At first sight, the two logos above look so similar that you might think they’re the same product. But are they? Nope. The image on the right is the logo for Google Glass, the futuristic glasses from Google that just arrived to the hands of the first lucky explorers. The image on the left, however, is the logo of a Los Angeles startup founded in 2008 that is now thinking about suing Google for copying its name, logo and typography.
Glass, co-founded by Joaquín Ayuso de Paúl, ex-CTO of Tuenti — one of the largest social networks in Spain — is a web service that lets you add different layers to a site, so you can add comments, share them and enhance the experience of web browsing.
One of the partners at Glass, Eric Bergasa, has confirmed today to Gizmodo en Español that they started working on their logo in 2008. One year ago, when they knew about the Google Glass project, they contacted Google to let them know that they were already using that name for their own product, which shared some conceptual similarities. For example: the idea of adding a layer of contextualised information.
Glass is a very generic name, obviously, and makes sense in the context of a pair of, well, glasses, so the fact that Google choose to use the name Glass is almost certainly nothing more than a coincidence. But explaining the similarities between both logos is actually a lot harder. Both are based on exactly the same typography (just look at the G or the S), with Google making only very slight changes to some letters. Moreover, Google, according to Eric Bergasa, already new about the existence of the pre-existing Glass, its logo and its typography.
The startup has confirmed to Gizmodo en Español that it is thinking about suing Google. We’ve contacted Google for a response on the matter.
This post has been translated and republished from Gizmodo en Español, Gizmodo’s Spanish-language site.