In Defense of Google Glass

This post was originally featured in Forbes.

John C. Dvorak from PC Magazine UK recently wrote a piece outlining all of the reasons that Google Glass will fail.

He is largely wrong.

Dvorak’s primary thesis is that Google is taking a cavalier attitude towards privacy and that the public won’t stand for it. He predicts that as a result of slow sales (which he doesn’t quantify), Google will shut down Glass in the next year.

There are a few problems with Dvorak’s hypothesis:

Glass is not a walking invasion of privacy

Most peoples’ negative reactions to Glass from a privacy perspective are rooted in the camera. Theoretically, this camera could be recording at all times. Although technically true, that fear is not a logical interpretation of reality. Just because one is wearing Glass doesn’t mean that one is recording. But more importantly, new technologies don’t create new behaviors out of thin air.

In other words, if everyone was so adamant about recording their peers, what’s stopping them from doing that today with their phones? If people aren’t doing that today with smartphones, why will they all of a sudden do that with Glass? Glass’s camera is more convenient than that of a smartphone, but that doesn’t mean people will use it in the most nefarious, privacy-invading way possible. Social norms and self-image will prevent the vast majority of people from recording when inappropriate.

“But what about the creeps in the world?” you may ask.

Just because most people won’t use Glass for nefarious purposes, that doesn’t mean that some people won’t, right? And those bad apples will rot the entire tree, right?

Once again, simple logic comes to the rescue: people who want to record others in public typically don’t want others to know that they’re being recorded. Glass is a particularly awful tool at being discreet. It rests clearly on one’s face in plain sight and forces the recorder to look at the intended target. Google Glass is more likely the least deceptive technology than the most deceptive. Smartphones, given their ubiquity, are far more apt for deception.

Smart glasses in 2014 are where desktop computing was in 1978

Google initially designed and marketed Glass for consumers. Eighteen months later though, it’s clear that like desktops and cell phones before it, Glass will be adopted by enterprises first.

The first real application for desktop computers was spreadsheets (in the form of VisiCalc). In 1978, despite all of its limitations, the Apple II desktop computer was capable enough to render a 2-dimensional spreadsheet of numbers linked by basic addition and multiplication. Business analysts in finance and the corporate world immediately rejoiced because they no longer had to calculate each cell by hand. Spreadsheets made business analysts and executives 10x more productive.

In the early ’90s, Motorola released the first commercial cellphones. Despite their poor performance, poor network coverage, high price, and excessive bulk, business executives bought them in droves. Why? Because there was undeniable value in making phone calls while mobile. They would have gladly paid $1,000 / month for a phone in order to make billion dollar business decisions on the move.

The teams that built Glass intended it for wide-scale consumer adoption, but like Steve Jobs in 1978, were too early. However, early “killer apps” are emerging for Glass for use in the enterprise.

Of course, I have every reason to believe in a wave of enterprise Glass adoption. My company, Pristine, is on a mission to dramatically improve field service, training, and education through Glass. We’ve built a scalable, secure, robust, remote-collaboration suite for Glass to help local technicians fix problems that they otherwise never could have. Rather than struggle with a phone call to remotely diagnose mechanical problems, our customers empower their engineers to share what they’re seeing securely to remotely collaborate and fix mission-critical equipment, leading to massive ROI in healthcare, manufacturing, aerospace, oil & gas, and more.

What Dvorak gets right

While the killer apps for Glass in the enterprise are clear to many, Dvorak is closer to the mark in terms of consumer adoption. Currently, “consumer” ownership of Google Glass is limited to very early adopters who are trying the technology for its own sake, in absence of a truly game-changing application.

For consumers, the emergence of a killer app will be predicated on a few things:

1. Glass won’t achieve mainstream adoption until you can no longer tell the difference between Google Glasses and regular glasses.
2. Glass needs a killer app. It’s clear that given current hardware constraints, there isn’t a killer app for consumers. Perhaps augmented reality technologies will deliver the killer app for consumers.
3. The price needs to fall dramatically. Luckily, Moore’s law dictates that the price will drop.

So where does this leave Glass?

Is Google going to kill Glass like other high-profile projects (e.g. Wave, Reeder, Buzz)? Doubtful. Larry Page just handed over most of his daily responsibilities to Sundar Pichai so Page can spend more time accelerating commercialization of Google’s most promising nascent technologies such as Glass and self-driving cars.

Instead, I offer this: Glass is going to change the world. But like other world-changing technologies before it (desktop computers and smartphones), Glass will solve expensive problems in the enterprise before achieving broader consumer adoption. Agree? Disagree? Drop me a line at kyle@pristine.io to talk more.

Smart Glasses Will be the Internet's Portal to the Physical, Hands-On World

This post was originally featured on the Huffington Post.

The Internet has been the most democratizing technology of all time. It has enabled knowledge, ideas, culture and expertise to be transferred between people and places more quickly than ever before.

We've seen entire industries disrupted by the Internet including newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, libraries, travel agents, music, taxis, hotels, the Yellow Pages and more. All of these industries were predicated on controlling proprietary information flows. When the Internet brought the marginal cost of communication and information transfer to $0, the old business models failed and new ones emerged that took advantage of a fundamentally new way to communicate.

What About Non-Information-Based Businesses?

The industries that have been disrupted are, at their core, information-based businesses. The Internet hasn't transformed industrial enterprises and more hands-on industries such as manufacturing, warehousing, energy, healthcare and field service. Operationally, these industries are remarkably similar to their 1960s counterparts: They still rely on airplanes and cars to move workers around to do things -- inspection, audit, diagnostics, repair and service. Why can't people communicate virtually in these scenarios across distances to address the problems at hand? Why hasn't the Internet virtualized communications around real-world, hands-on collaboration?

The Internet hasn't yet disrupted many hands-on industries not because the Internet is deficient or because management is incompetent, but because the Internet end-points have been deficient. The client devices we've been computing with -- desktops, laptops, phones and tablets -- are simply not designed for hands-on jobs; using these devices in hands-on settings is simply ergonomically impractical in most cases.

Enter Smart Glasses: The Internet's Portal to the Physical World

Today, we are finally on the cusp of the industrial Internet. Using smart glasses (like those manufactured by Vuzix, Google and others) as a portal, the Internet will reshape traditional industries by bringing information and expertise where it was previously not possible: into hands-on arenas.

Field service in particular is ripe for disruption. When mission-critical equipment is down, business operations come to a halt. Using glasses, workers will be able to remotely collaborate to diagnose and repair problems. Rather than waiting hours or even days for the right people to arrive, workers will begin collaborating immediately and fix problems and order of magnitude more quickly than ever before.

This problem manifests in all kinds of industries: airline manufacturing (e.g. conveyer belt not working), pharmaceutical manufacturing, contract research organizations (CROs), HVAC refrigeration (industrial, commercial, academic), midstream and downstream oil and gas, and telecom.

Healthcare is also ripe to adopt glasses. Smartphones are remarkably filthy. Why are healthcare workers touching these devices all day while taking care of patients? This seems like a recipe for accelerating the growth of hospital-acquired infections.

There are incredible opportunities ahead. By breaking old assumptions about who can do what and where, entire industries can be reshaped. Just imagine being able to extend the knowledge and insight of your best workers to the periphery of your distributed workforce. Or training your customers on a new machine daily over the course of the first month, instead of 0- and 30-day trainings.

The future of traditional industries look remarkably different -- for the first time in a long time -- through Glass.

The Technology Hype Lifecycle: Google Glass Edition

This post originally featured on Forbes.

Recent announcements from Google about the future of Glass naturally ignited an explosion of commentary in the tech media. For those of us in the Glass at Work world, the news that Glass has “graduated” from Google[x] into a true business unit headed by Tony Fadell is very promising. Yet many outlets’ coverage focused on the end of the Glass Explorer program for consumers, characterizing it as the final death knell for the technology.

So why the disconnect?

Historically, Glass has fallen victim to the technology hype lifecycle, and has done so more strongly than most technologies.

The Technology Hype Lifecycle

There’s a famous graph you’ve probably seen before on the Internet that charts the lifecycle of hype for new technologies.

But in a number of ways, this graph isn’t quite right – specifically, the plateau of productivity isn’t illustrated correctly. Technologies plateau far above the peak of inflated expectations.

Consider Mobile Computing

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Microsoft recognized the potential of mobile devices, so they built Windows Mobile and worked with OEMs to deliver Windows Mobile phones. They were way too early and made some fundamentally poor design decisions. They dreamed big, but failed to deliver on most of them. By 2004, BlackBerry was emerging with phones that could support basic business communications, contacts and calendar functions. Mobile computing was exiting the trough of disillusionment. Google saw this and bought Android in 2005. Rumors suggest Apple started development of the iPhone in late 2004/early 2005. They saw it too.

What no one foresaw was not only how fast the curve would ramp up, but the magnitude of the peak. Even in 2009, no one could have imagined Uber or Tinder or Snapchat, let alone 2007. Even today, we still do not know where the curve will plateau. How could Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter, have seen the potential of mobile computing in 1999 when they committed to building the (failed) future of mobile computing?

The mobile computing hype cycle graph actually looks something more like this.

Who knows which of today’s Series A and Series B stage startups are the next Uber? Kevin Spain from Emergence Capital has recently been evangelizing that today’s enterprise mobility market resembles that of the cloud in 2004. If that’s the case (and given mobile’s incredible penetration today), there is only one inevitable conclusion: mobile is eating everything.

So What About Glass?

Right now, in early 2015, Glass seems to be deep in the trough of disillusionment. The media has been hammering Glass lately, declaring its demise and failure, and before today’s announcement, Google itself was very quiet about Glass’s future. For the record, Glass is not just alive and well, but thriving in professional and enterprise use cases.

But what’s much more important isn’t Glass’s near-miss with death, but its tremendous potential. Glass is today where mobile computing was in 2000: dreams seemingly shattered by early setbacks.

The Glass curve will look a lot more like the mobile curve than the famous generic curve. We are seeing tremendous growth as enterprises adopt Glass to solve painful economic problems that were previously unsolvable.

The Glass growth curve will not mirror the mobile growth curve identically. Glass will peak at a lower point on the hype cycle graph than smartphones did. Smart glasses simply don’t have the upside potential on a per-person basis that smartphones do. Glass competes with smartphones; smartphones compete with laptops. The marginal improvement from always-on-you smartphones to hands-free Glass is material, but not as large as the jump from sitting-only laptops to always-on-you smartphones. Moreover, the best use cases for Glass are for desk-less, hands-on workers; these workers typically earn substantially less than their white collar, desk-bound counterparts. Smartphones amplify the productivity of expensive workers; glasses multiply the productivity of less expensive workers.

Having said that, Glass is still nascent today. We are at the tip of the iceberg. There is tremendous potential to be had in hardware, software and services. Over the next few years, we will see tremendous innovation from startups and giants. Hardware experiences are going to diverge. Software developers will experiment and pioneer new user-interaction models. Cloud services will evolve and take on an increasing percentage of computing. We know nothing, which means we can still do anything.

Watches Are For Consumers, Glasses Are For The Enterprise

This post was originally featured on Wearables.com.

From watches to socks, shirts to wristbands, glasses to rings, wearables promise all kinds of features to make our lives better. Thus, everyone seems to be building new wearables or software to run on them. The hottest sectors for wearables currently are twofold: wristbands such as FitBit, Jawbone, Basis, Microsoft Band, Android Wear devices, and the Apple Watch (collectively dubbed “Smartwatches” for the rest of this post) and smart eyewear such as Google Glass, Meta, Vuzix, and more (henceforth “smart glasses“).

Smartwatches are primarily being adopted by consumers, and smart glasses by the enterprise, and their adoption is driven by widely different reasons. Why the split? 

It’s all about marginal utility

Many consumers react negatively to smart glasses like Google Glass because of two hardware traits: the outward-facing camera and the omnipresent screen. The general argument is that smart glasses come with both a massive invasion of privacy (via the camera), and the ultimate manifestation of our always connected culture (via the screen). Although these sentiments aren’t really valid, the fact that most people hold these opinions will slow adoption in the consumer market for at least a few years.

On the other hand, smartwatches don’t face many socio-cultural challenges. They just need to solve some basic consumer problems to create value and justify their cost. Indeed, there are all kinds of reasons for consumers to purchase a smartwatch, leading to to a burgeoning smartwatch market for consumers. The entrance of Apple entering the market is proof enough that we can expect fast growth in the consumer smartwatch space.

Enterprises, on the other hand, are much more objective buyers. Broadly speaking, they pay for products and services for one of two reasons: to reduce costs or to drive revenue.

What business problems can smartwatches solve that phones can’t?

The use of wearables in corporate wellness initiatives to reduce employer healthcare costs has shown some early success, in terms of ROI.

But in most cases, and particularly when we talk about leveraging wearables to help employees do their primary job, the business case for buying employees smartwatches is pretty thin. Smartwatches are basically an extension of the smartphone, but with additional, strict limitations around screen size and battery. It’s these restrictions that pose a problem for their use in day-to-day work. Though smartwatches are technically hands-free devices, they impose material restrictions on their wearers that will prevent wide-scale adoption for enterprise field applications:

• Smartwatches require the wearer to turn his/her arm, which may not not be possible in certain scenarios.
• Many field workers wear specialized gloves and sleeves that would prevent a watch from functioning correctly.
• Smartwatches can’t display much information because of the small screen.
• Smartwatches lack robust input mechanisms for documentation. 

On the other hand, smart glasses can be used in almost any hands-on situation, and are a perfect fit for mobile field workers:

• Smart glasses can rest comfortably under protective gear, and can be sanitized for use in sterile areas such as operating rooms and semi-conductor fabs (we've verified these use cases and many others at Pristine).
• Smart glasses offer large screens that can render more information
• Voice activation on smart glasses obviates any comprises in hand-based ergonomics
• Most smart glasses have a camera, a great tool for documentation and remote support and assistance.

This isn’t all theory, though.

Gartner predicts a $1B savings in the field service industry by 2017, a prophecy that industry players seem to be fulfilling. Companies from oilfield services to remote assistance are actively and publicly investigating ways to use smart glasses in their business. The manufacturing industry has been particularly quick to realize the value of smart glasses by deploying them on the factory floor.

Consider a production line: in this setting, perhaps more than any other, calculating the economic value of uptime is simple. Just count the number of widgets that roll off the line per day, multiply by revenue per item, and scale for % uptime. When an incremental reduction in downtime can recapture significant amounts of lost revenue, the math of smart glasses is rather simple. If a wearable-equipped onsite staff member can get a conveyor belt or laser etcher up and running quickly with the help of a remote expert, extended downtime is avoided, materially increasing revenue. Plus, the OEM has avoided travel expense for their field engineer, and satisfied their SLA at a dramatically lower cost. In other words, the price of glasses represents a mere fraction of the potential ROI.

At Pristine, we’re driving the very future outlined above. Our customers–spanning more than two dozen organizations across life sciences, field service, industrial equipment, and healthcare –empower their mobile workers to communicate, collaborate, and document in the field, 100% hands free. None of our customers are asking for watches. Why? Because watches don't make the workforce materially more productive.

Welcome To Telehealth Through Google Contacts

A few months ago, Google announced that they are developing contact lenses that can measure glucose levels present in one's tears. For diabetics accustomed to poking themselves multiple times per days, these contacts present an incredible opportunity to improve quality of life.

Now, Google has filed a patent for what I'll call "Google Contacts," which feature tiny cameras embedded in the contact lenses. 

At Pristine, the moment we saw Google Contacts, we began dreaming. Compared to a contact lens, Glass is a primitive tool. Because the screen is removed from one's direct line of site, Glass isn't a practical augmented reality device. Rather, Glass is just a passive device, described by Google as: "there when you need it, and out of sight when you don't."

Google Contacts will open an incredible wave of opportunities in augmented reality and human-computer interaction. With the ability to layer or remove any data from one's visual field, the lines between reality and virtual reality begin to blur.

Google Contacts will also create incredible new opportunities in telehealth. By embedding cameras in contact lenses, Google Contacts will overcome one of the greatest limitations of Glass: the fact that the camera can't mirror movements of the eye. 

Imagine an emergency room physician or nurse, sending the visual product of an exam to a neurologist or other specialists for an immediate consult. The specialist could "draw" on the screen on which s/he is viewing the video stream, and the person wearing the contacts could literally see what the consultant is drawing. The opportunities for telepresence and collaboration are incredible.

Or imagine an emergency responder who, by closely examining an injured or ill person, will automatically beam back detailed visual information to a physician back at the hospital. Or a military medic, beaming back details of an injured soldier from the battlefield to doc based in the rear.

Coupled with breakthroughs in augmented reality, the future for Google Contacts looks incredibly promising.