We definitely prefer to have employees in our NYC, Dublin, or Portland offices. It depends on the role and the person, as you can imagine. I think it would be very challenging to have a Product Manager working remotely -- the job requires lots of meetings.
Personalization feels like the SEO of 2013. In general, personalization is very hard in terms of "what customer wants" -- look at Amazon's "products for you." In the case of Facebook, this feels like an association algorithm based on affinity rather than personalization the way Target was doing it.
There's an assumption here that if you're going to be using your Google Glasses to open a garage door, you'd presumably be wearing them while you're driving. I hope they finish driver-less cars first.
Other uses listed in the patent include: "For example, target device 14 could be a household appliance or device, such as a refrigerator, television, dishwasher, audio system, video system, alarm system, thermostat, garage door, etc. Alternatively, target device 14 could be an office appliance or device, such as a copy machine, fax machine, projection system, security system, etc. Other examples of target device 14 are also possible."
Congratulations on this. In my experience, however, the initial cost to create is usually the cheapest part of development -- maintenance is expensive. If you have to update your app with a new developer in the future, I hope the initial developer followed good programming practices to make it easy to understand what's going on. I'd encourage you to pay another $50 next time and have the developer explain to you how the code works.
This is a perfect size team for using HipChat. We tried HipChat at Gilt with around 40 engineers and it was too cumbersome because of the number of groups.
I hope they finally allowed users to edit their comments. That was one notable issue I had. Also, there was no such thing as a "private" group because admins had access to all groups.