Marketing executive Ivy Ross to lead Google Glass team

Ivy RossChanges are afoot over at the Google Glass team. The company will have a new leader starting Monday while one of its lead engineers is headed to Facebook’s Oculus project.

In an open letter posted on Google+, former Art.com Chief Marketing Officer Ivy Ross announced that she has been appointed head of Google Glass. Her appointment is another indication that Google is getting ready to make Glass available to the general public. Rather than a technology background, Ross describes her past roles at companies that include Calvin Klein, Swatch, Coach, Mattel, Bausch & Lomb and Gap as being “at the intersection of design and marketing.”

With your help, I look forward to answering the seemingly simple, but truly audacious questions Glass poses: Can technology be something that frees us up and keeps us in the moment, rather than taking us out of it? Can it help us look up and out at the world around us, and the people who share it with us?

At the same time, the Google Glass team has lost Adrian Wong whose LinkedIn profile shows that he last worked on Google Glass Consumer Edition as the Hardware Engineering Manager (Systems Engineering, EE, Camera, and RF). He was also the Senior Hardware Engineer on the Explorer edition of Google Glass.

The move this week to make Google Glass available to anyone in the U.S. under a public beta program is another sign that the company is readying to make a push into the general consumer market.


Sources : +GoogleGlass // TechCrunch