Stained Glass Labs seeks to raise $25 million from investors to nurture startups in the burgeoning field of “wearable computers.”
While the much-buzzed about Google Glass is the most highly visible type of wearable computer – and I’ve spotted a few prototypes in the wild already -- it isn’t officially on the market yet. Meanwhile, the lion’s share of wearable computers available now are focused in the health and fitness space and Silicon Valley-based Stained Glass is hoping to build on that to create wearables that provide entertainment and other applications.
“We are the first glass and wearable focused incubator,” Redg Snodgrass, founder of Stained Glass, said in an interview with me during the MobileBeat 2013 conference held this past week in San Francisco. I was the first reporter to which Snodgrass disclosed the $25 million fundraising goal for the recently launched entity. The lab will fund, mentor and incubate startup wearable computer companies in this growing space.
“So far it’s got legs. Everybody wants to be in on it,” he said.
Snodgrass mentioned products like Jawbone UP and Pebble Smart Watch (pictured) as entrants into a space called “quantified health,” in which apps on the wristwatch-like devices record a user’s vital signs to monitor their health. A Facebook friend of mine uses an iPhone app called Moves that records the number of steps she takes – walking or running – which she then posts to her Facebook page.
By making these apps available on a wearable device like a wristwatch, the user can better interact with the app, argues Snodgrass, who moderated a panel on wearable computers at MobileBeat, which was hosted by the tech news Web site VentureBeat.com.
“We’re at the Palm Pilot stage of wearables now,” said Jef Holove, CEO of Basis Point, a firm developing its own computer watch, on the panel, which also included Gary Clayton, chief creative officer of Nuance, a developer of speech recognition technology.
A Samsung executive appeared earlier at the same conference to tout the South Korean tech giant’s smart watch plans. Meanwhile, Apple is rumored to be developing the iWatch.
Snodgrass notes that Nuance’s presence in the wearable computer market is notable because voice recognition – along with gesture recognition – will make the user engagement with their wearable computer more natural. You may recall that when the Galaxy S IV smartphone was introduced earlier this year, Samsung touted its new gesture recognition features. When you combine gesture and voice recognition with the comfort of wearing a computer on your wrist, the technology has great potential, said Snodgrass.
“Where the platform is in voice, in gesturing and how we really behave as humans, that will eventually win the day with wearable technology, in my humble opinion,” he said.
Snodgrass sees wearables progressing beyond health and fitness to entertainment content. He also described a startup in the Stained Glass incubator developing an app to help a user find the most important people to talk to in a crowd, such as the attendees at a conference like MobileBeat. The app could identify a potential investor in your company, then helps you identify people you know who know that investor. You contact that person and they can introduce you to the investor, he explained.
“For us it’s just understanding the possibilities of the platform; it’s still very new,” Snodgrass said.
