GlassUp plans a sexier, cheaper take on Google Glass

A team of Italian designers has plans for a simpler, cheaper, and more stylish take on Google Glass. The GlassUp team announced Tuesday that it is raising money to produce its Glass competitor.
GlassUp, an IndieGogo project seeking to raise $150,000 to take its augmented eyewear to production, says that the team showed off its first prototype in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. The team hopes to deliver its first production models by February 2014 for an estimated price of $299, it said.
According to Francesco Giartosio, GlassUps’ chief executive, one of the chief differences between Google Glass and the GlassUp eyewear will be in how the device displays data; instead of projecting information onto the edge of the glass from an offset projector, GlassUp will use a dedicated lens embedded in the glass itself.
That will allows GlassUp to overlay monochromatic text directly “ahead” of the user’s eye, which Giartosio said was more ergonomic. GlassUp’s display has a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels.

GlassUpWhat life is like looking through GlassUp’s glasses.
With Google, “you have to lift up your eyes,” Giartosio said. “”It’s not comfortable and can’t be good for you continuously.” GlassUp weighs about 1.5 ounces, he said, with a battery life of 150 hours of standby time and 8 hours of normal usage.
GlassUp is just one of a number of companies vying to be the next big thing in “wearable computing,” with the argument being that consumers will eventually grow too lazy to haul their smartphone out of their pocket. Instead, a number of Google Glass competitors have developed wrist-mounted devices including the Pebble or the rumored Apple iWatch to provide glanceable information.
But while Glass is a standalone device, GlassUp characterizes its glasses as “basically a second screen output for your devices,”  that connect via Bluetooth to your phone or tablet.
As such, it will be “read only,” only able to receive information—unlike Glass, which can be used to send information back and forth. GlassUp will also forego voice input—something that will arrive in a future generation, according to Giartosio—and there won’t be a camera included for recording photos and video, either. However, sensors including an accelerometer, compass, ambient light sensor, and a precision altimeter are included.
The GlassUp glasses include a touchpad on the right side of the eyewear, which GlassUp says will support gestures such as swiping, as a means to avoid tapping on your phone all the time.

GlassUp
The information that GlassUp displays will be dependent on what sort of apps that you download. Giartosio says that GlassUp will develop five to ten apps on its own, and that 100 developers are already hoping to take a crack at GlassUp with their own apps.
The company envisions GlassUp projecting messages, tweets, and real-time directions on the screen, overlaying the “real world” that’s visible though the glasses. However, it’s difficult to see how apps that showed real-time translations of movies would work with GlassUp, as it lacks both a camera and audio sensors.
However, while Google has refined its industrial design, Giartosio says that GlassUp is located in northern Italy—right smack in the middle of eyeglass designers like Luxottica, Safilo, Marcolin, De Rigo, who design eyeglass brands like Ray-Ban, Oakley and others. The company will develop two models, a basic and a “sporty” model.

”People are waiting for this,” Giartosio said. Are they? Or will they instead buy Google Glass, when it reportedly goes on sale this fall? Time will tell.  

Bits Blog: With Big Data, Fail Cheaper, Fail Better

Kim Steele for The New York Times More than big computers or huge databases, diversity of information is at the heart of what is called big data.
There are lots of reasons for the current boom (some would say bubble) in data, including cheap computing, sensors everywhere and lots of new algorithms.

To all of those, perhaps we should add the rising likelihood of failure, both the expensive kind and the cheap kind.

The expensive kind is when your business or employer gets wiped out. That is happening with greater frequency. According to Richard N. Foster of Yale University, the average tenure of a company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 is now about 16 years, down from 60 years in 1959.

“The duration of your working life is now almost certainly greater than the lifespan of a company,” said Alistair Croll, an entrepreneur and author. “That makes everyone more willing to accept that they will be disrupted.” When people know there are reasons to think their business will be blown up by new market developments, he said, they’re more likely to seek data that helps them respond.
 Alistair Croll, author of “Lean Analytics.”
Mr. Croll is the author of the book “Lean Analytics,” which is about how companies, and start-ups in particular, can better focus on change by working with lots of different data sources.

More than big computers or huge databases, diversity of information is at the heart of what is called big data. That term may be somewhat hyped, but there is no doubt that analysis of standardized information is becoming the norm in more of our lives, from personal medicine to real-time analytics of big industrial machines.

It is also cheaper to take risks and fail, both for start-ups and corporate divisions. Many costs that existed even a decade ago have fallen sharply. Computer hardware and software are now rented through cloud computing, social media is a proxy for much of marketing and a burgeoning number of business applications are sold cheaply in Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS stores.

“When things like that happen,” Mr. Croll says, “companies focus less on costs, and more on experimentation about what is going to make their original idea work. There is more desire to experiment.”

Experimentation, of course, involves a lot of failure, as failure is where most learning takes place. Data around the failures of others are collected and studied as part of the overall process now. Data on failure is cheaper to create, and cheaper to come by. That is another way of saying that people are more likely to make new and interesting mistakes, instead of the same old ones, which is probably a good thing.

One big result of this failure-driven world, Mr. Croll says, is that organizational leadership is changing toward a more structured learning environment. “In the past, a leader was someone who could get you to do stuff in the absence of information,” he says. “Now it’s the person who can ask the best question about what’s going on, and find an answer.”

Farmington residents to see cheaper disposal costs under new contract

FARMINGTON — Residents will save a bit of money on garbage disposal and recycling in the coming year, thanks to a new contract city leaders are finalizing with a local waste hauler.

The city council voted Tuesday to accept a new five-year contract with Robinson Waste of Layton, following a request for proposal earlier this year that generated four bids. The contract will lower the rate for the first garbage can from $3.98 a month for residents to $3.85, while the cost for a second can will remain at $1.75. The new contract will also lower the monthly cost for recycling from $2.72 per residence to $1.93 per residence.

Some of the language on the new pact is still being finalized, so final approval of the contract is expected to take place at an upcoming meeting, said City Manager Dave Millheim.

Robinson has been the city’s waste hauler for the past nine years, but city leaders felt it was important to generate a request for proposal to make sure their costs were in line with the market.

Mayor Scott Harbertson and Millheim both praised Robinson for attention to detail and service.

“We’re very happy Robinson came in on the bid. From a management perspective, we get almost no calls,” Millheim said.

Harbertson also noted the company pays attention to detail in dealing with curbside waste and customer concerns.