A few months ago, we released SimpleWing.com, a site enabling anyone to create an app for Google Glass with all the same functionality as the existing Glass apps for New York Times, CNN, or Elle. Except you wouldn’t have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a developer and designer to build the apps. All you needed was an RSS feed--the same feed you used to power your iPhone or iPad apps. Or you could send an email or use our publishing studio to create and deliver Glass timeline cards.
We launched with National Geographic, Techdirt, and the New America Foundation as partners. Over 100 organizations and individuals signed up and sent content to Glass through SimpleWing, including the CEO of Betaworks John Borthwick (creating a Digg app), the well-known foreign policy journalist Steven Clemons (creating the Washington Note app), the most popular political publication in Mexico (Animal Politico), and several football fanatics distributing news about the Ravens and Bills. A few journalists noticed us, announcing that we were “democratizing” apps for Google Glass and making Google Glass “as easy as an RSS tap” for publishers.
Despite the positive feedback, we were always a little embarrassed by a few things. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's Executive Chairman, famously said, "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." So at least we didn’t launch too late...
Here are a few of the things that embarrassed us and that we're changing today to make our service better for our users:
1. The name: from SimpleWing to Wearab.ly. It’s hard to find a good URL. SimpleWing.com was the best we could do. Since then, after lots of brainstorming and searches on NameBoy.com and elsewhere, we found something we liked: wearab.ly. It combines wearable and technology into one lovely word. It also happens to follow the trend of startup names ending with “ly.” (A recent article was called: “Why the trend for misspelled words and -ly won’t go away.”) Since our product helps media companies, bloggers, and others get their content on wearable technology like Google Glass and smartwaches, the wearably name makes more sense.
So, today, we’re rebranding, changing our name to Wearably and our domain to http://wearab.ly.
2. The design. When we launched SimpleWing, our lead designer had not joined the company yet. The CTO and I were more focused on making the backend work with Glass than making the frontend look pretty on the web. People told us they thought the website looked nice, but we were never happy with it. Plus, Google has not yet announced an app store for Google Glass apps, so we had to build something like a Glass app store within our website so people could subscribe to different publications.
Over at wearab.ly, you’ll see that we now have a designer and the site looks much prettier and simpler. Also, because Google has made recent announcements moving towards an app store for Glass apps, our web presence can focus on helping publishers get on wearable devices, rather than also ensuring that users can subscribe to those publishers’ new apps. Instead, we will be able to provide embedded code and links to app stores that the publishers can include on their own sites. We only list a few featured apps at wearab.ly.
3. The pricing. We launched SimpleWing as a free service partly because we wanted to test user-interest for publishing on Google Glass and our main goal was to enable users to contribute and consume content on a new wearable device. We have now tested our software for a few months with many different feeds; we even rewrote much of our software recently, to make it pretty insanely reliable. As for pricing, we’re still a little confused, but all the startup advice out there points in the same direction: pricing a product is important to test the business model. Plus, we wanted to offer an enterprise version for large publishers, and have tested our software to ensure we can. We considered a few different paths for pricing--a set-up fee, a monthly software-as-a-service-fee, or some sort of fee for usage.
We have decided to go with a monthly, software-as-a-service fee. We will continue improving the service based on API changes, SDK features, and new devices, so delivering the software-code to a media company seemed less important than the monthly maintenance and improvement. Plus, we will be improving the service and adding new devices. Since it’s early in the evolution of wearable technology, we offer a few different plans, which are far, far less expensive than hiring an agency to build the apps for you. We are also grandfathering our current SimpleWing publishers (and their users) for three months, as a thank you to our early adopters, and migrating their accounts. If you are one of them, you received an email, and should let us know what you think.
Beyond the rebrand, we have some other big news.
More brand name users. We are now working with NPR (yes, that NPR) and Atlantic Media (yep, that one) distributing their content to wearable devices through our platform. We couldn’t be more excited to bring them to Google Glass.
Smartwatch integration. If you want news on your smartwatch, we’re working on it, and will release this functionality soon. We demoed an integration with the Sony SmartWatch 2. Sony even showcased the demo in its booth at Berlin IFA, which is essentially the European CES. We are working on integrating content onto other devices too, including the Pebble and, soon, the Samsung Gear watch.
If you would like to learn more (or otherwise say hi) just email us here: [email protected].