The good people at Google have been busy releasing new aspects of their services that are meant to augment our muti-media experiences. As is often the case, one’s first blush of these technologies might appear a bit overwhelming or a bit far out on the bleeding edge for most of us. But one of our goals at MKCREATIVEmedia is to keep our readers up-to-date on that bleeding-edge technology and to keep apprised as to how that technology is adapted and adopted by the nonprofit, charity, and small-business communities.
The first, Google Play, will likely seem pretty familiar to anyone using a cloud-based media service like iCloud or Amazon Prime. But Google Glasses seems so far out there that even some tech fetishists are wondering about its appeal. Of course, people scoffed at the notion we would want to travel in a noisy open-air flying machine as well.
Google Play promises to bring all your media to one place, and is hardly unique in making such a claim. But Google also brings the power of Google+ to the mix, so you get access not only to your own media in your own cloud and the access to media recommended by Google (and its advertisers), but also access to what your Google+ friends and followers are reading, listening to, and watching. Google Play also offers a single entry point to Google Apps, which means Angry Birds is always accessible in your Googleverse.
With the ever more ubiquitous presence of high-speed WiFi and as ever more people use mobile devices as their communication/entertainment hubs, Google’s umbrella ‘Play’ platform seems a smart move (though not an early one) toward cloud-based media distribution. The access of materials makes us all that much more expectant that we can get our information (entertainment or otherwise) whenever we feel like we want it. And even the nonprofit world must be ready to face this fact as its members explore new ways to share their good work and to draw supporters into their causes (vis the ‘Kony 2012’ video).
For a different perspective on the physical world, Google has gone into optometry, which is to say, Google has been developing glasses to augment our reality. They are not beyond Beta state, but their claims are being circulated via Google’s promo videos:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4[/youtube]
What exactly these glasses will show us is not entirely clear, but one scamp, RebelliousPixels, suggests it mostly will be a medium to inundate us with Google Ads. Here is the ‘same’ video with those ads causing eye strain if not seizures for the advertising needed to pay for the service:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mRF0rBXIeg[/youtube]
It’s difficult to believe he(?) is far from the truth. But the change is coming, and the fact is we all will have to make our blogs and website optimized both for mobile and for Ray-Bans.
