Hush, a San Diego startup that has developed “smart earbuds” to minimize the distractions of a noisy world, is beginning a crowdfunding campaign today that would enable the year-old company to produce as many as 10,000 units by spring.
Founded by three UC San Diego engineering students (all named Daniel), Hush has set a goal of raising at least $100,000 on Kickstarter to produce wireless, noise-masking earplugs with a Bluetooth link that enables a user to connect with a smartphone.
By downloading the Hush mobile app, users can set their notifications to allow important phone calls, calendar alerts, and wakeup alarms to go through—without disturbing sleeping partners. The app also enables users to fall asleep to the sound of ocean waves, rainfall, and other types of white noise, and a Hush tracker enables users to find missing earplugs.
Each pair of Hush earplugs also comes with a charging dock that doubles as a travel case.
CEO Daniel “Ewok” Lee says Hush created the Kickstarter campaign after raising $150,000 from angel investors over the past two months in the culmination of what might be described as a seed-stage “pitchfest” strategy for the hardware startup.
Lee says the idea for Hush came out of a senior-level undergraduate class for entrepreneurial-minded engineers. Loud neighbors and roommates kept him awake at night. Conventional earplugs worked OK, but then he started worrying that he wouldn’t be able to hear his wakeup alarm, and would be late for work. The result was an earplug that would block out the world, yet allow users to
