Janus Friis’ Next Act Is A Hardware Startup Called Aether, And A “Thinking” Music Player Called Cone

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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Roku player software cracked open temporarily, root now to run XBMC later

Roku's line of set-top boxes have been popular thanks to their simple controls, large set of available apps (recently expanded to include YouTube for the new Roku 3) and hardware ranging in price from inexpensive to downright cheap. Still, despite an active and encouraged developer community with custom channels and well-supported media player apps like Plex, the hardware has remained largely on lockdown -- until now. The GTVHacker team that previously unlocked Google TV and Chromecast has found a way to run its commands as root on any Roku 2 or Roku 3 using the most recent software version (unfortunately, that does not at this time include Sky TV's cheap Now TV player, which runs on older software). While the player overall is credited as "considerably more secure than others in the entertainment field" (Samsung comes to mind but it's from from the only one) a development password field provided a way in.

Currently they've only achieved persistence on the Roku 2, which in this case means they can maintain control even after the box reboots by breaking the secure boot process and modifying the initial boot loader. Since Roku 2 runs on the same Broadcom chip used by the popular Raspberry Pi, team member CJ Heres expects to see ports for third-party home theater PC software like XBMC very quickly. The Roku 3 will be a bit trickier since it runs on different hardware, and right now it needs to have the command entered each time the box starts.

Those well-versed in using the command line should find the process simple. A WGET command entered via the development password field pulls down a script -- available from the GTVHacker team -- that makes sure you have the right box and does all the dirty work before rebooting, leaving you with a rooted box, as seen above. Hardware level access on mobile platforms has lead to a number of custom software projects and we'll have to see if the same path is followed here, but if all this does is create a simple $40 XBMC box, it's probably still worth looking into -- and quickly, the team expects this security hole will be patched soon.

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