Will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas frontman, producer and impresario, has a new band.
It goes on your wrist.
On Wednesday, he unveiled Puls at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, a “smartcuff” (or, as he called it, “a communication and socialisation device”) with a Sim card and a radio that is untethered to any phone but can, he said, make calls, send texts, post on Instagram, stream music, use Twitter and so on. With it, he pits himself against his former employer Intel (he was the director of creative innovation from 2011 to 2012), Samsung and Apple.
“I worked with Michael Jackson and Prince, but that didn’t stop me from making music my way,” he said on the phone from California. “But making music just to sell more music doesn’t interest me anymore. This is where I want to be creative now.”
The cuff is about the same size as the Mica by Intel and the Samsung Gear S, though when asked to describe it, the creator said it was “slightly smaller than the Chanel Maltese cuff,” which may give you an idea of where his ambitions lie. Indeed, it will come in both a coloured plastic version, which has a pretty Star Trek look, and a “gold and diamond” version.
Like the Intel and Samsung cuffs, Puls has a curved screen, and like Intel’s offering, it is not dependent on any other device. It will cost “less than a smartphone” — presumably, that’s the plastic version, not the diamond one — though will.i.am declined to give an exact price. The aim is to have it in stores like AT&T and select fashion retailers by the holidays.
Will.i.am has been developing Puls for the last two and a half years via his company i.am+. He now has 50 employees, including about 30 engineers. He declined to specify how much he has invested in the project, other than to say it was his “biggest investment by far, ever.” (To put this in context: He was a founder of Beats by Dre, the audio technology giant.) His partners include AT&T in the United States and O2 in Britain, as well as Salesforce.
As to why he wanted to embark on this new stage, he said, “It’s a calling and an obligation.”
The calling part has to do, he said, with the fact that, “In my world, tech companies come to celebrities and ask them to endorse a product, and pay a lot of money for that, but you don’t own any equity in the actual good.”
“I didn’t want to play that game anymore,” he said.
As for the obligation: “For three years, I’ve been going around to inner cities saying computer science is the way out. But people from the ‘hood have never made platforms and operating systems. This shows them someone has. It gives them a model.” Will.i.am grew up in the hardscrabble Los Angeles neighbourhood of Boyle Heights.
He said he was not concerned about being taken seriously by Silicon Valley. “It’s not about me being a rock star,” he said. “The device is the rock star.”
Certainly, he had the best answer I’ve yet heard as to why the wrist is the first piece of the body to be colonised by technology. “From Dick Tracy to Inspector Gadget to Star Wars, we’ve been told for years that that’s where it is supposed to be,” he said. “It’s pop-culture conditioning.”
Besides, he pointed out, he was not stopping at the wrist. He is also making a so-called ecosystem of wearables, including a backpack for music streaming, a jacket that can charge the cuff (its battery life is seven to eight hours) and shoe insoles that, in conjunction with the cuff, can be used to measure fitness.
“I am continuing the conversation,” he said in our phone call — though at that point, just before he hung up to go on stage, he was talking metaphorically.
