Google Glass is an exciting technology and who wouldn't want to get their hands on one. After parting with $1500, some developers are finally going to get something for their money in the form of  two developer events.

Google promises that people who attend the events will actually get hands-on time with the hardware and with its new API called Mirror. The events, called "The Glass Foundry" are exclusively for people in the "Explorer" program.You have to apply and not everyone is guaranteed a place. The first Foundry is in San Francisco January 28th & 29th and the second is in New York February 1st & 2nd.

Apart from the new jargon the only other piece of news is that the Mirror API is a RESTful API.

There is also a new video introducing the API and Glass, but you need to be warned before you watch it that the quality of the presentation is low with very little being said and the whole thing being very "wooden" and unconvincing. After seeing so many "cool" people making Google Glass look stylish on stage at Google I/O, it is also interesting the way that the three presenters manage to make it look nerdy and not at all desirable.

One of the comments to the video on You Tube likens them to three Borg from Star Trek and I can see what they mean. If this is what Glass is going to look like when "ordinary" users get their hands on the product, this is not promising:

I liked the phrase about what you could program Mirror in, it being a REST API, "PHP, Python or even Java"...

Google has also caused something of a backlash from non-US based developers. The Explorer program is only open to developers based in the US. This is said to be due to the difficulties of making early prototypes legal in other countries. It seems that software may be a worldwide phenomenon but hardware is local.

Various people are commenting that, whatever the reason, leaving out the rest of the world in an early start program for Glass is not good for Glass, Google or the developer community. On the other hand the attraction of Glass is so great that in the long run it probably wont have any great impact - non-US developers are going to be just as keen to get hold of the hardware as soon as it becomes available for real - presumably sometime later this year.