Google Acquires North

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 enter the market again for smart glasses once apple makes them "cool."

North was previously known as Thalmic labs, and their first product was the Myo, a gesture-based input device. More recently, they created Focals, a smart glasses product.<p>More on their blog here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bynorth.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bynorth.com&#x2F;</a>

Sigh, all I can think is yet another promising startup vanishes into the depths of Google, never to be seen again.<p>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.<p>People don&#x27;t want an agile foundation, they want a hundred year foundation.

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&#x27;t understand what the interface is like. Can it project a screen to it or not? I&#x27;m perfectly happy to see a translucent IDE&#x2F;browser window in my field of view.

Not acquihire. Employees are not moving to alphabet.<p>North was a scam, and was about to be bought by patent trolls. This was a legal move by alphabet. They pretty much paid ransom to the North (Thalmic labs) founders to not be harassed by trolls later on.<p>I guess it at least shows that google haven&#x27;t abandoned google-glass entirely (or their legal dept doesn&#x27;t know they aren&#x27;t in the glass business any more, i wouldn&#x27;t doubt it)

Thalmic Labs&#x2F;North helped to normalize the act of exaggerating the capabilities of your tech, lying to investors, raising millions of dollars and pivoting to something completely unrelated. We have to stop celebrating tech companies that are able to raise millions of dollars and still fail to deliver.

I think the biggest problem with smart glasses, (AR tech) is the battery&#x2F;power system. A family member worked at a defunct AR eyeglass maker and mentioned that point. Magic leap is in that space also and their solution was a huge battery pack(hip mounted) with a chord attaching to the glasses. His company had the power supply near the ear(it was smaller but didn&#x27;t have enough juice to last hours). These examples(north glasses) seem pretty simple with just basic info being piped out, the two examples I mentioned above you could play movies and watch detailed realistic meta scenes imposed on reality.<p>If power can be figured out in small form factor the end results could really be incredible. After trying out the demo AR glasses to my family members company(5 years ago) it was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen and felt like sci-fi come true.

What&#x27;s the rumored price? They reportedly raised $200M. Employees get nothing, I&#x27;m guessing. Well, a secure job at Google is a decent consolation prize, at least.

Smart Glasses?! Please!<p>I&#x27;ve been waiting since forever. This is the only &quot;smart&quot; tech I&#x27;ve been so interested in. I already wear glasses, why not make them more useful?<p>Meanwhile watches get in the way of using keyboards and interacting with things, and you constantly take them off. Can&#x27;t use them if your hand is busy either, like holding a drink. They&#x27;re not as convenient as they seem.

I was hoping that North would license their display technology to someone that would build practical smart sunglasses for endurance athletes. There are a few heads-up display products available now for cyclists but they are all flawed in various ways, and there&#x27;s nothing that works for runners. Unfortunately I don&#x27;t think Google understands or cares about the sports tech market.<p>From a customer perspective I would pay $1000 today for a pair of smart prescription sunglasses that could link to my fitness tracker as an ANT+ extended display and show a few key data field including speed, distance, heart rate, and power. That would be super helpful for racing and structured training.

&gt; Lastly is our appreciation for Focals 1.0 customers who share our vision of everyday smart glasses. We are winding down Focals 1.0 and we will not be shipping Focals 2.0<p>From the blog at bynorth.com ... I guess that&#x27;s one way to show your appreciation!

Well that&#x27;s disappointing.<p>It seemed like they had cool products, and it&#x27;s too bad to see it bought up by an advertising&#x2F;spyware company with a history of killing products.

In addition to everything below, a great way to expand their Canadian presence to get around problems with American immigration laws.

Sad. I have their Myo band sitting around, but the company appears to never have gotten a solid hit. RIP Thalmic&#x2F;North.<p>It&#x27;d be nice if Google was somehow prohibited from snapping up even more companies while under numerous investigations for antitrust during a global pandemic, but I think that attempted legislation has fallen flat.

I cannot imagine North has something that Google doesn&#x27;t already have. Strange buyout decision in my opinion.

Just more proof that Google needs to acquire companies to compete:<p>- Phones? Google buys Motorolla and HTC&#x27;s smartphone division.<p>- Watches? Google buys Fitbit and Fossil (the smartwatch side)<p>- AR? Google buys North<p>I don&#x27;t know why Google&#x27;s Product team gets the prestige it does, when the last successful product it _didn&#x27;t_ buy was GMail.

This acquisition along with the Fitbit deal sets up Google perfectly to dominate the health wearables market.

I think this is a pretty solid acquisition by google. I have doubts that the tech from North will be able to match the tech in the &quot;upcoming&quot; apple ar glasses, but things will probably eventually match up, like Android and iOS.

&gt; We call this ambient computing.<p>Wow, it sounds like &quot;IoT&quot; is getting a makeover. Will this become the new more palatable vogue term for total immersion in corporate-owned wireless electronics?

Smart glasses were a gimmick back when they were first designed and implemented in the 60s&#x2F;70s, and they will continue to be a gimmick, especially if G takes them on.<p>Nothing against North in particular, I just think that it&#x27;s a recipe for disaster to have every minute of a human&#x27;s waking life tracked by Google. Color me a cynic, but I&#x27;m not optimistic about the future of this technology, especially in the hands of big G.

Looks like North is heading South.

I look forward to everything North ever was or did being chucked down the memory hole in 3-10 years, as is tradition

Not brave enough to say it to my friends but I would really love a pair of smart glasses

Will they keep most of the North team @ the google Kitchener-Waterloo location?

Always a bit sad when Canadian companies get acquired by the US behemoths

&gt; 10 blue links on a PC<p>are they blue because they&#x27;re all from advertisers?

tl;dr what do I do about recycling my Focals, ring, and case, given the difficulties a generic e-waste facility will have in removing the highly integrated batteries from the Focals and case? Also, if you have a startup making pretty, highly integrated devices, please have a plan for recycling your devices when they inevitably turn into bricks.<p>I was a little surprised to hear that the acquisition is going to turn my Focals into a pair of chunky-looking, prescriptionless eyeglasses, and the carrying case into an alcantera-lined brick. I would like to recycle these, but I&#x27;m not sure how. The post-acquisition FAQ only seems to cover what&#x27;s happening to their products&#x2F;services, how we&#x27;re going to get refunds (wasn&#x27;t expecting that), and how to wipe my Focals.<p>My main concern in recycling these is the highly integrated batteries. The Focals, the ring, and the case all have batteries that I can&#x27;t access and can&#x27;t see, and I don&#x27;t see too many screw holes (though I admittedly haven&#x27;t looked). Given what I&#x27;ve seen of e-waste recycling processes, I don&#x27;t see anyone taking the time to carefully opening these up to get the batteries out, and I doubt they would try cracking them open like a crab to get at the battery, given the risk of possibly breaking a battery or cutting onesself on something sharp.<p>Ideally, I would be able to just ship them my Focals and they would take care of recycling properly, but providing instructions on how to remove the battery or the types of facilities that would be capable of recycling these things would be a start.<p>Also, I&#x27;d like to make a request of all of you: if you are or are ever involved with a startup that is making pretty, highly-integrated devices, please have a plan on how to recycle your devices when they inevitably turn to bricks. Hell, make it part of your acquisition message so customers won&#x27;t just throw them in the trash (or blindly throw them into the single-stream recycling expecting it to get handled there and have it end up back in the trash) and dump more lithium into landfills.

How can you buy a cardinal direction?

MARCH 19, 2020: North Wearables Looks for a Buyer While Cash Is Running Out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;aKLaPA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;aKLaPA</a> (from Bloomberg, just without the paywall)

Three more to go.

&gt; We are winding down Focals 1.0 and we will not be shipping Focals 2.0, but we hope you will continue the journey with us as we start this next chapter.<p>Isn&#x27;t this just a classic acquihire?<p>I&#x27;m sure it will be on Our Incredible Journey soon.

byenorth<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a>

So we have a new king in the North

I just can&#x27;t see how these are better than smartwatches.