David Hyman (October 17, 1971) is an American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Unagi Scooters, a manufacturer of electric scooters, which launched in December 2018. Hyman is also the former CEO of Beats Music, MOG, Gracenote[1] and Blin.gy.

David Hyman
David Hyman, founder of Unagi Scooters and former Beats Music CEO
Born (1970-10-17) October 17, 1970 (age 54)
Alma materUniversity of Vermont (B.S.)
Occupation(s)CEO and co-founder of Unagi Scooters
Known forCEO and founder of MOG
Children2
Parent(s)Martin and Diane Hyman

Early life and background

edit

Hyman was born and raised in Melville, New York. The son of Martin and Diane Hyman, he is the youngest of three siblings. His father Martin Hyman was executive vice president of Milgray Electronics. Hyman was educated on Long Island, graduating in 1985. He attended the University of Vermont from 1985 to 1989 and earned a bachelor's degree in Economics.[citation needed]

Career

edit

Wired Magazine / Hotwired

edit

Hyman started his online career in online advertising sales at Wired Digital in San Francisco, California, where he was an active participant in the web's establishment of online advertising. While at Wired Digital he sold one of the first advertisements online and also created the first platform for pioneering e-commerce entities to advertise.[citation needed]

Sonicnet

edit

From 1996 to 1999 Hyman worked as the senior vice president of sales and marketing at Sonicnet. From 1999 to mid-2000 he worked at MTV Interactive as the senior vice president of marketing, where he oversaw all marketing functions for MTV.com, VH1.com, Nickelodeon.com, and Sonicnet. Hyman was the voice-over announcer on the only television ads done in MTVi's and Sonicnet's history.[2]

Gracenote

edit

In 2000 Hyman created Gracenote and was its original president and CEO. There, he took fledgling compact disc identification technology (CDDB) and converted it into the world's largest music identification and music management company.[3] Hyman's efforts helped to drive Gracenote to become core plumbing for all MP3 players & encoders in hardware and software. Gracenote was sold to Sony for $260 million in 2008.[4]

In 2005 Hyman founded MOG in Berkeley, California.[5]

Beats Music

edit

In 2012, Hyman was CEO of Beats Music, the music subscription service created as an offshoot of Beats By Dre. Beats Music was subsequently sold to Apple along with Beats By Dre for $3 billion.[6]

Blin.gy

edit

In 2016 Hyman developed Blin.gy, the first augmented-reality mobile application enabling video segmentation, allowing anyone to superimpose their video or image into any video simply using their built-in mobile phone camera. There, he oversaw the development of a proprietary lightweight neural network to run on a mobile GPU with an inference engine trained to identify and separate humans from their background environments.[citation needed]

Blin.gy closed its operations in September 2017. Hyman wrote a eulogy to the company.[7]

Unagi Scooters

edit

In November 2018, Hyman launched Unagi Scooters on Kickstarter, generating $240,000 in revenue. Unagi has been praised as a quality portable electric scooter by numerous publications including The Verge,[8] Gizmodo,[9] and Endgadget.[10]

Personal

edit

Hyman holds three patents: one in automatic meta-data sharing of existing media through social networking (US 7685132 B2[11]), another in automatic meta-data sharing of existing media (US 7979442 B2[12]), and a third in multiple-step identification of recordings (US 8468357 B2[13]).

He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as SXSW, CES and Midem. In 2008, he founded Musica Tecnomica, a regular gathering of music-focused innovators in San Francisco.[14]

See also

edit
edit

References

edit
  1. ^ https://www.linkedin.com/in/hymco [self-published source]
  2. ^ "Mee, mee, me, meeee!" FredSeibert.com
  3. ^ "Gracenote | MusicID". Archived from the original on 2014-08-07. Retrieved 2015-08-06.
  4. ^ "Sony Buys Gracenote for $260M". 22 April 2008.
  5. ^ "Top 5 on-demand streaming music services feat. Spotify, MOG and Rdio". 17 September 2011.
  6. ^ "Apple to Acquire Beats Music & Beats Electronics".
  7. ^ "My Mobile AR Start-Up Died So Yours Doesn't Have to". November 2017.
  8. ^ "Unagi is the $1,190 electric scooter you won't want to share with anyone". 17 November 2018.
  9. ^ "This Electric Scooter for Adults Might Replace My Need for a Second Car". 13 November 2018.
  10. ^ "Unagi's high-end electric scooter is a mix of design and power". 28 November 2018.
  11. ^ "Automatic meta-data sharing of existing media through social networking".
  12. ^ "Automatic meta-data sharing of existing media".
  13. ^ "Multiple step identification of recordings".
  14. ^ "Music Startups CAN Work: MOG CEO David Hyman Responds To imeem's Dalton Caldwell". www.noemiconcept.com (in French). Retrieved 2024-03-23.