Back in 2001, we at Sound ID (a Silicon Valley startup consisting primarily of former GN ReSound senior employees) had a radical vision: every consumer electronics device that produced audio would have hearing loss compensation in it.
This was our second business model (we had already had one major pivot in our business, with one more pivot to come), based on the idea that anyone could take an online hearing test and create what we called their “EarPrint” that could then be entered into TVs, mobile phones, stereos, etc to compensate for that individual’s hearing loss. Sound ID’s business model was to produce the EarPrint technology and service, and to license technology that would compensate for hearing loss based on the EarPrint to major consumer electronics companies to embed into their consumer audio products.
We pitched the idea to many of the major mobile phone companies of the time. One company that gave us an immediate Yes was Nokia. They were the market leader and most innovative mobile phone company at the time, and they spend considerable resources on early development of new competitive ideas. The team that we worked with on this was quite excited about the idea—everyone we talked to there had an aging relative that they wanted to help use their company’s products.
We worked with this team at Nokia to create a working prototype of a real-time multiband compression system that processed telecom audio according to the EarPrint of the user (we didn’t use NAL-NL1 at the time to determine compression parameters from the EarPrint; my memory is that we developed a fitting prescription designed specifically for telephony signals, for which NAL-NL1 was not appropriate).
We created a working prototype with Nokia and successfully trialed the prototype with people with hearing loss. This brought us to the pivotal point for transferring prototype technology into product development, which was Nokia’s annual “science fair” where different groups displayed the outcomes of their research and innovation projects to Nokia executives who went around looking for the next great thing they should introduce to the market.
None of us from Sound ID were at this event, but we were told by the partners we were working with that the conversation with executive decision-makers went something like this: “Interesting. So how many of our customers have hearing loss that would benefit from this? Only 5%? Hmmm…” Meanwhile, one of the other prototypes on display was a technology that allowed users to customize their ringtones, with the conversation with decision-makers going something like this: “So how many of our customers might want to customize their ringtone? Everyone? And we could charge $1 per ringtone? Genius!”
To be honest, while disappointing, this was not a surprising outcome. Ours was an idea well ahead of its time, and proper timing is critical for innovation to succeed. It would take another decade before I found myself at the headquarters of the next dominant mobile phone manufacturer, this time in Silicon Valley instead of Helsinki, having discussions about implementing technology in their phones that would help people with hearing aids to better hear their phones. That conversation did lead to a market success, and of course now there are many companies successfully embedding hearing loss compensation into general consumer electronics products. Timing is everything.
(Sound ID employees from GN ReSound included Rodney Perkins, Chas Pavlovic, Susan Whichard, Andy Atamaniuk, Benny Johansen, Nick Michael)