Glass main reactions: terrified, meh and ecstatic

As Google reveals their new Glass device it becomes clear that it generates a very polarized spectrum of reactions. Without counting those that have no idea what it is and don't even care to know, which we'll call the meh reaction group, there's two main super extreme reactions groups. Most people who care about Glass are either completely terrified (you could say paranoid, but I won't say it myself) or over the top ecstatic (you could say obsessed but I will only say that about myself).

One thing that always helps me understand processes and the future is looking at graphics, finding patterns that repeat themselves and can shed some light when speculating.

In particular, one of the graphics that helped me understand the Glass reactions is to bring in the curve that technology adoption describes time over time:


Nobody argues with this adoption curve, although some people like Seth Godin argue that the curve is changing as marketers push products faster and stronger into the market, and as consumers get used to this cycle, as I discuss on this previous post.

So, let's analyze in detail the Technology Adoption Lifecycle Graphic and see how it can shed light about Glass reactions and adoption. 

1. The first segment to adopt a new technology are the Innovators. In the case of Glass these are the Glass Explorers, Glass Pioneers like me and everybody that is ecstatic (and yes maybe obsessed) about the idea of wearing Glass even if they have to pay $1,500 (which is well above the expected consumer price) to get them early.

2. The next wave of adopters after the innovators are the Early Adopters. These will be in Glass case the first people that will go to the stores and buy Glass when it's released for consumers. The Early Adopters are a very special segment, because at some point within this group something drastic can happen, something that has the power of start a chain reaction and there is no way back on the adoption of the technology, all the rest of the curve will be an expected unavoidable process. Once "The Chasm" is crossed the curve will continue all the way until the end for a particular tech. This "Crossing the Chasm" concept was introduced and studied by Geoffrey A. Moore. The causes for this process are probably rooted in network scaling, economy and effects that have been also very well studied on this little great book "Linked: How everything is connected to everything else and what it means?". The possible Early Adopters for Glass are at this point probably just observing with some level of interest and curiosity but are not betting their time and money on it yet. Great to have Early Adopters are celebrities and other trend setters, so we can expect and we're seeing a big focus on them at the early stages.

3. The big majority of technology adopters will join the technology lifecycle as "Early Majority". At this point, the product has proven itself to the market, the product has achieved market fit and the majority of the users are aware of this technology and easily join the now super obvious wave. The Early majority right now in the Glass scenario is probably ranging from mildly interested to meh about Glass.

4. The Late Majority is a natural extension of the Early Majority, these are the people that, even if they denied it for years, very recently realized that they need a smartphone and have one. They watched with some level of fear the process as it went along and kept their reserves up until very late. In the case of Glass, the Late Majority first reaction to Glass is somewhere between "I don't need this s..." to "this is scary!".

5. The Laggards are the last group to adopt a technology. In today's world, on the cellphones parallelism, they are the ones that reluctantly adopted a cellphone, after swearing they would never use or need one, and now still have those old cellphones and they claim they're perfectly fine for them, it's all they need. This group is in the case of Glass either terrified or just plain paranoid, and many of them are actively engaging on activism as in "we need to control when/where it can be used" or more like "we have to stop this!".

What can we conclude after doing this analysis?

The adoption curve is following it's natural course as expected and everybody is right on their role:

• Innovators building, seizing the opportunities and evangelizing for Glass
• Laggards actively fearfully opposing the development and adoption of Glass
• and the meh ... well, the meh are not paying much attention right now

All we see are the two extremes of the lifecycle curve, the innnovators and the laggards and if you don't know what's in the middle you could lose perspective and think 50% of the people will love it and 50% will hate it, but it's only the active involved participants at this time and it should change as it flows through the technology adoption lifecycle.

Now, at least to me, everything is starting to make a lot of sense and I can really understand better the scared reactions that are the most foreign to my mindset.

What Glass will continue to do is focus on the Innovators and Early Adopters while leaving the Early and Early Majority open and mildly interested. Once Early Adopters help cross The Chasm there is no looking back.

Augmented Reality vs Intelligence Augmentation

A G+ post from Eric Schrag regarding Augmented Reality, reminded me of an old post I wrote in 2006 pondering Artificial Intelligence vs Intelligence Augmentation. He's question was sparkled when reading my post on Google Paving the Road for Glass.

The question of Intelligence Augmentation (IA) vs Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now a non question, as we see clearly most every new innovation that produces Intelligence Augmentation involves Artificial Intelligence in the form of machine learning, voice or image recognition, etc.

The question there that could remain is: Will in the long term AI surpass IA and become an independent thing that stops serving humans and starts serving its own purpose. I'm not going to go there ... it's too futuristic and it would be a good subject for maybe a long philosophical conversation at the end of a long night ...

Back to Augmented Reality (AR), and Eric's question: Is AR the future we want in products such as Google Glass?

I believe the answer is for the most part the next short term phase of what's coming is Intelligence Augmentation and not so much Augmented Reality.

Intelligence Augmentation is using technology to augment our human capacities in areas such as:

1. extended memory - photo, video, voice and text storing and retrieving by processes much like the semantic free association that happens naturally on our brains.
2. senses, with exo-sensors that are quantified, verifiable, expanding beyond our current sensing capabilities (such as sensors that measure air gas composition and alert for CO, etc).
3. connectivity, allowing us to connect to each other in synchronous as well as asynchronous ways, beyond space and time.
4. context information accessing, information comes to me when I need it, versus me having to search for it (a la Google Now).
5. statistical data - tapping into the anonymous statistics and big data to find trends, patterns and learn (a great example is Google Translation)

I can see particular applications in which AR with specialized visors/HUDs would be possible and would actually make sense. There are glasses such as the I/O Recon Snowboarding companion:

Smith Recon Video from smith optics on Vimeo.

I'm sure there's many other specific applications that will make a lot of sense to use Augmented Reality or even Virtual Reality such as Oculus:

Oculus Rift: Step Into the Game from Oculus VR on Vimeo.

Technology as Kevin Kelly explains on his awesome book "What Technology Wants?" doesn't really die, even ancient technologies stay in pockets. I am a firm believer on every technology on its own place. Give me a tablet to read news/books, a keyboard to type, a big screen to code, a TV to watch a movie, etc. There's room for AI, IA, AR and VR, all on it's own time and space.

In the particular case of AR, it will be harder to do it right than generalized IA, so I expect to see more IA on cellphones, watches and visors before we see any AR done right. If you ask me on the long term though will we be there some day? I believe we will. If you ask me, is Google Glass the right technology to make AR done right happen ... everything indicates it was not designed to do that and for the most part it won't.

Time to mass market accelerating

Really? Walking into a Costco store and seeing the Drone 2.0 is really surprising. I saw this device for the first time less than six month ago, and it's already at Costco by Christmas!












The same happened with the belkin wemo that allows you to control any device plugged into an electrical outlet from your cellphone. I heard about it at a Quantified Self meetup and a few days later it was at Costco.

It used to be a long time between the time I heard of a new tech or gadget for the first time and the time your average non-tech neighbor (or your mom) would talk about it. But that's on the past! Nowadays, your parents will talk to you about the next new thing or startup acquisition before you even read it on the news.




The traditional adoption curve used to look something like the image on the left, going from the innovators in green, to the early adopters in black, early majority in orange, followed by the late majority and finally the laggards (those people always swore they would never use cellphones but know have one and they swore they would not use smartphones but they will be using one very soon).

According to Seth Godin the bell curve is moving, and he proposes a graph that looks more like this, with a huge push by the market and media to get "earlier early adopters".

I'm not completely sure the curve is really deforming as in the image above or if it's just being accelerated and compressed over time. Something more like the image to the left.


In any case, it's amazing to see how fast products and apps are pushed into the market, as well as how fast people "get" this products and market and adopt them.

So, how do you remain cool during these new fast paced times?

Our New Digital Brain - Resistance is futile

I had the privilege of being a speaker at the TEDxTemecula event October 13th, 2012.

My original idea was to address the future of digital with pervading sensors, context all around us and bionic augmentation of our minds and bodies.

During the process of preparing the talk, one night, in the spirit of TED I opened my mind to the question of "What could be an idea worth spreading, that is unique, valuable and can potentially change the world?".

In the morning I woke up with one image in my mind. It was an image with the evolutionary layers of our human brain, and the connection that we are witnessing an amazing time in the history of humanity: the development of our New Digital Brain.

Image credit: VLADGRIN/Shutterstock + Mauro Canziani

Here's the talk:



Great news keep pouring regarding hardware and software improvements in connecting directly with sensors implanted on our brains. Stanford University just published improvements to their BrainGate2 devices particularly on the software algorithm that drastically improved the speed for cursor tracking with their brain implant on chimpanzees.

I expect to see sensors and wearable devices to become the super glue that bring the whole planet alive and super connected in ways we never thought possible before.

I love to hear the reactions which range radically from "wow! supercool!" to "this is scary!" and "I don't want to give out my privacy!" (angry tone).

Let me know what your reaction was!

The magic of NFC

When we started playing with betterize.it - a fun new way to a better you, one new habit at a time - we thought of Near Field Communication (NFC) as one of the technologies that would make tracking things done (or not done) super easy.

After researching a bit, we got our tags kit, built a simple habit/goal tracking android app (new android phones come with an NFC reader included) with the help of Genexus and we headed to the real test: we started to be the guinea pigs.

Personally, I had a few things I wanted to track:

1. My am and pm meditation. My goal was to do a simple mantra repeating meditation at least once day for 15 to 20 minutes, and ideally twice a day. I tagged one of the NFC stickers by my little Buddha statue right behind my meditation space.










2. I wanted to try and drink more water daily, I measured my bottle I water refill all day long and it was 16 fl oz. I attached a little NFC tag to my bottle.


3. With flossing my goal was to be more consistent on at least one daily floss, even when I wasn't too far away of my goal, at this time it was NFC euphoria, so I needed more places to stick my NFC tags!



After programming all the tags with urls matching each of the habits the experiment begun.

What I discovered, surprised me a bit! Not only I was doing the NFC checkins (as betterize.it calls them) very often without almost missing any events, but I was enjoying doing them. I couldn't wait to hear the next "ta-da!!" that the system did every time it read a tag successfully. It was like I found an extra unexpected reward on getting things done.

Here's a 18 seconds vid showing how NFC works for habit/goals checkins:



NFC is pure magic! Seamless, frictionless as could be, we were increasingly excited. We were ready to start our kickstarter project and ask the people: do you dig this NFC habit improvement thing?

There was one problem though, and it was not minor. iPhone did not have an NFC reader. We hoped for the iPhone 5 to include a reader. I mean, it had to include a reader! How could they miss out on this party? But, iPhone 5 came out and the NFC was not a part of it ...

Recently, my friend Jun point me on the direction of these guys:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flomio/flojack-nfc-for-ipad-and-iphone

At the time I wrote this, they were very close to reaching their goal, and in the process they went from a great idea with bad design to a great cover approach design that made them into a winner. They expect to deliver their NFC reader cover for iPhone 4/4s around March 2013.

A world of possibilities is coming, with everybody on the same page regarding NFC, magic will happen all over with their chance of becoming mainstream. Replacing paper tickets, logins to systems, alive ads, posters in the streets, stadiums that give you media, and all the other good things people will think about when this starts being a reality. 

Google paving the road for Glass

Back in July, when I had the privilege to be part of bringing the Full Swing Simulator to the Google IO party I had the chance to attend Google IO as well (Yes, the pic on the left is Sergey playing golf on our simulator at the party). It was an amazing coincidence as I attempted to get tickets when registration opened, but after hitting retry a million times, I couldn't get one.

With 6,000 other people in the room, I witnessed live as skydivers jumped from a plane to land on the roof of the Moscone Convention Center while transmitting everything from their Google Glasses.
It was a historic moment!

For us seekers of all tetchy cool new devices and apps, it was the beginning of a new chapter. But, many people I talked to at the event, were completely unimpressed by all of it. They were saying things like: 

"You can't really do much with those glasses"
"They didn't show nothing really cool"

I guess, part of being on the innovators side of the wave, is to be able like Paul Graham says to '"Live in the future, then build what's missing." or "Live in the future, then build what's interesting". You have to be able to look a new technology and imagine a future world in which everybody adopted this technology and ask yourself "What's possible?".

After the keynote, I was super excited to re-explore every bit of information we got at the keynote and see it through the brand new Glasses.

So, when they were presenting features of browser synchronization, I was thinking:
"Perfect, I have a page on my desktop or cell and I send it to my Glasses."

And as I was exploring Google Now on my brand new Nexus 7 tablet, and it would show the weather at San Francisco for the day and the time in current traffic to go back to my hotel. I was thinking:
"Voila! Google Now notifications popping up on my Glasses".

And the effect of seeing the road to Glasses being paved all the way to its launching kept going. As I enabled Google Goggles on my android camera app, I could see:
"There we go! Automatic notifications of relevant information triggered by visuals, such as barcodes, product identification." Just imagine the future, faces, places, business, objects .. how exiting!

Being ADD all my life I missed all the action when it just happened in front of my eyes. The thought of having a little button on my Glasses that will allow me to DVR to the last 30 seconds and play back or upload to a server the last 30 seconds plus the next 30 ones just makes me high.

And what about seeing a face and having info popup on your field of vision? I know I know them but who are they??? Problem solved! With Glasses, a simple notification can overlay contact information, last time I saw them, how and when I met them, etc. Very cool!

So, when you live in the future you can imagine going from Glasses to Contacts and produce videos like this one:



Project Glasses is just the beginning to restoring and expanding our biological body and brain with our new digital body and brain. Fun times lie ahead!

Of course there will be issues, we'll have to deal with the noise that is being generated massively by all of us and our sensors. We'll have to deal with attention/distraction management. We'll have to design awesome interfaces (maybe on the cellphone) that will talk to Glasses in meaningful ways. 

We'll work our way through all of the obstacles, like we did with many other technologies before, because of the value Glasses (and other wearable context aware devices) will deliver.

Self-Tracking is fun!

The image to my left shows the perils of one of my shortest nights. The red is actually awake time, so it doesn't count much as far as to sleep. It shows I got some light sleep represented by the gray bars, a bit of deep sleep with the dark green bars and very little REM sleep as shown by the light green bars.

This device is addictive! Every morning as I wake up I can't wait to see how my night went on the inside of my brain. In addition, My zeo app gives you a sleep score or what they call ZQ, which for my last night (ZQ: 48/100) was pretty poor, way below my average. The ZQ is a secret sauce mix that gives you a seemingly accurate idea of how your night actually went. It has been very predictive/descriptive of how my nights go (in Zeo's own words).








Even if I have to wear this band every night (I just can't imagine skipping a night and it's been 3+ months so far) I don't even want to think about how I would feel in the am if my data is not there for me. Checking my Zeo App became the very first thing I do every morning when I wake up. But of course, if someone were to tell me that it was like this, before I tried it ... I would have been skeptic too ...



Another device I'm carrying with me everyday is my Fitbit Ultra.

Fitbit, depending on the exact version, tracks your steps, mileage, calories burn (estimated) and elevation climb.
I probably not proud of this, but as you can see on the right pic, I found out that Haloween night was my busiest day for November and my only day I surpassed the suggested goal of 10,000 steps. A lot to improve there I guess ... My relationship with fitbit is different than with the zeo. I almost never look at my fitbit stats, I just wear it almost every day and I let it do its thing. I am aware that it is tracking and I don't like it when I forget to wear it, I have a minimum discomfort of no-tracking, but I don't have a big dependency or goal with it at the time.



I also have a Withings scale, which is not necessarily my favorite device, it is more like my scary device, but it always tells me "the truth" so it's valuable. And it syncs wireless which is awesome and completely pain free.
A few seconds ago, I downloaded the Withings Companion App and will see if it motivates me futher.


For now I just have fun with these sensors, I enjoy peeking into the future and getting a glimpse of how it'll be when sensors conquer things and the world at large (which has been known as the Internet of Things).

Besides goal setting in relation to the tracking, most of us trackers hope that the data might become valuable as new applications provide fun visualizations, extract meaningful relationships and gamify in a way that is interesting or cool in some way.