Four short links: 19 July 2017
Open Source Car Code, Glass for Business, Videogame Narrative Skills, and Gmail Leverage
- Apollo — open source autonomous auto platform.
- Glass for Enterprise — Google X has relaunched Glass for businesses. See blog post and Steven Levy. A HUD for assembly operators in factories with marked results. “We knew the value of wearable technology when we first put it on the floor,” Gulick says. “In our first test in quality, our numbers were so high in the value it was adding that we actually retested and retested and retested. Some of the numbers we couldn’t even publish because the leadership said they looked way too high.” I’ve been telling people for years that the killer app is boring business. Interesting that G has a new sales model: they make the hardware but sell to partners who will create specific applications and sell to customers.
- Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames — as VR and AR introduce branching stories into our lives (never mind Westworld-like hotels), the art of flexible narrative is a useful one to study. This is a review of a 2008 book with contributions from greats in the field. Of the books on professional games writing I’ve encountered, this is possibly the best, and definitely in the top three.
- Google Hire — recruitment tool, but notable because they’re integrating their enterprise tools into Gmail (note: you can’t integrate your enterprise tool into Gmail). Most workflows touch email at some point, and that’s the precise point where systems like Salesforce chafe. (I still twitch remembering the Chrome plugin for Gmail-Salesforce integration that we used at a previous startup.) Owning the mail client gives them huge opportunity here.
