Thomas Hawk shot a huge high-resolution photo of Sergey Brin, which includes a clear shot of Google's new computerized glasses.
Looks like Sergey Brin has a touch of grey on his beard now, too. Click on the image for a bigger version. And head over to Hawk's Flickr page to see more.
Google managers are pushing the Google Glass team to get an early version of the computerized glasses out as soon as they can, and it's causing tensions in the group.
That's according to 9to5Google, which first broke the story of the glasses last year.
The report says that members of the product team behind Google Glass -- which was called Wingfront until a couple months ago, when Google decided it needed a more release-ready name -- are complaining that they need more time to perfect the product, but management is pushing to get the glasses out to developers as soon as possible. More people have recently been added to the team, increasing the strife.
Reportedly, the glasses spotted on Sergey Brin last night are only one of a bunch of prototypes. Google is also testing models that clip-on to regular glasses, and models that are built into sunglasses.
The company already has a small run available internally, says the report, and may try to get a prototype into developers' hands at Google I/O in June.
Yesterday afternoon, an anonymous post on Quora from somebody claiming to be on the Google Glass team said that the product is "quite far from" what's being shown in the video. When The Verge asked Sergey Brin when the glasses would be available, he said "give us time."
The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world". "I am more worried than I have been in the past," he said. "It's scary."
The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.
The 38-year-old billionaire, whose family fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union, was widely regarded as having been the driving force behind Google's partial pullout from China in 2010 over concerns about censorship and cyber-attacks. He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long, but now says he has been proven wrong. "I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle," he said.
He said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, but warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web.
"There's a lot to be lost," he said. "For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can't search it."
Brin's criticism of Facebook is likely to be controversial, with the social network approaching an estimated $100bn (£64bn) flotation. Google's upstart rival has seen explosive growth: it has signed up half of Americans with computer access and more than 800 million members worldwide.
Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive," he said. "The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation."
He criticized Facebook for not making it easy for users to switch their data to other services. "Facebook has been sucking down Gmail contacts for many years," he said.
Brin's comments come on the first day of a week-long Guardian investigation of the intensifying battle for control of the internet being fought across the globe between governments, companies, military strategists, activists and hackers.
From the attempts made by Hollywood to push through legislation allowing pirate websites to be shut down, to the British government's plans to monitor social media and web use, the ethos of openness championed by the pioneers of the internet and worldwide web is being challenged on a number of fronts.
In China, which now has more internet users than any other country, the government recently introduced new "real identity" rules in a bid to tame the boisterous microblogging scene. In Russia, there are powerful calls to rein in a blogosphere blamed for fomenting a wave of anti-Vladimir Putin protests. It has been reported that Iran is planning to introduce a sealed "national internet" from this summer.
Ricken Patel, co-founder of Avaaz, the 14 million-strong online activist network which has been providing communication equipment and training to Syrian activists, echoed Brin's warning: "We've seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we're seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world."
Writing in the Guardian on Monday, outspoken Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei says the Chinese government's attempts to control the internet will ultimately be doomed to failure. "In the long run," he says, "they must understand it's not possible for them to control the internet unless they shut it off – and they can't live with the consequences of that."
Amid mounting concern over the militarization of the internet and claims – denied by Beijing – that China has mounted numerous cyber-attacks on US military and corporate targets, he said it would be hugely difficult for any government to defend its online "territory".
"If you compare the internet to the physical world, there really aren't any walls between countries," he said. "If Canada wanted to send tanks into the US there is nothing stopping them and it's the same on the internet. It's hopeless to try to control the internet."
He reserved his harshest words for the entertainment industry, which he said was "shooting itself in the foot, or maybe worse than in the foot" by lobbying for legislation to block sites offering pirate material.
He said the Sopa and Pipa bills championed by the film and music industries would have led to the US using the same technology and approach it criticized China and Iran for using. The entertainment industry failed to appreciate people would continue to download pirated content as long as it was easier to acquire and use than legitimately obtained material, he said.
"I haven't tried it for many years but when you go on a pirate website, you choose what you like; it downloads to the device of your choice and it will just work – and then when you have to jump through all these hoops [to buy legitimate content], the walls created are disincentives for people to buy," he said.
Brin acknowledged that some people were anxious about the amount of their data that was now in the reach of US authorities because it sits on Google's servers. He said the company was periodically forced to hand over data and sometimes prevented by legal restrictions from even notifying users that it had done so.
He said: "We push back a lot; we are able to turn down a lot of these requests. We do everything possible to protect the data. If we could wave a magic wand and not be subject to US law, that would be great. If we could be in some magical jurisdiction that everyone in the world trusted, that would be great … We're doing it as well as can be done."
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GOOG Sliding With Markets
The market was mixed in early trading as both Bank of America and Morgan Stanley beat expectations but dove in the negative after miss in jobless claims and increased concerns over Europe. Shares of GOOG sliding with tech. Investors continue look for Android momentum, clarity on the Motorola acquisition; regaining ground in China; the resurgence of Google TV; continued growth of YouTube; expansion of social network Google+ and progress in other initiatives (location-based services, mapping, Google Wallet, Google Music, etc.). The stock trades at approximately 11.0x Enterprise Value / EBIT.
Google's CPC Rates Could Fall For Awhile During 'Transition' Period (Business Insider)
What transition you ask? Well, one theory is this all started with Google's acquisition of AdMeld, the real-time bidding platform for publishers. Now those publishers are all in Google's ad system. So here's the problem: when advertisers win a bid to place an ad on Google, they do not pay the price they bid. They pay a tiny bit more than the second-highest bid. But display ads still have fewer bidders. So relatively speaking, CPCs for display ads are lower than CPCs for search ads. Adding a bunch of new display inventory will drive average CPCs down a bit.
Sergey Tries To Qualify His Statements, Says The Same Thing (Google+)
Sergey Brin is trying to clarify his recent statements but is still spouting more 'open' nonsense. It's all very silly. Google's search algorithm is nothing if not the Web's biggest gatekeeper. The Google+ post is basically in line with what was written in the original interview. It's the part where he criticizes Facebook and Apple, he feels has been over-exaggerated. "I have much admiration for two of the companies we discussed — Apple and Facebook. I have always admired Apple’s products." Yeah, yeah.
Google Introducing New Ad Plan To Boost Online Ad Sales (Mashable)
Attempting to move the industry behind click-throughs and impressions, Google introduced a new plan to measure online advertising dubbed "Brand Activate." The plan is designed to "re-imagine online measurement for brand marketers." With better metrics, the company hopes marketers will feel more comfortable allocating more money to online advertising. As part of the rollout, Google will use a measurement tool called GRP, or gross rating point, which is common in television advertising.
Internet Advertising Revenue Hits All Time High, Mobile Fastest Growing Sector (IAB)
According to The Interactive Advertising Bureau, Internet ad revenue revenue grew 22% in 2011, to an all-time high of $31 billion. The fourth quarter were also the all-time best three months at $9 billion, an increase of 20% from 2010. Search remains the biggest sector, with $14.8 billion in revenue, up from $11.7 billion in 2010. Not surprisingly, however, in terms of growth rates, mobile is the fastest-growing sector, more than doubling from $0.6 billion in 2010 to $1.6 billion in 2011. Display advertising grew 35% to $11.1 billion overall, with video accounting for $1.8 billion. All good news for Google.
What's The Deal With Google Wallet? (Business Insider)
It's been almost a year since Google Wallet was introduced and about seven months since it went live. Yet the service is still limited to one carrier partner (Sprint) and one smartphone line. Verizon, along with AT&T and T-Mobile, have plans for their own mobile payments service, Isis, which is rumored to launch very soon. That puts Google in a sticky situation. The nation's two largest carriers along with T-Mobile aren't very likely to allow Google Wallet any time soon.
Some Soundbites From The Oracle / Google Trial (Various)
Everything from denial to saying Android isn't important:
More to come.
Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, director James Cameron, and others have funded a new company: Planetary Resources Inc.
Its mission: mine asteroids, "add trillions of dollars to the global GDP" and "help ensure humanity's prosperity."
Ross Perot Jr. is also an investor.
There's going to be a press conference on Tuesday in Seattle where the company will explain more.
We can't wait. Our sun is going to explode in a few billion years, and it's never too early to start dealing with that problem. Billionaires who care about technology are exactly the right people to worry about it.
By the way, this is a great sign for Google shareholders. Years past, Schmidt and Page would have used their company's money to work on projects like this.
Forbes has good story with more details >>
Last week, it was reported that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and others are investing in a new company called "Planetary Resources" that wants to mine asteroids.
The company's founder, Peter Diamandis, has apparently been dreaming of mining asteroids since he was a kid. Like others, he thinks the resources in space will create the world's first trillionaire.
But, engineering challenges aside, how exactly can you mine asteroids?
Specifically, what gives you the right to mine asteroids?
Doesn't somebody own asteroids? Wouldn't you have to acquire the mining rights from someone?
According to a panel I attended last winter at the DLD conference in Munich, the answer is no.
Legal scholars apparently disagree about how laws pertaining to ownership apply to space, but the prevailing view is apparently this:
If you go plant a flag on an asteroid before anyone else does, it's yours.
So asteroid mining, at least in the early years, may be all about getting there first and planting flags.
Of course, as soon as Planetary Resources holds its big press conference this week, countries and lawyers the world around will probably begin gearing up for a big legal fight over who owns space.
And that will be amusing to watch.
Because the concept that any tiny life-form or group of life forms on one tiny planet in one tiny corner of the universe can "own" the universe is so ridiculous and arrogant that it's basically farce.
But don't forget that there's precedent for the flag-planting theory.
When Europeans started sailing ships around the globe ~500 years ago and "discovering" land, no one "owned" any lands they encountered (least of all, in their view, the people who lived there)... until they planted their flags. And then, in their view, they owned the land--at least until someone else bought it from them or conquered them and took it.
And the same will probably be true of the space race.
So get your flags and spaceships ready...
SEE ALSO: A Bunch Of Cool Things I Just Learned About The Commercialization Of Space
Google demonstrated running a web browser on its computerized glasses to its employees recently, we hear from a source close to Google.
It seems Google is actually serious about the project if it's coming along at this kind of pace.
When Google co-founder Sergey Brin walked around wearing them shortly after they were unveiled, we heard the glasses did little more than boot and shut down.
That was just about two weeks ago.
A concept video shows Google's computerized glasses running location-based applications, video chat, maps and other social applications like Google+.
We reached out to Google, which didn't comment on the story.
There are plenty of rumors as to what Google co-founder Sergey Brin is working on at Google — most of which center around Google's fringe projects under Google[x].
We caught up with Sebastian Thrun, the lead engineer behind Google[x], to find out how involved Sergey Brin is. It turns out that's pretty much where he spends most of his time.
"He is very much so involved with Google[x]. The Glasses, everything, they're his baby," Thrun said. "He's great, he's super insightful. It's no accident he was the first person spotted wearing the glasses."
That means he's on the team that — so far — is handling Google's self-driving cars, the computerized Google Glasses, and its indoor mapping system, which includes the inside of buildings in Google Maps.
So, there you have it.
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GOOG Up As Market Rises
With Occupy Wall Street trying to take over the world, the market is rebounding as April ISM blows past expectations despite disappointing construction spending figures. Shares of GOOG are up from morning lows. Investors continue look for Android momentum on smartphones and tablets and actually monetizing that operating system; clarity on the Motorola acquisition; regaining ground in China; the resurgence of Google TV; continued growth of YouTube; expansion of social network Google+; and progress in other initiatives (location-based services, mapping, Google Wallet, Google Music, etc.). The stock trades at approximately 10.9x Enterprise Value / EBIT.
Google Slapped With Lawsuit For Weird Stock Split Plan (CNet)
Shareholder Brockton Retirement Board filed a class action lawsuit in an attempt to block Google's stock split plan on the grounds that it gives Google the co-founders too much power. The suit alleges that Larry Page and Sergey Brin "wish to retain this power, while selling off large amounts of their stock holdings, and reaping billions of dollars in proceeds." As part of the split (or "non-voting capital stock plan"), the company plans to issue a new class of stock that won't carry voting rights. The overall effect will be to ensure that Google's existing shareholders retain their current voting power.
The Oracle Vs. Google Trial Goes To Jury (Reuters)
Jurors began deliberating yesterday in the Oracle vs. Google copyright trial. Oracle attorney Michael Jacobs said the parts of Java software that Google copied took much creative talent to compose. "It's kind of like creating a symphony," Jacobs said during his closing argument. But Google attorney Robert Van Nest said Sun's leadership had supported Android, and that Oracle decided against pursuing a smartphone of its own. "It isn't until after they failed that they brought this lawsuit here," Van Nest said.
Google Going To Paid Inclusion Program For Ads (Search Engine Land)
Google's "comparison ads" are getting a new look in the search results. Google hopes the change will better explain to searchers that comparison listings come from companies with which it has a commercial relationship. It also highlights how three Google search products now seem to largely operate on a paid inclusion basis. Google was once a vocal opponent to paid inclusion programs. The paid listings aren't in its main search engine results (at least not yet). But it's another example of how Google is putting into action its new philosophy that "ads are just more answers," as it stated in its last annual report.
Should Google Be Included In The Dow Jones Industrial Average? (Barron's)
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is overdue for a makeover. The world's most famous stock index hasn't adjusted its component companies since 2009, during which time Apple has emerged as the world's most valuable company, with a market value of $570 billion. Also conspicuous by its absence from this elite list is Google, the online advertising-and-search behemoth. Google, it is planning a stock split that would cut its share price in half, to about $300. But even at that level, it would have a hefty 15% weighting in the average.
Google's Search Share Grows In Russia (Bloomberg)
Yandex, Russia’s most popular Internet search engine, saw its weekly share of the Internet search market fall for a second week, while Google share rose, according to Liveinternet. Yandex’s share of the Russian online search market fell to 60% last week while Google's share rose to 26.3%, the highest since the beginning of the year. Google's monthly average remains around 25.9%.
For years Google had one of the most pristine reputations in the Valley.
It took care of its employees, allowed them to work on personal projects, and explore big ides.
Open source software embraced, and the perks were out of this world.
After Microsoft had dominated technology for years, it was a refreshing change of pace.
However, in the last few years a lot has changed. The tech world has started to turn against Google.
It largely boils down to two decisions: Android and Google+.
To make Google's mobile and social strategies work it has been forced to abandon some of its ideals, and make new enemies along the way.
We've gathered all the reasons people are starting to say Google went from believing in "don't be evil" to being an evil company.
When you sign up for Gmail, you are now automatically signed up for Google+.
Whether you want to assign yourself to Google's social network or not, Google makes you sync up with a network where anyone can follow you and track what you are voting up and down.
Google made a huge change to its search engine recently called "Search Plus Your World," which includes personalized search results based on your Google+ circles.
It's moving further and further away from its purely democratized search by giving extra favor to companies and individuals that effectively utilize Google+ to game up their search ranking.
You can disable the personalized search options, but by default they are enabled.
Wil Wheaton had a seething blog post on his site earlier this week when he discovered he had to connect to Google+ to vote up a video on YouTube.
The result is that video producers might lose out on potential votes up on videos, which are directly proportional to revenue in most occasions, because users don't want to sign up for Google+.
After catching up with Google[x] lead engineer Sebastian Thrun, we finally know that Sergey Brin is indeed spending most of his time working on Google's fringe projects.
He's taken less of a role in the day-to-day activities at Google and now spends his time creating projects that could potentially change the world.
Here's a quick breakdown of everything he's been working on since he started working on fringe projects at Google.
One of the first projects released by the Google[x] team was a way to include maps of the insides of a building in Google Maps.
This wasn't a highly publicized feature, but it was still one of Google's first fringe projects.
Here's the first fringe project from Google[x] that actually caught a huge amount of attention.
Under the tutelage of Brin, lead Google engineer Sebastian Thrun led a team that's building a car that can literally drive itself.
Google also hosted a big conference where the company gathered together some of the smartest people in the world to try and solve the world's biggest problems.
Brin was a big part of this — serving as MC with Eric Schmidt and hosting the event.
Mark Zuckerberg is worth at least $19.1 billion thanks to Facebook's IPO.
As Bloomberg reports, that makes him worth more than Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google.
Page and Brin are 30 and 31 on Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Zuckerberg just landed at 29.
He's just behind the three Mars brothers, and six places behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Abdullah Gül, the president of Turkey, is visiting the Googleplex right now—a stop on his first trip to California.
He and his wife joined Google cofounder Sergey Brin in one of Google's experimental self-driving cars.
We noticed Brin was sporting a beard, as he has of late—but also Google's new Project Glass eyewear, which displays information from the Internet as you look around.
Since stepping down as president, Brin has been spending a lot of time on Google's crazier projects, like the automated cars and the augmented-reality glasses.
He seems to be having a good time!
Google cofounder Sergey Brin, focused on research and development these days, is working particularly hard on a product called Google Glass.
In a video embedded below, he tells California's lieutenant governor that he hopes the product will come out in 2013.
Google Glass is a computerized glasses gadget. It will work kind of like a personal version of the "heads-up display" you see in fighter jets in the movies.
The glasses are very controversial.
Around our newsroom, some people will say they would never wear them, others – like me – can't wait to try them out.
If the right kind of third-party applications are built, these things are going to make life more fun, safer, and less expensive. Imagine the enhancements they might be able to bring to walking through new cities, shopping, going to sporting events, and even playing games like golf, bocce ball, or laser tag.
On the other hand, there is a valid viewpoint that Google, a search engine company, shouldn't be wasting resources trying to build strange hardware products.
Here's the video:
There's a lot of handwringing about Google's move to present paid listings—oh, heck, let's just call them advertisements—in places where it used to provide pure, unpaid search results.
It's understandable that people are making a big deal about this.
Google wasn't the first search engine, but it aimed to be the best. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin believed that other search engines' practice of charging companies to be included in search listings was, well, evil.
That's where the whole "don't be evil" thing came from.
Then again, Page and Brin weren't exactly big fans of advertising at the beginning. (They thought Google could make more money by licensing search technology to enterprises. Ha!)
Nowadays, Page is in charge as CEO.
Brin, when he had an active executive role as co-president, was Google's moral compass.
"Evil is what Sergey says is evil," then-CEO Eric Schmidt told Wired back in 2003, before the company had even gone public.
That compass is now off wearing augmented-reality glasses while riding in a self-driving car with the president of Turkey. (And good for him! Being a moral compass is exhausting!)
When Google went public, it warned shareholders very specifically about its aversion to evil. It specifically highlighted paid shopping listings as an example of something it would not do.
Nowadays, it's getting paid to sell airline tickets and hotel rooms and, yes, products in the space it used to reserve for unpaid search results.
It might make as much as $250 million a year from its recent changes—pocket change compared to its $40 billion a year in annual revenues.
Similarly evil: Google's attempt to put results from its Google+ social network in search. That wasn't evil so much as a waste of space. Google has largely replaced those results with its new "Knowledge Graph" summaries. But that move wasn't motivated by providing great search results: It was motivated by wanting to screw over Facebook and Twitter.
Evil!
And you know what? It may be healthy for Google to get over the whole "don't be evil" thing. It's not like anyone was buying it.
Even Googlers. Especially Googlers.
All the free-speech advocates have decamped to Twitter, where former Googler Dick Costolo now runs "the free-speech wing of the free-speech party."
The open-sourcerers have joined startups like Cloudera or HortonWorks.
The get-rich-quick crowd—sorry, people who want to make the world a more open and transparent place!—left long ago for Facebook.
Google's a nice place to work if you like the free food, predictable hours, and humongous gobs of data. But it's not like anyone's naive enough to think that joining Google these days is some kind of statement against evil, are they?
If you believe that, I've got a paid listing for a bridge to sell you.
Google cofounder Sergey Brin's hush-hush research and development division, code-named Google X, might be bigger than most of us imagined.
According to a source who has been close to Google for years, Googlers are "fleeing" to the division in droves, eager to work on something exciting and new.
Headcount is now up to "hundreds of people," says this source.
One of the first projects released by the Google[x] team was a way to include maps of the insides of a building in Google Maps.
This wasn't a highly publicized feature, but it was still one of Google's first fringe projects.
Here's the first fringe project from Google[x] that actually caught a huge amount of attention.
Under the tutelage of Brin, lead Google engineer Sebastian Thrun led a team that's building a car that can literally drive itself.
Google also hosted a big conference where the company gathered together some of the smartest people in the world to try and solve the world's biggest problems.
Brin was a big part of this — serving as MC with Eric Schmidt and hosting the event.
The Google Investor is a daily report from SAI. Sign up here to receive it by email
GOOG Off As Tech Rises
Markets are surging back from morning lows. Shares of GOOG are off again after Apple's announcements yesterday. Investors continue look for Android momentum on smartphones and tablets and monetization and integration of Motorola; regaining ground in China; the resurgence of Google TV; continued growth of YouTube; expansion of social network Google+; and progress in other initiatives (location-based services, mapping, Google Wallet, Google Music, etc.). The stock trades at approximately 10.0x Enterprise Value / EBIT.
Apple Is Really Trying To Kill Off Google (Business Insider)
Apple is at the start of a truly "thermonuclear war" on Google. It's clearer than ever that Apple really is going to attempt to kill Google. And we're not just talking about Android. Apple is going to try to blow up all of Google. Google, for all of its ancillary businesses, lives and dies with search.
Apple is doing everything it can with iOS to de-emphasize the importance of search, and the web, in its mobile devices. Check out Jay Yarow's interview on CNN this morning.
900K Android Activations Daily And Rubin Isn't Leaving (The Verge)
Early yesterday, Robert Scoble posted a rumor on his Google+ feed that Android boss Andy Rubin was preparing to leave Google to join a stealth-mode startup called CloudCar. The rumor was enough to get Rubin to post his eleventh tweet on Twitter (I guess he does know how to use it after all), denying the rumor and taking the opportunity "for meme completeness" to point out that there are now over 900,000 Android devices activated daily, up moderately from the 850,000-per-day figure he'd mentioned at MWC in February.
Apple Rubs Google's Nose In Android Fragmentation (Business Insider)
Apple took a lot of potshots at Android and Google yesterday. Scott Forstall, the head of Apple's mobile software flashed a graphic and said, "More than 80% of our customers are running the latest version of iOS, iOS 5. Now if you compare that to the competition, they released a dairy product, 4.0, about the same time that we released iOS 5. And about 7% of Android customers are running the latest version." Yes, this is an Apple talking point, but it's important. Over 80% of Apple's users have the best possible OS Apple can make. Only 7% have the best possible OS Google can make.
Apple's Billionaire Competitors Loose Big On WWDC Day (Forbes)
While the U.S. stock market as a whole went south yesterday amid Eurozone worries, the billionaires behind Apple’s big competitors were among the hardest hit. Microsoft moguls Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer saw their fortunes dip a combined $629 million. Gates was the biggest loser, down $378.24 million as his company’s stock fell 2.55%. Google kingpins Sergey Brin and Larry Page were also worth slightly less at close of market on Monday, losing a combined $617 million as the search engine’s stock fell just over 2%.
We just ran into Isabelle Olsson, the senior industrial designer on Google Glasses, right after she demonstrated the awesome Internet-connected eyewear on stage at the tech company's big I/O 2012 conference in San Francisco.
She was wearing a set of Google Glasses, of course.
Olsson joined Google last year after getting recruited (through LinkedIn, she told us) from Fuseproject, Yves Behar's design agency.
"My inspiration is to make it as minimal as possible without being boring," Olsson told us. "I'm not interested in adding textures or patterns. Instead of trying to make it conventional, looking like glasses, literal, it's essential."
She cited Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec as designers who inspired her. They've done work for Ligne Roset and Habitat.
Olsson also said that working for Google X, cofounder Sergey Brin's secretive skunkworks within Google, was "like working for a startup."
"It's easier to work in a group of all designers, but that's kind of boring," she said. Colleagues who don't have a design background "ask all kinds of questions. It challenges you more."
She also showed some of the features of the phone. To take a photo, you squeeze an area of the eyepiece near the lens—almost like miming taking a photo. When using the touchpad, you point a finger towards your temple—"almost like you're saying, 'Hmmm,' and thinking," Olsson explained.
Only a "handful" of Google employees currently have Google Glasses currently, she told us. At I/O, Brin announced that developers could preorder experimental test units for $1,500.
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Google Glass will go on sale about one year after the test version for developers ships -- think early 2014.
A pair will cost a lot less than the $1,500 that Google is charging developers for an early beta version, which will ship in 2013. They will not include advertising. Instead, Google will make money from the hardware itself.
Google cofounder Sergey Brin explained the details to the San Francisco Chronicle's James Temple.
Developers at the Google I/O conference, which started today, can preorder a version of the glasses now and receive them early next year. Google reps at the show stressed that the early version is not for consumer use, and is available only to developers in the U.S.
See also: The Designer Behind The Google Glasses Explains The Top-Secret Project
San Francisco's Moscone Center is ground zero for big tech announcements. Apple had its annual conference for developers just last week; now it's Google's turn.
The events have decidedly different vibes. Apple is locked down and hush-hush; Google is friendlier to the press and more open in general. But both share something in common: mobs of developers hankering to get an edge, learn something new, and walk away with some great free stuff.
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