Between the $19 billion Facebook acquisition of WhatsApp and the billion dollar valuations thrown at Snapchat, messaging apps have been some of the biggest tech stories of the past year. The one thing we haven't seen is any new hardware come into play in this segment beyond smartphones.
San Francisco startup OnBeep is changing that with a new wearable called Onyx. The small $99 device clips on to your clothing and allows for real-time voice communication with a group of people also wearing an Onyx. You just press a button and start talking. Onyx is connected to your smartphone via Bluetooth and as long as your phone is connected to a network, Onyx will work. The battery life is relatively short at 12 hours of heavy usage.
In the iOS or Android app, Onyx users can manage who's in a particular group, see where each group member is on map and figure out who's talking.
Pretty simple stuff. It's not much different than a walkie-talker. But OnBeep CEO and co-founder Jesse Robbins thinks this kind of device will solve a problem that many messaging apps have. Namely, they require you to stop whatever you're doing and pull up an app. Robbins thinks Onyx will provide a more seamless way of communicating with groups of people.
“We want to provide something that's heads up and in the moment rather having to figure out which app you're in and looking down at the screen,” said Robbins in an interview at the company's San Francisco office in the Mission District.
Robbins is planning for Onyx to be a direct-to-consumer play. He wants everyday people to pick up an Onyx and then slowly migrate them into different settings such as work. "This is a direct-to-consumer item for people who work in jobs that require them to be out in world and be connected to other people," said Robbins.
But does anybody really need this? It's already embarrassing enough to stick a computer on your wrist or your face, why do we need another piece of technology hanging off our bodies, especially one that makes noise?
We'll have to wait and see. But ideally, Robbins thinks Onyx will work best for people in jobs like delivery, construction or really any job that requires people to be running around and communicating. Outside of this, Robbins hopes people can use in more social situations like on a ski trip with friends or even just between family members on a daily basis.
Eventually, OnBeep will add a premium version of the app for additional features like different types of messages, audio playback, notifications and security options.
Robbins references the now-deceased Nextel phones as an example of how popular this kind of real-time communication used to be among mainstream US consumers. Nextel phones were hugely popular about a decade ago for their push-to-talk feature that gave users that real-time communication capability. At its height, Nextel had more than 20 million subscribers. It merged with Sprint and the phones were eventually discontinued as the smartphone transition made the phone obsolete despite still having fans and subscribers. One of OnBeep's three co-founders, Roger Wood, was a former product manager at Nextel.
Robbins also thinks there's plenty of opportunity in Asia for something like Onyx. Tencent's WeChat app offers voice and text messaging on phones and has a massive subscriber rate of 400 million users. Onyx isn't available in markets outside of the US for this first rollout.
For now, the problem for OnBeep will be in making sure enough people buy an Onyx so it's actually useful. It has no value for individual people to buy one Onyx on their own. This is all about group communication. At $99, that might be a hard bargain.
OnBeep has mostly been in stealth since it incorporated in April 2013. The 23-person startup announced a $6.25 million in a Series A round from Avalon Ventures in August.
All of this is strange area for someone like Robbins to get into. Robbins came from the enterprise tech world at Amazon's cloud services where he made sure websites never went down and then he started his own company, Opscode (now called Chef), that also works on ensuring big websites never go down.
The idea came from his time as a firefighter up in Seattle while he also worked at Amazon. "When you're saving a life, you don't want to be touching a phone or looking down," said Robbins.
He didn't put the idea down on paper until 2012 while he was on a vacation with girlfriend. He was seeing all these messaging apps come out but none of them were trying to figure out how to make the messaging experience more seamless and without the distraction of constantly having to look down at an app.
“I was thinking, 'surely someone will figure it out,' and no one did,” said Robbins. “The reason for that is, they're building ad-based businesses. They're depending on getting more pageviews. We're building a business dependent on something different than that.”
