Google Glass Startups Claim: Not Dead Yet

Last week, Google Google announced that it’s shuttering its consumer-end operation for Google Glass. As of this week, the product is no longer available for purchase by consumers. For startups using Google Glass to revolutionize healthcare, that poses a problem, right? You’d think.

Not so, insist the entrepreneurs. They claim it’s good news. There’s still a huge opportunity in the enterprise market – that is, selling these funny computerized spectacles to businesses. Google is still working with a select group of ten “Glass Certified Partners,” listed on the company’s Glass at Work page. Four of them (AMA, Augmedix, Pristine, and Wearable Intelligence) are focused at least partly on putting Glass on the faces of physicians or other healthcare workers.

“Glass at Work has been growing and we’re seeing incredible developments with Glass in the workplace,” Google said in a prepared statement. “As we look to the road ahead, we realize that we’ve outgrown the lab and so we’re officially ‘graduating’ from Google[x] to be our own team here at Google.” That team will be helmed by Tony Fadell, whose last major project was co-founding Nest, the smart-thermostat company acquired by Google last year.

“Our accelerating expansion plans continue,” says Ian Shakil, chief executive of Augmedix, a startup that aims to help doctors automate medical recordkeeping via Glass. “Our supply of Glass v1 remains unaffected. Google’s support is unaffected.”

Just the day before Google’s own announcement, Augmedix announced the completion of a $16 million Series A funding round. But Pelu Tran, the company’s chief product officer (and a member of this year’s 30 Under 30 list in healthcare) said in a previous interview that this was the same path that smartphones followed. “We focus on providing a service delivered via Google Glass and I think that right now Google Glass is doing quite well in enterprise. If you look at Glass as a consumer and you look at what tablets are like and what smartphones are like, if you look at the early days, you see that they started in enterprise. For the next couple of years, that will be Glass.”

Chase Chase Feiger, founder and director of business development at Wearable Intelligence, goes so far as to say the announcement is actually improving business. “Google’s announcement has and will continue to be beneficial to our business,” he wrote in an email, describing his belief that the company’s telemedicine product will improve from Google’s apparent doubling down on Glass products for the workplace.

It’s been hard for these companies to explain to customers that the whole scene isn’t dead yet. “When that story came out, literally 200 people emailed me,” says Kyle Samani, founder and CEO of Pristine, which makes a product allowing doctors to share live video feeds through HIPAA-compliant channels. “It’s affected our business only in that people are like, ‘Kyle, is Pristine dead?’” It got so bad that the company soon put a large blue banner at the top of every page on its website to reassure both current and potential customers that everything will be fine.

Although not even enterprise-end companies know when the new version of Glass will be released, executives from Glass at Work companies say they’re still regularly making and receiving Glass orders from Google. Samani says his company buys the headsets from Glass’s enterprise arm “by the hundreds” on a regular basis. And if these companies’ – and Google’s – claims are to be believed, that trend should continue.

Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhedgecock/2015/01/23/these-entrepreneurs-depend-on-google-glass-so-why-are-they-happy/

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