GigaOM » Hosain Rahman

Jawbone buys Visere & MassiveHealth to marry data & design with wearable computing

Om Malik — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 21:58:16 +0000

Updated: You can tell the influence of uber designer (and chief creative officer) Yves Behar on the San Francisco-based wearable computing products company Jawbone. The company is buying two startups – Visere and MassiveHealth (behind the Eatery app) for an undisclosed amount of money in order to create a better experience around the UP, its personal health focused wearable computing device.

As I have often said, hardware today needs to be more than hardware; it needs to marry connectivity, data and design to create a compelling user experience that keeps people coming back. The better the user experience, the more people engage with the device. Amazon’s Kindle, Nest’s thermostat and Sonos’ devices are examples of this new hardware equation.

Wearable computing’s building blocks are sensors, which record a lot of data. In order to make sense of that data, companies needs data wranglers. But to translate those data inferences into human-understandable experiences, companies — big and small — need design and user experience expertise. And with these two small app-makers, Jawbone is getting that in spades.

MassiveHealth was started by well-known designer and UX thinker Aza Raskin and it launched with fanfare, though it failed to attain the scale normally associated with winning apps. The Eatery app did win a lot of critical acclaim. MassiveHealth raised $2.25 million from various venture funds including Greylock and A16z, and a source tells us, that it was sold for low single digit millions.

Raskin, who in the past worked for Mozilla and helped come up with cool concepts for Firefox, is joining Jawbone. He had helped build a top-notch mobile design and engineering team. Visere, a digital design firm that has storied pedigree and is chock-full of talent. It has worked with Nike in the past.

Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman said that both these acquisitions bring in about 25 new people who will add to its growing software, data and design teams. The company has not decided what to do with the two apps just yet.

Today nearly 40 percent of Jawbone 300-plus employees work on software. “A year ago we had no one working on using data to enhance our offerings,” said Rahman, “Today we have fifteen and that number is going to keep growing.”

Jawbone started life as a company making headsets for mobile phones and about two years ago it has expanded into wearable computers. It launched UP in 2011 but the initial version came under widespread criticism. The company went back to the drawing board and re-jiggered the UP and released it recently along with a new iPhone application.

While these are early days for wearable computing, the market is chock-a-block with a lot of devices and it has drawn the attention of Nike whose FuelBand is a runaway hit.

Correction 2:23pm: An earlier version of this story misspelled Visere.

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It’s still early days for connected wearables

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 10:00:48 +0000

We’re at the very beginning of the era of connected wearables, like wristbands that track your health data, says Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman. It’s a similar phase to when the desktop computer was in the Home Brew Computer Club Days, says Rahman, but eventually more and more things we wear on the body will become connected and smart.

We interviewed Rahman as part of the book we’re creating for our RoadMap event taking place on November 5th in San Francisco, and which is focused on design in the age of connectedness. At RoadMap we’ll hear from thought leaders about intelligent devices and the connected body like Nike’s VP of Digital Sport Stefan Olander, MINIMAL’s founder and principal Scott Wilson, fuseproject founder Yves Behar and many more. Check out the full speaker list and schedule here.

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Jambox wireless speaker gets bigger & better

Om Malik — Tue, 01 May 2012 04:00:32 +0000

Jawbone, the San Francisco-based company that got its start making headsets for mobile phones is launching a new wireless speaker, simply called the Big Jambox. It is a much larger (and louder) version of its portable Jambox speaker that is one of the top selling wireless speakers in the market.

The Big Jambox comes with 15 hours of battery life and connects to the iPhone via bluetooth. “We are targeting the speakers that want to make you dock your phone,” says Hosain Rahman, chief executive officer and founder of Jawbone. “It makes no sense to dock your phone, considering we are doing more and more things on the phone.” In other words, they are taking aim at the likes of Bose with this new speaker.

Connected Experience

Rahman, in an earlier interview said that emergence of iPhone-connected consumer electronics
devices is a big opportunity for his company, which has gone through many ups-and-downs. Jawbone has taken the audio technology it used in its original headphones and expanded into different categories by building new capabilities. The Big Jambox is the latest in a series of connected devices being launched by the company. Jawbone launched the original (and smaller) Jambox a couple of years ago and a few months ago launched the fitness-oriented UP device in addition to its lineup of bluetooth headsets. UP launched with much fanfare but encountered stormy weather soon after launch. In comparison, the $299 Big Jambox is a less risky move for the company.

Rahman believes that the devices such as the Big Jambox have to be social as well and as a result they have built in ability to take sound inputs from different sources – so for instance you could be playing your playlist and your spouse could switch the Big Jambox to playback their playlist. The speaker is simple, well designed and easily portable. It was designed by Yves Behar, chief creative officer for Jawbone.

Hey Dj, Hit That Bass

So how must be wondering does it sound?

I have been using the Big Jambox for a couple of days and my initial impression is that the speaker is very good. First as a speakerphone, it is a godsend. I cannot underscore how much better it is to make phone calls via Big Jambox versus turning on the speaker phone functionality that is built into the iPhone. I used it to make phone calls via Skype and so far have nothing to complain. You can customize the Big Jambox via the company’s MyTalk platform.

Now when it comes to music, Big Jambox isn’t going to replace my Sonus Faber speakers or even the Sonos Play 3, but it is a nice addition to my home office. The sound is clear, crisp, though I find it a tad metallic. I like my sound “warm” but you can get that only from old-fashioned speakers. The sound of Big Jambox reminds me of old-fashioned cassette players that made Sony and Panasonic a lot of money. Think of it as a boom-box for the iPhone age.

The speaker comes with what the company calls Live Audio technology that makes it possible to get a 3D audio effect, which is pretty awesome when you are watching movies. I would say that is my most favorite part of the speaker. Rahman says that the company wants to get more folks using the Live Audio technology and is going to offer an API that can be utilized by other apps as well. As it is always the case, I don’t make a decision or a recommendation based without putting it through the paces, so stay tuned for the review.

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Another $40 million for Jawbone from Kleiner Perkins, Deutsche Telekom

Om Malik — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:17:23 +0000

Jawbone, a San Francisco-based company that makes mobile lifestyle accessories such as Jambox and Up, a personal health device, has raised another $40 million in new funds from Deutsche Telekom, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, private investor Yuri Milner (and not his investment vehicle, DST), and investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management were amongst the earlier investors in the company. With this new slug of funding, the company raised a total of $160 million in new funds during 2011 bringing the total amount raised by the company to a whopping $210 million. The company is valued at north of $1.5 billion, according to a report published in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

The new funding comes shortly after the company faced a backlash and an uproar over its Up health device. The company decided to reimburse unhappy customers all their money and allowed them to keep the devices as well.

As part of the deal, Deutsche Telecom is going to distribute Jawbone’s mobile lifestyle products through its channel, especially in Europe. Hosain Rahman, chief executive of Jawbone (which till recently was known as Aliph) told us the company was seeing a huge surge in demand for its Jambox wireless speaker product and, at present, it is the number one selling portable speaker system in the US both by revenues and unit sales.

Jawbone started out making headsets for mobile phones and later expanded into new markets such as audio and latterly healthcare devices. The company has changed its focus to making connected personal & lifestyle devices. Rahman says the company is going to launch a series of new products both addressing the healthcare and audio market segments.

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Need to optimize your sleep? There’s an app for that.

Derrick Harris — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:23:33 +0000

It might sound like science fiction, but Jawbone Founder and CEO Hosain Rahman says we’re headed to an era where our bodies can be connected to everything in our world, including our air conditioners. It won’t be innate, of course, unless we literally have chips implanted in our bodies, but a device like Jawbone’s Up Band could make it possible.

Talking about his company’s new wristband device at RoadMap today, Rahman painted a picture of lives so optimized by data about our bodies that even new parents like himself can wake up refreshed every morning. The band measures an incredible amount of data about individuals — from how many calories they burn to how efficient their gaits are to how much deep sleep they got — and displays it via an iPhone app. As users start to understand more about the information they’re seeing and how it relates to their lifestyles, he said, they’re more motivated to act accordingly.

But the Up Band isn’t just about displaying data and leaving the rest to users, it’s also about helping. For example, Rahman said, the band’s alarm function is a gentle vibration on the user’s wrist during a time when the user is in a light sleep. That way, it’s not as jarring as being woken by a blaring alarm clock during deep sleep, and users are more likely to get up feeling well and ready to face the day. There also is a social element to the Up Band, so users can see how their peers are doing and try to keep up, or engage in challenges to see who’s eating the healthiest or being the most active.

As impressive as the device and associated app are, Rahman acknowledges that we’re just at the beginning when it comes to better our bodies via data. For one, he said, most people haven’t even given a thought to the idea of monitoring the data their bodies generate, so you have to go slow. You can’t “kill people with sensors” off the bat, he said, but let them grow into the new lifestyle. What Jawbone has found is users actually start to understand the data rather quickly, and then they’re anxious to see more and more information to take the experience to the next level.

Ultimately, as more people get on board with monitoring their data and more device manufacturers open their APIs to partners, we could start seeing connectivity between our health sensors and other connected devices. One example Rahman gave was a connection between the Up Band and a home’s air conditioning system. Knowing that a user had just ran five miles because the band told it so, an air conditioner might adjust the house’s temperature so that the user doesn’t cool down too quickly.

It’s tough to tell how many people will actually buy into Jawbone’s vision of personal health, but it’s difficult to argue with the company’s approach. As Rahman noted, phones are becoming the center of people’s digital lives, so why shouldn’t we expect they’ll use them to better understand how our lifestyles affect our bodies? There already are apps to program everything from DVRs to alarm systems to ovens, so what’s one more that might actually help us live a little longer?

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Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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