing on the roof of the Moscone center, where they handed off a package to some mountain bikers, only to have it handed to guys climbing down the face of the building. Words don’t really do it justice, so you might want to check the video out yourself. However, the big show couldn’t really conceal that Google had little news to offer about the actual glasses.

Check out the Project Glass demo from Google I/O:

Google did start taking pre-orders on site, offering developers in attendance of the conference a chance to put their name down on a priority list for the device. But even those pre-orders won’t likely ship till early next year. Brin said that the version they’re going to make available to developers will be rough around the edges, but that the company is trying to get it into the hands of developers as early as possible. Developers that are willing to pay a premium, one should add: The first version of Glass, called “Explorer Edition”, will cost a whopping $1500. There’s no word on how much glass will set back the average consumer when it becomes more widely available, or when this will happen.

But the biggest omission during Wednesday’s Glass presentation was any peek at the current Glass UI, or any of the features it will offer end users, save for one or two: Glass will be able to record photos and video, and users will be able to share these via Google+ and also join Google+ Hangouts.

That’s remarkably less than what the company shared when it first publicly unveiled Glass in April. Back then, Google released a conceptual video that was meant to show off some of the ideas behind Glass. The video featured an augmented reality experience, letting the wearer of Glass know about interesting spaces he was visiting, notifying him of the location of his friends and allowing him to answer phone calls without distracting too much from the real world.

But ever since this first glimpse, Google has only been showing off the device’s photo and video capture capability. Brin joked on stage Wednesday that it would be hard to show off the Glass UI because it might require him to wear two glasses at the same time. Of course, the Glass experience is far from ready – and that goes far beyond the UI.

Even with as little as Google has shared so far about the project, it’s becoming obvious that Glass will offer a completely different computing experience. It’s taking computing away from the screen, and into the real world. That poses numerous challenges, as it requires Google to completely rethink the way it has been presenting information. Its new Google Now mobile search takes a first step into this direction, away from making information searchable, to more instinctively surfacing things you want to know in any given situation. Of course, there are also privacy and basic safety implications – things Google apparently wants to work out before giving us a closer look at Glass.

It makes perfect sense for the company to involve developers in this process – but it’s less certain what developers who commit to pre-order are getting out of it. Will they be able to run their own apps on Glass? Will Glass work in concert with other Android devices? Will it lead to the birth of a new generation of online services that combine location with image recognition and other types of sensory input? We just don’t know yet, and Google won’t tell.

But judging from the lines at the pre-order table, this doesn’t seem to stop developers. We’ve heard that people pre-ordering the device now won’t have to pay until it actually ships next year – but nonetheless, Google is asking developers to take a leap of faith for Project Glass. Maybe the whole jumping out of the airplane was more than just a stunt, after all.

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