[A CLOCKWORK TRADER]

Sergey Brin: Smartphones are 'emasculating'
Mobile phones may generate the fastest-growing segment of Google's revenue, but the experience of using them still bothers Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Speaking at the TED Conference today in Long Beach, Calif., Brin told the audience that smartphones are "emasculating." "You're standing around and just rubbing this featureless piece of glass," he said.

Using Google Glass requires a fair bit of rubbing as well, and the prototypes have fewer hardware features than most phones. But Brin said they improved on smartphones in certain ways, particularly in having a camera ever-ready to start snapping pictures. (The same camera is also the source of the most serious privacy concerns raised by Glass.)

Brin said the ideal search technology would surface information before a person had to ask for it, and that he has been working on the problem for 15 years.

"This is the first form factor that can deliver that vision," Brin said.

During the last two years Google has made significant strides in making Glass more comfortable and attractive, Brin said. The original version was "like a cell phone strapped to your head," he said.

Brin's remarks came on the last day people can apply to become a Project Glass "Explorer," getting a prerelease version of the device for $1,500. To apply, would-be Glass owners have to pitch Google on Google+ or Twitter using the hashtag #ifihadglass.

Anyone left out of the pilot program will have a chance to buy Glass later this year when it becomes broadly available, Brin said. The price tag will be below $1,500, he said, though he did not suggest a price target.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-5757161...sculating/

Roosh has been saying this for ages. It's hilarious that it's now coming from a tech guy who has made a killing in that industry and is now releasing the google glasses.

One thing though that Brin didn't mention is the idea of being constantly available. That alone is emasculating. It kills game whether it's with women, business life, etc.

[Emancipator]

I can't wait for Google Glass, of course I would look strange wearing them but the potential usages for it is amazing.

Whole new form of amateur porn can be created POV style, frees up your second hand!

[WesternCancer]

(03-03-2013 02:48 PM)Emancipator Wrote:  

I can't wait for Google Glass, of course I would look strange wearing them but the potential usages for it is amazing.

Whole new form of amateur porn can be created POV style, frees up your second hand!

[Emancipator]

(03-03-2013 03:02 PM)WesternCancer Wrote:  

(03-03-2013 02:48 PM)Emancipator Wrote:  

I can't wait for Google Glass, of course I would look strange wearing them but the potential usages for it is amazing.

Whole new form of amateur porn can be created POV style, frees up your second hand!

Wrong, let me FTFY


Not to mention they can be attached to existing glasses. Just a little addon.

[Grit]

I see feminist attack vultures orbiting already. A camera that could theoretically be taking discreet photos at any time? Looking at women is going to be banned next.

[Teedub]

We're really heading into the sort of sci-fi future movies predicted. Just look at the above picture, knowing what he's wearing and it is like something from I Robot or whatever.

[Veloce]

Just looked at some videos of Google Glass.

That shit is frightening. Some people might thing it looks cool, and don't get me wrong I'm impressed with the technology, to me it's just the next step in humans becoming mechanized drones. These technologies are geared to make people feel like their experience is so unique and special, even celebrity-like, but it's just everyone taking pictures of the same shit; the same latte art, the same graffiti, the same amazing sunset. In sharing these experiences with each other socially, people remove themselves from the gravity and significance of the actual experience. Take a picture of something cool you did; great, NEXT. This technology will make attention spans even shorter.

I predict that within our lifetime, there will be a setup involve a chip implant and contact lenses. Chip gets buried into your temple or somewhere enabling audio/speech commands, and it will wirelessly connect to the contact lens. Total human/machine synergy. Any information available anytime, you'll be able to take a picture with the lens and share it with the world in a split second. I can even imagine travel logs of your daily experience being digitally recorded and backed up by a central server, so if you're a crime witness or something happens to you it will be archived by the authorities in a database and used as evidence.

Oh Brave New World...

[Teedub]

(03-03-2013 04:08 PM)thedude3737 Wrote:  

Just looked at some videos of Google Glass.

That shit is frightening. Some people might thing it looks cool, and don't get me wrong I'm impressed with the technology, to me it's just the next step in humans becoming mechanized drones. These technologies are geared to make people feel like their experience is so unique and special, even celebrity-like, but it's just everyone taking pictures of the same shit; the same latte art, the same graffiti, the same amazing sunset. In sharing these experiences with each other socially, people remove themselves from the gravity and significance of the actual experience. Take a picture of something cool you did; great, NEXT. This technology will make attention spans even shorter.

I predict that within our lifetime, there will be a setup involve a chip implant and contact lenses. Chip gets buried into your temple or somewhere enabling audio/speech commands, and it will wirelessly connect to the contact lens. Total human/machine synergy. Any information available anytime, you'll be able to take a picture with the lens and share it with the world in a split second. I can even imagine travel logs of your daily experience being digitally recorded and backed up by a central server, so if you're a crime witness or something happens to you it will be archived by the authorities in a database and used as evidence.

Oh Brave New World...

There's a great show in Britain called Black Mirror, well there are 3 eps per series/seasons, so far there have been 2. It's basically a fictional, but bleak dystopian look at the future. It's fucking excellent. One episode called 'The Entire History of You' is a bit like what you said. Robert Downey Jr has optioned to make it into a feature film I think. The show is called 'Black Mirror', because monitors/TV's/Smartphone screens are exactly that.

How many UK guys have seen it?

[Veloce]

Apparently Diane Von Furstenberg, the designer, got her hands on a pair at some meeting with Brin. Here's what she had to say:

Quote:

Buy a pair of these ultralight beauties and you’ll be able to update your Twitter feed or find a place to eat without digging in a handbag for your iPhone. Just be careful of what you wear with them.

Guys, if you thought the iPhone was the worst thing to happen to game, you ain't seen SHIT. Prepare for war.

[Screwston]

WhT exactly will the glasses do?

[Emancipator]

(03-03-2013 04:25 PM)houston Wrote:  

WhT exactly will the glasses do?

[Emancipator]

And of course the fembots are complaining about Glass and Brin's comments:

Quote:

If you build it, they will come. Perhaps. And only if you don’t chase them away.

Recently Google co-founder Sergey Brin took to the stage at the TED “Ideas Worth Spreading” conference. His idea worth spreading? That cellphones are “emasculating.”

This newsbyte, currently making the rounds, appears here and elsewhere out of context from a much longer pitch for Google Glass, a high-tech monocle that is Google’s eyebrow-raising vision for the next generation of wearable computing. But with reporters there to witness it live, readers appear to have since deemed Brin’s remark the most shareworthy headline of the event. (When asked about the remark’s larger context, Google didn’t immediately elaborate on record.)

With one word Brin appears to have shot in the direction of both feet: both possibly alienating Google’s male Android smartphone customers and offputting women who might otherwise be in the market for Google Glass.

This is a point made clear by close technology follower and Wharton business ethics professor Andrea Matwyshyn, who writes to TechCrunch:

That is a missed commercial opportunity. Women make a large portion of household consumer purchasing decisions in the United States, and they tend to spend equal or greater numbers of hours using technology as do men according to some studies.

In other words, a marketing strategy that positions Google Glass as a “man gadget” potentially alienates half of the consumer base who might have been keenly interested in purchasing the product in the future.

A question going forward is whether women beyond technology insiders like Matwyshyn have even heard about the gaffe, let alone Google Glass altogether. In the meantime, from an armchair perspective, charts from Google Trends shows usage for the “emasculating” search term has skyrocketed, and thousands of references to the quote appear to smear across Google News.

If the first rule of speaking is to know your audience, such a remark prompts questions about whether Brin, and by extension Google, knows theirs. What will Google Glass be used for? The answer seems to be literally anyone’s guess.

In a recently ended contest, Google asked potential Google Glass customers — when “applying” to purchase the $1,500 developer device — to identify and define themselves via the use of a #ifihadglass hashtag on Google+ or Twitter. Thanks to public messages and public APIs, results from the #ifihadglass marketing campaign are in effect transparent.

In order to guess at what Google is seeing in terms of gender breakdown amid this abundance of marketing information, TechCrunch collected close to 11,000 Google+ posts and 22,000 tweets tagged with #ifihadglass and looked at the likely gender of the authors’ first names. The results suggest that if Google isn’t yet worried about encouraging female adoption of Google Glass, perhaps it should be.

Amateur analysis is fraught with guesswork — especially when dealing with gender-by-name, since names such as “Taylor” can be donned by both females and males. To attempt to compensate, a probably for each gender was assigned using census data on how frequently the name occurs by gender in the United States. Names like “Elizabeth” with greater than a 95 percent certainty of being a given gender were assigned to a gender group; mixed names like “Taylor” are compared across genders and become ‘likely-male’ or ‘likely-female’ and grouped together as ‘uncertain’; both never-before-seen and non-names like “JetBlue” get lumped into the ‘ambiguous’ group.

To be taken with skepticism, here’s the breakdown of the TechCrunch analysis of the likely gender of authors of #ifihadglass postings on Google+:

For the 7,358 Google+ postings whose authors had first names assigned to a gender group, 86% were guessed to be posted by males and 14% by females.
Including 517 uncertain cases, the numbers water down to 80% male and 13% female.
Among the uncertain cases, 77% where thought to be ‘likely male’ and 23% ‘likely female’.
27% of the overall 10,782 found Google+ postings tagged with #ifihadglass were authored by people’s whose names were deemed ambiguous.

For Twitter:

For the 10,524 Twitter tweets whose authors had first names assigned to a gender group, 80% were guessed to be male and 20% female.
Including 807 uncertain cases, the numbers adjust to 74% male and 19% female.
Among the uncertain cases, 72% where thought to be ‘likely male’ and 28% ‘likely female’.
48% of the overall 21,684 tweets found at the time were deemed as authored by someone whose first name was too ambiguous to gender.

guessedgendergoogle guessedgendertwitter

Google has a real name policy that makes its publicly findable data quality a little better than Twitter’s. The gender breakdown of Google+ users is uncertain and so a good baseline of over-/under-representation by gender cannot be established across both Twitter and Google+.

Any uncontrolled or publicly sourced data are suspect and the underlying dataset here is not an exception. Another possible problem is that kind of hashtag analysis also embraces the “no press is bad press” mentality and includes those freeriding with their own marketing efforts and and those just having some fun.

Despite all the caveats, the numbers present a strong argument why Brin might be tempted to play up the “masculinity” angle for Google Glass: among early customers talking about “#ifihadglass,” about four out of five appear to be men.

The other edge to this truth is that while it might be tempting to preach to the male demographic choir, in fact Google should perhaps be doing the opposite: encouraging early adoption among women. Without a representative customer base selling the first generation of this technology to their peers, Google could end up with the next Segway.

An informal mining of the many different uses suggested by these prospective customers — among them, health and recreation (traveling, coaching, workout, biofeedback, biking, baby care), health and emergency services (emergency care, diagnosis, surgery), reference (instructional material, study aids/practice, translation, search, research, image recognition), location (GPS/maps, directions, traffic), communication (reading, sharing, teaching, training, tours), productivity (note taking, tasks) and cooking — none but the very visually- or manually-intensive applications scream for the immediate abandonment of the ubiquitous and “emasculating” smartphone. In this case, as in others, data seem to back common sense that it’s not a great marketing strategy to alienate a critical and already-trailing customer segment.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/03/google-...-problems/

[Teedub]

^Western society is a joke. People complaining about a fucking word used in a lecture. First world problems indeed.

[Screwston]

Wow, they seem pointless. Good invention to make people even more socially retarded brcause theyre focused on glass.

[A CLOCKWORK TRADER]

Shit is going to hit the fan with those glasses. Yet again another disruptive technology. Like thedude said above, I'm impressed with the technology as well. The video quality on that is insane, scary but insane:

I could just imagine fuckheads wearing that to go everywhere. Shopping at the supermarket, dropping their kids off to school, going to work. It's like some Truman Show shit that is completely voluntary and unnecessary. Again, I can't help but be impressed with it but I can't ignore the downsides either.

[Screwston]

People will gladly get a chip or whatever implanted in their brain if it fives you a cool experience and lets you update Facebook by your thoughts.

[Roosh]

I would hate to have a conversation with someone wearing it. If you thought a girl who leaves her phone out while talking to you was bad, this will be ten times worse. Every time they get a text, their eye will dart around and they'll completely miss what you're saying.

But since there is no cool factor, and it would mess up a girl's hair, I don't think it will get popular. People pay thousands of dollars to get ride of glasses with lasik. I doubt they will wear voluntarily wear this full time just to shoot some video. In other words, it won't be as popular as the smart phone. It will be mostly used by those who are in the GoPro camera market.

[Nineteen84]

nerd shit

[The Pumpkin King]

I think you guys are missing the point, they invented this device so the tech would be less disruptive. It seems like part of the reason he found phones so emasculating was the simple fact you had to stop what you're doing, effeminately fiddle with a small device, constantly throughout the day. I don't necessarily see the average woman jumping all over this product. For starters, google only offers it in a few colors, and only has one option for a sunglass attachment. It will be awhile before these become fashionable, or at least until they start producing fashionable ones. Secondly, outside of the cool factor, or using them as a first person video log, most of these features wouldn't really need to be used by an attractive woman. I see these being used by people in certain careers, like a taxi driver, high-demand business man, architect, etc.

If anything, I think these could lower the social retard level. Today, many people socially accept when others look at their little glowing screen, except alphas. But someone staring at me, then yelling above me to send a text, would really make you socially unpleasant. Sure, looking at a phone is rude, but society accepts the behavior because society overall has become inept at socializing, since we're all afraid of strangers. I haven't seen anyone use SIRI like this yet either. I see this catching on with nerdy chicks, or men who have legit uses for it. Hell, I can see myself keeping easy tabs on my harem, and upcoming dates. Its like google wants to coddle my ADHD.

[Therapsid]

The story here is that gifted and industrious men invent a remarkable new technology and feminists and the mainstream press, instead of being concerned with the engineering behind the device, its future applications, or economic impact, are on hand to shame one of the men behind it for an utterly innocuous throwaway comment.

[Nineteen84]

I agree with roosh. I don't want to talk to someone with this on their face

[The Pumpkin King]

The sunglass attachment makes them look less sci-fi. I could see some chicks wearing it to seem cool, like all those fake nerdy chicks who rock obscure cartoon shirts.

[Veloce]

(03-03-2013 04:59 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

I would hate to have a conversation with someone wearing it. If you thought a girl who leaves her phone out while talking to you was bad, this will be ten times worse. Every time they get a text, their eye will dart around and they'll completely miss what you're saying.

But since there is no cool factor, and it would mess up a girl's hair, I don't think it will get popular. People pay thousands of dollars to get ride of glasses with lasik. I doubt they will wear voluntarily wear this full time just to shoot some video. In other words, it won't be as popular as the smart phone. It will be mostly used by those who are in the GoPro camera market.

Not sure about this. Imagine Google partnering with Gucci, Fendi, Louis Vuitton to release designer Google Glass. It might even be worse...combining high end chick-crack fashion with chick-crack attention whoring.

The prospect is enough to make my skin crawl.

[Nonpareil]

Give me glass, I'd get even more ass.
#ifihadglass

[Nineteen84]

I just don't like the idea of my face to face convos being recorded - which these things probably will