Creative Connectivity

Hearables market to reach $80 billion in 2025

Who could have guessed, back in 2014, that a Kickstarter campaign would lead to an $80 billion market segment in just over a decade? But that’s what is happening with hearables, where a new report predicts that it will reach that size in 2025.

The growth of earbuds, which are now the “must-have” hearable for around 80 million users, has turned into the fastest growing consumer electronics product sector ever, eclipsing even the iPhone. That growth is set to accelerate even more with the launch of a new Bluetooth LE Audio standard at CES 2020, which allows designers even more freedom, higher quality and new audio applications.

It all started when Bragi managed to raise almost $3.4m dollars for a new concept – a set of stereo earbuds which could stream music as well as measuring your vital signs. A raft of other startups managed to raise over $50 million in crowdfunding investment between them before Apple arrived with their AirPods, and the rest is history.

Will Amazon’s Echo Buds challenge Apple’s Airpods?

In the five and a half years since I coined the term “Hearables” the market has grown at an amazing rate. At the time I estimated that the market for the things we put in our ears might grow to $7.6 billion in 2018. I think it just nudged over that to reach $7.8 billion. What I hadn’t anticipated was the success of Apple’s Airpods, which are driving adoption even faster, more or less doubling their sales volume every year. With the recent launch of Amazon’s Echo Buds, which could attract a new audience with the promise of a life which is “Always Alexa”, as well as the availability of a growing number of Bluetooth enabled hearing aids, the market looks as if it could reach $22 billion in 2020.

Hearables had a slow start. Although Apple probably started its Airpod design project as far back as 2013, the first thing that the public saw was Bragi’s Kickstarter campaign for their Dash earbuds. In March 2014, the Dash became famous as the most heavily funded Kickstarter project, raising $3.4 million. Another crowdfunded startup – Earin, beat them to market by a few months, but Bragi eventually got the Dash out in February 2016. In that first year of hearables, (or the first fifty-one weeks, as Apple finally started shipping Airpods in the last week of the year), global shipments from all manufacturers were probably not much more than 100,000 units, most of which were the early MFI compliant Bluetooth hearing aids. In that last week of 2016, Apple probably sold more Airpods than the rest of the industry had shipped through the course of the year. Four years on from that humble start, 2019 will probably see 75 million sets of hearables shipped. That makes hearables the fastest growing tech product ever.

What the Smart Metering Debacle tells us about the reality of the Irish Backstop

Last week, the UK Government finally admitted the obvious, presumably in the hope that the announcement would be lost in the Brexit noise, which is that the GB Smart Metering Programme rollout has been delayed by four years to 2024. For those who don’t know the history, back in 2011, the Government announced that it was instigating a smart metering programme which would see 53 million domestic smart meters installed by the end of 2019. We’re approaching that date and the latest figures show that only 2 million compliant SMETS2 meters have been installed. Despite many of us having pointed out the issues for years, it’s only now that reality has dawned on our ministers, who have set a new target of 2024. Many in the industry believe that’s equally fictional and are suggesting that 2030 is more realistic. That would mean a total of nineteen years for a project that was originally meant to take less than seven years to complete. Over the course of the project, costs have spiralled, although BEIS – the ministry now in charge of the project are still doing their best to dream up magic benefits, presumably because of a concern that if they revealed the full impact, any Minister in their right mind would cancel the project.

The announcement was hardly unexpected. Along with many others, I have been critical of the project since its early days, when it became obvious that that it was being driven by ideology rather than practical requirements. Countries such as Italy managed a national deployment in a couple of years at a fraction of the price. The difference with the GB programme is that it was politically led, turning into the latest in a long line of Government IT disasters. However, the announcement is timely, as it comes at the point when our current Ministers are promoting a technical solution to the Irish border as an alternative to the backstop. If we assume that the same mistakes will occur, as they have done again and again in previous IT projects, it is unlikely that we would see anything workable in place before 2030. More worryingly, it is likely to be hacked by organised crime well before that.

Hearing Loss takes the Stage in Edinburgh

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the largest in the world, with around 2,500 different performances taking place each day. It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors over the course of three weeks, sells almost three million tickets and showcases some of the best performances from around the world. It also seems to attract the world’s worst sound technicians, who think that volume is the only thing that matters. So it was refreshing to find a couple of shows this year which highlighted the issues of hearing loss. Around a quarter of us will experience hearing loss during our lives, so it is important that people become more aware of how to protect their hearing, as well as understanding the consequences of hearing loss and for society to remove the stigma of wearing hearing aids.

When Smart Meters go wrong

Most people don’t think much about firmware – the embedded software which runs the microcontrollers in all of the devices we have around us. We’re aware of the frustration when they don’t do what they’re meant to, at which point we realise that “smart” may not have been the best adjective to use to promote the product, but even when they do go wrong, turning them off and on again, or taking the battery out generally clears the problem. They almost always go wrong because the design process didn’t include enough testing, or not enough time was given over to thinking about the “edge cases” – those unexpected combinations of events which result in things not working the way they should. Most of the time it’s just a short-term annoyance; if it’s worse than that we’ll probably send it back, or throw it out and buy a new one.

However, we do expect safety critical devices like cars and planes and national infrastructure to be a lot better designed than this. Your boiler turning off because it thinks there’s a flow problem when there isn’t is annoying (time for a firmware upgrade please, Vailant), but it’s not life threatening. In contrast, a self-driving car that runs over a cyclist is not something the public is generally happy about. Nor is a plane falling out of the sky. But where would you put a smart meter in the scale of things that might affect your life? Last week we found out, and it’s not a happy answer.

Understanding IoT Business Models or “Who killed my Unicorn?”

One of the memes that has been going around the industry this year, particularly amongst platform suppliers, is that the slow growth of IoT deployments is due to the fact that “Consumers don’t yet understand the real value of IoT”. It’s an incredibly arrogant statement, which tells us a lot about the current start-up mentality, where too many have the perception that they’re entitled to become a billion-dollar company just because they’ve had the presence of mind to jump on the IoT bandwagon. However, the fundamental fact remains that if you are going to succeed, you need a business model. Unfortunately, profitable business models in the IoT are rather thin on the ground, largely because many of the self-styled IoT experts don’t really understand the market.

What most people do agree on is that the IoT isn’t taking off at the rate which everyone had expected, although that’s no great surprise – technology growth curves almost never match the hockey stick curve that analysts predict. Gartner’s famous Hype Curve constantly reminds us that the path to ubiquity is strewn with failed ideas, many of which never emerge from the trough of disillusionment. The IoT suffers from a further problem, which is that the catch-all name has become to mean all things to all men (or maybe all machines). Many forget that the popular IoT poster children which the press pick up and promote as IoT are generally more fluff than substance.

Which brings us back to business models. The IoT will take off when companies work out how to make money out of it. Sadly, that’s proving harder than it may seem, with the more cynical concluding that the only people to profit from the IoT so far are conference organisers. So, let’s take a look at why developing a profitable business model is proving to be so challenging.