At Mobelux, A Hard Day’s Night Brings Sweet Dreams
Mobelux Labs 1.0
Posted: Monday, February 25, 2013 12:00 am | Updated: 10:01 am, Thu Mar 14, 2013.
"What happens when the VC money runs out?” Garrett Ross, co-founder of the mobile app startup Mobelux, wonders this aloud with a relaxed confidence. Venture capitalists: they manage to kick-start your idea, they provide direction for design—and they sometimes do not raise enough capital, leaving a project stuck at an important turning point.
Here in Mobelux’s office, Ross may be soothed by the ultra-comfy chairs that are in the startup’s trademark color, tiger orange, but his confidence comes from the hard work of developing popular apps in-house. Financial independence brings certain liberties, such as getting to ask the mobile app industry: How do you sleep at night?
In fact, Mobelux honestly wants to know if there could be a relationship between iPhones and better ZZZs. Back in 2009, after Tumblr picked up Mobelux’s first creation, Tumblrette (re-released as Tumblr for iPhone), the easy next step could have been more product for a hyper-stimulated social media sphere. Instead, Mobelux was intrigued by an activity during which iPhone users are completely unconscious.
The startup reached an agreement with iHome to develop an app for the audio company’s award-winning alarm clock radio. With an iPhone in the clock radio’s charging dock, iHome+Sleep allows users the option of waking and sleeping to a playlist or Internet radio. A daily weather report and forecast gives the app some depth. Standing out from all of these features is the list of sleep stats, which even includes how often the snooze button is hit.
Despite the numerous lines of code that make iHome+Sleep possible, users still had to rely on the Internet and search engines if they wanted to drift away to ambient sounds. By late 2012, dissatisfied with the solutions offered by the app industry, Mobelux sought to find new ways of waking up and going to sleep. So Ross picked up his camera (He is an accomplished photographer.) and producer Johnny Hugel gathered his audio recording equipment—the Mobelux team would light out to collect sounds and images from landscapes and man-made machines for a 90-day project called iHome Zen.
Hugel got the idea to organize the sounds and images into “packs,” and sell each separately. If users are calmed by record-player static or the hum of an airplane, they could choose “Home & Travel.” Likewise, if weather is the perfect lullaby, there are stormscapes in “Nature & Weather.” The “Zen” pack compiles good vibrations, such as white noise.
Ironically, revisiting one of the esoteric lessons described in Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise,” reads like Mobelux’s experience during the post-fieldwork stages of iHome Zen. DeLillo blurs the line between reality and illusion when a character notices signs labeled “Most Photographed Barn in America,” as tourists take picturesque snapshots. “One of our team used to row crew and he called up about 10 guys for the rowboat sound,” Ross explained, while turning his iPhone to show the accompanying image of a solitary rower. “The ceiling fan sound is actually a composite of multiple recordings,” Hugel added. “You expect to hear a whoosh of air, but you also want to hear the turning of the blades, and there’s another repetitive sound going on—the clinking chain.”
The app debuted at number 2 in the Mac Store’s “Health & Fitness” section, even though Ross humorously mentions that some found the sound of real chirping crickets to be annoying. Criticism comes with the freedom of experimentation. The daily transformation that takes place between waking, sleeping and waking again “is a microcosm of the way Mobelux approached different platforms for iHome Zen,” Ross said. Before heading back to the main workspace, there is talk of a new release from Mobelux. The project is “still in the beta phase,” and it will be another hard day’s night before Ross and Hugel are ready to say anything more.
Mobelux is located in the Corrugated Box Building. For weekly updates, check out mobelux.tumblr.com.
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