Janus Friis’ Next Act Is A Hardware Startup Called Aether, And A “Thinking” Music Player Called Cone

Janus Friis made his name founding a series of disruptive software startups such as Skype, Rdio, Joost and (much earlier) KaZaA — some more successful than others.

Now the Swedish entrepreneur is moving into new territory: a hardware startup called Aether (formerly known by its in-stealth working title, The Morse Project) which today is debuting its first product, a music player called Cone.

Cone draws on music from streaming music platforms, along with Internet radio stations and potentially other sources, and the aim is to be as inclusive as possible. For this launch, Friis’ previous venture Rdio will be among the early integrations, “but we are in talks with several others,” Aether co-founder and chief product officer Duncan Lamb (who worked with Friis at Skype and also spent years at Nokia) tells me.

Cone is not your average music device: it’s integrated with software that features voice recognition powered by Nuance, and you can navigate music on it in three ways: through apps, by turning the hand-sized dial that encloses its speaker, or by saying something out loud. Lamb describes it as a “thinking” music player, and this is the basic idea behind it: through algorithms, Cone learns what you like to listen to based on whether you linger on a selection or pass it along, and then starts applying customized selections based on what time of day it is and where your Cone is located.

The longer term picture, Lamb tells me, is to add more functionality to it over time. “Cone is very well specced,” he told me (a full list of those specs below). “As a startup we don’t have the capacity to use some of that right now, but we wanted to build it so that it doesn’t become immediately obsolete.” Could that include integrating things like voice calls using the microphone? “I wouldn’t rule things out,” he answers.

More to come.

SIZE & WEIGHT

Height: 6.3 in

Width: 6.3 in

Length: 6 in

Weight: 2.9 lbs

POWER & BATTERY

Built-in rechargeable Lithium ion battery

8 hours of continuous playback

CONNECTIVITY

Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n

Dual-band (2.4 and 5GHz)

REQUIRED FOR SETUP

Any device running iOS 7+ or Mac OSX 10.9+ “Mavericks”

DETAILS

3” woofer plus dual tweeter design for natural stereo envelopment

SNR Signal-to-noise ratio 106 dB (A-weighted, f = 1 kHz, maximum power at THD < 1%)

ARM Cortex™-A9 1GHz processor

32 bit floating point processing

Power efficient design using advanced class-D amplifier with up to 90% efficiency

Fully digital I2S 2,1 channel 20w audio amplifier

Low-power, three-axis, micromachined accelerometer with 14 bits of resolution

Dynamically changing LED light ring with variable luminosity