Toast - Google Glass
Sliced Bread
BBC
4.6 • 695 Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2023
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From the team behind the hit series, Sliced Bread.
Sean Farrington investigates wonder products and businesses which promised so much to consumers.... but ultimately ended up toast.
Sean is joined by the self-made millionaire and serial entrepreneur, Sam White, to conclude what went wrong. Together they look at why a product or business failed, and what we can learn from their stories today.
In this episode, Sean talks about wearable tech and Google Glass.
These futuristic looking spectacles, with a heads-up display which showed text messages and street directions and allowed users to record video footage of what was happening around them, were named in Time Magazine as one of the best inventions of 2012.
There was plenty of hype. Google even demonstrated them by live-streaming a sky dive using Google Glass.
But by 2015, just two years after their release, Google announced that Google Glass Explorer, the consumer version of the glasses, was going to be shelved, and the version used by businesses has since been ditched too.
Sean and Sam speak to the BBC's former technology correspondent, Rory Cellan Jones, and the 'godfather' of wearable technology, Professor Sandy Pentland from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), to discover how Google Glass went from being the best thing since sliced bread, to toast.
Presenter: Sean Farrington Producer: Jay Unger
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, podcast fan. |
| 0:03.0 | Consider this your invite to the UK's biggest podcasting party. |
| 0:06.7 | We're heading to Sheffield from the 4th to the 6th of July |
| 0:09.0 | for the BBC Sounds Fringe at the Crossed Wires Festival. |
| 0:12.8 | We'll be joined by some of the biggest names in podcasting, |
| 0:15.3 | including Sarah Cox, Charlie Hedges, Russell Kane, |
| 0:18.4 | and some bloke called Greg James doing his Radio 4 show called Rewinder. |
| 0:23.2 | You can watch live shows of your favourite podcasts, and the best part is free. |
| 0:28.0 | To book your free tickets, go to crossedwires.org slash fringe. |
| 0:34.4 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:40.0 | Hello, it's Greg Foote here from Slice Bread. |
| 0:44.6 | The team and I are taking a short break to prepare our next batch of investigations for you. |
| 0:51.7 | And while we are away, there is a five-part guest podcast popping up here in the sliced bread feed only on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:54.3 | It's called Toast. See what we did there? |
| 1:01.8 | And each episode is going to tell the story of some products and businesses that promised so much at launch but went disastrously wrong. |
| 1:07.2 | Asking the people involved why things failed and what, if anything, could have been done differently. |
| 1:12.0 | So without further ado, let me pass over to the host of Toast, Sean Farrington, for the first episode. |
| 1:17.4 | Hello and welcome. I'm Sean Farrington, here to serve you Toast, a new series from BBC Radio |
| 1:23.7 | 4. Each week, we're going to have a look at one wonder product or business, which promised |
| 1:28.0 | the earth to consumers, but in the end, left its back as burnt. And alongside me is Sam White, |
| 1:34.1 | entrepreneur, self-made millionaire, run a ton of businesses, set up of her first one when she |
| 1:38.8 | was 24 years old. She's the business brains of this show. Sam, hello. How's that for an intro? |
... |
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