Goodbye Google, Hello World.
Today is my last day at Google,
which naturally has me in both a reflective and an anticipatory mood. So I thought it might be a good time to share a bit about the exciting career nexus at which I find myself.
Google, and specifically the Nest team, has been the perfect home for me post-Apple. I joined with a keen sense that the smart home landscape, currently a frustrating mess, is now poised for drastic improvement. I sort of feel like the smart home today is analogous to Bluetooth headphones before AirPods.
To me, that is tremendously exciting.
As blurry as Google’s vision is for the smart home, they’ve established a clear focal point with the tablet as a centerpiece. For my part, I’ve been passionately focused on the charging speaker dock, which is a new product category with a lot of future potential. There’s something very satisfying about docking a mobile device to a home speaker, perhaps reminiscent of the iPod dock of old.
In fact, I joined Nest mere weeks after its founder, Tony Fadell, launched his book, Build. For the few that might not know, Fadell is also rightfully the “father of the iPod.” His book tour afforded me the opportunity to meet him in person and challenge him to sign my iPod shuffle!
During his talk at the CHM, something he said — not once but twice, insistently — shot through me like lightning:
“I think the iPod should still exist.”
— Tony Fadell
This sentiment was shared by Fadell and others when Apple finally retired the iPod brand. As Joanna Stern wrote in her article on the topic, ‘He [Fadell] said the iPod’s demise was inevitable, for business reasons. However, he thinks there’s real value in a dedicated audio player without all the distractions of the internet. “I do believe the iPod should go on,” he added.’
The iPod was not just a tech product or an audio product. For many people it felt almost like an extension of one’s soul. A tiny rectangle with a 3.5mm portal to spectacular inner realms of rich sonic textures & deep emotions — your music, in your hand, in your ears.
Today we still hold a place in our hearts for the iPod.
These days, it’s not uncommon for me to hear expressions of deep appreciation & damn near pure love for AirPods, those incredible little white buds helping millions of people across the globe connect better with the music & people they love.
Being directly responsible for the audio electrical engineering in AirPods was absolutely a dream job for me. Even including my traumatic departure, which stemmed from my conviction to report incidents & cultural facilitation of harassment, discrimination, and retaliation… I wouldn’t change a thing about it and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
But after six and a half years and six different models of AirPods, I was ready for a change. Invigorated by the emerging developments in spatial audio, wearable AR, and generative AI, I now see an opportunity to not just think different, but build something different.
Ultimately, Google is not the place for me to develop my vision. I joined less than 2 years ago and, despite brilliant minds working on compelling products, we’ve endured more project cancellations, layoffs, and roadmap changes than one ought to see over a decade’s time. Even outside the smart home, Google’s innovative vision for smart frames, teased at I/O 2022 right before I started, seem increasingly ephemeral. Maybe Google will end up dominating the AI arms race, but personally I’d rather put my money on OpenAI.
Speaking of OpenAI, I’ve thought a lot recently about the merits of open source development, which sort of came to me like a breath of fresh air after scaling the height of Apple’s proprietary walled garden. I’ve been deeply impressed and motivated by the DIY & maker communities building incredible hardware & software projects upon open platforms.
I started using Raspberry Pi to develop a concept I had been chewing on ever since Tony Fadell struck me with those bolts of lightning. The affordability, accessibility, and development community around RPi & Linux helped me start prototyping quickly, in my free time outside of work. But ultimately, I knew I’d need to port to an embedded platform to build the system I envisioned.
Just so speculation doesn’t wander too far, I’d like to make clear that my career journey is not taking me headfirst into the open-source effort I’m introducing here. No, my next main gig will soon begin, but before soundcheck I figure this is a good time to share a bit with the community that has inspired me so much.
Specifically, I’d like to highlight the open-source approach of Brilliant Labs, especially since my effort is partly being architected for consistency with their developer platform. I’d also like to thank & acknowledge the excellent support I’ve received from Nordic Semiconductor, Analog Devices, xMEMs, soundskrit, and others.
This new project falls under the banner of Spawn, which is an innovative open-source decentralized music hosting protocol in development. More details will be shared over time, but the central premise is for music to be universally available as encrypted content that is permanently hosted on Arweave.
Streaming content real-time over the Internet not only degrades battery life & audio quality, but also presents issues with connectivity & hardware compatibility. By leveraging a massive local cache of curated content on device, only low bitrate license metadata needs to be exchanged in real time, along with royalty payments & decryption keys. Portable players then require management of stored content, as well as on-the-fly playback queue, both of which are tasks well supplemented by ML & generative AI. Local content can be intelligently refreshed while charging (e.g. overnight), and playback curation can tailor to a rich set of contextual metadata. There are numerous music services now starting to offer AI-based curation, and these will only improve over time.
But we’re not just building the backend protocol.
We’re also building some hardware.
Just as the Nest thermostat was “the world’s first learning thermostat,” you might think of this as “the world’s first learning iPod.”
The world’s first learning iPod?
Remember when the iPod shuffle lost its user interface? Well, not quite lost, more like offloaded. It relied on voice control (pre-Siri, mind you) and the buttons on the wired headset. Now imagine something nearly that small but much more compelling.
Lovingly, and a bit tongue-in-cheek, it’s called AiPod.
Since the Spawn protocol, the AiPod product, and the underlying hardware module are all being developed open-source, lots of details will ultimately be shared long before launch. So for now please take a gander at this rough preliminary concept rendering, and stay tuned.
Oh, and one more thing…
if you’d like to be actively involved in the development, hit me up.
