Pocketbook Google Glass brings augmented reality to spending

Australian startup Pocketbook has built an app for Google Glass aimed at helping you manage your money during your day-to-day life.

Pocketbook for iOS and Android is the best budgeting app we've seen — intuitive, practical and customisable, it allows you to manage your budget with ease. It's a masterful piece of app design.

But the company wants to make managing money as easy as walking around. It has designed an app for Google Glass with several features to bring budgeting to your day-to-day life.

"Mobile banking has overtaken banking via the desktop in recent years and it has happened tremendously quickly after the wider adoption of smartphones. That trend is increasing at an astounding pace," said Pocketbook CEO Alvin Singh. "There's no doubt that personal banking will move beyond mobile as device adoption of personal wearable devices increases. We are already starting to see the early stages of this — Fitbit was the most sought after electronic gadget this past Christmas."

The Google Glass app, currently in prototype form, taps into one of Pocketbook's current features, Safely Spend, which allows you to set a weekly budget for various purchases, then will constantly update you on how much you have left to spend in that category. It also uses Google Maps and information from other places around the web to aggregate information. For instance, walking into a café, the HUD will display ratings from websites such as Urbanspoon, the type of cuisine, the average cost of food — and how much you have left in your weekly food budget.

Similarly, when looking at electronics, you'll be shown the RRP, a review rating, an alternative lower price and how much you have left in your electronics budget — or by how much you have overspent.

That seems like a pretty useful tool, but the app has a couple of other tricks up its sleeve. The first is using Pocketbook's ability to manage accounts from multiple banks. Because the app knows your banks, it can easily find your associated ATMs, and tap into Google Maps to help you find them in your surrounding area.

The last offers at-a-glance information about your accounts. When you pull out a card, looking at it wearing Google Glass will show the user how much money they have on that particular card, as well as other account information. This would be particularly useful, say, at a supermarket checkout to avoid swiping multiple cards before finding the one that actually has the money.

Of course, we have no idea when Google Glass will even be available to the Australian public, so this app is something we have to admire from a distance at this point — but we're excited to see the Pocketbook team continuing to think up user-friendly ways to help Australians manage their money.

"The Google Glass technology...sits firmly in line with our design philosophy of 'if it's not simple, we don't build it'," Singh said. "Glass creates a means of intertwining everyday consumption with the world of banking in a seamless way — which pushes the boundaries of what we're able to achieve today in building the simplest service to manage your money."