Technology Reviews | Donato Diorio

My First Month with Google Glass

What was I thinking? Spend $1500 on wearable technology that is not quite ready? The same desire that made me get the first Apple 1, the first PC, the first iPhone, Android (Gphone back then) and many other firsts. When you want to understand where technology is going, you can’t live it from afar you must immerse yourself.

There are 2 parts of the Glass experience: (1) How others react to you and (2) what you experience

How others react

This is funny, top questions

Are you recording me now?
Did you take my picture?
How do they work?
Can I try them on?
How do I get a pair
Can you see through my clothes?

From the questions, I could tell people are a bit confused. There has been some negative press. “Glassholes” wearing Glass into a bar and acting inappropriate. These are probably the same people who you would not want to be around anyway. I think this was a mistake by Google. The first set of people that got Glass were people that liked gadgets and had money to afford it. They should have made the selection more stringent; people who actually wanted to build something on the Glass.

My Glass Experience

After the first day, I had buyers remorse. After the second day I was on the fence. By day three, I was seeing all sorts of new applications that could be built on the Glass platform. Fun.

Today, I drive, email, record videos, take pictures, attend conferences and generally have fun with Glass. The battery life is short. I always travel with the charging cable.

Today is the day that Google is selling Glass to everyone (I was on an 18 month waiting list). It will be interesting to see how wider adoption will impact the platform, public acceptance and applications available.

As an experiment, the next person that asks me if I can see through their clothes with Glass, I am going to do my best to say “yes” with a straight face.

It’s called Telepresence

Cisco has a cool new system for teleconferencing. It’s called telepresence. This is the next evolution in web conferencing with the idea to make you feel like you are really in the room with multiple people from remote locations. Cameras are lined up in such a way that it appears as you’ve got eye contact with the person in the remote location.

I was curious about the topic so I did a few search engine queries. Almost everything was about Cisco, I had to dive deep to find some variety. Google was only giving me the popular side of the story. I needed to dig deeper.

Using Broadlook’s Market Mapper tool. I was able to find several vendors that have telepresence offerings. Time to do search: 5 minutes. Pages I would have had to weed through on Google: over 3000 (would need 3 separate queries).

Here is a partial list.

Company	Web Page
FaceToFaceMeeting Telanetix Remote Meeting Technologies, LLC BrightCom, Inc. IVCi, LLC All Polycomm Cisco Haivision Tandberg HP Glowpoint	http://www.facetofacemeeting.com/ http://www.telanetix.com/ http://www.rmtcentral.com/ http://www.brightcom.com/ http://www.ivci.com/ http://www.polycom.com/ http://www.cisco.com/ http://www.haivision.com/ http://www.tandberg.com/ http://www.hp.com/ http://www.glowpoint.com/

What I learned in 5 minutes is that Cisco is NOT the inventor of the technology and a closer look should be given to companies that were the poineers like Telnetix. Good research yields results that the popularity ranking algorythms of the search engines pass over. Cisco is big and popular. So mob mentality rules with all the blogs and posts about Cisco’s offering. If you want the mob version of a topic, use Google. If you want something that people, not algorthms control, try wikipedia. If you want to take research into your hands based on your decisions, check out Broadlook.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepresence