Zeo

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

~ the goodbye ~

Zeo started life as Axon Labs, established on 29 December 2003 in Providence, Rhode Island by Brown University students, and spent its first five years as a company with an idea rather than a product. An Entrepreneur piece from April 2005 names the people around it, Daniel Rothman and Ben Rubin among the founders, with outside directors brought in from a consumer brands company and from a sleep laboratory. The Boston Globe wrote it up in March 2005 under the headline a gentler way to start the day, which was the pitch in full.

The device that eventually came out of it was an alarm clock that reads your sleep. A headband of three electrodes made from electrically conductive fabric sat across your forehead overnight, with a wireless unit on the band sending the signal to a clock on the nightstand. The clock waited for a light stage of sleep and rang then. The data went up to a website called MyZeo, where your own nights came back as colored bands.

Axon Labs became Zeo, Inc. on the strength of an 8.3 million dollar Series C announced on 16 January 2009, and the product reached buyers that year. The Wall Street Journal covered it that June. DC Rainmaker reviewed it at length in December 2010. David Dickinson was the chief executive and the company had moved to Boston.

By late 2012 it was in financial trouble, and it closed in early 2013 without telling anyone. The community forum went to a maintenance message. The website emptied out. By the time TechCrunch got to the story on 22 May 2013, a bankruptcy trustee had nearly finished selling every asset the company owned.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the consumable problem ~

The headband was not a one-time purchase. The conductive fabric strip wore out, and Zeo recommended replacing it about every three months, which meant the device worked only for as long as a company existed to sell you strips. After early 2013 there was nowhere to buy one.

It also made the thing structurally unavailable where I live. A 2009 American gadget that needs a mail-order consumable every quarter is not something you buy in Turkey and keep running, however easy the box itself is to ship. I read the quantified-self wave of those years from outside it, people charting their own sleep and arguing about what the numbers meant, and the thought always ended at the replacement strip.

~ the data that stayed ~

The archive is the unusual part of this story. Users had years of their own sleep sitting in MyZeo, and the company took the site down with no migration path, so the Quantified Self forum spent 2013 telling each other to export while there was still something to export from. Then people worked around it: a PC viewer for the bedside models, and an unofficial ZeoScope reader on GitHub that still runs. Gwern's published sleep experiments used the hardware as an instrument, and those write-ups outlived the company that made it.

At least some of the intellectual property went to ResMed, which makes CPAP machines, although that detail rests on a forum post rather than any announcement. myzeo.com was serving a GoDaddy parking page by 22 June 2013. It serves a lifestyle and fitness blog today, on a domain that used to hold other people's sleep.

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