Leonardo Del Vecchio is CEO of Luxottica, the world's biggest eyeglasses company. Besides owning huge retail brands including Lenscrafters and Cohen's Fashion Optical, Luxottica makes frames under the names Ray-Ban, Oakley, and tons of others. It also has a deal to make Glass for Google. Which makes an interview he gave the Financial Times (which is behind a paywall) a little … [Read more...]
Glass Roundup: New Frames, New Market, New Boss?
We're probably going to hear a lot from Google this week because its I/O developers conference kicks off this week. But before the balloon goes up, there are some small Glass-related items to report on. The long-expected Diane von Furstenberg frames for Glass are now available. For $300 above the $1500 base price, they're actually not bad, especially if you like the hipster … [Read more...]
Google Picks Its First Five Glass Software Partners
There's more signs of Glass's life in the enterprise: Google has selected five software companies as its first Google At Work Certified Partners. We met the guys at APX Labs at Glazed earlier this month, although they were demoing their enterprise data application on Epson's Moverio. Aside from its hooks into enterprise data of all kinds, what's interesting about APX is an … [Read more...]
Salesforce Brings Wearables Into the Enterprise with Salesforce Wear
We've long believed that the most exciting thing about wearables isn't the Quantified Self movement as much as it is how wearables can change the relationship between people and entities. (It's much the same as early personal computers: standalone computer were much less interesting than computers connected to the Internet.) Salesforce -- the world's top CRM platform -- … [Read more...]
Dyson Had A Glass Prototype in 2001
To celebrate its 21st anniversary, Dyson (the vacuum cleaner folks) are talking about some of the projects it's tinkered with over the years but never brought to market. Turns out that one of them was something that looks an awful lot like Google Glass. We're talking 2001 technology, so the electronics, storage, and communications aren't to contemporary standards. But the … [Read more...]
Google Exec Changes Point to Glass Productization
Some personnel changes that have just come to light among executives involved with Google Glass make it look like Google means to turn its widely heralded experiment into an actual product sooner rather than later. Adrian Wong, a lead electrical engineer on the project, has left to join visor company Oculus, his LinkedIn profile says. Wong's profile lists two projects at … [Read more...]
Want Glass? Go Right Ahead.
Google has now opened its Glass Explorers program to anyone (in the United States) with a spare $1500. If the devices are in stock, and you've got a US address, you can step right up and order one. Keep in mind, though, that Glass remains a pretty much roll-your-own kind of thing... And speaking of Glass, there's another estimate out of its material cost. IHS put the cost at … [Read more...]
Glass Helps Save a Life In A Boston Emergency Department
CIO has an interesting story about a neat use of Google Glass in the emergency department of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. An ER doc was able to access and read a patient's medical records while providing emergency care -- learning from the documents that the standard treatment that was about to provided would probably have killed the guy. It's worth noting … [Read more...]
Components for $1500 Glass Cost $80
Teardown.com has disassembled Google Glass, identified its components, and says the pieces can be had for about $80. Google tells the Wall Street Journal that's nonsense, and even severe Glass critics (like us) would have to acknowledge that the company has a point even if the bill of materials is accurate. There's lots more to a sophisticated piece of gear like Glass than … [Read more...]
FirstBank Pokes Fun at Glass
FirstBank, a regional bank with branches in Colorado, Arizona, and California, is out with an ad that touts its "old-fashioned" banking app at the expense of a family that's a little too plugged into its Glass. Because families that only have smartphones are all completely engaged with each other at the dinner table, … [Read more...]