Update 3/16: Augmate has reached out to clarify the situation, noting that CEO and founder Pete Wassell is indeed not leaving the company. The previous “team” page we linked to on the company’s site didn’t list Wassell’s name, but it appears the page — which has now been taken down — was inaccurate.

CrowdOptic, widely known as one of the larger and more successful of the dozen-or-so Glass at Work partners, has today announced its first in-house developed hardware product. The CrowdOptic Eye streams video via the company’s video streaming stack at the flip of a switch, adding additional opportunities for clients that have until now primarily used wearable devices like Google Glass for a wide variety of purposes ranging from medicine to sports…

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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… expand full story

The Google Glass Explorer program ended somewhat abruptly in January, and this didn’t come as much surprise to the Glass-bashing media nor those who tried the device for their own consumer use. In these situations, where Glass was a privacy nightmare and an underpowered gadget, the head-mounted wearable display would appear to be a failed piece of consumer technology (and Google’s Astro Teller believes that allowing this mindset to spread was one of the project’s biggest failures).

And it’s true. The first-generation of Google Glass might not really bring much value to the daily lives of most people, and it’s definitely not close to being socially acceptable quite yet. But many companies and organizations that adopted the experimental $1,500 spectacles for specific use cases weren’t so quick to dismiss the device. In fact, there are many groups—even now, after the Explorer program has ended—who are still doing some exciting things with it.

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Dr. Tad Vail of UCSF at the kickoff of CrowdOptic’s medical solution

This is part two of my series on the state of Google Glass. Be sure to read the first part of this series where I explain the truth of Google’s official stance on where the device is headed.

Google Glass has an uncertain future, but there are many things we can learn from the past two years. While the general public is holding it to the standard of being a consumer product (and has watched it flop), the Explorer Edition Glass saw amazing accomplishments and successes elsewhere: in the workplace. Many startups—dubbed by Google as the “Glass at Work” partners—have seen the device become a major contributor to their business, and one company in particular, CrowdOptic, has seen extraordinary success working with seven Fortune 500 companies that represent more than $1 trillion in market capitalization.

Although the Glass team definitely missed some hurdles as mentioned in Thursday’s Q4 earnings call, the experimental device definitely has legs (and it’s not just because Google says so)…

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Google Glass has seen its fair share of emergency and medical use cases, but today it was announced (via MarketWatch) that CrowdOptic, a provider of broadcasting software for Glass, has partnered with ProTransport-1 to bring said software to the company’s ambulances and “mobile medicine” units.

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