The Engadget Interview: Paul Griffin, CEO/founder of Griffin Technology
How long ago did you found your company? We started 13 years ago.
What products did you start out focusing on?
We started off making video adapters and later on started making serial adapters. We've been focused since the early days on making connectivity products, and later on we began making stand-alone products or peripherals that didn't rely on just a single product but on things like a USB bus.
Where are your headquarters? How many employees?
We're in Nashville, Tenn., and we have 60 to 70 employees now. About half our employees are in R&D, including me. I don't even get involved in sales or marketing distribution areas.
Whenever I think of Griffin I think of an entire buffet of products. But do you have one main product line?
There are several products I really love that we did for the iPod. We did the iTrip and the iTalk and the SmartDeck, and we have a couple of new variations that are really interesting. These are all products that in one way or another were fairly novel and different ideas. Our hearts are really into it.
Let's run them down. Start with the iTrip. At the time it was rather clever. We used audio tones to send the signal to the
iTrip to tell it what station to broadcast
on. At this point it sounds somewhat clunky or dated, but I don't think anyone had done it up to that time. It made for
a really inexpensive and very small device with a ground-breaking LCD form factor.
What about iTalk?
In my opinion, it has stunning design, and it works so much better than any of the other products in the marketplace.
It's got automatic gain [volume] control and a small but not-so-bad speaker that allows you to hear the audio play back
that you've imported. It's just a great-looking device.
Haven't tried it so can't grill you on it. How about iFM.
That's a product everyone has always wanted
for the iPod: an FM receiver. We announced four years ago: We designed it, we built it, we built it, but I don't think
our thought process around it was very good. We built something almost as big as an iPod, and it was kind of crazy.
Rather than ship it and embarrass everybody, we canceled it.
A few years later we finally got around to doing it right, in my opinion. It's sleek and small and feels good in your
hand, and has a lot of functionality. It's not just an FM receiver but also a remote control and a voice recorder and
radio recorder. You can be listening to the radio, hear a song you like, and save it to your iPod, and play it back
later or listen to it on your computer.
Any word from the RIAA or music industry about that?
People have always been able to record music and radio since the days of cassette tape recorders. It's not a very
high-resolution recording, so I don't think anyone will have any problem with it. Recording from FM radio has generally
not been something the industry has cared about a lot.
It's not digital radio, then.
No.
Any products in the work for that?
It's too early.
How's the RadioShark doing?
The
RadioShark was one of those products we really
wanted to build for ourselves. I wanted it because I listen to talk radio — you come in during the middle of something
and you miss something you want to hear again. And so the product I wanted was to be able to hear something you just
missed, or to record the whole show and play it back on your iPod or your computer later on. That's what it does, and
we get a lot of consumers give us compliments on it.
How do they use it mostly?
For recording "Car Talk" on NPR and other shows. A little bit of time-shifting, people who missed something on the
radio and want to go back and hear it.
It's like TiVo for radio.
It's exactly like TiVo for radio, with the scheduled recording and with the time-shifting and replay.
Any plans to add new features and functionalities to it?
Tagging or naming some of the songs would be a feature we'll add at some point down the road. Always eager to hear
other suggestions from your readers as well.
We looked at building another cassette adapter and decided we didn't want to do that. So what we came up with was
the SmartDeck. It looks like an ordinary
cassette adapter that you'd plug your iPod or mp3 player into and play music in your car, but it goes a couple of steps
further. It lets you fast-forward and rewind your iPod from the cassette adapter. If you press fast-forward on the
SmartDeck, your iPod will skip to the next song. If you press rewind, it'll go to the previous song. If you press pause
or play, it'll do that. This allows the iPod to go to sleep and shut down when you shut your car engine, without you
having to think about turning anything off. It'll wake up the iPod when you start your car again.
It also has smart sound, an automatic gain control thing, which automatically adjusts the volume to the optimal level.
That's a feature I don't think you've seen anywhere in a peripheral for audio devices before.
How are people using the Griffin
AirClick?
Most people use the USB version with iTunes. With iTunes, it does volume up, volume down, next and previous track,
play and pause. We have another version of the
AirClick that works with iPods, and it's for
transport controls, the basic play, pause, fast-forward and volume up and down.
It's also a great tool for PowerPoint and Keynote presentations, and probably works better with that than anything
else. You don't have to aim it because it's RF, and the range is very good, and it's small enough to fit comfortably in
your hand.
About half your products revolve around the iPod universe now.
Yeah, we're spending about 40 percent of our R&D on iPod products. I think that's a short-term situation because
the iPod's very popular, and there's a big rush to get new products out. In the long run I'm sure we'll spend less on
that.
So you said in today's session that in the short term, no one is going to knock off the iPod, even if they do
knockoffs.
I think Apple has done too many things too well. I see products coming out with the same features as the iPod, with
maybe not as good software. That's not good enough, they have to do something groundbreaking and earth-shattering, and
I don't see that coming from anyone else right now. It's just not enough to knock them off.
Any new products coming out for the holidays?
We just got our iTrip 30-pin out. It's an FM transmitter for the iPod. It attaches to the bottom of the iPod because
both the new iPod models — the fifth generation and the iPod Nano both have the 30-pin connector now. So it works
really well and it's just out.
What's coming down the road for Griffin?
We've got a couple of new products that I'm really excited about for early 2006. The one we've shown publicly here is
the iTrip for Nano, which we thought was really clever. We're using the iPod screen to display information in a way it
really wasn't designed to do. It was designed to pop a logo up when you plug it into a dock. We're displaying station
information, and it makes for a much smaller, cleaner peripheral.
Due out by Christmas?
Maybe. It should be out sometime in December.
Is that it?
Yeah. Isn't it sexy? You can do really crazy stuff like Preferences, More Preferences, More Preferences, information
screen. Nobody has ever used an iPod screen this way. It bitmaps screens to the iPod through a serial connector from
the micro-controller. It's just crazy.
So you just place your Nano into this dock?
That's it! When you plug it in, it initially shows you what station you're on. We really had fun coming up with this.
The only way to do it was to use the iPod screen. You're not supposed to do this, since it was just to show logos, but
we figured out how to change it on the fly and made it work.
Apple won't mind?
We weren't stupid enough to ask beforehand. You can ask forgiveness, you just don't want to ask permission. They're
happy, they're gonna love it. If we had asked ahead of time, I'm sure they would have said no. But they've seen it and
said, Oh, that's so cool. If we'd asked if we could do it, though, I'm sure we would've gotten a different
answer.
J.D. Lasica's book about the digital media revolution is Darknet : Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation (Wiley & Sons).
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
az1324 @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
"Yeah. Isnt it sexy? You can do really crazy stuff like Preferences, More Preferences, More Preferences, information screen. Nobody has ever used an iPod screen this way. It bitmaps screens to the iPod through a serial connector from the micro-controller. Its just crazy."
Apparently, Mr. Griffin is not aware of the Dension Ice Link Plus, which has been doing the aformentioned for a while, plus allows the mcu firmware to be updated from the iPod.
Rus @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
Paul is a really great guy ... I have had the fortune of meeting him face to face.
Michael Wyszomierski @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
You should have grilled him on Griffin's vaporware. I preordered a SmartDeck in April, and just cancelled it at the beginning of this month when it still hadn't shipped.
narco @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
Great interview, and I love Griffin, but I am not very fond of their customer service. I went through two iTrips, and after I email them they respond with an email saying I have to call them at a long distance number back east somewhere. The problem is they have the same set hours as I work, so it has been a pain to get things replaced. When I finally did, there was a quick turnaround.
Other than that, they're a great company that makes excellent products.
Fishes,
narco.
slyecho @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
"It's crazy stuff we have coming, like the iBrain, where you get a surgical implant and you just plug in a cable to your left temple. No hassle with the iPod earbuds anymore. Plus now if you just can't get that song out of your head, turn up the volume and enjoy.
"And we hacked it so it would display Preferences, More Preferences, More Preferences, information screen ALL the time. Nobody has ever used your eyes like that before. We weren't sure it would be okay, but we asked some Apple guys and they loved it. I'm sure they wouldn't have allowed it if we'd asked them before we actually did it."
Craig @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
clearly, the question to ask would have been how griffin feels about the loss of the headphone remote connector. so many of their good products used it.
griffin now has to design and sell new products using the thirty pin connector. so i guess they like it. apple did them a favor.
still, i would have liked to hear griffin rip apple for such a stupid move. i hate the new 30 pin accessories.
John @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
Cool! Even before all the iPod accessories, Griffin Technology was making some awesome products.
Timothy Raine @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
I can echo the vaporware I ordered an iVault 5 months ago and still have not received it. I will NEVER buy anything from them ever again.
james v @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
a dock-port (30 pin) airclick with either a line-out jack or a pass-through dock port would be sweet
Richard @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
Got to put in a good word for Griffin's support - I bought an iTalk while on a business trip to the US and found that after a few days it got really unreliable - the iPod often wouldn't see it, or would drop out in the middle of recording. I emailed Griffin, who sent me out a replacement to the UK - didn't ask me to send in the duff one first or anything silly like that...
kelly @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
I don't know if JD is female or not, but I couldn't get past the "I'm staring at your chest" look on his face.
JD Lasica @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM
Nope, 100% male. I doubt Paul was staring at my chest ... :~)