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 December 2018. Hyman is also the former CEO of Beats Music, MOG, Gracenote and Blin.gy.

Early life and background

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 holds a bachelor's degree in Economics.

Career

Wired Magazine / Hotwired

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 constructs 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.

Sonicnet

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 MTV (Originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable channel that launched on August 1, 1981. Based in New York City, it serves as the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group, part of Paramount Media Networks, a di ...

Interactive as the Senior Vice President of Marketing, where he oversaw all marketing functions for MTV.com, VH1.com, Nickelodeon.com, and Sonicnet. A little known fact is that Hyman was the voice-over announcer on the only television ads done in MTVi's and Sonicnet's history.

Gracenote

In 2000 Hyman created Gracenote and was its original President and CEO. There, he took fledgling compact disc identification technology ( CDDB) and turned it into the world's largest music identification and music management company. 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 , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

for $260 million in 2008.

MOG

In 2005 Hyman founded MOG in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and E ...

Beats Music

In 2012, Hyman was CEO of Beats Music, the music subscription service created as an offshoot to

Beats By Dre Beats Electronics LLC (also known as Beats by Dr. Dre, or simply Beats by Dre) is an American consumer audio products manufacturer headquartered in Culver City, California. The company was founded by music producer Dr. Dre and record company exe ...

. Beats Music was subsequently sold to

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...

along with Beats By Dre for $3 billion.

Blin.gy

In 2016 Hyman developed Blin.gy, the first augmented-reality mobile application enabling video segmentation, allowing anyone to superimpose their own 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. Blin.gy closed its operations in September 2017. Hyman wrote a eulogy to the company.

Unagi Scooters

In November 2018, Hyman launched Unagi Scooters on Kickstarter, generating $240,000 in revenue. Unagi has been praised as the leading portable electric scooter by numerous publications including ''

The Verge ''The Verge'' is an American technology news website operated by Vox Media, publishing news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, consumer electronics news, and podcasts. The website launched on November 1, 2011, and uses Vox Media ...

'', ''

Gizmodo ''Gizmodo'' ( ) is a design, technology, science and science fiction website. It was originally launched as part of the Gawker Media network run by Nick Denton, and runs on the Kinja platform. ''Gizmodo'' also includes the subsite '' io9'', ...

'', and ''Endgadget''.

Personal

Hyman holds three patents: one in automatic meta-data sharing of existing media through social networking (US 7685132 B2), another in automatic meta-data sharing of existing media (US 7979442 B2), and a third in multiple-step identification of recordings (US 8468357 B2). He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as

SXSW South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, ...

, CES and Midem. In 2008, he founded Musica Tecnomica, a regular gathering of music-focused innovators in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

External links

*Gracenote
MogChosen

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hyman, David 1967 births Living people American businesspeople People from Suffolk County, New York University of Vermont alumni