Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Would Google Glass be banned in strip clubs?

It's no doubt there's an excitement in the techie world about the Google Glass, seeing the number of news and non-news that comes by every day. Some positive, some negative, everyone is jumping into its slipstream to say something about it. Yes, myself included with this blog, here I go...

"Wouldn't that be a lot of invasion into privacy?" that's  consistently the first comment whenever I explain the Google Glass to a non-techie, so consistent that it's becoming predictable.  Of course, many blogs and tech journals have also jumped onto the bandwagon with articles like "Expect wide usage bans over privacy concerns", "Google Glass Half Full : Why that ban may not be needed", "Google glass is good for privacy"... you get the drift. The marketing champ that stole the limelight is 5 Point Bar, the Seattle bar that made a press release being the first bar to ban the Google Glass, promising an ass kicking for anyone disobeying the ban. 


The lists of where Google Glass would not be welcome runs on and on:

  • Pubs, Bars, Cafes : what if you're caught on camera and your wife sees you there when you shouldn;t be, or worse, with someone you shouldn't be with
  • Cinemas : you could actually be live streaming that blockbuster movie to anyone(s) in the whole world, or be the first to put up the torrent batmen_returns_again_6_cam_x264_aac-BiGdAddy.torrent
  • Casinos : something about counting cards? All I know about casinos is from watching too much Las Vegas (the TV series)
  • Playgrounds : because it could be used by pedophiles to monitor kids
Yes, the list can go on and on. That's what disruptive innovation does, it forces people to scramble new rules which didn't need to exist before. New rules about what's acceptable behavior, what's outright not ok and there would be a lot of gray area, a lot of disagreement before the dust settles and a new social norm finds its own balance.

Now you might wonder why sorely missing from the above list of Ban-Google-Glass places is : the Strip Clubs, the title of this post - Would Google Glass be banned in strip clubs? It would be the most logical place to ban it - the privacy of customers, concerns of the performances being recorded / streamed etc. On the contrary, I think Google Glass would be very welcome!


So why do I think Strip Clubs just might not ban it? Just look back in history, you'd find the porn industry has always been the firsts to embrace new technology:
  • DVD - when Hollywood was still holding out on DVDs, porn stood up for it - I know because I was marketing DVD-ROM drives and there was like 3 movie titles available for Region 2 (Europe), and at the same time already 200+ porn titles Region-Free - it's true!
  • Video Conferencing - the firsts webcam uses (then known as video conferencing ) were mostly personal "hello Grandma" and the likes. Before other non-tech industry could say "Hello, you see me?", all kinds of porn webcam services were making good and solid revenue!
  • not to mention breast implant technology, photoshopping, modem dial-up bulletin boards, photo-sharing sites, discreet internet shopping... they've always been ahead on the adoption curve. Well, not just adopting new technology, but actually embracing it and synergizing with full creativity.
You see, there's no stigma.

Not chained by stigma, it's free to embrace, free to create, free to create opportunities that outweigh the negatives. Imagine pay per view or ad-funded crowdcamera'd very multi-angle streaming, instead of illegal streaming; imagine sexciting (sorry I couldn't resist the pun) augmented reality, instead of privacy concerns (eg. auto realtime face replacements could replace your face with that of a dragon); imagine imagine ...

And we all know the old saying "you can do anything you put your mind to". Opportunities don't come to those who say nay. Take a lesson from the porn industry. New opportunities, new challenges, new industries, all thrive on disruptive innovation. Lose the fretting, just imagine.

---- disclaimer
I've been advised me to put this disclaimer (for the sake of my professional career): I am not from the porn industry, nor paid by the porn industry, nor involved with the porn industry in whatever form. The references to the porn industry in the article is just a personal observation that I've noticed in my many years in the technology world, with the introduction of each new technology. And please please read my blogs with whatever sense of humor you can mutter and not take it too seriously.


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