Sometimes deaths are sudden, but most company deaths are the opposite, with Jawbone’s protracted terminus taking upward of a year. The company was an early pioneer in the consumer-wearables market and had raised close to a billion dollars in investment, but that wasn’t enough to save it. Its end doesn’t just mean the demise for one company, but signals the end of the great generation of wearables.

A report by The Information claims the company has begun the process of liquidating itself, at least in part. It’s also believed that co-founder and CEO Hosain Rahman is launching a new company — Jawbone Health Hub — to continue part of his mission. Health Hub will apparently produce health-related wearable hardware and software, as well as service the existing Jawbone devices in the wild.

Whatever form the remains of Jawbone take, the company will never again scale the heights it once did. The wearables market, and the world, has moved on to the point where new entrants have a nigh-impossible journey to success. A variety of factors killed Jawbone the first time out, but there’s no indication that Rahman knows how to get past those obstacles.

One lesson that many startups learn the hard way is that developing consumer hardware is far harder than it may seem. Even Jawbone, which had experience building Bluetooth audio gear, couldn’t easily apply its knowledge to wearable technology. In 2011, the Jawbone Up promised the world a stylish fitness tracker that made the Nike+ Fuelband and Fitbit’s belt-worn pedometers look outdated by comparison.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.engadget.com