It seems as though Jawbone, the company that has brought us Bluetooth earpieces and wireless speakers has announced that they are closing their doors after entering liquidation proceedings (the company cannot pay its obligations and their operations are halted and their assets are divided amongst creditors and shareholders).
Co-founder and CEO of Jawbone, Hosain Rahman, has even moved to a new company primarily focused on health-related products and services along with most of Jawbone’s previous employees. Rahman is acting CEO at the new business known as Jawbone Health Hub and reports claim that the new company will service existing Jawbone products once the original company is gone. Jawbone has been in financial trouble and instability for over a year now, customer service began to decline, the inventory began to dwindle, major employees and executive figures left and the company entered a legal battle with rival company Fitbit.
Representatives of Jawbone declined to comment about the closing of the company, but recent job openings have been posted for Jawbone Health Hub with most of the roles relating to data management such as heart rates, and accelerometer readings. It was reported previously that Jawbone was trying to sell their technology for a new clinical health product to other businesses instead of to customers and had completely halted their customer support, who were having technical issues and expected updates to their technical Jawbone Bluetooth speakers, earpieces, and activity trackers.
The company’s legal battles with Fitbit have only contributed to their decline, the lawsuits ranged from copying trade secrets to patent copyright infringements. Investors believe that Jawbone’s shift to being more health oriented company was a bad business move which caused the company to decline due to the more experienced health business already in existence, which provided strong competition for the company.
The business first began in 1999 as an audio technology company known as AliphCom and focused mainly of developing military-grade technology and was later known for producing their incredibly popular Bluetooth headsets and their Jambox line of speakers, which were even labeled as “America’s favorite Bluetooth speaker.” However, their products were not without faults, after the company launched their UP health tracker in 2011 reports came in of product malfunctions from customers and soon the company began to face financial struggles due to the backlash. Despite this Jawbone did manage to earn more than $900 million from investors, however, the company was still unable to recover from their financial ruin. Hopefully, their new health oriented company will be able to sustain itself within the business world.
Featured Image via Flickr/Kazuhiro Keino
