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Google Glass for Work partner CrowdOptic in acquisition talks w/ Fortune 500 firm

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CrowdOptic is one of the most well-established of the 10 current Glass for Work parters, and now the company is in acquisition talks. According to people familiar with the matter, the company has been in advanced discussions with a Fortune 500 firm that intends to build software applications for the upcoming iteration of enterprise-focused Google Glass hardware

As we told you earlier this year, CrowdOptic — like many other Glass for Work startups — has been doing a lot of really important things with the Google Glass camera. In the medical field, the company has installed its HIPAA-compliant streaming software in more than 60 U.S. hospitals and labs — including Stanford and UCSF to name a couple. In the operating room, CrowdOptic’s software lets doctors share and record video streams typically for training and educational purposes.

In July of last year, CrowdOptic’s software brought video broadcasts to ProTransport-1 ambulances, which sends a video feed from an ambulance to a destination hospital during emergency response. CrowdOptic has also given Google Glass many use cases in sports, bringing real-time video streams to dozens of stadiums, and the company’s CEO Jon Fisher previously told us that this business — both in medical and sports — has been lucrative thus far.

Even with the Google Glass Explorer Edition being discontinued earlier this year, CrowdOptic recently launched its new “CrowdOptic-in-a-box” product which helps companies livestream HIPAA-compliant video streams on various wearable devices — Google Glass only being one of them. “Streaming live video from Google Glass and other wearable devices just got easy,” the company’s website touts.

Notably, CrowdOptic is the only Glass for Work partner that has patents protecting its technology. The company had two recently-granted, including US #8,527,340, which gives the company the rights to an algorithm that automatically selects the best of many Google Glass video streams based on movement and video quality, as well as US #9,020,832, which defines a “method of gathering and analyzing data from device operators.” The company also has many international patents.

Being in acquisition talks is obviously important for CrowdOptic, but it could be huge for Google as well. While CrowdOptic could be in talks to sell its business to a company that wants to build its own wearable devices, sources say that the interested firm is enterprise-focused and is interested in getting on board with Google Glass at some point in the near future as the next hardware iteration, dubbed “Enterprise Edition“, nears completion.

We reached out to CrowdOptic for more information but the company said that it has no comment on the matter.

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Avatar for Stephen Hall Stephen Hall

Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.