Since October I’ve been saying that Apple is about to uncork a major new mixed reality strategy in September, and probably tomorrow at its developer conference.

Tomorrow at its developer conference, if Apple is really serious about AR, or its even better sister, mixed reality, then it will need to show developers a set of foundational technologies, including a new SLAM system (which really is a virtual copy of the real world that can be used for a wide range of things from self-driving cars, to navigating drones and robots, to mixed reality glasses).

But my faith is being tested this weekend for sure. Why? A certain Foxconn insider.

First, lets talk about my fears, then let’s dig into the detail that this insider brought to us and what I think it all means.

This insider has a TON of new info about Apple’s plans, but one thing he says is that there’s a good chance that Apple will kill its AR glasses, and that even if they ship they are fairly low in resolution. In fact, Apple’s glasses, as described by this insider, sounds very similar to Google Glass. Which I wore for a year and my experience led to studying the wearable/AR market a lot deeper. Yes, and that’s me wearing them in the shower, an image you have probably seen and made fun of. Funny on my wife for shooting that photo, which was designed to test if they could put up with a bit of water (something I should have tested a lot more thoroughly, turned out they were really bad about standing up to water).

So, what if I’m wrong? What if Apple’s AR efforts are much more constrained than I was expecting? Less Black Mirror and more Google Glass without the camera Google Glass had.

If so, then Apple is going more in the direction of just simplistic AR and less in the future of total mixed reality like Microsoft HoloLens shows us (which also has significant problems on field of view to solve, not to mention weight, expense, and usability problems) then I need to change strategy to more information displays and fewer polygons.

In other words, these glasses look much more suited to putting lines on the ground to help you navigate, and letting you see short bursts of text and other info than watching a movie or playing a new kind of video game. VR is certainly out the window with such a constrained product.

Think about a bigger Apple Watch screen out in front of you than something like Microsoft HoloLens that is trying to scan the room around you and “mixing” reality. Or, more accurately, an Apple CarPlay screen out in front of you. Interesting to be sure, but not the mixed reality dreams I was having.

It also means that these won’t bring the benefits of multiple virtualized monitors around you either. You can’t work on virtualized monitors at such a low resolution.

I love showing users the app RoboRaid on my HoloLens because it shows aliens blowing holes in your own walls and crawling through those holes into your room where you must shoot them before they shoot you. Lots of fun and demonstrates effectively that mixed reality, er, AR, or whatever this industry calls it (some call it “Immersive technology,” others call it “XR,” while yet others call it something else) is amazing and coming soon to all of us. I expect mixed reality glasses by 2020 that will be totally mind-blowing and already have seen several that will be released in 2018.

Apple’s Tim Cook has been sticking with “AR” which always bugged me because what’s coming in the next few years is much more like HoloLens and less like Layar, which did augmented reality on mobile phones years ago. If he were really aggressive he would be using the term “mixed reality” instead of “AR.” Or, he would come up with a new term and avoid the academic definitions.

But what if I’m wrong about Tim Cook? If I am, why did he spend a year telling the press about how cool AR will be? Why did he spend billions buying the best AR startups?

If I’m wrong, the mixed reality industry will develop slower than I am thinking it will (I was just at Augmented World Expo, where Microsoft had lines around its booth most of the time for people to get a look at HoloLens). The industry is clearly happening without Apple anyway (I know of 10 glasses under development around the industry and I’m sure there are a few I have no idea about) but it sure would be better with an Apple that pushes the market forward.

If either Apple stays out of mixed reality, or if Apple has a lackluster product offering, then that will help out the rest of the industry, but it will delay the day we see mainstream adoption by three to five years. Why? Only Apple really has the ability to prime the market. Only Apple has the necessary “ingredients” to get the entire market to care — everyone else, whether Samsung, Google, Huawei, has to build certain parts of its distribution channel to make mixed reality glasses a mainstream success. What are those?

1. A brand we want on our face.  Apple yes. Microsoft no.
2. Stores in best markets so people can try on glasses.
3. All the tech in place (Apple has bought many companies in AI and AR).
4. All the relationships with content folks (music, movies, games, etc).
5. The market power to push it through (Apple’s keynotes are watched by many more people than, say, Microsoft’s keynotes).

If we need Google, Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, Huawei, Snap, or, some new well-funded startup like Magic Leap, ODG, Meta, etc to bring mixed reality to market it will happen much slower. It will still happen because of other forces like all the investment into self-driving cars which uses very similar technology to what mixed reality glasses need. Eventually Moore’s Law gets us to a place where we have amazing optics and glasses that do true mixed reality.

It will be a shame because Tim Cook’s legacy won’t improve if he doesn’t have a new hit. While Tim has made a TON of profit we look to Apple to do more than just make profit. He needs to come up with something that reminds us of Apple’s story (Apple has been the one to really push the market into new user interfaces, something it has done three times before).

The market is hoping for something new that most people don’t expect. Just like most people didn’t expect Apple to do a phone back 10 years ago when it brought us the iPhone.

We expect a new OLED screen because many of our friends who have Android devices already have OLED screens (that’s coming in the next iPhone and will bring us much better color, sharpness, and way better battery life).

Anyway, by this time tomorrow we’ll know how aggressive Apple is about augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

If it shows developers nothing then I’ll be depressed for a while. I have bet hard that Tim Cook has a major new user interface under development and if he shows up tomorrow without any magic then it’ll be depressing.

If Apple is just bringing us glasses that do what Google Glass did four years ago (albeit without the camera that people wrongfully blamed Google Glass’ demise on) then I’ll also be depressed. Google Glass did have a lot of interesting ideas, particularly when navigating us around, or showing us who is calling, and all that, but it hardly was a convincing product and wasn’t one that really showed us what the future is like when the iPhone came along (or the Apple II, or the Macintosh).

Yes, I will probably buy them, but I will feel about these the way I feel about my Apple Watch. Nice to have but I’m hardly going to gush over them. That said, look at Apple’s AirPods. Selling well even though there are lots better headphones on the market. My Pioneer Rayz are WAY better. Why? They have six microphones, have noise cancelling, way better sound, and more. These will probably be the same. Popular because they are from Apple but hardly the best that pushes the market forward.

If all this is true then I’ll be forced to stay with Windows for my VR work and look for others in the industry to supply what I want in terms of new ways of working, shopping, entertaining ourselves, etc.

It will dramatically help the nascent VR market too. Why? There is no way in hell such a small resolution and field of view can provide immersion. Anyone who has been in VR knows what it feels like to be “immersed” in the media. It’s magical and I was hoping that Apple would have an answer to that. It is starting to look like Apple is far less aggressive than I was hoping for.

Also, it shows that Apple bought into the anti-camera feelings that I believe are wrong to listen to, but understandable in today’s marketplace. Apple knows the number one thing is these things have to be light and can’t damage its brand. Apple didn’t ship a camera in the first iPad and this might be smart way to get people used to wearing a pair of glasses before bringing us a full-blown mixed reality pair.

This leaves a HUGE opportunity for Microsoft to exploit and one I expect a rejuvenated Microsoft to use in a big way.

Interesting how so few people really understood Google Glass and its problems. Hint: the real problem isn’t with the camera. It’s with the screen and I felt that the only way to get over the screen issue (which introduces a new social contract problem that makes people around those wearing such a gadget feel nervous because the screen gets in the way of eye contact and it also introduces information asymmetry — if you are wearing it and I’m not you have information on me that I don’t have on you).

It’ll be interesting to see what Apple decides.

Aside: Shel Israel and I have started a consulting business, Transformation Group, that helps businesses figure out what they should do regarding mixed reality. We both are about to get on a plane to San Antonio, Texas, to speak to GEOINT, and you can bet these leaks are getting us to change our strategy too.

So, back to the details that I see from this Foxconn Insider:

Details on the glasses:
Called “Project Mirrorshades, Apple Iris.”

The glasses have a resolution of 428×240 per eye. There’s a prism used to reflect light into your eye and make a virtual screen in front of you. Has a microphone, an accelerometer, a microphone for Siri control, and a “small capacitive strip” for accepting calls and adjusting volume, etc.

No camera. That also seems to mean there’s no 3D sensor too, since those and cameras are very close to the same thing. If so, then it’ll be hard to do mixed reality because doing that requires sensing the real world.

Has both polarized and prescription lens snap ins. If ever released will be available in different sizes for men and women.

Also the field of view is about 14.5 degrees, which is even smaller than HoloLens.

This source believes it’ll cost about $600. This leaker thinks there will be a 65% chance it will be cancelled.

Here’s all the details:

Kopin NED acetate frame with polarized or prescription lens with Zeiss smart optics.
Speaker: Bone induction modules with noise cancellation.
Light sensor accelerometer for step tracking and head movement.
Magnetometer for navigation.
Capacitive Pavel Ceramic battery.
Charging circuit is a BL5 induction module.
Colors: crystal, champagne, and black.
Cellulose acetate injection mold frames into an aluminum mold. Colors are added and tumbled for finish.
It has a prism that conveys the NED (Near Eye Display) display image to lens.

It is the fourth visible user interface of the personal computer era.

The first was character mode. MS-DOS.
The second was the GUI, graphical user interface. Macintosh and Windows.
The third was touch. iPhone and Android.
The fourth is spatial computing.

At each introduction of a new user interface some companies either went away or became dramatically less important. When GUI’s came along Borland and Wordperfect, both companies bet on the older character mode and promptly went away.

Same when touch came along. Nokia and Blackberry bet against touch, or didn’t react nearly strongly, nor quickly, enough. They are either gone or really much less important than they once were.

I can not see a world where Apple goes away, not with $220 billion in cash reserves.

But I CAN see a world where Tim Cook goes away and his legacy is dramatically changed.

The Apple Watch didn’t hurt him. At least not beyond a small skin scratch. That will not be true when spatial computing comes along.

First, what is spatial computing? Run a Google Search on the term and you find: “Spatial Computing is a set of ideas and technologies that will transform our lives by understanding the physical world, knowing and communicating our relation to places in that world, and navigating through those places. The transformational potential of Spatial Computing is evident.”

It already is arriving, though. Self-driving cars use spatial computing. Robots use spatial computing. Drones, especially ones that map out the world at some level, are using spatial computing. Google will soon introduce spatial computing to smartphones, in the introduction of Tango sensors that map out the world. Robots use spatial computing, particularly those from Boston Dynamics, another Google company.

Finally, mixed reality glasses use spatial computing. Microsoft Hololens is showing you spatial computing and the four video cameras on that product that map out the real world are what bring you both spatial computing and mixed reality. Magic Leap is preparing to launch products in the next 18 months, and has $1.3 billion invested in it so far by a group of companies led by Google and Baidu. Only insiders are paying attention, but both products let you walk around the real world and see virtual items placed on them. Go to YouTube and search for Hololens and you’ll see lots of demos of what spatial computing looks like.

Now, it isn’t clear yet to most people what will force Apple’s hand here. That’s the crazy thing. I know of several mixed-reality-spatial-computing glasses under development:

1. Magic Leap.
2. Microsoft Hololens.
3. Meta.
4. Apple??
5. Facebook. (Zuckerberg already announced he’s working on such).
6. Amazon?? (Its delivery drone has a paper-thin radar in it that my nerdy friends say is quite brilliant).

I’m seeing amazing demos, I’ve been including a few in my speeches around the world, and meeting with engineers that are working on some of these projects (later this week I’ll be in Israel to meet with such).

Also Meta and others are developing new spatial user interfaces. If you haven’t seen my tour of Meta that I did back in February (you need to be logged into Facebook to view), you really should. There you’ll meet some of the people who developed Tango, but are building a new user interface.

Anyway, back to the point. I bet that Tim Cook is going to try to follow Steve Jobs’ playbook. Which is watch everyone else prove there’s a market but wait until you can provide a better alternative. After all, the iPod wasn’t the first audio player. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone. The iPad wasn’t the first tablet.

We know Apple and Tim Cook knows what’s coming. Cook hired a professor from Virginia Tech who has seen Magic Leap. Or at least his students had seen it. Cook also has bought a number of companies in VR and AR, including Metaio, which showed me monsters on top of buildings years ago.

So Cook is prepared and he seems to be working hard with teams to come up with new products. Just read MacRumors rundown of all the moves Apple is making and you’ll see Tim Cook has all the ingredients to compete in this spatial computing world.

Here is the rub: Tim Cook isn’t Steve Jobs. He doesn’t have the market thinking he’s a genius. It will be a LOT more skeptical of Cook’s claims than it did toward Jobs. Cook rarely talks about products. He’s not someone I expect to sit down with for an evening and talk about great new products, like, say, a Tesla, and have a stream of visionary feedback about what does and doesn’t work.

Cook doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who can get a superhuman effort out of a development team, either, the way Jobs could. Which is important for focusing a team on a market window. Lets be honest, most of the world’s great products came with quite a bit of pain on behalf of employees. Will Cook’s nicer way of working work at Apple to bring us a world-defining product? The jury is out.

So there are a lot of questions, heck, questions that the Apple Watch didn’t answer, and, in fact, caused to get louder.

Is Cook a product guy? So far the answer is no, he’s not.

To date that hasn’t hurt his legacy. He’s still leading the best company on earth. The one with the best retail stores. The best innovation legacy. The best brand. The best supply chain. The best marketing and PR teams. The best profits. These are daunting advantages for Apple, but if Magic Leap ships and Apple can’t match it for years you’ll see many switch brand preference. Then Tim Cook really will be gone and his legacy will not be a sweet one, but rather a sour one as the guy who hobbled Apple.

All this is saying is a new user interface is coming. Will it bring with it major corporate change the way previous user interfaces have?

History says yes.

Tim Cook better worry.

On the other hand, if Tim Cook delivers in the coming spatial computing era, well, then, he will finally put Steve Jobs in a box that Apple can really move forward from.

Are you a betting person? If so, where would you put your money?

Honestly? I just am not hearing good things out of Cupertino lately and the folks at Google and Microsoft are bringing real innovations to the market.

This post has a bunch of business honesty and goes into my personal financial situation in depth. I’m sharing it with you to start a new conversation about where I’m going, and to make it possible to write openly from now on about my new path through life.

See my deal with Upload VR isn’t a paying deal. Being entrepreneur in residence just means I have an office there and I have to figure it out. Many of my friends tell me they think I talked myself into a great-paying job and don’t need to worry.

No.

My deal with the founders of Upload VR just put me in place to have a great office in the middle of one of the hottest industries out there (and that’s not me saying that,  great Silicon Valley investor Jeff Clavier told Leade.rs that last week in Paris).

It means I have to come up with a business (or businesses) that will pay enough to keep my family’s lifestyle and, to keep my office at Upload for more than a year, I have to come up with one that provides value to Upload itself. We are in active discussions about that and I expect them to go well. More on that in a future post.

Having an office in the middle of the hottest media business in the world is a HUGE benefit, but all it is is unrealized opportunity. I still need to do the work. I still need to find a way to turn all the coolness of VR and the community that’s coming together into a business. Lots of people want to do VR-related events, for instance, and I have to figure out how to do that while making the income I need to keep my family in Silicon Valley and my autistic son’s many specialists paid to get him the care he needs.

The Upload deal does have other big benefits: I have a media team around me that helps me learn about a new, rapidly changing industry. It has events nearly every night, and is part of a growing market, so opportunities are surrounding me. It reminds me of the early days of blogging where there was the same and eventually the businesses did show up. Techcrunch, Engadget, Huffington Post, all started within a few years of each other due to the opportunity that blogging brought. I believe VR is going to be just as important, if not more so, and it will be followed by an even bigger wave, AR, but the real market might not show up for three to six years. I don’t have the financial freedom to just play VR until the market shows up, so need to find real businesses fast that start paying dividends now.

I can’t imagine a better place to start new businesses than from inside Upload’s offices.

On the other hand, my personal financial runway is running out and boy does that sharpen your focus. Rackspace gave me a few months income to figure it all out and I have until Thanksgiving to build businesses now, or get revenues, before I start digging into my meager savings. I am luckier than many to have even that much time to figure it out, but then my expense flows and housing costs, along with having a kid in college and another who has special needs. His psychologist has been urging us to put Milan into a school that costs $75,000 a year. That is more than a Stanford education for a year! Even now he has dozens of teachers, psychologists, care givers, and baby sitters. Truth be told I couldn’t afford it all even on my Rackspace salary and we are working to cut back but it’s hard to not give your kids the care they need. If you haven’t noticed Silicon Valley is expensive, even for someone with a nice six-figure income.

I remember talking to MC Hammer about why he had to declare bankruptcy: all those mouths to feed. You can get in a financial hole and fast.

I’ve been working on figuring out where my next income is going to come from, but in looking at the problem I realized that I have a mental block. I needed to wash the big-company thinking out of my mind. See, when you are at a big company you start to cruise and you start doing things that don’t necessarily need to add to your personal bottom line. You do things you think are important for your company to be at. You don’t take risks that might help you personally, but might put you in conflict with your bosses. And, yes, even you get used to that fun corporate credit card. Now I find I’m not so willing to go out to an expensive restaurant as I used to be.

I get now why innovation usually comes from a lack of resources. When your family’s future is uncertain staying up a little later and working on your business seems more important than watching a TV show or, even, playing that VR headset (which is why I have two of them sitting on my office floor unboxed). Taking time to meet with yet another businessperson is more important all of a sudden than hanging out with friends (sorry friends). So does taking a tour around the world to meet innovators. All of a sudden you are listening, thinking, and cutting things that don’t aggregate to you. Coming up with business plans. Trying your pitch out on people (and you learn how to pitch again because you have to do it so much where at a big company you only get one chance a quarter to pitch a new idea).

Same when you are working on a technology, or any business really. If you don’t have enough money to do it the old way, you have to come up with a new way to do the same thing cheaper and faster if you want to grow or increase profits. I was talking to the owner of the South African Cycling Team about this, Douglas Ryder. He has two thirds the budget of the other teams. He’s using innovative technology to win. I hope to meet up with his team this week as they race through California to capture his story better but already they have moved from worst to fifth in the world in about two years despite the lack of resources.

I fought with myself whether I should even disclose this to you. After all, there are certain benefits from having you all think I landed a well-paying job and I’m making tons of cash. Sort of like a rapper who brags about his private jet but really is broke. Helps you keep appearances, but I’ve never been one for appearances.

I really only have one thing as a journalist, futurist, or whatever you call me: your trust.

I really have come to hate the social media attitude of “only show the beautiful side of yourself.” I will never treat you that way. Plus, once you start lying, or leaving things out, to your audience and friends in an attempt to get jobs or keep your reputation, well, then you are leading a life that will drive you nuts.

It’s always better to just tell the truth and see where that leads.

I’ve learned the value of asking for help before I fall too deep into a hole. Easier to dig you out of a well if you are only a few feet down than if you’ve fallen all the way to the bottom.

Lately you’ve seen me traveling the world meeting with entrepreneurs, next Monday I head back to Europe to do just that for several weeks. One that I met with recently told me he is worse than broke, his company closed down and now he has a personal debt of a million dollars that he needs to pay back. He’s feeling the pressure I’m feeling but even more intensely. He laid out how he’s digging out of the hole he’s in and that helped me deeply. I know many in the community that are struggling financially. Not knowing where rent for next week will come from. Just knowing there are others going through this pressure does help, which is yet another reason I’m sharing my own struggles.

Some other mental blocks: I thought speaking income might be the way out of this problem, but, no, and even if it were enough speaking is a tough job for a family man. One international speech requires being away from family for five days. This month I will rarely be home in an attempt to rebuild my story and media streams and get around the world to meet many of the influencers in the VR ecosystem, which will probably pay off. Worse, it’s not scalable. There isn’t any way to increase revenues unless you do something else with your life, which probably won’t happen if you are living your entire life on the road.

It’s tough, too, for someone getting older. Even if you get business class seats (which are very expensive) it’s tough on the body and takes one away from building a more sustainable business and is spiky income at best, plus it drives you to do things that might not be natural acts (I arrived to one speaking gig to discover they wanted me to teach a four-hour class to a bunch of MBAs instead of my usual 20 or 40-minute keynote. I’m proud I pulled it off with less than 24-hour warning, but it wasn’t comfortable for sure).

Oh, and if you are desperate for income word gets around that you’ll work for cheaper than your usual retail fee. Which puts your family on a downward spiral. Lots want you to speak for free. The best speakers don’t need to speak to make their money, so they can turn down everything except for the high-paying gigs or the ones that will help their business make even more (which is why most speaking gigs are free, the organizers know you will use it as an advertisement to get business). I’ll keep doing speaking to extend my runway, and for the other benefits, for sure, but doing that keeps me from really working on my business and solving the problem.

Back to mental blocks. I had a mental block about my blog. After all, in an age of Facebook, Medium, Twitter, and Snapchat, why do I need it? I really don’t. I thought. Plus, here I have to worry about security and servers and, yes, even paying for them. Right now Rackspace is picking up the bill but it won’t forever so I need to figure it out. A few years back I was hacked here, which made me realize just how useful having a service is to run your media. Facebook and Medium, for all their failings, protect their users from the underlying work it takes to keep a platform up and running.

It is a mental comfort, though, to have your own space, with your own name on it, that has no competition from others, in which to just share with the world and see what pops out. On Facebook you might not get distributed. On Twitter you might not get seen. On Snapchat you might not get deep. On LinkedIn you might not get read, and even if you do your words are surrounded by distractions.

So I’m working on that mental block. If I’m going to build a media business I need to build it from somewhere I own. I’m CEO and founder of Scobleizer.com. That sounds better than “I’m hoping Facebook distributes me.” I might be broke soon but at least I have something I control. Turns out investor Fred Wilson was right that I gave up something when I left my blog.

All weekend I was hanging out with great entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, er, San Francisco, including Evernote’s founder, Phil Libin, and one of Product Hunt’s key players, Erik Torenberg, and they focused me on this: build things that you own and that can aggregate back to you and that won’t change. Oh, and they all are trying to find ways to disrupt what already exists. In other words, change the rules. Service Rocket’s founder told me the same recently, he told me to do virtual events to corporate clients. He showed me how one such event would make as much as a speech on the road, maybe more and that it’s more scalable, I could do several per day and to larger and larger audiences. (Service Rocket does corporate training and does it well, has 200 employees and hasn’t taken any venture capital to build that business).

Some things that I do own: my email newsletter. If you are subscribed to that, thank you! (Although Rackspace is currently hosting it, and paying Hugh Macleod to do the art for it, the email is mine and I’ll be moving it to my own business soon). A great reputation that gets me into most any door in the industry. My social graph is full of influential people who continue shaking the industry. My Facebook friend graph has everyone from Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, to Kara Golding, cofounder of Hint Water. I have so many great friends that open up opportunities for me. It’s why I still have a flow of great insights and news from inside companies. It’s why I’m able to recognize trends, like the current move toward spatial computing, before anyone else sees them.

Also, I’m working on another book with Shel Israel, which is about what’s happening next after mobile phones: spacial computing, VR, AR. But there too we don’t have enough money to complete the book. It is expensive to report on, and write books and get them edited and marketed properly. Even just a trip to Magic Leap in Florida will cost us a few thousand dollars. Shel is not in a place where he can invest in the book either, and this lack of resources is causing us to innovate there too.

We are exploring some other business ideas, including starting a consulting/analysis business where we would charge businesses for early access to not just what we’re learning about, say, augmented reality, but where we’d work with said companies on coming up with an innovation plan. Still need more time to figure that out, but Jeremiah Owyang is inspirational here. He has built a nice business that supports his lifestyle without forcing him to be on the road too much away from his family.

We’re considering crowd funding, too, to sell copies of the book, or other partnerships, before the book will come out.

That said, we are willing to hear all creative ideas, including me doing consulting or adding other value beyond just a blurb in the book, and it will be an important book about just how deeply the world is about to change. Heck, tomorrow Google will announce several spatial computing initiatives at its IO conference, but we are between cycles and marketing teams aren’t willing to throw much cash around when this new age will really arrive in two to four years. Timing is hard on products and our book is just a little early. One entrepreneur told me he got sponsors for his conference by offering them 10 days of his time. Great idea, and one we are willing to entertain.

This is what it means to be an entrepreneur: refuse to hear no and refuse to die. That said, damn those mental blocks are sure loud in my head. “You’re going to fail,” they say. I get why it’s so important to get coaching and mentoring to tell those voices of failure to be quiet for a while and to focus your efforts on where you’ll get the most likely chance for success.

Some of my friends and family keep asking “why don’t you go work for Google, Amazon, Facebook or Microsoft or some firm?” I know that’s the easy way out of this problem. I want to build my own thing and get over the mental block that keeps telling me I can’t build my own business. It sure is uncomfortable facing the dwindling savings, though. I am keeping myself from entertaining that mental block for a few more months.

The way I see it is even if I choose the big company path again (or even a well funded startup) I am more useful to it if I have tried to find a new path through life first. I need to build some entrepreneurial skills first to have something to offer another company, if I am forced down that route. For the past month I’ve been working harder than I have worked in two months at Rackspace. Those resource constraints are hugely motivating and that newly exercised muscle will soon be much more valuable than the flab that existed before.

The other thing about going to a big company is that I might end up in this same situation in another seven years. Having to figure out my financial life. But then I’ll be 57 and it won’t be as easy and there might not be two big waves of opportunity coming. The industry is tough for older people. I’d rather have my own business for the last part of my career than have to rely on a committee that I can’t influence for my paycheck.

It gives me a new respect for those of you who have built businesses and, even, those who are struggling to do so. It also shows why the culture you are around is so important. Do you hang out with big dreamers who not only show you it’s possible, but show you how? That force you to focus on business? So many around the world don’t have the advantages I do so end up working at the big company and putting their dreams on hold. Yesterday, on a train, Phil Libin, founder of Evernote, did just that for me. It wasn’t comfortable for either of us, but he was right and I’m so fortunate to have people like that to help me get over my mental blocks.

Over the next few months you’ll follow me as I head down this path to redefine myself and figure things out.

Finally, one person is really inspiring me. Maryam Scoble, I’m her husband. She took a job this year as a conference planner at Service Now. While I’m typing these words at 35,000 feet on the way back from France to home she’s dealing with hundreds of speakers at their huge industry conference in Las Vegas. Why? She’s trying to help me figure this out. She’s keeping a brave face on it, but I can see and hear the strain of a new job with big responsibilities and it has sharpened my resolve to figure it out. It’s really great to have a life partner that’s pulling on the oars in the same direction as you are trying to go, not to mention her job provides health care for the family so that’s one less bill I need to worry about. Plus, as she’s done that I see a sparkle in her eyes of new-found confidence and that makes me very happy.

OK, now that I’ve disclosed the strain, back to work! (Heading back into a plane, this time home to San Francisco, see you in a few hours!)

What a seven years it was working at Rackspace, much of it as its futurist.

As you know, for the last seven years you’ve seen me hop around the world visiting innovation labs, conferences, startups, and other places/companies that could tell me something about where the future is going. I’ve built relationships all over the world and brought Rackspace to many new companies and places but there are deep shifts coming in our society due to new technologies and it’s time to make a career change.

Not to mention I was one of the most recognizable faces at a multi-billion-dollar public company with 6,000 employees and successfully helped it build its brand on social media and on the world’s most important stages.

Today I’m announcing that I’m leaving Rackspace to join Upload VR http://uploadvr.com/ — a new media site covering virtual and augmented reality — as its entrepreneur in residence, where I’ll be developing new shows, events, and working with other entrepreneurs in the Upload Collective, a coworking space for virtual reality-focused startups. In particular working with Upload’s cofounders Will Mason and Taylor Freeman.

Why?

Well, two years ago, at Web Summit in Ireland, I watched many people get their first look at Oculus Rift. Nearly everyone came out of the demos with a stunned look on their face and most used expletives to describe their experiences. Me too. I’ve seen that happen dozens of times since, including last weekend in Cape Town, South Africa, where a local entrepreneur threw a VR party in my honor and many people got their first experiences with VR, which is why I posted this video as part of this post.

It is clear to me that there are new opportunities to build companies in the VR space (duh, just look at the billions of dollars of investment) and the Augmented Reality wave that will follow VR will be even bigger. I wanted to be in a place where I’d have the freedom to create businesses, or at least be part of a media team that was focused on this future.

In the past six months it’s been clearer and clearer that Rackspace was undergoing its own shifts, toward supporting more enterprise customers who were moving existing datacenters to clouds running at Amazon or Microsoft. VR and AR didn’t yet matter to them, at least not to the bottom line. At least not yet and probably won’t make a difference in the bottom line for three years.

As a media guy, though, I know that in three years the market window will have closed. If there will be new brands, and I believe there will be, or new shows, documentaries, conferences, blogs, worlds, whatever you want to call them, they will all be built in the next three years.
I just didn’t want to sit on the sidelines and Rackspace couldn’t invest in me internally to do such. That’s not how companies work.

So, today, I’m announcing that I’m leaving Rackspace to be entrepreneur in residence at a new media property that you might have heard of. Upload VR http://uploadvr.com/ is my favorite place to learn about new VR headsets, products, experiences, games, cameras, and more.

I’m writing a separate post about what Rackspace, and, in particular, my boss, Robert D. La Gesse, meant to me over the last seven years. It’s been such an honor to be a public face of a public company and, especially one that has such an important role in the tech industry with hundreds of thousands of customers.

Some QA:

Q. What does Rackspace think of this? Were your bosses disappointed?
A. Rackspace invested in me to go follow my dreams and passions. We both are friends and you may see Rackspace involved in what I do in the future. They also gave me my newsletter, content rights to use as I see fit. This move made sense for both sides. We’ve been working on this for a while and figuring out what my future might look like.

Q. How are you going to be compensated?
A. I’m in a very fortunate position because I’ve been asked to speak to corporate events all over the world. I have a new speaker management company, ODE Management, and they are quite positive that there’s enough demand out there for me as a speaker that I don’t need to worry about that short term and that I can work with Upload easily while doing so. That said, I’ll be working on making a series of businesses, including a new book, “Beyond Mobile” that I’m writing with Shel Israel, so I’ll open up new sponsorship and advertising possibilities in the future. More on those soon. I’m also open to new business opportunities, if you have one let’s talk!

Q. What does this mean for what you are doing on social media?
A. You probably won’t see many changes, at least not soon. My Facebook will keep being full of industry news and things that catch my eye. I will still visit with many entrepreneurs and others, albeit with more of a VR/AR focus now. Same on Twitter, SnapChat, LinkedIn, and Google+. They will get my newsletter, like I’ve been doing the past year. Some changes you might notice is that my blog will start up again and I’m playing with some ideas for YouTube, but more on those later in the year.
One idea that I’m noodling on is doing social media consulting, though. Dale Bracey (he worked at Rackspace on the social media team) and I are thinking that through. A lot of the world still doesn’t understand how to use social media well and Dale was amazing at doing the dirty work of what I call “defensive social media” (helping customers out on Twitter and other places) while I did the “offensive work” of building brand, and building storytelling devices for Rackspace (like I did at Microsoft too). I’m working with brands to come up with some ideas, if you have advice or need that kind of service, drop us a line at scobleizer@gmail.com

Q. What will my role as EIR at Upload entail?
A. I’ll be working with the Upload Collective team to help find other great startups to join me in the space, along with thinking through its event strategy for 2017. This is one reason why I wanted to join as an EIR, it would give me time after leaving Rackspace to have discussions with a number of companies without the constraint of worrying about appearances. Being a public representative of a public company does tend to limit the kinds of discussions one can have without causing rumors, brand destruction, or stock price consequences, so this change frees me to work with the marketplace on a number of different initiatives. Want to have a chat? Please contact me at scobleizer@gmail.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble

Q. What will you be doing this weekend at SXSW?
A. I’ll be attending the Upload VR Mixer on Sunday night. I’ll also be hosting a “Beyond Mobile” VIP breakfast for VIP brand representatives on Sunday morning (sorry, that’s sold out). Plus speaking at several events and doing my own reporting on how the VR/AR space is evolving here at SXSW. Am on a panel during the VR day on Thursday with several VR pioneers. Plus having a little fun at the concerts in the evenings and many dinners and parties I’ve been invited to.

Q. Will this mean you will focus exclusively on virtual reality?
A. No. I’m going to continue to cover “Beyond Mobile” technologies, including additive manufacturing, IoT, robots, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and other technologies that change our future, all hitting in the next decade. I’m especially interested, though, in VR and AR, and how our culture is deeply changing due to these new technologies. In fact, one advantage of this move is I can spend more time working with Shel Israel on our book, “Beyond Mobile,” which will ship in December. We’re still looking for more sponsors for that, by the way. We’re looking for companies who want to position themselves as leaders in the “Beyond Mobile” space.

Q. Why Upload VR?
A. While most people haven’t heard of Upload, it is my favorite site of those covering the upcoming virtual reality and augmented reality spaces. Plus they have a great office in downtown San Francisco where they are hosting several startups with more coming soon.

I won’t push this on social media. I wonder who will find it first?

Oh, and if you are going to SXSW I’ll have some other announcements to make there.

Details on “Scoble Show” on Saturday.

I have 200 friends coming from around the world to Napa on Saturday to raise awareness for http://www.preventchildabuse.org/ and celebrate several birthdays. Angelica Mabray and I started this last year because our birthdays are next to each other and we wanted a way to celebrate and kick off the year properly. Last year we started the Scoble Show because it was my 50th birthday.

This year it takes on a new importance, because its been a year since I’ve been drunk on wine I had from Sarah Francis at this party last year (she was our featured entrepreneur).

This year we have a TON of music, and much more. We’re planning on live streaming it on my YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/scobleizer

We’ll also be using the shoto app to share photos with each other, as the official photo sharing app of the Scoble Show (it is sponsoring the Scoble Show). This is a great new app that lets people easily share photos at events, or moments in their lives and get the photos your friends take. It’s a lot of fun, more on Saturday.

Rackspace is another sponsor, they didn’t put any money in, but gave me the time to plan this, which is very valuable. As we further move to supporting a variety of business infrastructure, from our own OpenStack, to AWS, Azure, Magento, and other clouds, having great relationships with entrepreneurs and other key players in the ecosystem matters a lot, plus Rackspace supports employees’ charity and community building efforts in a variety of ways.

Prevent Child Abuse is an organization that means something very personally to me, since I was sexually abused when I was young. If we can help just one person avoid such this will be worth it.

Anyway, come join me at 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday. I’ll post the exact URL then.

Here’s a list of the music and when they will be on stage.

Streaming will start at 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time, with Roem Baur.
–>>Official Start 4:15 p.m. Introductions,
4:30 p.m. Claire Parr. She’s an amazing musician, who has built an entire career around finding the best in life, music, food, wine (she picks the music for Southwest Airlines, among many other brands).
4:40 p.m. Jillette Johnson Jillette’s voice is amazing and is getting millions of listens on Spotify.
5:30 p.m. Bebo White and The Sada Springs Jug Band (Bebo built the first Website in the US).
6:15 p.m. Teresa Valdez Klein (Tae Phoenix) and Anna Post (She played her first concert last year at my event).
7 p.m. Roem A Baur (and Philip Nelson). Roem beat 100,000 others to get onto the Voice two years ago and he’s even better now.
7:30 p.m. Peter Hollens (he has millions of views on YouTube for his unique performances where he sings all the parts).
8 p.m. Pete Stringfellow and his band (Pete will be showing us his new music video which will be shown for the first time, then performing for us with his band). Pete also helped me choose the charity and will be talking about what it means.

Thank you to:

Sasha Webber for helping me with event planning/etc.
Sachin Dev Duggal and the team at http://www.shoto.com/ for sponsoring the Scoble Show.
Eddie Codel for live streaming the event on my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/scobleizer
Michael O’Donnell for making great photos in the studio downstairs.
Alexander Green and http://www.symmetrylabs.com/ for providing amazing LED displays upstairs.
Dominic Mendiola and his wife for the amazing Dom’s Chop Salsa – Taste the Grilled Difference. (They will be our featured entrepreneur).
Kara Keenan Goldin for the Hint Water. My new addiction.
Don Wetherell and http://www.bountyhunterwine.com/ for the amazing BBQ and other food.
Eric Mitchell for sharing his EDM documentary, which will be seen for the first time at our party (unfortunately we can’t share that publicly, but you’ll see more about it at SXSW).
Hugh MacLeod for the great poster artwork.
Tanya Denise Halepota for the flowers.
Kevin Hague and JBL for the Pulse 2 speakers.
GotLight for the AV. http://www.got-light.com/

Oh, and most importantly, Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble who makes it all possible and Robert D. La Gesse who continues to lead by example.

Hope you can join us for a fun time on Saturday! Thank you to everyone who has added something to this event to make it something very special.

Want to go? Tickets are sold out, but I still am holding three tickets for people who will make a great non-alcoholic drink for our guests. You game? If so, post below what it will be.

Damn, thinking about how much the world has changed since then. (I also posted this to Facebook here).

Back then there was:
No Facebook.
No YouTube.
No Twitter. Or Google+. Or Quora.
No Uber. Or Lyft.
No iPhone. Or iPads. Heck, even the iPod hadn’t been invented yet.
No Android.
No HDTV.
No self driving cars.
No Waze.
No Google Maps.
No Spotify. Or Soundcloud.
No WordPress.
No Wechat.
No Flipkart.
No AirBnb.
No Flipboard.
No LinkedIn.
No AngelList.
No Techcrunch.
No Google Glass.
No Y Combinator. Or Techstars. Or Geekdom.
No AWS. Or OpenStack. Or Azure.
No Snapchat.
No Skype. Or Hangouts.
No Yelp.
No Kickstarter.
No Apple Stores.
No Periscope. Or HangW/. Or Meerkat. Or, even, Qik or Kyte, which are gone now.
No IFTTT.
No Nest.
No drones.
No Kindle.
No Foursquare.
No Pebble. Fitbit. Or Apple Watch.
No Tesla. Or Hybrid cars. Or electric cars.

I can’t remember how we survived back then.

If I live another 15 years, what will we see?

Maybe I should fire up my blog again. I was thinking of doing that as a repository of my newsletter. http://www.scobleizer.com

Oh, and thanks to Dori Smith and Dave Winer. The two of them convinced me to start a blog (they were speakers at a conference I was helping plan back then, working for Dan Shafer). I thought blogging wasn’t important enough to add a session about it to our conference. Now there are conferences on blogging, even a famous one just for women bloggers. But they got me to start and Dave’s blog at http://www.scripting.com is still at the top of my reading list.

I am putting TONS of great content into there. If you aren’t on Facebook, I’m also on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/scobleizer or on Google+ at https://www.google.com/+Scobleizer

Someday I might come back to the blog, but the world has moved and it is on social media.

Now the trick is to figure out what to do here that I can’t already do on Facebook, which is where I’ve been spending most of my time lately. Are you reading me there? Why not? That’s where you’ll see EVERYTHING I do.

Here? I think I’ll start writing longer posts again here and see what happens. Also, after this post ships I’ll also connect this to all the social networks, which will bring more people here.

In the Age of Context lots of companies will go over the freaky line. What is that line? Where at least some people are uncomfortable with the privacy implications of the service. At EVERY speech I’ve given about our new book privacy comes up and people tell me they are scared by this new world that we’re heading into where systems like Google Now help you based on all sorts of private data, from where you are standing to who has sent you airline plans.

But there are some “over the freaky line” concerns that are actually valid because they could put users into real harm. I believe this is one such case.

Figuring out where the freaky line is is one of a product designer’s top jobs in 2014 (and really this falls on corporate leadership in the CEO and CMO office, which increasingly will gain power over the IT budgets in the future, I believe).

Lately I’ve been looking at location-based services to make sure I didn’t miss anything that is important in the Age of Context we’re headed into (if you haven’t read the book Shel Israel and I wrote about the future of mobile, titled “Age of Context,” you really should because it’ll get you up to speed on how data from location, social, mobile, and sensors are being fused together and what this means for the future of privacy) and I looked back at Trapster. I thought it might have been killed by now, in the shadow of Waze, which, at least in San Francisco area, does a LOT better job (Waze is now owned by Google and some of the data reported by users on Waze now shows up on Google Maps but that data doesn’t come close to the freakiness of what Trapster shares with other people).

But Trapster is still alive and is being pushed by Nokia. Trapster still has a team with a budget of millions of dollars per year being poured into it by Nokia and dozens of employees. In fact, on April 30, 2013, on the Trapster blog it shows they have 30 employees.

What I found, though, scared me and showed me a company too far over the freaky line to be safe. Trapster is similar to Waze in that it lets drivers report cops, accidents, and other hazards which are shared with other drivers. I hadn’t used Trapster in a while because Waze has thousands of times more users in San Francisco and cities I’ve tried both on. Waze isn’t over the freaky line the way Trapster is which you’ll see in a moment.

Here’s what’s going on: Trapster shows your driving behavior on other people’s mobile phones as a blue line. A traceable path. Waze doesn’t do that, Trapster does. The blue line is there to show people that someone has just driven there and hasn’t reported any cops or other driving problems. The thing is this blue line sticks around for hours (I believe two, in my testing) and can be captured as a friend did on my account. He called me after I reported a cop and said “hey, did you just make a U Turn?”

Why yes I did. “Oh, how did you know that?” I asked. “I’m watching you on Trapster.”

Turns out that because Trapster has so few users it’s easy to “stalk” individual users based on these blue lines (I have several examples of where friends of mine and me have “stalked” users as they drive around town in real time). Especially if they use their real name as their user name, like I do. But even if not, if you know where someone lives or works you can easily figure out who different blue lines belong to. I did this to one employee who works at Trapster as I watched him drive home. These blue lines even continue after you stop driving and I can see what stores you visited and where you walked, even.

Competitor Waze doesn’t do that and when I’ve talked with Waze officials they tell me they are careful not to show your car exactly where it is in real time to other drivers, either, to keep stalkers from “attaching” themselves to you and following you around. In fact, in my testing, Waze obfuscates your real location in a pretty deep way and doesn’t show you at home or at work. Trapster, on the other hand, starts sharing your blue line as soon as you get up to about 35 miles per hour and shows everywhere you go, see screen shots below for more.

This is a case where a product designer hasn’t put enough privacy into the system and isn’t clear enough with the risks involved.

I’m getting more and more attuned to this problem because of all the speeches I’ve given because of the book I wrote. Yesterday, for instance, I talked with product designers at Expedia (company that helps travelers with their plans), and they are feeling pressure to come up with new cool location-based features, but that team is very focused on privacy fears because they know that many people will switch products because of lack of trust and aren’t willing to take huge risks in order to put new features in place. The conversations I’m having with companies like Expedia and Ford and Ritz Carlton execs show that privacy is a HUGE concern in corporate world because they know that it could piss off rafts of customers if they get it wrong.

The thing is they know there is value in going over the freaky line too and are watching as companies like Uber ask customers to share a HUGE amount of location data in order to build new billion-dollar businesses. Uber knows where you are standing, for instance, a few years ago THAT would have been “over the freaky line” for a limo company to ask for. But Uber doesn’t share that data with the public so isn’t nearly as freaky as Trapster is (and Uber even takes other steps to protect privacy and make it hard to stalk people who use its service. For instance it uses the Twilio API to obfuscate phone numbers from your driver).

What do I recommend to companies to make sure they gain trust when doing over the freaky line stuff?

1. Disclose EVERYTHING you are doing to gather data. Visit Google, for instance, at its privacy site at http://google.com/privacy — it shows everything it collects on you. I couldn’t find clear wording on Trapster’s info screens, privacy policy, terms of use that your location will be shared with other people. Plus, even after your blue lines disappear, we aren’t sure whether that data is kept on Trapster’s servers and for how long. What happens to that data? Is it given over to government authorities (I bet it will be turned over if a court order is received).

2. Make the data correctable. If it made a false assumption, make that correctable too. One app noticed I live on a golf course and kept showing me info about golf. I hate golf. Don’t have any interest in playing or lessons but there was no way to shut the app up. Same thing on Trapster. Once I realized my data was being shared in public I couldn’t correct it to make it to my liking. I couldn’t hide my blue line when I got close to things I might care about keeping private, like my son’s schools, my home, or my work.

3. Let me turn it off. I couldn’t figure out how to make it not share my blue line with others in Trapster’s case. Maybe there’s a setting somewhere I missed, but I couldn’t find it and if I can’t find it other users can’t find it either. With such “freaky” data, though, that could lead to really nasty consequences product designers have to be far more careful in order to gain my trust.

That’s the rub. By doing something freaky and not putting me in control (and not giving me enough utility to make being that far over the freaky line worth it) Nokia has lost my trust.

I no longer believe that Nokia is a company that can properly guide us into the age of context and that should be frightening to executives at that company since they no longer have the phone business to fall back on. Nokia should be leading us into this new age where even Mercedes is building a contextual car and Nokia should be showing all of us how to go over the freaky line in a responsible, trusted, way.

This is why Google has gotten so many scared with its acquisitions of robot, artificial intelligence, and home automation companies recently. What new risks to our lives will show up because of all of this surveillance-era technology? We don’t yet know and are looking to companies to carefully build new products that have great utility with a minimum of risk to us personally.

This lack of care with over-the-freaky-line privacy features from a company as important as Nokia is definitely troubling. Here’s some screen shots that show why Trapster is over the freaky line.

I thought it was going to be the next big app. I was wrong. Should have picked Snapchat (which I didn’t see coming because I personally don’t need it very much).

Highlight just hasn’t proven to be very addictive to either me or my friends. We talk about it often. I keep running it.

Now, what did they do right? They did fix their battery issues. It doesn’t put a major strain on my battery anymore. It does have some users, it’s just that the user count isn’t going up very fast and the UTILITY hasn’t gotten to where I thought it would.

Why not?

It has the chat room problem.

What is the chat room problem? I wrote back in 2009 that I’ve noticed that chat rooms get less interesting over time.

Why? Because chat rooms drag in new users (even interesting new users reduce the quality of an already-existing conversation). Eventually they drag in uninteresting users, even spammers and trolls.

Highlight hasn’t gotten that bad, but in talking with tons of users about it I think it tried to solve the wrong social problem: we simply don’t want to meet random people. If we did want to do that we’d just walk up to random people in the street and introduce ourselves.

This is why it has a chat room problem: when Highlight started out it was full of interesting people. Mostly A list bloggers and people at SXSW. In other words, people like me. People that I’d hang out with anyway.

I assumed that as more people used it the quality would remain the same. HORRID assumption on my part. Back when it started I had lots of interesting conversations because of Highlight and the people who were walking by me were people like Jack Dorsey. Today? Not so much.

I screwed up by getting it wrong with Highlight, so I’m sorry.

Now, what DO we want to do? I’ve seen this over and over again: people love it if you step up their experience. No one turns down an upgrade to business class in a plane. But Highlight doesn’t do that. It is too random.

Highlight just shows you other people near you and brings a lot of noise into your life. If Paul made one small change it could radically change and there’s a new technology that would help him do this: Smart Bluetooth, AKA “BLE — Bluetooth Low Energy — radios, er, Beacons.”

What is the change I’m recommending to Paul he makes?

Instead of bringing random people into my life, bring only people my existing friends have spent at least an hour with.

“Huh?”

The people who can step up my experience are those who have a common set of experiences with people I know. Think about it. How often did a total stranger come into your life to make your evening better? Not very often. But the friend of your friend? That happens all the time. On Tuesday I’m taking someone I don’t know to a special winery in Napa. Why? My friend asked me to “step up this guy’s experience.”

That very rarely happens with total strangers. There has to be a common tie for you to go out of your way to drive four hours and make a ton of phone calls to help someone else.

Now, how does Low Energy Bluetooth fit in? This new technology is now in every iPhone with iOS 7. I have given tons of speeches lately about our new book, “Age of Context” and very few people know what these are, even though they are carrying them. These little radios spit a number into the air every second. They use very little battery (the ones from recent Y Combinator graduate Estimote run for two years on a coin battery, for instance).

Why is this important? Well, with Apple’s iOS 7 Apple added a software layer called “iBeacon.” Here’s an article in Gigaom about iBeacon.

So, now, if Highlight added this capability, it would be able to add a feature where it would know who you spend the most time with. Then it could filter out everyone who hasn’t spent time with your actual friends (or at least push the random folks down so the high utility folks are at top). See, if I meet someone who really knows my best friends then I want to meet them too. But Facebook doesn’t have enough signal to really do this. BLE would. It also would let Highlight add innovative new features like “it looks like you are in a conference or event, because you are in a high density of people.”

Basically these radios tell your iPhone how close you are to another user. You can even make it so that your iPhone could “count” how many minutes that person is standing with you. You could even write other algorithms that would know the context. Did you spend that time with that other person in a church? Shopping mall? Bar? Work? Were you in a group, or just face-to-face? All that is now possible thanks to BLE.

If Paul turns Highlight into a contextual app, instead of a purely “meet random people you might like” app, it might have a chance of getting people excited again. For now, though, it’s one of those apps I keep on my phone just because I don’t have the heart to admit I was totally wrong. I hope that Paul figures out how to save Highlight for me before I totally get to the place where I delete it forever.

How about you? Do you get utility from Highlight? If you already deleted it, why did you? Am I on the right track here?

Here Scott McGregor, CEO of Broadcom, shows me some new wireless devices, based on Low Power Bluetooth, which will be the “hub” of a new kind of “personal cloud” that will connect sensors and wearable computers to our smartphones of the future. These devices can support hundreds of other wireless devices, each with sensors, lights, or controllers for things on us or around us. This has deep implications for our contextual future (I’m writing a book, titled “Age of Context”).

These new devices will cost less than $10 (wholesale) and run on a small battery for a year or more.

On this topic, I think the personal cloud is going to be hugely important at the Techcrunch Disrupt event coming up in September: don’t miss our Techcrunch Disrupt Google Glass developer contest. We’re giving away $10,000 to try to help developers take advantage of what Scott’s showing us here. Details on that are here — entry ends September 5 and we’ll announce the winner at the end of Techcrunch Disrupt, which is in San Francisco September 7-11.

At Techcrunch Disrupt we’ll be doing interviews all three days in our studio (which will be right by the front door). If you haven’t gotten your ticket yet for Disrupt, use this link to get a discount and use ScobledSF13 as the code.

++++++++++

Y Combinator company, Estimote, shows why Low Energy Bluetooth is so important as an enabler for the future of the personal cloud.

+Estimote was one of the hot new companies to come out of the latest batch of Y Combinator, the famous Silicon Valley incubator.

Here you see its new product, Estimote Beacons, which is a small, wireless device, sometimes also called a ‘mote.’ When placed in a physical space, it broadcasts tiny radio signals around itself.

Think about it as a very small lighthouse. Smartphones that are in range are able to ‘hear’ these signals and estimate their location very precisely, as well as communicate with the beacon to exchange data and information.

Here you hear cofounder/CEO Jakub Krzych.

This company is hugely important for the contextual future that’s coming quickly.

The crowdfunding revolution is well underway and has helped many companies get started on both Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Here you meet IndieGogo cofounder Slava Rubin who tells me about what’s happening with Indiegogo now. In the next video you’ll meet a company that’s using Indiegogo to raise money.

You can meet more people like this at Techcrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. Coming up September 7-11. I’ll have a studio at the front door, come by and say hi.

There still is time to get tickets, just visit this link.

Finally, we’re having a developer contest for those of you who are building apps for Google Glass. Winner gets $10,000 cash. Enter here.

How could Google Glass change advertising? Well, today it was revealed that there might be a “pay per glaze” style of advertising.

Here I talk with Sahil Jain, CEO of AdStage, about the future of advertising. Interesting conversation.

Interesting conversation about what advertising might look like on Google Glass.

By the way, the photo here is from my brother’s bar. I believe his is the first bar to welcome Google Glass wearers. Story here.

This weekend I’ll be at a Google Glass hackathon. You can learn more here. The future of commerce, and all that, will definitely be on the table. Speaking of commerce, you really need to check out what Tapingo is doing. Imagine you are a college kid, you wake up, leave your dorm, and Google Glass asks you “would you like your usual coffee?” You answer “OK Glass, yes, have my regular coffee ready.” Tapingo has your order waiting at your favorite coffee shop. Don’t believe that can happen? It’s already happening on dozens of college campuses this fall. Check out the CEO explaining how it works:

Finally, Rackspace is laying some cash down to help make this future come about. At the Techcrunch Disrupt conference we will hold a Google Glass developer conference where we’ll give $10,000 cash to the winner. More details in about a week. But please join me there and let me know if you’d like to participate. scobleizer@gmail.com

I have arranged a $100 off discount code ScobledSF13 for Techcrunch Disrupt, too.

The future is coming, will your business be ready the way Tapingo and AdStage’s are?

Are you building anything? At Techcrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, coming up September 7, Rackspace and I going to have a Glass App developer’s contest. More on that after all the lawyers sign off on it. I’m off to Australia to meet with startups next week in Sydney. Hope to see you there!