Google today announced a second set of five certified developer partners for Glass, the search company's $1,500 wearable computer.
As with the first five developers, announced in June, the selected companies are focused on the enterprise side of Glass, a sci-fi creation whose price and as-yet limited applications have for the moment kept it from being a broad consumer hit.
"We continue to work hard on the consumer side of Glass, but with enterprise there seems to a new use-case proposition each week," says Chris O'Neill, who runs global business operations for Glass. O'Neill reports to new Glass head Ivy Ross, who was brought into the Google fold to leverage her extensive consumer marketing experience to ease Glass' acceptance into the mainstream.
O'Neill says the continuing target for business use are the "roughly 80% of the global workforce that have blue-collar or true hands-on jobs, where if they put their tools down it means they're putting their work down."
Among the new companies Google selected as partners for its Glass At Work initiative are Pristine of Austin, Texas (developers of secure video communication for health care workers), Ubimax of Bremen, Germany (improving the flow of manufacturing and order picking in factories) and Interapt of Louisville, Ky. (helping fast food companies improve employee training).
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