The Smart Glasses Contract

When smartphones first came out, nobody in the industry predicted how we’d end up using them.   Nokia commissioned some fascinating research on the use and psychology of photo-taking, which they published as an interesting book – Mobile Photo.  Its main findings were that most rolls of film had a Christmas tree at either end, from which they predicted that smartphones would mostly be used for photos of friends and pets, which would be shown on the phone.  This was back in 2000, when social media was in its infancy and mobile networks barely supported the transfer of grainy photos.

Nobody in the industry saw where things would go.  Or go wrong.  What was a novelty has changed people’s lives.  So far, it has been overwhelmingly consensual.  Individuals have the choice of what they capture and upload.  Most probably don’t fully understand the implications og having their images online, and some abuse it, but there is a fairly well defined contract.  With smart glasses, that is about to change.  To illustrate why, let me ask a simple question.  Do you appear in any online porn videos?

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Let’s Applaud Plaud

For the last five or six years I’ve been bemoaning the fact that most of the audio industry has been ignoring one of the great earbud innovations – the battery box.  When Bragi came up with the concept in 2014 it was a very necessary invention.  Earbud batteries didn’t last more than an hour at most, so you needed a neat way to store and recharge them.  Apple refined it into the form we know today with their first Airpods, after which it’s been more or less left as it is.

It’s always felt like an opportunity missed.  There’s so much more you can do with it.  With the greater versatility of earbuds using the new Bluetooth LE Audio specifications it can do volume and media control (and a few companies have got around to do that).  With Auracast, it can be used to find and display the available broadcast audio streams around you.  You can put in camera in it to scan QR codes to select music streams.  (Apple filed a rather basic patent on that back in 2019, and there are rumours it might soon see the light of day).  Or you can take advantage of the decent sized battery to add a cellular modem and SIM to provide a local access point for audio and data.  So, I was really pleased to see Plaud do exactly that with their new Plaud One.  They’ve put an AI agent into the battery box to let you make sense of conversations and summarise your day.

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Hearing Loss at the Edinburgh Fringe

Ten years ago, there was virtually no mention of hearing loss at the Edinburgh Fringe, and very little to help anyone who had hearing loss.  The Traverse, the main professional theatre that participates in the Fringe rather than the International Festival, had a hearing loop, but that was more or less it.  Signing was limited and I don’t recall many shows exploring the effects of hearing loss or deafness until “Louder is not always Clearer” arrived on the Summerhall stage in 2019. 

A lot has changed.  After the interruption of Covid, the Edinburgh Deaf Festival https://www.creativescotland.com/news-stories/latest-news/archive/2026/07/fifth-edinburgh-deaf-festival—bigger-brighter-bolder-than-ever came into existence.  Celebrating deaf culture, language and heritage, it runs as an integral part of the Fringe.  This was its fifth year, where it had grown to 80 events.  Equally importantly, a recognition of hearing loss has become more obvious in the mainstream.  In the first week of the Fringe, Dundee Rep’s excellent show “The Singer” won a well-deserved Fringe First Award.  It was an object lesson in how to put BSL, captioning and deaf experience together on stage for every audience member.  It was a brilliant example of how to do it properly and tell an important story in a way that everyone could appreciate.

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The Burnham Boost for British Manufacturing

It was good to wake up to another upbeat policy announcement from Andy Burnham, in this second week of his premiership, proposing that secondary schools let their students study subjects like manufacturing and AI in addition to core academic learning.  Messages of support for manufacturing have been few and far between for most of the last fifty years.  The mantra has been that Maggie killed UK manufacturing, although more recently the mantle of industrial destroyer has shifted to Ed Miliband. 

Within manufacturing circles it has become a constant complaint that the cost of UK energy is crippling industry, with Ed Miliband’s NetZero policies placing an almost impossible burden on companies trying to compete internationally.  Whether he will supplant Maggie as the chief architect of UK manufacturing decline is something only time will tell, but there was a collective sigh of relief when he was exiled to the Foreign Office.  So, what do these new announcements mean for UK manufacturing and technology?

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Anyone for Stereo Tennis?

With Wimbledon upon us again, I was reminded that one of the use cases we considered when we were designing Bluetooth LE Audio was based on a tennis audience at Centre Court.  Despite all of the money and technology that goes into international tournaments like Wimbledon, the sound reinforcement design provided for spectators still hasn’t evolved to the level of the original TV tennis games of the 1960s.

Looking at the spectators sitting in the main courts, it looks as if they’re aging, possibly because you need a hefty Civil Service defined-benefits pension to afford the tickets.  Which mean that a fair number will have hearing loss.  According to Wimbledon’s Access Guides, there are Hearing Loops located at key points around the grounds, but it doesn’t mention if they’re in the courts.  Even if they are. reinforcing sound for a tennis audience poses some interesting questions.

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Plug-in Solar and the PV Detector Van

Let’s start with the good news. It looks as if the UK is about to make it legal to buy and install plug-in solar panels.  That’s basically a solar panel packaged with electronics, that lets you plug it directly into an ordinary 13A socket in your home to generate some of your own electricity.  The bad news is that DESNZ ( the Department for Energy and Net Zero) want to regulate plug-in solar units in much the same way as TVs used to be regulated.  These are DIY products which you can install yourself, but when you buy one, DESNZ wants to be notified, presumably so they can check that you’ve plugged it in properly and not broken anything.  Their proposal reads like the old TV Licensing regime, which then sent detector vans around to make sure you had a licence.  Except in this case, they’d be PV vans to check your Photo Voltaics.

There’s a consultation on whether that’s a good idea at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/plug-in-solar, but in typical DESNZ fashion, it opened last week and closes next week.   So if you’ve got an opinion, you have until 30th June to respond.

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