North (formerly Thalmic Labs, now Google)

[KevinL]

Segment starts at 25:35.

[tomh009]

Here is a written story for those of us who prefer words to videos!
https://www.therecord.com/news-story/903...overnment/

[robdrimmie]

Did the Myo armband ever make any money?

The sold a good number of them, but they probably never turned a profit. It found a small niche in a few markets - there were a lot of stories around prosthetics especially - but almost certainly nothing close to enough to pay for all the growth over the past two years.

That wasn't really the point of the Myo though. Like most VC-funded companies, profit probably hasn't been a key metric. North (still as Thalmic) announced their $120 million investment from Amazon in fall 2016 and my guess (outsider speculation, no data) is that they used that money almost entirely to develop the glasses they've just announced and didn't push to increase viability of the Myo as a product. It could only go so far, and I think they wrung most everything they could out of it. 

As wearables become more commonplace I wouldn't be too surprised if a successor of some sort is announced - the ring thing they have is a suitable interface, but I don't think it's a great one (pure uninformed opinion, I've never touched one I would just be irritated having it around). They're going hard on voice which might be good, but there's something about physicality that I think humans go for, and the Myo or something similar still seems like a pretty non-intrusive way to interact with a glasses-mounted display.

[rangersfan]

North is buying a number of Intel's patents relating to smart glasses.

https://www.therecord.com/news-story/908...t-glasses/

[rangersfan]

Apparently there was a number of layoffs at North today, no idea why or how many people affected but it seems like it was a significant amount in their production team.

[robdrimmie]

There were definitely layoffs, I know some people who were affected. I don't know the scope either. It sounds like the package was moderately generous.

Speculation: The why is for cash flow reasons. They got a lot of VC money, but ramping up production of a consumer product is expensive. Now that the product is out they can be less aggressive about R&D and more aggressive with marketing and (hopefully) sales. It may be that early sales are not what they hoped but this is a common pattern in video games especially but also other tech industries: Big team to get something out the door fairly quickly, then shed many to reduce burn rate.

[panamaniac]

Apart from the launch, has the new eyewear product generated any buzz?

[robdrimmie]

I've seen positive reviews, but I've found them by way of North folk I follow on Twitter so there's some obvious bias there.

Wired has a mostly favourable review, with some caveats: https://www.wired.com/review/focals-by-n...t-glasses/

It's still early days, and the requirement for an in-person fitting in either Toronto or Brooklyn is likely to dampen rapid growth for a while - that might be intentional while the supply chain ramps up but the "projector" (I don't know if that's the correct word) requires a lot of custom fitting. It seems likely (to me, almost entirely ignorant) that it's going to be a slow burn kind of thing until they start showing up in popular media, on celebrities, etc.

[robdrimmie]

On a personal note, I'm very curious. I wore a Pebble 2 for the better part of a couple of years and really liked getting notifications on my wrist and being able to perform simple tasks like controlling music or kicking off tracking a bike ride without having to get my phone out. But I hate wearing things on my wrists and fell out of habit. Since I wear thick plastic glasses every day anyway it seems like it would potentially be a good fit. I'm concerned about the Alexa integration - I'm reluctant to give Amazon an open mic into my life and have been resisting home assistant devices for the same reason.

[Spokes]

I think a big deciding factor when it comes to the success of their product is how widespread is the popularity going to be of wearable technology? While it's also about what product people wish to go with, I think it's more so, do people want to use this technology.

[KevinL]

Sounds like they have some UI kinks to work out based on customer feedback, and once they're past this initial post-launch phase they'll open more outlets. Places like San Francisco, London, Dubai, Shanghai seem likely.

[robdrimmie]

The Verge says 150 people (of approximately 450): https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236...e-lay-offs

Much bigger than I would have guessed.

[Spokes]

Wow, that's a big chunk of their workforce.

[rangersfan]

It was almost their entire production workforce.

[tomh009]

It was almost their entire production workforce.

So … does that mean they have outsourced their production now?