The Detroit News:
Jake Sigal isn’t old enough to remember the days of holding a microphone and cassette recorder next to a radio so he could take his latest favorite songs on the go.
But that hasn’t stopped the 28-year-old Ferndale entrepreneur from inventing a 21st-century way to digitally do the same thing and try to appeal to an older, less technology-savvy generation.
Sigal, founder and CEO of Myine Electronics, displayed the latest version of the Abbee FM Radio at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where it won a CES Innovations award in January.
The Abbee, with a built-in FM tuner, allows its users to digitally record and store FM radio — scrubbed commercial-free — to an iPhone, an iPod Touch or an Android-based mobile phone like Motorola’s Droid.
“It’s high-tech, it’s simple, it’s very fast, and it’s free music,” Sigal said.
Sigal set out to cater to baby boomers like his mom and father Bernie by designing devices that require minimal instruction.
“I saw a problem with boomers and technology,” he says, “and wanted to solve it.”
In the case of the Abbee, it analyzes the audio fingerprint of the FM audio, distinguishes the spoken word from music and discards the spoken material, which is largely confined to commercials. The music is stored to an audio player about the size of an iPod shuffle that costs about $250.
Consumers can unplug the player and take the music — or other programming like talk radio or a sports event — wherever they go.
Sigal concedes the Abbee is not a perfect system. Musical commercials appear like songs and will likely end up transferred to the device.
The Ferndale company, which also owns a subsidiary business called Livio Radios, did $1.1 million in gross revenue last year, he says, and projects that it could earn more than $5 million this year. Business is strong enough that Sigal says he is looking to hire a chief marketing officer.
Photo from Myine