Every thing
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        with Zombocom

> What if Technology helped us focus on what matters most? Keeping our lives free from distractions. To help us be more present.

Laughable, coming from Google. Or Apple, or Microsoft, or Facebook.

> This thing, we really think it'll help you focus and live free from the distractions of all the other things that we make. We're not going to stop making those things, though. Or change them in any meaningful way, because no one here actually believes anything we say.

This is in particular useful if you’ve already filtered down your notifications significantly, you’ll be able to go stretches of hours without looking at your devices, because you’re mostly sure nothing important happened.

Seems like they're trying to do too much with this instead of niching down. I have no use for a device I can touch that triggers some tiny subset of things I might want to trigger.

All in all, as someone who might want to use this product one day, I'd rather Google not spend their project's resources on never-buyers like yourself and instead spend those adding features and driving cost down for people that could be genuinely interested.

Sure. And drop all open protocols and support only the proprietary ones while they're at it?

I have a pet peeve for company marketing people that say “We provide products and services to empower customers”. Well, no shit! It would be insane otherwise.

I raised my hand and asked how this could be a competitive advantage since every single consulting company has the same brand. Their response was that our people were better.

It’s weird how people think these meaningless statements are useful. I expect that there’s some psychology that shows that while bullshit to me, they are perfectly fine to enough people to work.

The "Technology" link is literally the third word visible on the page, after the Jacquard logo and a "Products" link.

> I have a pet peeve for company marketing people that say “We provide products and services to empower customers”. Well, no shit! It would be insane otherwise.

Companies manufacturing washing machines don't "empower customers" in that there aren't many differenciators between washing machine brands today. Nor does your average company selling toilet paper, that would be insane.

This project however aims to "empower customers" by introducing a paradigm change: make your clothes smarter (smart fibers woven in the base product) while deciding yourself how smart you want them to be (you choose what actions to take on what gestures).

Whether it succeeds is another thing entirely of course.

Might privileged to assume everyone can afford or has room for a washing machine, for the people who don't I'm sure it definitely would empower them to get more done if they could .

Also there's a lot of differentiation, I never knew how much better front-loaders were till we owned one.

This reminds me of the "futurism" movement in Italy that led to Mussolini's rise where they were so into fashion that they didn't know how but they just knew they wanted milk-based clothing and had to figure it out, and they actually did! It's kind of a cool story, without the fascist dictator throwing a wrench into the coolness.

This also seems like it's totally ripped from star trek, the insignia on their uniforms do exactly that and Jean Luc Picard sounds a lot like Jacquard....

I could see this as a gimmick from Nike, Reebok, or someone already in fashion but from Google it seems... like some weird B-project team endeavor like Google Glass that probably won't go anywhere long-term.

Please take 12 minutes of you life to watch this Hans Rosling talk, may he rest in peace.

Hans Rosling: The magic washing machine https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_magic_washing_mac...

As I wrote, there aren't much differenciation between washing machine brands today. Of course one is empowered by getting a washing machine, any washing machine. That much is obvious. It doesn't mean however that washing machine manufacturers are in the business of empowering their customers , although they certainly were in the mid 1930s.

Nowadays though, the folks who are getting their first washing machines right now are simply catching up with the times, which is precisely what Rosling is saying in that talk. In fact, there hasn't been much innovation in washing machine technology over the last few decades, it's all mostly come down to gradual improvements in their general efficiency. For people who already owned washing machines, those improvements are very small in nature.

This is why this Jacquard project is a different thing altogether: we're currently in the mid-1930s of the smart cloth. Whether it's a fad or a complete paradigm shift won't be apparent for a few years.

I agree with you however that wether smart clothes company are empowering anyone is yet to be evaluated.

If that is your definition of empowering, so is a company that produces toilet paper.

Please watch the video because I guess from you answer that you haven't...

Beside my point was just that you choose a particularly bad exemple this is not a thread about washing machine vs smart clothes... (even though washing machine probably win against jacquard which is not water proof)