Month: March 2017

Hearables attract $50 million of crowdfunding

It’s almost four years since I coined the word “hearables”, so it was pleasant to see it displayed as a headline product category on NXP’s stand at the Mobile World Congress last week, confirming that hearables are taking off as a serious market sector.  It was also encouraging to see the range of products that they had on display which are already available, or close to being available to buy, including models from Bragi, Doppler, Earin, Nuheara, MyManu and Jabra.

Most of these still come from start-up companies.  With the exception of Jabra and Apple, the majority of companies shipping hearable products started off life through crowdfunding campaigns.  I’ve been tracking many of these, and was fascinated to see that at the end of February, the overall total that has been raised for hearable devices passed the $50 million dollar mark, with backers placing orders for over 300,000 products.  With major headphone brands starting to weigh in, it’s a good indication that hearables are topping the list of wearable products that consumers want to buy.  That’s in stark contrast to other wearable products, where the demise of Pebble and continuing layoffs at Fitbit and GoPro suggest that the initial customer enthusiasm has not translated into a compelling desire to continue wearing them.

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Qualkia – Constructing the 5G Myth

I’ve just returned from the Mobile World Congress, and a fairly clear theme this year was the alleged imminent arrival of 5G, with companies promoting the current status variously as 4.9G, the Bridge to 5G or pre-5G.  The only problem is that no-one seemed to be very clear about what 5G is going to be.

Up until now, it’s been pretty clear what the “G”s stand for – it’s been the main user application area over and above the basics of voice and text.  For 2G they were pretty much confined to Games and Gambling.  In other words, applications which relied on timely, but minimal data.  3G gave us Girls, as the porn industry realised that, with higher data rates, they could charge for sending pictures to the most private of our devices.  The increased bandwidth of 4G resulted in Gossip – the net curtain twitching of Twitter and Facebook which has glued millions to their smartphones.  But the potential killer app for 5G is proving remarkably elusive.  Participants at the Global 5G Test Summit event kept on emphasising the importance of early testing for exploring new usage models and applications.  That appeared to be because nobody had no idea of what they might be.  Judging from the reticence of many network operators at the show, who are obviously struggling to see how they are going to make any money from investing in 5G infrastructure, the fifth “G” may end up bringing little other than Grief and Gloom.

At which point I’d like to highlight a recent book by William Webb, entitled “The Myth of 5G”.  In it, he argues that not only does no-one know what 5G is, but there’s no need for it.  After which, I’ll tell you about Qualkia.

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