After yesterday’s link to the Wrap_Up on Kickstarter, a lot of readers contacted me to point out this similar-in-concept product: the Quirky PowerCurl. The PowerCurl looks to be more robust and is half the price, though it doesn’t accommodate international outlet adapters like the Wrap_Up. And if you grab a Quirky PowerCurl from this link, I may get rich enough to buy a Chiptole burrito.

Or, you could do as I do, and as Dr. Drang recommends, and simply be sure there’s some slack on the thin cable when wrapping it around those little feet.

Brilliantly clever trick by John Marstall.

Silicon Prairie News did a brief interview with me. It was a nice change of pace to be able to contribute to a Kansas City-based website and to meet with my interviewer, Annie Sorensen, face to face.

This is a funny remix of the Google Glasses video.

Ben Brooks and I talked about this yesterday when recording The B&B Podcast. It’s not a far stretch to imagine Google injecting ads into their Project Glass UI. But, to play Google’s advocate, they don’t have advertisements pop up when you’re using Android. When I was using the Galaxy Nexus, not once did I see an ad when trying to make a phone call or use the map.

(Via DF.)

Episode 55 of The B&B Podcast, Ben and I talk about the clickety clackety Das Keyboard I received this week, as well as Google’s Project Glass, and UI-less UI design in iOS apps (such as Clear and Paper).

Apple filed a patent application in 2008, entitled “Head-Mounted Display Apparatus for Retaining a Portable Electronic Device with Display”.

In the patent description it talks about the glasses being like a remote viewer and controller for the iPhone. In Neil Hughes’s post on Apple Insider about the patent, he summarizes that “the form factor, the application states, would allow the user to ‘relax while viewing image based content on the head-mounted device because he does not have to hold onto the portable electronic device.'”

Suppose that Google’s Project Glass were not a stand-alone device, but rather a remote control that connects to your smartphone.

For one, that would answer some of Viticci’s questions about if the glasses will be “PC-free” and how would enter passwords onto them. But moreover, that could give some resolution to the juxtaposition about this technology that is supposedly there when you need it and out of your way when you don’t.

Say Project Glass were a remote control for your phone. If so, you could surely configure it to only display certain types of incoming messages, and maybe even only from certain types of people / networks. In that type of scenario, Glass would be more like a very advanced, visual version of a Bluetooth headset.

These are some good questions from Federico Viticci.

What I am most curious about — if not even somewhat befuddled by — is the juxtaposition between the project’s vision statement and the actual product shown in the concept video. I think the video and the idea, in and of itself, is cool. But that’s not my point of befuddlement. Rather, it’s that not one iota of Project Glass comes across to me as demonstrating a technology which is out of your way when you don’t need it.

How are a pair of 24/7-connected glasses, that you wear, and that pop up notifications before your eyes, more out of your way than a smartphone that’s hidden away in your pocket?

Why doesn’t Google just say it like it is? Putting it nicely, something like:

We think people want to be even more connected to their social networks. We know that you get incoming texts and tweets all the time and that you are always coming across things you want to share. And so why should the device you do this from — your smartphone — be kept always at arms distance, and hidden in your pocket?

Therefore we’ve thought up a product that we believe is more convenient to use than a smartphone.

Our idea behind Google Glass is that you can text and tweet and send emails 24/7 while keeping your hands free and not having to take a break from what you do throughout the day. No longer will you have to tediously pull your phone out of your pocket when you get an incoming text message. No longer will you have to waste time by pausing to launch the camera app, snap a photo, and then launch the Google+ app just to share a memory with your Circles.

We want to invent a pair of glasses that lets you do all this and more while walking to your favorite coffee shop and using our maps and location services to get there.

Putting it not as nicely, Google Glass doesn’t strike me as a product which gets out of the way but instead as a product which would only give more fuel that “always connected addiction“.

Looks like a clever solution to the MacBook’s power-adapter-cable-wrap-up conundrum. Sure beats using Gorilla Glue.

Federico Viticci:

Whilst apps have evolved in the past five years, the “excuse” has remained the same. Developers want us to ditch old, analog ways of managing our information to embrace the digital era. They want us to get rid of the post-it notes to buy a $0.99 todo manager.

But the digital era has already started. And it’s been one giant, massive boom. So wouldn’t it be more appropriate for these new, innovative apps to tell us that we should ditch old, PC-like complicated apps instead?

It used to be that the biggest free account you could have was 10GB (8GB max of referrals added to the 2GB free account). But as of yesterday Dropbox has doubled the referral limit, and you can now get up to 16GB free storage added to your 2GB plan. If you’re a paying user, the referral limit is double-doubled to 32GB (!).

On top of all that, the referral bonuses are retroactive. So check your storage because you may have some extra space that wasn’t there yesterday.