Episode 57: The Real Brand Story — weara AIR Edition — The Next-Generation Product That Never Materialized

“Real Management | The Real, Unscripted Stories of a President Talking Honestly About Success and Failure in Business Management”

In this program, I, Tetsumi Hoshikawa, also known as Hossy, talk candidly about management and what goes on behind the scenes, based on my own experiences.

Real Management isstreamed every Friday at 6:00 a.m.

Good morning. I’m Tetsumi Hoshikawa, also known as Hossy, a free spirit.

Right. Up through the last episode, I think we talked about the sad story of how our independently developed wearable, weara, was announced but ultimately could not be released.

Oh! You remember well. That’s right.

Yes, that’s right. I’ll talk about it in detail another time, but I don’t really like things like worrying or talking about mental health and all that.

Rather than everyone being like that, these days people are quick to say things like “my mental health.” I don’t really like that kind of thing, and I’m not really the type to worry much.

It’s not that they like it. Well, I think “worrying” and “mental health” are slightly different things. When it comes to “worrying,” most people worry about things where you’d think, “Is there any point worrying about that?”

Exactly. If you have the information, you’re better off making an immediate decision. Even if you worry, the more you worry, the more you later think, “Maybe the other option would have been better after all.”

If you don’t worry, all you can do is decide immediately and move forward.

That’s how I think, and in my everyday work, people who have worked with me probably have never heard me say something like, “Let me think about it for a week,” or “Please give me until tomorrow.”

If the necessary information isn’t available yet—for example, if there’s something that needs to be examined before I can make a decision—then we can’t move forward without it, so I’ll say, “Let’s look into this first.” But if the information is already there, there’s really no point in worrying.

And I only say that because people have started using the word “mental.” I don’t think that’s what it really is.

Even so, I never imagined I would develop alopecia areata, so honestly, I was surprised. I think that after going through all sorts of difficulties, the fact that we had announced it to the world but couldn’t release it was a pretty big thing for me. I had no awareness of it at all, though.

So that’s where I experienced a major setback and failure.

Yeah, just that once.

I never had it before that or after that.

From here on, this was something we never actually released to the world, and it was also something we were doing internally, so I think almost no one knows about it.

Outside the company, the people who were involved with us know about it, but people who weren’t involved don’t. So this time, I’d like to reveal this new story.

So, weara ended in failure, but taking into account everything we had done up to that point, I still thought wearables themselves were interesting. Being constantly worn and knowing things about the person wearing them can lead to something incredibly convenient. I also felt there were different ways they could be used, so I was thinking about new applications.

In fact, even assuming we had released weara, we already had something we planned to make for the next version.

Its name was “weara AIR.” It’s kind of like Apple’s MacBook Air, but there was meaning behind it: AIR, as in air.

Originally, it was a wearable that communicated with a smartphone via Bluetooth. That’s basically the same for Apple Watch and for recent smartwatches. But with this second-generation weara AIR, it would not connect to a mobile phone via Bluetooth.

Instead, it was a model that would communicate using the mobile network, just like a mobile phone.

What’s good about that is, although things have improved somewhat recently, Bluetooth is still a little troublesome to use. You quickly run into issues with whether it connects or not, and setup takes effort too.

And there are often cases where you think it’s connected but it isn’t, or where you want to connect but communication doesn’t work properly.

That’s why, for young people and others who understand it to some extent, it may not be much of a problem. But for elderly people, Bluetooth itself often becomes a question of, “What even is that name?” and setup tends to be difficult.

With weara as well, to solve that problem, we added a feature using NFC that allowed pairing just by touching the devices together. Even so, there were still cases where it didn’t connect properly.

We wanted to solve that, and for the second generation, we were thinking of making it less for individuals to use as a hobby and more for services.

Exactly, it was more B2B. Wearables are constantly tracking the health, sleep, activity, and other conditions of the person wearing them. Simply put, wearables are devices that can be used for things like monitoring services.

There are ways to monitor people with cameras, but of course people don’t like being watched by cameras. And simply watching with a camera makes it difficult to know details like sleep status or to collect vital data such as heart rate.

To be honest, when someone is sleeping, a camera alone may not be able to tell how they are sleeping—or even “the difference between being asleep and being dead.” For reasons like that, we thought we would use wearables for monitoring.

At that point, I thought the biggest hurdle was Bluetooth.

Structurally, Bluetooth uses a frequency band defined by the standard, the 2.4 GHz band. And all kinds of devices use that band for Bluetooth. For example, earphones, smartwatches, and of course smartphones too. So when lots of devices gather in one place, interference occurs and it becomes harder to connect.

For example, I think people have experienced earphones cutting in and out when they go to places like Shinjuku Station. There are lots of people, and devices today really use Bluetooth a lot, so when you go somewhere where many of them are being used, interference inevitably happens.

Because of that, when we talk about monitoring, the targets are basically sick people or seniors. These days, it’s common for the children’s generation to move to the city while their parents or grandparents live in the countryside, isn’t it?

In that kind of situation, the children living in the city want to know how their parents are doing, wondering, “Are they doing okay?” Living together with one’s parents is difficult for various reasons. Bringing your parents to Tokyo is also a big challenge. But you still worry a little about your parents back home, don’t you? Like whether they’re staying healthy.

To know that information, let’s say there’s a wearable that can show activity, sleep, vitals—in other words, health status. For example, what if you gave them an Apple Watch?

I’m sorry to keep using this as an example, but let’s consider the case of giving an Apple Watch to your parents or grandparents. First of all, you can’t use an Apple Watch without an iPhone, right?

So first, unless you buy both an iPhone and an Apple Watch, they can’t use it in the first place. And even if you set it up and hand it to them, the first problem is that the battery doesn’t last. Even if you tell your grandparents, “You have to charge it every day. Don’t forget to wear it,” it probably won’t work.

Also, with Bluetooth, it’s easy for connection problems to happen, so it’s not really suited for monitoring someone.

I don’t think you hear much about people using Apple Watch to monitor someone, and it really is difficult. But I feel there’s a huge demand for it. What solves this is a wearable that communicates using a mobile phone network, not Bluetooth.

What’s good about this is that you don’t need a smartphone.

It collects vital data on its own and uploads it to the cloud using the mobile network. It would be a problem if there were no mobile signal, but Japan has a certain level of coverage, so there are probably very few people whose parents’ home has no signal.

If you upload the data using that mobile network, you don’t need any smartphone connection or setup at all.

You do have to charge it once, but in the end the battery lasts for about two weeks.

We said the first-generation Weara would last 30 days, but using a mobile network inevitably consumes more battery, so the battery life is shorter than that. But after making various improvements, we got it to last about 14 days. And once every 10 minutes, it automatically uploads vital data to the cloud without the user doing anything.

This originally came from the fact that my father had cancer and was living nearby while undergoing treatment, but he passed away before I really understood what was happening.

I didn’t think he was going to die, but based on that personal experience of someone suddenly passing away without even knowing whether they were doing well or not, I felt that this kind of situation would probably become more common going forward. So I thought there would be a very real use case for this.

That issue ends up being the same even with wearables if you use Bluetooth. There’s no setup required at all, and as a wearable, the battery lasts a decent amount of time. Specifically, it needs to be charged once or twice a month, but I thought that was just barely within an acceptable range. That background is what led us to create this product, Weara Air.

Since the data is automatically uploaded to the cloud every 10 minutes, the person doing the monitoring can view that data on a smartphone. Even if you’re in Tokyo, for example, your parent’s data from Nakashibetsu in Hokkaido is uploaded through the cloud, so you can check it from Tokyo anytime.

Even if you’re not nearby, you can constantly monitor someone in that way. Naturally, we weren’t just thinking about letting people see their current sleep status, but also about providing a service that would show trends—what the details mean and what should be done.

From our perspective, rather than running that service ourselves, we’re thinking of making proposals to companies that we think should launch that kind of service.

For example, even if you call it “monitoring,” simply watching over someone by itself actually doesn’t mean very much. It’s not meaningless, but it only achieves half the purpose. After monitoring them, if something happens, someone has to go there, right?

That “going there” part is something a company like ours could never do, so the biggest sales target I had in mind was the post office.

The post office, after all, has an obligation to deliver mail to every corner of the country. As part of a national service, even though it has been privatized. Basically, they can access anyone. And their work is decreasing now because there are fewer items to deliver.

But basically, the post office is maintained by law, right? By using that, there are people who can access homes all across the country through that infrastructure. They also have a certain understanding of local people, including information like who lives where.

The post office provides this Weara to homes as a monitoring service. Then no setup is needed, and the data automatically goes up to the cloud. If something abnormal happens, a notification goes to the local post office, and a staff member there goes to check on the person. If that kind of system can be created, then children or family members living in the city who can’t live together with them can first check the data to see how they’re doing, and if something happens, a post office employee can go and check on them.

If that becomes possible, the post office can monetize it, and it gives meaning to having post offices all across the country.

So, the post office. And then carriers as well. NTT, for example.

NTT Mobile is of course one option, and also NTT as a telephone company.

Because NTT has an obligation to connect a phone line if someone asks for one.

Landlines may be gradually decreasing, but if you ask whether they can respond anywhere in the country, they can. They have all kinds of branch offices. For example, if someone wants an internet line installed, there are companies that do that too.

Places like that, and also companies such as Yamato Unyu and Sagawa Kyubin. After all, companies that reach the whole country, whether in rural areas or deep in the mountains, are already going there to deliver packages. So if we partnered with those kinds of companies, when something happened, they could respond by saying, “We’ll go check on so-and-so over there.”

If that happens, it can become a fairly large service. There is definitely a need, but the reason it couldn’t be realized until now is probably, as I said earlier, that Bluetooth, device charging, and the need for a smartphone made it difficult to turn into a service. That’s why I thought it would be good if we could develop Weara in that kind of form.

With the original Weara, we talked about things like how it matched brainwave measurements during sleep, and how it matched an actigraph by over 95%, but that level of accuracy is…

Exactly. I may have mentioned this when talking about failures, but it was something like saying 95%, when it was actually 93%. Well, even 93% is an extremely high match rate, and other wearables are actually much lower. So the accuracy is high. But in settings like academic research, it can’t be used as a substitute for an actigraph. So, I don’t know if “lowering the level” is the right way to put it, but that’s what it comes down to.

Exactly. Since the purpose is different, there’s also the idea that we don’t need to demand that level of accuracy too much. Weara ultimately didn’t go well, but with Air, we were thinking of shifting to BtoB—well, ultimately BtoBtoC—and seeing if we could take it in that direction.

Also, in terms of BtoB, we hadn’t announced this, but the inquiries we often received after people saw Weara were from what you might call the transportation sector.

For taxi and truck drivers, if their health isn’t managed properly, it has a major impact on safety. I think it’s the same for pilots too, but what matters is not so much the time they spend driving or riding, but rather what they’re doing during the time when they’re not driving.

For example, when they come to work, you don’t yet know whether they’ll get sleepy later that day, right?

But whether they’ll get sleepy later can actually be predicted quite well based on what they were doing before that. It’s research into making those kinds of predictions, and whether sleepiness can be detected from vital data. In the end, there are the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves, and when the parasympathetic side becomes dominant, people get sleepy.

Well, it’s basically that you enter that kind of state when you relax. If we collect that kind of data, we might be able to tell when sleepiness starts to appear while someone is driving. So we spoke with several major companies that make drive recorders and asked, “Would you like to build this together?”

In the end, what was important then too was that if it can’t be used without a smartphone, it’s difficult for companies to introduce it.

Exactly. Uploading to the cloud through a smartphone might be possible automatically if the app is running the whole time, but realistically, you can’t keep it running forever. But with this Weara Air, it can automatically upload once every 10 minutes.

Through the cloud, for example, Seino Unyu could see the status of all its drivers, and they would be able to properly confirm, with evidence and a database rather than self-reports, how much each driver slept the day before.

No, that would only be for the first day or two.

Once it becomes every day, not at all. Humans can sleep even in a deafeningly loud music practice studio, even while the drummer is playing.

Humans have an incredibly high ability to adapt, so even if they feel that way for the first day or two, once they wear it every day, they eventually forget about it.

Thinking about it that way, I think transportation-related fields could also be a pretty big business opportunity. Our original target was monitoring and caregiving, but we also received inquiries from transportation companies, especially railway companies, and we talked about that. We have announced the Bluetooth Weara here, but when we received those inquiries, we said, “Actually, we have a plan like this.”

From my perspective, when we talked about it, more than 90% of the reactions were like, “That’s incredibly good.”

That’s right.

In the transportation industry, there really aren’t any devices that can properly measure whether someone is getting inexpensive, high-quality sleep. There are plenty of things that can measure it roughly, though. Also, this isn’t a smartwatch, right? It has no screen, and you basically can’t operate it yourself. In that sense, that actually makes it more convenient for BtoB.

Features like on an Apple Watch, where “you can view images” or “listen to music,” are actually unnecessary. It’s better not to have any of that.

Exactly. Including all sorts of information, it’s better to have a device dedicated to health management.

Because of that, while the world was dominated by Apple Watch-like smartwatches that prioritized functions like “you can do this and that,” our direction was to eliminate all of those functions and instead improve battery life and make it fashionable.

And if I may add one more thing, it can also be used to prevent heatstroke among workers.

Even without connecting it to a smartphone, the data is uploaded to the cloud, so you really just have to hand it to them. As long as they wear it.

However, defining what state counts as heatstroke, and what vital signs would indicate heatstroke, is quite difficult. We had several discussions, including commissioned development where we would receive development fees to build it, and we also spoke with pharmaceutical companies in various ways.

Pharmaceutical companies are interesting too. Doctors prescribe medicine, but the pharmaceutical company doesn’t know whether the patient took that company’s medicine and got better.

Of course they conduct experiments, but they don’t know what actually happens once it goes out into the real world.

So the use cases are limited, but in the form of something like an additional study, they want to see how things change between people who actually take the medicine and people who stop taking it. What the pharmaceutical company said was, “The best outcome is for someone to take the medicine and recover. It’s not good if they don’t recover, stop taking it, then after a while develop symptoms again and take the medicine again.”

How can they measure the person’s health condition afterward? To do that, they said, “A smartwatch linked to a smartphone that allows people to do other things would be a problem.”

Yes. Originally, we narrowed down the functions and didn’t add a screen because we were considering fashion and battery life, but as a result, it developed into various use cases. And when we talked about the AIR, the reaction was, “This is absolutely perfect. This is exactly what we wanted.”

But in the end, this product also never reached completion. To connect it to a mobile network and make it work properly required extremely detailed design, even though we truly thought we could create it as a “dream device.”

Ah, yes, that’s true.

Basically, making something small is a disadvantage in terms of design, including antenna design. So we really did all kinds of design work, andSORACOMWe also had a company called SORACOM make various accommodations for us. They taught us how to handle data communication, and after doing all sorts of things, in the end the Chinese company couldn’t do it.

With this AIR, partly because of the failure of the original Weara, we were of course proceeding under the idea that we couldn’t release it to the public until it was complete. However, it was still a product with hurdles that were too high for the Chinese development company we were working with.

We spent time on it and changed development companies, but in the end, we couldn’t complete it. So we had a withdrawal criterion, so to speak. It was me and about two other people in the company moving it forward. We also had someone in charge in China, but it was a very small team.

That said, we couldn’t keep allocating resources to something we couldn’t sell, so we decided, “If we haven’t achieved this by a certain point, we’ll stop.” And as a result, we couldn’t get it made in China by that deadline.

So even internally, I said, “Since we couldn’t achieve these things by the scheduled deadline, we’re ending this project,” and as a result, we ended it.

In terms of the level of failure, it’s different from announcing something and then being unable to release it, so it was only an internal matter. But personally, I still think that if we had been able to make what I envisioned, it would have sold normally.

Right? (laughs) There may have been, but after all, it was something we said at the time of the announcement.

Yeah. If someone other than me made it, there might have been a possibility.

In the end, because I had studied sleep deeply myself, there was accuracy in the idea of “this is what I want,” as well as numerical evidence. That was what set it apart from the many wearables that exist in China.

So I do think there is potential. Even if it differed by another 3% or so.

Yeah. But in this case, both the failed first-generation model and this AIR ultimately generated not a single yen in sales, so all the money invested was lost. That said, it was a story on a scale of just under 100 million yen, so maybe the investment scale was too small.

Yes. Trying to create a wearable unlike anything before with 100 million yen was probably too much penny-pinching, or simply far too little. In the end, saying “low quality” might be misleading, but it meant we had to rely on a small-scale development company.

It’s hypothetical, but maybe ten times as much. Around 1 billion yen. From the perspective of people who raise funds for startups, the mindset becomes, “It’s okay to be in the red,” right?

But I was proceeding with this on the premise that, as a company, we absolutely would not run a deficit, so the investment was nowhere near enough.

As a final behind-the-scenes story, or rather, I think the NDA has already expired, so I’ll say this: within the Sony group companies, there are development companies and manufacturing companies.

Sony used to do wearables, though they don’t now. At one point, Sony decided, “Just because you’re a group company, you can’t just take on Sony products as contract work; you need to earn money yourselves.” I forget the company name, but there was a Sony company that made those kinds of wearables, and we brought the Weara AIR proposal to them as a project to make an external product on contract as their first model.

We were connected through a certain contact and got an estimate. But as expected, while we were trying to do it for tens of millions of yen, Sony’s estimate was just under 200 million yen. Even the simplest version came out to that kind of amount.

At that point, it was impossible for us. That was just for the first stage of making it, and at an R&D level. In other words, they wouldn’t guarantee all performance.

Exactly. And that was the price. But if Sony were to make this, they could easily spend 100 or 200 million yen, right?

They run a mobile phone business worth hundreds of billions of yen. If we had been able to decide, “Two hundred million yen? Then let’s just try making it once,” we might have avoided problems like cutting costs in software development, relying on offshore development in India or Vietnam, and having that backfire, resulting in something completely different from what we intended or almost no development progress.

I do think that if we had properly invested hundreds of millions of yen into development, the outcome might have been different. And so, this truly was the ill-fated Weara AIR. This was a story revealed to the public for the first time here.

In the end, I think the major reason for the failure was insufficient investment. Since it wasn’t our main business, perhaps we didn’t put enough effort into it.

If we had decided that this was what we were going to live on, we might have felt a little more strongly that we should invest in it and really build it properly. But we already had our main business, and with an eye toward the future, we thought we would also take on something like this as a new business.

We did have the desire to create something that could become a main pillar, not just smartphone accessories, but maybe it ended up being half-hearted.

So, we’ve talked about the phantom product, Weara AIR, including how it ended in failure. Even now, I think it could be something interesting if someone were to make it a reality.

So, with that, we’ve been continuing our talks about Weara and the “real” brand story series for quite some time, but we’ll bring the stories about the brands mainly handled by Trinity to a close here for now. Starting next week, we’d like to talk about a different theme.

Please listen again next week. Thank you very much.

“Real Management | The Successes and Failures of Corporate Management, Told Candidly by a CEO Without a Script”

We’ve posted a link to this program’s website in the description. We’d be happy to receive your thoughts, messages, and requests from there.

Your hosts have been Hossy, also known as Hoshikawa Tetsushi, and

See you next week, and we hope you’ll tune in again.