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So what is Google Glass? It's the next in a great long line of different technologies
that we've had to deal with in our businesses and in our
home environment. If you think about where we've come from, we've come from mainframes
running companies and corporations, a world market of five, we had the mini computers
and people in the mini computer world said there'll never be a need for personal
computers in homes,
we had personal computers and laptops and tablets and smartphones
and we've now converged around wearable computing, so headborne devices and
head-up displays and that's what
we've got with Google Glass, it's a single lens where we get overlaid information
about our environment, or movies we're watching,
it's our PC screen, if you like, in our eye. And the critical thing is it's
always on,
always available, always relevant to where we are and more to the point, its always
a camera that can be on, always a video camera
that can be on, so we're absorbing vast amounts of information,
collecting information, analysing it, all the time. What can you do with Google Glass?
What can you do with these head-up display glasses?
Apart from being a little bit like fighter pilots,
or Marines in battlefields, they've been using this technology for a long
time, so it's well understood, well proven,
really it's all about productivity. If you look at the tools that we've taken
on board massively,
they're tools that make our lives more productive, more efficient, more effective
and that tips over very nicely into our business world.
So in terms of how much more can we get done in any one day,
we've become increasingly productive from our handheld devices,
which are never away from us, and we've now got devices that are always going to be
with us and on,
absorbing information, making us more insightful about the surroundings or what
we're looking at.
So, what's it going to do? It'll allow us to be more productive, more
spontaneous, better informed about our
environment and, as a consequence, become more productive employees, more
productive businessmen.
More particularly, Google Glass will invariably allow us to be more collaborative,
more cooperative with other people,
other organisations, even other avatars and other computer systems.
Simply put, apart from just the general terms of productivity, we'll be able to
learn better, we'll be learning in a more interactive environment,
we'll be collaborating with people around the world more interactively, more
intimately even
and more available to people around the world. That may be horrific for some people
to think about, moving on from
the BlackBerry, the red button tells us there's something needing attention,
if we're wearing it, it'll blink in our eyes. All these things are controllable.
But really what it will do is allow us to have different business models. If you're in retail,
you'll be putting on offers that people can see through their Glass at any moment in time
in the store. As people move around and
geo-positioning systems become more accurate, as I look at different
items
from different positions, I'll get a different perspective of
the price, the performance, of what those goods are like
to use, shown on my Glass as I move along down the retail experience.
Equally, in restaurants, I can look and choose my food
simply by looking at different aspects of the menu and making choices through sound,
or, again, by pointing or by using my glasses.
So, the whole business model will change. The way we interact with our environment,
the way we interact with each other, the way we interact with processes for
buying and selecting and learning and teaching
and exploring our world is going to change quite dramatically. So finally, what can we do about
it today? Well, number one, let's think about it.
Invariably, when we get a new technology, we do different things,
and then we learn to do things differently, and that's the whole point.
We need to learn to
look at the opportunity of what it really allows us to do
in our business, in our sector, our market and the sort of operation that you're running.
What could you genuinely do differently as a consequence of this type of device?
Our natural reaction is to ban it. Like social media, we ban it from the
workplace, then we work out, actually, it's essential.
Laptops, we made people sit at the same desk and work nine to five, then we realise they
could be mobile.
Tablets, we are coming to grips with what does it really mean to
to operate with tablets as opposed to fixed computers.
So, it takes us a long time to work out the true benefit of new technologies.
Why don't we just sit back, take a slightly longer run up at it. These things are
coming at us.
Maybe price point two, four hundred dollars, somewhere around there,
they're an experiment right now,
they're gonna come out, they're gonna be important, they're gonna make a difference.
Our consumers are going to use them, our smart employees are going to want to use them,
we'll want to use them. Or maybe not.
But one way or another, we're going to have to get used to this new technology. It's here to stay.