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Google Acquires North

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Re: Google Acquires North

#101

Post by macNchz »

peeters wrote: post #41
DiabloD3 wrote: post #15

Sigh, all I can think is yet another promising startup vanishes into the depths of Google, never to be seen again. Google, please stop buying companies, please learn to support your products and build a loyal customer base. You are not a startup anymore, you need to make the transformation that companies like Microsoft did, and quit moving fast and breaking things. People don't want an agile foundation, they want a h…

I'm not sure "promising startup" describes North (previously Thalmic Labs) that well. Everything I've heard around the Waterloo tech scene is that it was mostly smoke and mirrors from the founders who were able to maintain their own lifestyles using grants from the Canadian government. Tales from past employees are not flattering. Being bought by Google is likely the best thing that could happen to both the founders…

I lived across the street from their Brooklyn store from when it opened in 2018 to when it closed last winter (in anticipation of "relaunching" for the new glasses they were planning this year).

They rented an expensive glassy corner storefront ($50k/month I heard at the time) and built it out to a very high standard, but there was never anyone inside shopping. The store employees just stood around looking at their phones all day looking super bored.

I also found it bizarre that they didn't seem to be making any effort to use the space as a marketing tool beyond it's mere presence...I anticipated when they opened that there would be VIP/media/influencer events on a regular basis, but they seemingly just opened in the mornings and closed at night. Having been involved in opening some retail stores, "if you build it they will come" was certainly never part of our strategy.

There never seemed to be any attempt to attract customers or make the store more inviting at all...they didn't even have a listing on Google Maps for months after they opened. Seeing this stagnant shop every single day I spent a lot of time thinking about what must be going on inside this outwardly "promising startup" to make such an investment only to let it languish. Seems like my suspicions weren't misplaced!

Re: Google Acquires North

#102

Post by sprayk »

lordnacho wrote: post #4

Cool, who here has tried Focals by North? I was thinking of getting them for everyday walking around and reading. My problem is I still don't understand what the interface is like. Can it project a screen to it or not? I'm perfectly happy to see a translucent IDE/browser window in my field of view.

I have a pair that I hadn't picked up for a year before two weeks ago when I charged, updated, and tried them out again to see if anything had changed.

The interface is roughly 6 lines of white on transparent text/menus/icons, with some "apps" occasionally being more graphical and having larger graphics/arrows. The display is basically a bunch of low power lasers being projected onto a weird thing embedded in the glass of the right lens and getting reflected into your eye. If alignment was wrong it couldn't do anything. It felt more like those vector CRT displays like from an old arcade game, where instead of pixels of varying intensity in a grid there is an electron beam just drawing lines and simple shapes.

There was definitely no ability to project a screen. It was not like google glass at all.

Platform-wise, it was more like an imaginary gen-0.5 smartwatch that was locked into a handful of baked in apps and notifications. It had to be tethered to your phone to work. It could only integrate with select apps and services: Spotify for music, Alexa for a voice assistant, gcal for calendar. I'm probably missing some.

It had some morning glance sort of thing that showed you your commute and the weather and maybe some news?

It had it's own walking navigation system that worked... okay. Granted I tried that out pretty shortly after that feature launched, and only used in Dublin when I was on a trip where I would actually be walking a fair bit. It never inspired confidence that it would notify me properly of a turn, and I tend to not really need directions shown to me all the time anyways, so I stopped bothering after using it twice.

Notifications was about the only thing I got out of it when I was using it, and it was not the best experience. The time between knowing I got a notification and it showing me was long enough that I never got over the muscle memory of either pulling out my phone or looking at my pebble (if I was wearing it) when I felt the vibrarion from either.

That brings me to the hardest part for me, the lack of confidence in the projection. When I pressed on the ring controller to activate it, or heard a sound indicating something should be on screen, I couldn't be sure that it wasn't just being slow or if it was somehow misaligned. It got misaligned often, and when it's not in just the right alignment with your eye the display is not visible. I eventually got some of those silicone things you put on stems to hold glasses on your face properly and even then they could still get out of alignment.

EDIT: totally forgot, a cool part was how you contorlled it, with a ring that had a little 5way joystick on it. This would have been cool if it was more responsive, but it suffered from the general interface sluggishness that did not inspire confidence.

Re: Google Acquires North

#103

Post by Ajedi32 »

michaelmior wrote: post #65
vikramkr wrote: post #2

I guess the competition for smart glasses is heating up - I imagine google thinks apple's glasses are coming soon and they take that seriously enough to want to be prepared to compete. It will be interesting to see how this space plays out. If it's anything like smart watches, the market is going to turn around with apple's entrance, and buying north now while they're suffering gives google the tech they need to ente…

I just got an invitation today to purchase Echo Frames[0], Amazon's smart glasses. I'm a little on the fence but early reviews seem pretty promising. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Staging-Product-Not-Retail-Sale/dp/B0...

Aren't those more like smart earbuds in a glasses form factor? As far as I can tell there's no display component to the device at all, just speakers and a microphone.

Re: Google Acquires North

#105

Post by michaelmior »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #103
michaelmior wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got an invitation today to purchase Echo Frames[0], Amazon's smart glasses. I'm a little on the fence but early reviews seem pretty promising. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Staging-Product-Not-Retail-Sale/dp/B0...

Aren't those more like smart earbuds in a glasses form factor? As far as I can tell there's no display component to the device at all, just speakers and a microphone.

That's a fair point. I guess you could argue these aren't smart glasses at all.

Re: Google Acquires North

#106

Post by ciguy »

macNchz wrote: post #85
chimerasaurus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer - I’m a Googler. As a counterpoint, Cloud has acquired several companies that haven’t disappeared; rather, are fairly foundational in the portfolio: - Cask (now Cloud Data Fusion as a product, CDAP as an OSS project) - Looker - Stackdriver

Stackdriver did not disappear, but having used it daily for the past 4 years and witnessed its painfully slow and buggy migration into the GCP admin, I can't say it's a product that has visibly gotten much love. We kept using it for some things out of inertia, but I can't say it ever impressed me.

Using Stackdriver as an example here shows how out of touch people at Google are with their customers. Stackdriver has been terrible for years and has visibly become worse over time rather than better.

Re: Google Acquires North

#107

Post by kevstev »

andreilys wrote: post #99
modeless wrote: post #9

What's the rumored price? They reportedly raised $200M. Employees get nothing, I'm guessing. Well, a secure job at Google is a decent consolation prize, at least.

Employees are not guaranteed employment at Google. I'm sure a good chunk will be let go as part of this acquisition.

Does that really happen? I figured that an event like this is a good excuse to clean house a bit, but it seemed to me that this was the exception rather than the rule- how common is this and what is the process by which one gets unemployed?

Re: Google Acquires North

#108

Post by trhaynes »

macNchz wrote: post #101
peeters wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure "promising startup" describes North (previously Thalmic Labs) that well. Everything I've heard around the Waterloo tech scene is that it was mostly smoke and mirrors from the founders who were able to maintain their own lifestyles using grants from the Canadian government. Tales from past employees are not flattering. Being bought by Google is likely the best thing that could happen to both the founders…

I lived across the street from their Brooklyn store from when it opened in 2018 to when it closed last winter (in anticipation of "relaunching" for the new glasses they were planning this year). They rented an expensive glassy corner storefront ($50k/month I heard at the time) and built it out to a very high standard, but there was never anyone inside shopping. The store employees just stood around looking at their p…

I walked by it every day and can confirm. They didn't even have an inviting sign, or anything about what they were selling. The glass was a little reflective so you could barely see some mirrors and glasses on walls/pedestals. I'll bet most people walking by thought it was a typical optical store (but with only one boring frame option!).

Re: Google Acquires North

#109

Post by twox2 »

andreilys wrote: post #99
modeless wrote: post #9

What's the rumored price? They reportedly raised $200M. Employees get nothing, I'm guessing. Well, a secure job at Google is a decent consolation prize, at least.

Employees are not guaranteed employment at Google. I'm sure a good chunk will be let go as part of this acquisition.

I'm curious how this usually plays out. Do employees of acquired companies need to go through the google interview process?

Re: Google Acquires North

#110

Post by numpad0 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #103
michaelmior wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got an invitation today to purchase Echo Frames[0], Amazon's smart glasses. I'm a little on the fence but early reviews seem pretty promising. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Staging-Product-Not-Retail-Sale/dp/B0...

Aren't those more like smart earbuds in a glasses form factor? As far as I can tell there's no display component to the device at all, just speakers and a microphone.

And aren’t those “smart earbuds” just Bluetooth headsets?
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