What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [95]
How about gadgets, then? Personal electronics might seem immune from Googlification because they are so complex in engineering and manufacturing. Yet technology is also what makes gadgets easier to change than cars, as a device can be updated via software instead of hardware. That’s what Google is doing by offering its mobile operating system to any phone maker.
I could see Google proposing open standards for no end of connected devices. We can already buy refrigerators with internet screens. Their fabled promise is that someday they will take inventory of what’s inside, telling us what we can make with what we have and automatically ordering what we need. That’s the kind of information Google would love to organize. Home-delivery services Fresh Direct and Peapod in the U.S. and Tesco in the U.K. could order and deliver what we need and give us coupons for related products. Epicurious.com could suggest recipes based on what’s in the fridge. Refrigerators become platforms for these companies to serve us.
We have connected home-security systems with sensors and cameras. We have connected home-entertainment systems that can pipe web radio stations, iTunes music and movies, and YouTube videos to any device in the home. We will have connected cars with links to traffic information and feeds of entertainment. We have cameras connected to GPS satellites and to our computers. We have mobile phones that are becoming computers. Any device that produces information, that can be personalized or adjusted, or that communicates with or entertains us will be connected to the internet and to Google. Google will listen to and speak through these gadgets—if we give it permission—and deliver related information. Google would love to use that information to give us highly targeted and relevant advertising. That might freak privacy warriors. But if we can control that flow and benefit from it (with relevant content and ads, bargains, and subsidies for the services we use), I’d hook up my fridge and phone. Google could become the operating system not just for the web and the world but for our homes and lives.
Another challenge: fashion. We know what Googley fashion is: T-shirts, shorts, and sandals. It’s hard to imagine spartan, garish, geeky Google having an impact on taste and trendsetting, which are decreed by designers, fashion editors, and Hollywood. Fashion is top-down—or it was. Just as the internet democratizes news and entertainment, it is opening up style. A darling of the open fashion movement is Threadless, a T-shirt company that invites users to submit designs, which are voted on, Digg-like, by the community. Winning designers receive $2,000 plus a $500 credit and $500 every time a design is reprinted. They become the Versaces of the crowdsourced runway.
Just as in entertainment, we are learning that the public wants to create and leave its mark. A smart response is to create a platform to make that possible. CafePress.com and Zazzle provide the means for anyone to make and sell designs on T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, even underwear, getting a cut of every on-demand order. Threadbanger, a weekly internet video show, teaches viewers how to make cool do-it-yourself fashion with young designers. See also BurdaStyle.com’s open-source sewing from the German publishing empire Burda, which decided to take copyrights off its dress patterns and invite the public to use them, adapt them, create their own, and share them. The site is filled with patterns, how-to’s, and discussion. Springwise reported that SANS, a small New York label, stopped selling its hit $85 square shirt in 2008 and then released the pattern. For $6, you get the pattern, which you print out at home, and a SANS