Jawbone

» see jawbone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard of jawbone was as the brand on a bluetooth speaker, not a fitness tracker. the jambox came out in 2011, a black-and-orange brick the size of a sandwich that played louder than it had any right to. for a while it was the speaker every silicon valley engineer had on their desk and every coffee shop in austin had on the counter. that was the peak of the brand.

jawbone, the company underneath, had been around since 1999 under the name aliphcom. its first products were noise-cancelling bluetooth headsets, the kind people wore in cars in 2006 to look like they were always on a call. in 2011 they released two things: the jambox speaker, which worked, and the up fitness band, which did not. the up shipped with hardware problems: the rubber casing cracked, the battery died early. jawbone had to do a full recall of the first generation. fitbit launched its own band in the same window and took the runway jawbone needed.

they raised more than nine hundred million dollars over the company's life, peaking at a $3.2 billion valuation in 2014. by 2016 they were stalling on payments to suppliers. on 6 july 2017 they filed for liquidation. customer service shut down and the up app stopped syncing. people who had paid $179 for an up3 tracker the year before found themselves with a piece of plastic that was now decoration.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

aliphcom started as a darpa contractor working on noise suppression algorithms for combat radio. that's where the headset came from. the jambox came from the same audio dsp work, packaged for consumers. by 2011 jawbone had partnerships with t-mobile and a marc newson-designed product line that looked unlike anything else in consumer electronics at the time. the brand was hot in a way that very few hardware companies have managed since.

~ the decline ~

the up band was supposed to be the third leg. it was not ready. the team had spent millions on industrial design and almost nothing on basic reliability testing. when reviews started coming back, hosain rahman, the ceo, did the right thing: full refund for anyone who wanted one. but that recall cost a fortune, and the second-generation up that finally worked launched into a market where fitbit already had distribution at every best buy in the country.

by 2016 jawbone was selling unsold inventory at a loss to make payroll. a pivot to enterprise health did not save the company, which entered chapter 7 in march 2017 and dissolved formally that july.

~ the day it died ~

rahman moved on the same day. he set up jawbone health hub, supposedly to keep the up app and existing customers' data running, and used some of the original jawbone medical patents to start a new venture. the customers who actually owned an up band did not get continuity. the app stayed broken. the bands they were wearing on their wrists slowly stopped reporting steps and were quietly thrown out.

~ what replaced it ~

jawbone is the warning the venture world tells about hardware: you can raise nine hundred and thirty million dollars and still go to zero if the basic device on people's wrists does not work for two years. fitbit later got bought by google for $2.1 billion. that was the prize jawbone was racing for.

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