The world through the Glass

Google Glass is a phenomenal attempt to create a device that blurs the interface between a human and a machine. I believe this is a first step towards the complete integration, and a scary one too. The Glass as advertised by Google is an important step in the evolution of the human species, where the humans start accepting augmentation with machines as a natural progression. However, it brings out an important point on how Google as a company wants to invade in the private and personal space of each user. Google is primarily an Advertisement based company. It survives and thrives on people, you and me, using its powerful search engine, and other plethora of tools to play with information. This includes searching, recording, authoring, viewing and sharing. An important part of this engagement between the human and Google is the need for a consumption device. This engagement allows Google to profile the user, provide targeted advertisements and information. But a key problem with the engagement is that a user needs to be in interaction with the interface. A device fills the gap except places where the user does not intent to involve it. This may include the free time that we all have including interacting with our families, pursuing our hobbies, sharing love and experience for the first time etc. All this represent the pure human to human interaction. A machine in the form of a mobile phone, laptop, tablet is seen as an intrusion in these type of interactions, until Google Glass arrived.
The Glass opens up tremendous opportunity for Google to perceive the behaviour of each user in far detail than possible now.  This means, an unprecedented access to more of our human - to - human time. When the interface becomes invisible as in the Glass, there is very little a user can do to decide on the appropriateness of the content that gets communicated and shared. The interface is becoming a part of our real self. I will not be surprised if when using the Glass and playing a game of tennis, my Glass realises that I am poor in the sport, and superimpose training videos on my retina followed with advertisements of training institutes.
This is scary thought, but one whose time has come. I am all excited and scared at the same time :)

PLEASE NOTE:- The Image used here is a part of the published article "http://www.techradar.com/news/video/google-glass-what-you-need-to-know-1078114". The blog owner does not own any rights for the image.

The Wave is Here

Google has done it. On May 28, it presented to the

world, its shiny new toy for everybody : Google Wave.

I was blown away by the Google Wave webcast i saw

somedays back. They have truly reinvented Email for

21st Century. The features, some of them uniquely

intuitive and some out of the world. If you have not

yet seen the video, please rush and have a look. A

80 mins. of pure Technology bliss.

Some of the cool features I loved :-

1. Ability to reply to a part of a mail, instead of

the complete mail.

2. The awesome Spell Checker that comes as an

Extension.

3. Document Collaboration where participants

can see in real time, what the other user is

typing and making changes to. This really

rocked.

4. HTML 5 really rocks.

5. Ultra cool UI effects and functionalities.

6. Wave as an Real time component which

can be embedded into any existing Communication

tool like Blogging or Twitter.

and lastly,

6. The Out-of-the-World Language Translator

Extension which comes as an Extension to the

Wave. And boy it does awesome Real time

Language Translation.

Some links you must go through :-

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html