With the smartphone market stagnating, in terms of innovation if not yet growth, many of the smart brains of the sector are looking to use their creative juices in new ventures. Expect a wave of start-ups headed by exiles ‘ voluntary or forced ‘ from Nokia, HTC and, indeed, Apple and Samsung. One of the emerging names is Black Pearl Systems, still in stealth mode but boasting technical heavyweights from Apple, Sony, Palm, Amazon and Netflix, among others.
The firm is headed by Tim Bucher, formerly head of engineering at Apple, where he was key to the launch of the Mac mini and iPod. It claims to be working on a ‘category defining product to tackle a problem that faces billions of users’.
Hardly giving much away, and delving by GigaOM suggests that the ambitious promise may amount, at least for the initial product, to nothing more revolutionary than an Android tablet. However, that could be the basis for a full-blown home media platform, given the presence of former employees from Netflix, YouTube, Roku, TiVO, Sony and Amazon Lab126, among others, in the launch team of 40 – and that the firm has registered trademarks including ‘personal data center’ and ‘data mesh’ (as well as one for ‘Lyve’, which could be the product name, as GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers points out).
Bucher’s line-up includes content CTO Scott Smyers, a long time Sony man and also founder and former leader of the DLNA consortium; and co-founder Ain McKendrick, who also co-founded Palm. Then there is Joseph Palmer, who led hardware engineering at innovative handset company Danger (subsequently acquired by Microsoft), and is now senior systems engineer at Black Pearl; Jeff Ma, who designed the Apple TV user interface and takes the role of UX director; and founding team member Greg Orzell, who was the cloud architect at Netflix (Bucher has reportedly hired about 15 people away from Netflix, including device and cloud specialists).
The product is likely to make its debut at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, where the start-up has booked a suite, and Roettgers has seen photos of what he presumes to be the initial gadget ‘ a tablet designed to live on the coffee table and act as a second screen, remote control and cloud media platform. That is a well established idea, of course, and the differentiation will need to come from Black Pearl’s cloud credentials ‘ its job adverts refer to building ‘massively scalable services that will act as the brains for a seamless user experience across billions of connected devices’ (another of its trademark applications is ‘data fabric’).