This hot e-commerce startup is known for turning geek into chic with its line of fashionable eyewear. In September, Warby Parker filed an SEC form for a $36.8 million round. The investment was led by General Catalyst Partners, with room to add additional, strategic money to the pool. Last night, the New York Times reported that Millard S. Drexler of J. Crew and American Express bring this round’s total to $41.5 million.

“We’ve tried to be very deliberate in getting people with specific expertise,” said founder Blumenthal in the Times report. “Nobody knows retail like Mickey. And within financial services, nobody knows a brand more prominent than American Express.”

Warby Parker takes an innovative approach to e-commerce by offering a home try-on service for people that want to test out a few different styles before they buy. Shoppers can sample five pairs of glasses for five days and then send back the frames they do not want when the time is up. It also has a “no questions asked” 30-day return policy. The glasses are well-made and cost just $95, which is cheaper than many brands of comparable quality.

The success of the brand not only stems from its stylish, reasonably priced product but also from its savvy use of the Internet to “disrupt eyewear.” Before Warby Parker, most people avoided by glasses online because physically trying on frames was a key step toward buying. The try-home service, along with a virtual “try-on” feature on its website and placing Warby glasses in “pop up” stores, gives consumers the real-world experience they need but keeps their transactions online.

Warby’s strategy is clearly a hit, and it’s looking to expand its reach. These new investors will provide fashion retail and financial expertise as well as opportunities for partnerships. Just last week, rumors circulated that Warby Parker was in talks with Google to make Google Glasses less geeky. While at first glance an online eyewear retailer hardly seems innovative, Warby has enmeshed itself equally in the worlds of technology and fashion and is demonstrating that high-quality products at a low-cost with seamless customer service are a good investment.

Founded in February 2010, Warby Parker previously raised $13 million from First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, Tiger Global Management, SV Angel, Thrive Capital, and Menlo Ventures.

Google Glass got one step closer to reality yesterday with Google expanding its preorders. Now it also looks like the connected glasses are going to get more fashionable, with spectacles startup Warby Parker reportedly in talks to help style the device.

The New York Times reports that Google is currently negotiating with Warby Parker to make frames that will be a bit less geeky than what the device is currently peddling. Warby Parker is a hot e-commerce startup known for its stylish frames, so it could help make the product more palatable to people who aren’t tech enthusiasts.

Ideally, a Warby Parker line of Google Glass specs could be a popular device for the right price. Google Glass is sort of like having a smartphone on your face, with the ability to record and share what you are seeing and potentially display information over your eyes that you might want or need. Google showed off how versatile Glass can be last June, jumping out of an airplane and streaming the experience to a live audience.

Google reportedly plans to start selling Glass to the public some time later in 2013.

Check out the latest Google Glass video below to get a better feel for the experience it could provide.

Google Glass photo via Google

Marketing technology is getting too close for comfort, and while reaching for your invisibility cloak might not be an option (or is it?), a Japanese research team from the National Institute of Informatics created a pair of glasses that can help protect your privacy.

Facial recognition software is seeing use from number of retailers and other industries to collect more data on who is doing what. It can tell people your body type and age, and it can identify you. Scary stuff when all you want to do is walk through the mall with some friends.

That’s where these glasses factor in. They’re not the most appealing, and likely won’t be adopted by the masses as they look like protective laboratory glasses (which may actually be in style, see picture right). But if the idea of reliving those horrific 8 a.m. college chemistry lab classes when you were totally an art history major doesn’t get your fashion-blood pumping, get this: It has lights. Purple LED lights that are meant to obscure your face and not your vision. In order to keep the LED lights working, you carry around a small power supply in your pocket.

Someone get me to a runway.

In order to protect you from scans, the lights add extra image noise to a photo of you,that will confuse facial recognition software into believing your face doesn’t exist. Thus, it cannot collect data on you.

It’s a start for those who are truly paranoid, and with invasive marketing technology making their way into mainstream markets, I don’t blame anyone who wears them. Take the EyeSee Mannequins, as the BBC points out. These mannequins have a camera hidden in one of their eyeballs. The camera snaps pictures of anyone who walks by and runs those pictures through facial recognition software. It can tell you how many people visited your store in a day, what race they were, how old they were, their gender, and likely information about their body type.

And, of course, there’s facial recognition technology that can identify you as a person. Facebook is an example of that.

Glasses image via the National Institute of Informatics, Kanye West photo via SOCIALisBETTER/Flickr

I’m routinely plagued by sleep issues. If I go to bed early, I can’t fall asleep. Go to bed late, and I fall asleep fine but don’t get enough rest.

So when I walked by Re-Timer’s goofy glasses today at CES 2013′s Eureka Park, I was immediately intrigued. While the device launched in Australia a few months ago, this is the first week it is generally available in the United States and other countries.

Re-Timer operations manager Claire Hoban (modeling the glasses above) said the glasses are based on 25 years of research from Flinders University. The glasses emit a particular type of green light, and you must use them in coordination with instructions based on what you want to accomplish.

If you’re like me and have trouble sleeping at night, you wear the glasses in the morning when you first wake up for 50 minutes four days in a row. Or if you wake up too early, you wear the glasses at night before you go to bed for the same duration.

“You’re training your body to a different rhythm,” Hoban said. “The green light activates the photoreceptors in your eyes and makes you more alert.”

Hoban said the glasses can help with people suffering from jet lag or general sleep issues, shift workers, and people who have the “winter blues.” Hoban even used the glasses to help her with jet lag going to CES in Las Vegas from her native Australia. She used the Re-Timer glasses before and after her flight to the United States and said she got much better sleep because of it.

The Re-Timer glasses cost $274 and are available to online.

Continuing its trend of turning science fiction into reality, Google officially announced its augmented reality glasses today — and yes, they look about as geeky as you’d expect.

Dubbed Project Glass, the glasses will allow you to do many of the same things you do with your smartphone without whipping out a separate device. It’s still unclear when the glasses will be for sale, but Google says employees will begin testing them in public.

In a concept video released today, Google showed how the glasses could take pictures, give you directions, check-in to locations, and even perform video chats.

“We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input,” Google’s Babak Parviz, Steve Lee, and Sebastian Thrun wrote on a new Google+ page for the project.  “So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.”

Google is doing its best to give the glasses some fashion appeal by featuring rejected Gap models in its promo shots, but they still seem too obtrusive for most consumers. Google is also exploring different designs for the glasses, including some that could fit over your existing glasses, reports the New York Times.

While it may seem like the glasses will add yet another layer of digital distraction to our lives, Google employees say it will actually do the opposite. One person testing the glasses told the NYT: “They let technology get out of your way. If I want to take a picture I don’t have to reach into my pocket and take out my phone; I just press a button at the top of the glasses and that’s it.”

These glasses may seem ridiculous, but it’s worth noting that Thrun is the robotics and artificial intelligence expert who led Stanford University to win the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2007 with its self-driving car, Stanley; he’s also behind Stanford’s current experiment in online education.