MARKET RELEASE
September 8, 2016
HIGHLIGHTS
- Apple announces new iPhone 7 and removal of traditional 3.5mm headphone jack and moves towards wireless headsets.
- Nuheara welcomes Apple’s promotion of wireless earbud market.
- Nuheara IQbuds™ intelligent hearing platform to set it apart from Apple and other wireless earbud manufacturers.
Two years ago, the Nuheara founders mapped out a business plan to make intelligent hearing and, with it, IQbuds™ a reality. Since then, the company has been busily building and promoting its IQbuds™ by raising millions in funding, including A$1 million in a successful pre-order campaign that presold IQbuds™ to consumers in over 82 countries. In a positive coincidence, Apple is now helping Nuheara create consumer awareness for this emerging wearables sector known as hearables. Apple’s announcement on September 7th to remove the 3.5mm headphone jack in the new iPhone 7 is encouraging consumers to take a closer look at the wireless earbud options that are now starting to arrive on the market.
Although Apple has introduced proprietary wireless technology for connecting the iPhone to their new earbuds they have named AirPods (these are purchased separately as an Apple accessory), they’ve been wise enough to still include Bluetooth connectivity in the iPhone 7, making it a perfect fit with Nuheara’s IQbuds™ and the many other Bluetooth wireless headsets on or entering the market. According to NPD Group in June of this year, Bluetooth headphone revenue overtook non-Bluetooth for the first time, accounting for 54 percent of headphone dollar sales and 17 percent of unit sales in the United States. The movement to Bluetooth headset has already begun, but the Apple move today, irrespective of their proprietary wireless technology, is bound to escalate the adoption of this wireless form that frees consumers from headphone cables.
Nuheara’s mission is to be the best truly wireless earbuds option available to consumers by improving their overall hearing experience, a position that goes well beyond just being a fitness or fashion related hearing device. IQbuds™ offer not only truly wireless Bluetooth connectivity to smart devices, but more importantly, intelligent hearing technology that allows users to augment and control how they hear the world around them and blend their physical and digital world experience.
Accordingly, Nuheara’s IQbuds™ are not just another wireless headset; they bring an intelligence that is unparalleled compared to other hearables on the market today. Even Apple’s new truly wireless earbuds, AirPods, still only offer music and cell phone connectivity. Furthermore, other fitness-focused, Bluetooth earbud companies are attempting to deliver biometrics measurements, so far with limited success.
Building intelligent hearing in the form of two truly wireless earbuds is not easy. It requires a unique blend of sophisticated research, acoustics, RF technologies, highly miniaturized electronics, advanced speech processing, state of the art software and sleek industrial design. But Nuheara’s team has decades of experience in bringing innovative hearing and audio products to market, so we are well qualified to create an exciting new product category.
Some people say timing is everything. Apple’s announcement today to their massive consumer base that they now have to look at wireless headsets fortunes only good for Nuheara, particularly when you consider that according to IDC’s latest quarterly report that Apple only represents less than 15 percent of the global smartphone user base. It really couldn’t have happened at a better time for Nuheara as the company plans to commence shipping in December to our early backers and enter the broader market with leading retail and distribution partners around the globe with the smartest earbud on the market – IQbuds™.
