The post social age is not the age built after the age of social media, it’s the age built on top of social media.
For more about Tac Anderson, (and my disclosures) go here.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Where are the fashion brands in wearable computing?
This is an interesting article not only because it brought my attention to a new “smart glasses” player, Vuzix, but because of the perspective the author writes in.
If either of these products catch on, it looks like we’re destined to a future with droid parts on our faces, as you can see above in Vizux’s version and to the right with Google’s Project Glass creation. Even on pretty women that look is straight out of the Stars Wars sequels that haven’t been made yet. Maybe one day android fashions will be in and computer face accessories will separate the hip from the square. But it doesn’t look like that will happen any time too soon.
She obviously thinks smart glasses are dorky. And she’s probably right - for now.
We know that Google Glasses were displayed as part of some NY fashion show, but where are the fashion brands when it comes to wearable computing?
The one and great example we have is Nike. While some may call them more of an athletic clothing brand than a pure fashion brand, they’re close enough for me.
I imagine that the fashion brands will come out when the products are already on the market and they can just add their name and design aesthetics to the tech, but I think they’re missing out.
Not even that many tech companies have jumped on wearable computing. Apple with their strong design ethic and their practically, ready made, iPod Nano, have stepped away from wearable computing with the Nano’s latest redesign.
Where are the watch makers and the glasses designers and the other bold, tech savvy clothing companies? Fossil, made an early effort but then chickened out. Come on fashion world, help us out.
Cyborgs survey the Diane von Furstenberg catwalk.
img src: Telegraphc.f. my earlier post, One step down the catwalk for Google Glass; a giant leap for branding?
Amateur-Hacker-Activists (AHAs)
There’s so much I find fascinating about this article:
- How/Why does Google keep doing crap like this and they keep thinking it’s okay? I’m really starting to question their definition of ethical.
- I love the amateur-hacker-activist (AHAs ?) part of this. These AHAs really need an organization that they can work under and that can more readily promote and publish their findings. Maybe it exists and I just don’t realize it.
Emphasis is mine:
Jonathan Mayer had a hunch.
A gifted computer scientist, Mayer suspected that online advertisers might be getting around browser settings that are designed to block tracking devices known as cookies. If his instinct was right, advertisers were following people as they moved from one website to another even though their browsers were configured to prevent this sort of digital shadowing. Working long hours at his office,Mayer ran a series of clever tests in which he purchased ads that acted as sniffers for the sort of unauthorized cookies he was looking for. He hit the jackpot, unearthing one of the biggest privacy scandals of the past year: Google was secretly planting cookies on a vast number of iPhone browsers. Mayer thinks millions of iPhones were targeted by Google.
This is precisely the type of privacy violation the Federal Trade Commission aims to protect consumers from, and Google, which claims the cookies were not planted in an unethical way, now reportedly faces a fine of more than $10 million. But the FTC didn’t discover the violation. Mayer is a 25-year-old student working on law and computer science degrees at Stanford University. He shoehorned his sleuthing between classes and homework, working from an office he shares in the Gates Computer Science Building with students from New Zealand and Hong Kong. He doesn’t get paid for his work and he doesn’t get much rest.
If it seems odd that a federal regulator was scooped by a sleep-deprived student, get used to it, because the federal government is often the last to know about digital invasions of your privacy.
Google Glass Team: 'Wearable Computing Will Be the Norm'
This is the one piece of tech most intruging to me right now. I think it will “kill” the tablet, at least the same way the tablet is killing the PC.
Wired: What was your thinking when you embarked on the project, and how did that thinking evolve?
Parviz: We did look at many, many different possibilities early on. One of the things that we looked at was very immersive AR [Augmented Reality] environments — how much that would allow people to do, how much could come between you and the physical world, and how much that can be distractive. Over time we really found that particular picture less and less compelling. As we used the device ourselves, what became more compelling to use was a type of technology that doesn’t come between you and the physical world. So you do what you normally do but when you want to access it, it’s immediately relevant — it can help you do something, it would help you connect to other people with images or video, or it would help you get a snippet of information very quickly. So we decided that having the technology out of the way is much, much more compelling than immersive AR, at least at this time.
To be released sometime next year? But I wonder if it really will be? Still, if they’re shooting for next year you have to figure they’ll be out by 2014 at the latest.
