Funding Innovation Through Google Glass | Hacker News Reader

Funding Innovation Through Google Glass

glasscollective.com

50 pointsg2e9 comments

It's interesting to see how Google is approaching this, very different to some of their other efforts. The active recruiting of developers, strict guidelines for apps, deliberate seeding of journalists and enthusiasts with advanced access, and now this - seeding the venture capital market too (and I bet Google hopes what really happens is they start a race among VCs to fund Glass projects).

If you compare to other launches where they just lobbed things out there at launch this seems very deliberate, planned and cognizant of the challenges Glass faces in getting off the ground. It will be very interesting to see how it works out.

this is cool (and a nice endorsement), but our belief is that true killer applications will be multi-platform (which may include Glass's future competitors). We see Glass as a natural extension of the mobile web, not a closed garden by itself. Glass applications need to be able to tie into the lives we (and our friends) are already living. Given the adoption curve of most (non-Apple) tech gadgets, it's difficult to see Glass-only applications achieving sustainable revenue for their creators, which in turn makes it difficult to see this Glass fund as anything other than outsourced R&D - as in "let's have devs throw spaghetti at the wall and buy the ones that stick". Not much wrong with that, I just didn't think it was a16z's style. don't get me wrong: we love Glass, are spec'ing out multiple Glass-ready projects, and can't wait to get our hands on our dev units, but we believe sustainable businesses must be built on more than one pillar. If you decide to take the myopic approach, just be aware that your startup becomes but one roll in someone else's roulette game.

Not much info on that page, except for the link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpWmGX55a40 Watching it now. It gets interesting at 16:30. By the looks of it, developers won't get direct access to the hardware; everything will go through a Google-hosted cloud API.

I've mostly always handwaved away concerns people had about Google and privacy as being overblown, and I think the idea behind Glass is pretty cool and potentially limitlessly useful, but the privacy implications of a world where Glass-users are common and all data goes through a single entity are staggering. Particularly since they will impact you even if you aren't explicitly opted in (just being seen/scanned by someone who is wearing the device potentially involves you in it).

A world with even just a fraction of a percent of people actively wearing the devices but with all that real-world data streaming back to The Goog in real-time would make Batman's little cell-phone network scanning thing in The Dark Knight look absolutely quaint in comparison.

"We don’t publish independent contact information for the Glass Collective because we’ve learned that it’s difficult to sort through the noise that comes through an open email alias. Good opportunities get buried and we miss them."

Sounds like an opportunity for someone to solve this problem.

No, because the commonly held belief of many investors is that entrepreneurs need to be savvy to succeed and an example of that would be figuring out how to reach them either, "directly, or through our friends and associates," with the latter usually being the preferred.

I could see how that might be much more difficult for startups based outside of the United States but since they are currently looking to invest domestically this is a pretty good method of filtering.

isn't not publishing contact info. a good enough solution?

There is this belief that missed opportunities are the end of the world. They are far from it.

Looking forward to seeing what everybody does with this. We've been trying to build mobile apps with this in mind since we first heard the whispers about "Google's Secret Augmented Reality Glasses Project". It's amazing to see how far things have come since then.

Google Glass will bring about an interesting UI challenge for designers. Seeing VCs step forward for a new technology is no surprise, especially when we're talking about Google.

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