Janus Friis made his name founding a series of disruptive software startups such as Skype, Rdio, Joost and (much earlier) KaZaA — some more successful than others.
Now the Swedish entrepreneur is moving into new territory: a hardware startup called Aether (formerly known by its in-stealth working title, The Morse Project) which today is debuting its first product, a 6.3-inch high, megaphone-esque music player called Cone.
Cone draws on music from streaming music platforms, along with Internet radio stations and potentially other sources, and the aim is to be as inclusive as possible. For this launch, Friis’ previous venture Rdio will be among the early integrations, “but we are in talks with several others,” Aether co-founder and chief product officer Duncan Lamb (who worked with Friis at Skype and also spent years at Nokia) tells me.
For an entrepreneur who has had many hits in the world of software, why the shift to hardware — a notoriously difficult and capital-intensive space? And why music, where we have plenty of huge consumer electronics companies and smaller upstarts like Sonos already playing? Lamb says the move was borne out of frustration with what is on the market today:
“We looked at all the innovations in AI, with things like IBM’s Watson playing Jeapordy, but at the same time when it comes to consumers, we still have to tell our computers what we want them to do. And a lot of the “smart” electronics out there today still require a lot of effort to get them to work,” he said. “It’s a digital orphanage. We could clearly see the direction that things should go. So we basically set out to solve these kinds of problems by founding a company to make thinking things.”
The idea here is to present “physical objects which live in our everyday lives around but have the ability to think and process the data that is freely available and make decisions and to make this choice and selection in a human way.”
The team of designers and hardware specialists working at Aether — who come from Apple, SGI, Google, NASA, Twitter, Nokia, Motorola, Ideo, Skype, Logitech, Intel, Motorola, Frog and more are starting with a music player, but the intention is to take this to other areas, too, Lamb says.
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