Investing in Augmented Reality

If you want to get rich in technology as an investor, you really have only one mission: getting in on the ground floor of a future breakthrough.

This is not an easy feat for anyone. Even the most tech savvy only have a one in 10 chance of predicting a major success. That’s why angel investors sink money into dozens of start-ups. Three out of 10 early-stage investments will return a profit, and the rest will not.

Picking winners requires an ability to not only measure an individual company’s strength but also predict its future based upon tons of indirect information.

Investing in public tech companies is a bit safer but requires an equal amount of scrying. Projects from public tech companies might seem silly or frivolous, but they could turn out to be the future of the industry.

Google Glass is one of these projects.

The quirky head-mounted computer garnered tons of attention from tech media during its two-year-long pilot program, and Google considered the experiment a success. When the project was closed in January, Google said Glass was ready to work on future versions of the product that would eventually be released.

This was met with some skepticism in the media.

Editors from Wired and Motherboard pointed out that Google Glass, at $1,500 per unit, was essentially a “class divide on your face.”

It was a toy for the rich who were willing to look a little silly with a tiny computer mounted on their heads.

But for investors like us, adoption by the rich is an important indicator of a technology’s future success.

An article in Time recently pointed out that this observation was made about all of the most groundbreaking inventions of the last 200 years. Critics dismissed automobiles, laptop computers, and the Internet as toys for the rich.

New pieces of technology seem frivolous early in their lives because they haven’t yet worked their way into the fabric of society. Rarely do they enjoy exclusive use by the privileged.

Now, approximately seven months after Google closed the doors on the Google Glass explorer program, a mystery product has turned up in FCC filings.

It is believed to be the first consumer version of Google Glass.

With the product name and schematics not yet released, the FCC document assigned the product an identification of “A4R-GG1.” A4R is Google’s FCC identification, and some are speculating that the GG stands for “Google Glass.”

Now, there isn’t a lot of information to go on. But the product isn’t listed as a smartphone or as a wearable, and the specs include a non-removable battery, an unspecified type of display, and dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. No cellular radios are listed, and the FCC e-label included in the filing has the exact screen resolution as Google Glass (the somewhat unusual 640×360).

Though the interpretation of this FCC filing is entirely speculative, a new Google Glass product should be expected.

Tony Fadell, CEO of Nest and team leader of Google Glass, gave some clues at Google’s Zeitgeist conference in May.

Since the pilot program closed in January, Google has said nearly nothing about the project, but Fadell said he and his team held nothing from the original Glass design as sacred. Anything could be sacrificed to improve design, efficiency, and cost.

The first Glass units were built on the Texas Instruments (NASDAQ: TXN) OMAP system on a chip with SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) flash memory, Elpida (NASDAQ: MU) RAM, and a CSR (NASDAQ: CSRE) GPS unit. They also included sensors by InvenSense (NYSE: INVN) and Cirrus Logic (NASDAQ: CRUS).

Late in 2014, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) was rumored to be the new chip supplier for the second generation of Glass. The Wall Street Journal indicated that Intel has plans to promote Glass as a tool not for consumer use but for industry and enterprise such as manufacturing and health care.

Intel missed the smartphone revolution almost entirely. As a company that traditionally focuses on 64-bit, full instruction set computing, Intel’s smartphone projects amounted to little more than an experiment.

The chip company identifies wearables as “the next frontier in the evolution of computing,” and it clearly does not want to miss the boat again.

This rumor puts a slightly different spin on the future of Google Glass and diminishes the “rich person appeal” shown in the Explorer pilot program, but both avenues seem equally promising. After all, the enterprise segment lags behind the consumer segment in new hardware adoption because of the complicated nature of provisioning, security, and maintenance.

Because of this, enterprise wearables is truly a ground-floor investment.

Good Investing,

Tim Conneally

 @TimConneally on Twitter

For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.