![]()
The revenue opportunity is currently minuscule in any case.
Google Glass is still only available to a small group of people --
mainly developers -- who plunked down $1,500 for the privilege of
beta-testing the device.
CNN, part of Time Warner's Turner division, and Elle, part of
Hearst, joined companies with a lot more engineering firepower at
their fingertips --
Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Evernote -- in introducing
"Glassware," the name Google has given to Glass apps, at the I/O
developer conference in San Francisco yesterday.
While the prospect of being early to a new market and collecting
feedback from early adopters is compelling, there's more to it than
that, according to Barin Nahvi, a member of Hearst's corporate
technology team and project manager for the Elle app. Building
"Glassware" could potentially help Hearst get smarter about
designing experiences for mobile in general, she said.
"[Glass is] an extreme version of a lot of the principles you
need to be thinking about with mobile apps," she said.
Elle is offering four subscriptions on Glass: horoscopes; a
"dispatch" of posts with an emphasis on snappy headlines, parties
and celebrities; street fashion; and a "lookbook" where users can
watch an image of Suri Cruise materialize and then tap their Glass
to open a gallery and scroll through more of the famous tot's
couture.
Posts are light on text and heavy on images, though subscribers
have the option to have an excerpt of an article read aloud to them
and save it to read in full later. Users will get 8 to 10 updates
per day at most, Ms. Nahvi said.
CNN, on the other hand, will deliver updates from a menu that
includes breaking news, on the order of 18 headlines per day, as
well as tech, politics and business. Subscribers can read short
news briefings on the lens or have them read aloud and watch
accompanying video clips.
In a demonstration, this reporter saw an update about an
Internet-celebrity hitchhiker being sought as a
murder suspect in New Jersey, but struggled to make out any of the
audio. Having a lot of hair can apparently interfere with the
speaker on Google Glass.
Jeff Eddings, who led the CNN app in his role as senior director
of emerging technology at Turner, said that possible applications
of Google Glass for a news-gathering organization go well beyond
breaking news updates. If the hardware is adopted at scale, it
could become a useful way for people to submit photos and video
from the scene of a major news event like the Boston Marathon
bombings, he said. That method of submission might also have the
advantage of baked-in location data, giving the news organization
more confidence that the footage was shot where the sender
claims.
And while there are no ads allowed in "Glassware" yet, that
could obviously change as the platform matures. "I think in the
future, [Google is] thinking about how to help app developers and
publishers monetize this," Mr. Eddings said.
