Here today. Hearing aids tomorrow?

It’s been a good month for hearables, at least if you look at the $17 million that Doppler Labs has just raised.  But it asks the question of where hearables are going, as well as what consumers think they’re getting?

Doppler Labs started off life a few years ago with DUBS – a high tech earplug aimed predominantly at concert fans to help protect their hearing.  Unlike conventional foam earplugs, the DUBS are designed to attenuate fairly evenly across the audible spectrum, so they reduce the volume without distorting the music.  They appear to have gone down well, with the Coachella Valley music festival buying 135,000 pairs to hand out to attendees.

However, what has got everyone talking is Doppler’s recent Kickstarter campaign for their Here active listening earbuds.  2,855 backers pledged $635k to help bring them to life (and presumably to help close the external funding).  The questions are what those backers think they’ve bought and why?

I ask that because the Here is an interesting device.  If you’ve not seen it, click Here.  It’s not a music player.  If you’re wearing it you can’t stream music via Bluetooth or a conventional wire.  What it does, some may say all it does, is act as a volume control to attenuate or manage what you hear.  It’s almost like a reverse hearing aid, which helps you hear less rather than hear more.  Much of the internal technology is very like that a hearing aid, but its application and customer base are very different.  That makes it a very interesting product in the hearables spectrum.  I suspect it may have an important impact on the hearing aid industry, but not in the way many might imagine.

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A Happy New Hear

Last year I coined a new term – “Hearables“, for things you put in your ear. Much of what’s happening in that space is being driven by developments in hearing aids. Hearing aids have made immense technical progress since the first electronic ones were introduced to the market over fifty years ago. Few people remember those early ones – they involved large battery packs and amplifiers which people strapped underneath their clothing. But the benefits of better hearing were so great that people were prepared to do that. Today hearing aids are so small that you hardly notice them, whether you’re the wearer or an observer. The technology within them has also made incredible strides. They may contain multiple microphones, which, along with clever digital signal processing lets you focus on sound coming from in front of you, behaving much like your ear. They can also adjust the way they amplify sound to cope with different locations, from noisy streets to the office, restaurants and the home. The amount of technology which has been squeezed into such a small space is incredible, surpassing other high tech products like tablets and phones for the sheer density of electronics.

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Acquire a Tech Visionary for just $3 billion

Today Apple announced their purchase of Beats Electronics for a spectacular $3 billion. It’s left many industry analysts scratching their heads. Although a little shy of the original, anticipated $3.2 billion price tag, it’s surprising how close it is to the amount that Google paid to acquire Nest earlier in the year.  So what’s behind the new $3 billion price point?

There are some interesting similarities in the two acquired companies. Both were started for similar reasons – their founders were exasperated with the quality of products which were currently on the market. In the case of Nest, Tony Fadell wanted to design thermostats and other household products which were intuitive and worked, whereas at Beats, Dr Dre was exasperated that expensive music players and smartphones shipped with low quality earbuds which cost less than $1 and failed to reproduce the music. (The Register has a nice opinion piece on whether they succeeded.) Both companies have produced high profile, high end products to address these deficiencies along with very high media profiles for themselves and their founders in industries which have historically had little branding.

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