Author: Rebecca

Consumers in the United Kingdom can purchase the smartglasses for £1,000

Two years after being launched in the United States, UK consumers who own a credit card and who are over the age of 18 can now purchase Google Glass, which carries a price tag of £1,000 (just over US$1,700).

Even though they are on sale for the general public, the glasses are still in beta form.

According to Google, its wearable devices that have been made available for purchase in the United Kingdom are still only prototypes. The company wants the consumers who are the first to buy the product to use the gadgets, report problems and offers suggestions to help improve Google Glass’s future development. Once the beta phase is over, the official product is anticipated to cost about the same as the typical smartphone.

Glass can support prescription lenses and, soon, users will be able to choose from 5 swappable frames and 8 sunglasses from fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg. In addition, owners of this wearable tech will be able to resell the glasses just as users can sell their mobile devices. At present, there are several different older models of Glass up for auction and for sale on the UK eBay site from US sellers. However, prices are close to £950, which is not much cheaper than the newly released prototype.

The Google Glass version released in the UK will have better features than earlier models.

Since it was first introduced, Glass has been revised three times and has undergone several software updates. The UK model will have longer battery life than previous versions and will also be equipped with certain customizations that will enable it to adapt voice recognition software to accommodate varying British accents.

Consumers have the option of purchasing the wearable device online and having it shipped directly to them or they can head to the “Basecamp” center in King’s Cross in London, which Google has opened up for those who wish for a trial and fitting.

In addition, the UK variant of Google Glass can run “Glassware”, specialized Android apps. There will be 5 new apps made available from launch that are specific to the UK. These include apps from Guardian, Shazam, Star Chart, goal.com and Zombies Run.

Pandora Media Inc. experiences location based marketing flub.

Pandora, the online radio company, gives mobile advertisers the ability to target their users through the zip code the consumer enters upon signing up but, what has recently been discovered, is that the trouble with this mobile marketing technique is if the advertiser’s customers do not manually change their zip code data in the event that they move, they will continue to receive adds that would only be relevant to their previous place of address.

Many mobile ads that use latitude and longitude for targeting a user’s location are inaccurate.

According to a recent Thinknear survey of 53 million ad impressions, only 34% of mobile ads that use geolocation technology for the purpose of targeting mobile users in a specific location are accurate within 328 feet (100 meters). Meanwhile, 27% are inaccurate by over 32808 feet (10,000 meters).

Thinknear General Manager Eli Portnoy said that mobile users on the go create problems for these apps. Although an application developer may believe to have the proper longitude and latitude coordinates that are equal to a one meter (3.2 ft) by one meter location on a map, in reality, these coordinates could be way off by hundreds of meters. Therefore, if an app publisher utilized the zip code that was entered in during sign up as a central point, the user could, in fact, be traveling in a completely different zip code.

Portnoy commented that “The industry is moving very, very quickly, and location is very hard.” He added, “A lot of publishers are not location experts, and they are trying to get location, and they don’t understand how.”

To boost its mobile marketing technique, Pandora has started to check IP addresses.

According to Pandora, the majority of its advertisers are interested in running large-scale campaigns that are nationwide. They have no interest in trying to reach mobile users who are located on a specific city block. For this reason, the internet radio company does not try for a target that would be narrower than zip code.

To enhance its more targeted advertisements, Pandora is now checking from where the IP address of a mobile device is coming and will notify a user to change their zip code if this is required. Pandora’s director of product management, Jack Krawczyk, said that the company’s surveys have revealed that its mobile marketing location accuracy scores are in the high 90s on a percentage scale due to the fact that people do not move that often.