

Funding Innovation Through Google Glass - g2e
http://www.glasscollective.com/

======
zmmmmm
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.

------
rohamg
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.

------
T-A
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.

~~~
georgemcbay
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.

------
newman314
"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.

~~~
weisser
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.

------
sabalaba
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.

------
shirazi
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.

