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Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Ideo Designer Designing Smarts to Compete with Apple

We worked with Ideo in some of our shopping labs and problem solving spaces.   So the emergence of the emergence of a new smart speaker from an Ideo designer was of interest.   Look forward to seeing what this looks like.  Audio only, or an aim at the assistant-enabled markets from Amazon and Google, Samsung and Baidu too?

Ex-Apple designer to launch a product that competes with Apple itself

Christopher Stringer worked on many of Apple’s biggest hits. Now, he’s getting ready to release a new series of smart speakers that could compete with Apple HomePod and Sonos.
By Mark Wilson in Fastcompany

Christopher Stringer was a designer at Ideo, who helped create Dell’s hit ’90s design language, before he got the call from Jony Ive in 1995 to join Apple. Stringer went on to become a key figure in one of the most influential industrial design teams in history, launching dozens of products from PowerBooks to the iPhone.

In 2017, Stringer left Apple to build something new. According to a new report in the Financial Times, Stringer is now raising money to launch a product that will compete with Apple itself.

Stringer’s startup is called Syng. He cofounded it with Damon Way, who launched the tech protector brand Incase, and Afrooz Family, a master coder and former sound engineer at Apple who worked on the HomePod. Set up in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, Syng describes itself as “a future of sound company,” and it’s working on a new series of smart speakers, dubbed “Cell,” to rival the HomePod and Sonos, with the first of the line coming out in the fourth quarter of 2020. The Cell will undoubtedly be an impressive piece of machinery: Syng has lured designers from Apple, Nest, and Nike.  ....  " 

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