YourShow

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been very quiet over here lately. About 3 years ago at the very first public Google Glass hackathon, I pitched the idea that became the seed for Vital Enterprises, my startup leveraging enterprise software for smartglasses, to empower manual workers performing high-skill high-stakes tasks. 

Google Glass is now running Android KitKat, which opens up some exciting possibilities for YourShow. At the same time, the update broke YourShow (and other third-party apps) so we're releasing an updated version.

If you haven't tried the installed version yet, and you don't mind a bit of technical fiddling, give it a go! It offers a much smoother experience than the non-installed "Mirror API" version.

Latest version and install instructions are here:

My Side Project - A Smart Bike Alarm.

I love cycling around San Francisco, but I'm blown away by how rampant bike theft is here. I decided to do something about it, and I want to share what I've been working on.

We call it NoJack, and it's a smart bike theft deterrent. Attach NoJack to your bike and it connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth, so it knows when you're parking your bike, and automatically arms itself. If it detects intentional tampering, NoJack screams 120 decibels of bloody murder, the wannabe thief flees, and your ride is secure! 

YourShow was selected as one of three winners of the Google Glass GDK "Sneak Peak" Hackathon! The new GDK version of YourShow works great and opens up possibilities for ninja features like realtime translation, coaching and sharing, hands-free slide control... so much awesomeness! We're waiting not-so-patiently for the Glass app store to let everyone share the love.

We're chuffed to unveil our new name! Superhuman Labs fits the childlike thrill evoked by the futuristic superpowers we'll all have in the forthcoming wearable tech and augmented reality revolutions. It's an incredibly exciting time and we're so fortunate to be a part of this human revolution!

For the Breaking Glass hackathon I teamed up with a Stanford surgeon and a few brave techs to build VitalsOnGlass. We wirelessly stream patient vital signs from a wrist-worn monitor to the Glass display worn by a surgeon, so they have essential information and alerts always in view without being distracted from their work! Good for everyone involved :)

Here's a vid of our demo. Out of shot, there's a mannequin wired up with ECG cables and the wrist monitor. The Glass display is also kinda hard to make out, but it's showing this:

Wearable Technology is set to change our world. In our 10-minute investor teaser video, I offer some insights into the future of the technology and the market, and set out Superhuman Labs' opportunities and strategy to be pioneers in this technological and human revolution.

Our very first pitch event at Pitch Club SF was a nerve-wracking experience -- we demoed the YourShow app by actually using it to deliver our pitch presentation! Very meta :)

And it went great! Judges and audience were very enthusiastic. So from the 40 initial submissions to pitch, 5 were chosen, and our pitch came in second -- no dishonour as the winner Trax was truly amazing and has serious green cred.

We won space at the co-working outfit Citizen Space and we're moving straight in!

Google Glass 2 will be binocular, full vision. That brings full AR capabilities. THIS is the next tech revolution.

Glass apps coming to Play store? Google Glass now shows in my list of devices on Google Play app store, hinting that we'll see Glass apps soon. It could be just in time for YourShow!

The actual Google Glass part of implementing the app was almost trivial -- primarily because what you can actually do with Glass is almost trivial right now. What's taken the most time so far is figuring out how to extract individual slides and notes from Google Slides, with exactly zero provisioning for that in the Google Drive API.

Also, being utterly OCD, I've been obsessing over making the web site itself beautiful, fast and elegant both for users and at the code level. I didn't want all that effort to go to waste, so I've extracted out the underlying work into a boilerplate that anyone can use for a rapid setup on Google App Engine, using pre-built starter code that merges high-quality boilerplate, frameworks and clever stuff from the community. Please check it out!

Responsive Client - HTML5 Boilerplate, Modernizr, Twitter Bootstrap, PJAX.js, socialite.js, and sticky footer, seamlessly blended and buttery smooth.

Simpler Server - Webapp2, Jinja2 and Google Service APIs on Python 2.7, all drizzled with home-made decorators and wrappers for lightweight routing, templating and user authentication.

I've been reading so many opinions on Glass, from derision to adulation. To me it's absolutely clear that wearable AR will be as significant as the smartphone revolution, for one reason above all: it's empowering. 

Glad to see some positive market analysis:

Innocently running the site through PageSpeed Insights sent my OCD into berserker overdrive. So rather than doing what I was supposed to be doing--firming up the Google Glass integration--I spent two days optimizing the crap outta the site. I finally quit trying to hit 100% when I realised that even Google's own sites score between 90 and 97%.

Google PageSpeed Insights

We haz integration! I can send a Google Slides presentation all the way from Google Drive to Google Glass, with YourShow doing a whole crapload of munging and scraping and gurning to get it there.