SINGAPORE — Plenty of personal gadgets these days, from smartwatches to fitness bands, are aimed at relieving you of having to fish your phone out of your pocket so often.
If you spend a lot of time sitting at your desk or lying on the couch, why not mount a giant Apple Watch on the wall instead?
Image: victoria ho/mashable
Glance Clock is kind of like that, but it’s just the start of a connected life, says its founder and CEO, Anton Zriashchev.
Like a smartwatch, the clock connects to your phone to sync its time, and is able to display a host of notifications, including upcoming meetings, weather alerts and incoming calls. It’ll also hurry you out the door if your Uber’s arrived.
The idea is for the clock to be the showpiece for a bigger connected platform. The current model, which just raised $416,867 on Indiegogo, to hit 827 percent of its goal, will connect to your phone via Bluetooth.
Image: victoria ho/mashable
Eventually, the clock and other screens like TVs are expected to sync via Wi-Fi to an online platform that Glance is making, so they can all talk to each other. That’s promised to allow users to have the clock’s information flash on a TV screen in another room, if the user has walked away from the clock.
And with machine learning, Glance’s platform may be able to make some clever suggestions to users in future. For instance, it could prompt the user if they want an Uber on a rainy day, then be able to book a cab for them, Zriashchev told Mashable.
Zriashchev, who’s from Russia, set up Glance in Singapore in 2015. An early version of the clock looked more like a regular LED plate with acrylic over it, he said.
About a year later, after several redesigns, the company settled on the current look. It’s a minimalist fabric face, with LEDs that shine out from behind it.
Clocks are communal, but push notifications aren’t.
It has a battery that is supposed to last between three and six months on a charge, but you can also leave the clock plugged in if there’s an outlet nearby.
Glance says the clock syncs with up to five phones, but I imagine that’ll get really noisy quickly in a communal space with everyone’s notifications going off.
While clocks are communal, push notifications often aren’t, so it could get tricky trying to share a smart clock with four other people.
