Google Stole Its Smart Contact Lens From Microsoft. And That’s a Good Thing -

Google latest bombshell of a research project is a smart contact lens diabetics can use to read blood sugar levels through the tears in their eyes. Thanks to a tiny microchip, Google says, the lens can provide a new glucose reading as often as once a second.Some have pointed out that the project follows in the footsteps of rival Microsoft, but this is merely another reason to applaud Google, a company with a knack for bringing research into the real world that we’ll likely never see from Microsoft.

The lens Google unveilTechCrunch notes, one of the Googlers behind the project, Babak Parvis, once collaborated with the Redmond software giant on a lens the company fashioned for tracking blood sugar without needles.

ed on Thursday seems to draw heavily, if not directly, from work done by Microsoft. As

So, no, the Google lens isn’t all that new. But it’s still worthy of attention, mainly because it’s coming from Google.

At Google, you see, this kind of blue-sky research isn’t just blue-sky research. Its research operations are designed to work in step with the rest of the company, and push its work as close to the commercial realm as possible. That means the stuff coming out of Google skunkworks programs like the Google X Lab has a very real chance of seeing the light of day, unlike much of the research happening at Microsoft.

This is true not only of eye-catching gadgets like Google Glass — another graduate of the Google X Lab that gave birth to the new smart lens — but also the countless research projects that aim to fundamentally remake how we build software and how computers operate. In so many cases, these projects — from the Google Brain artificial intelligence project that’s improving Android’s voice recognition tools to the Borg software system underpinning Google’s entire software empire — have already remade Google and countless other companies intent on following its lead.

Google has stocked its research operation with some of the sharpest minds from places like DEC and Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and they’ve created new-age software like Google MapReduce and the Google File System and the Google BigTable database. These massive creations run across thousands of computers and are now the basis for how vast swathes of the web store and analyze data. MapReduce and GFS gave rise to Hadoop, software now used by everyone from Facebook and eBay to countless everyday businesses. Borg, a means of carefully spreading computing tasks across entire data centers of machines, has already inspired the new computing system that underpins Twitter.

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