Toast - Google Glass

From the team behind the hit series, Sliced Bread. Sean Farrington investigates wonder products and businesses which promised so much to consumers.... but ultimately ended up toast. Sean is joined by the self-made millionaire and serial entrepreneur, Sam White, to conclude what went wrong. Together they look at why a product or business failed, and what we can learn from their stories today. In this episode, Sean talks about wearable tech and Google Glass. These futuristic looking spectacles, with a heads-up display which showed text messages and street directions and allowed users to record video footage of what was happening around them, were named in Time Magazine as one of the best inventions of 2012. There was plenty of hype. Google even demonstrated them by live-streaming a sky dive using Google Glass.But by 2015, just two years after their release, Google announced that Google Glass Explorer, the consumer version of the glasses, was going to be shelved, and the version used by businesses has since been ditched too. Sean and Sam speak to the BBC's former technology correspondent, Rory Cellan Jones, and the 'godfather' of wearable technology, Professor Sandy Pentland from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), to discover how Google Glass went from being the best thing since sliced bread, to toast.Presenter: Sean Farrington Producer: Jay Unger

Om Podcasten

While Sliced Bread takes a break we serve up… Dough. Dough is the series from BBC Radio 4 which looks at the business behind profitable, everyday products and considers how they might evolve in the years to come.In each episode, entrepreneur Sam White speaks to industry experts to find out how these products manage to make a profit and what game-changing - and pointless - innovations they have seen in their time.Tom Cheesewright, a technology expert and applied futurist, then offers his predictions on what might be coming beyond the current production pipeline.Episodes of Dough are released weekly on Thursdays wherever you get your podcasts. But if you’re in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode on BBC Sounds first, a week earlier than anywhere else. Produced by Jon Douglas. Dough is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations in April when Greg Foot will investigate more of the latest so-called wonder products to find out whether they really are the best thing since sliced bread.In the meantime, Dough is available in the Sliced Bread feed on BBC Sounds.