On Oct. 11, 2011, as tributes to Steve Jobs continued to pour in across the world, one man took out a $16,000 full-page newspaper ad in Singapore to pay his respects to the Apple Inc. co-founder who had passed away. It said:
“Thank you for the great lessons. Thank you for the great products. Thank you for bringing a bit of us to the whole world.’’
It was signed: “Sim Wong Hoo, Chairman & CEO, Creative Technology Ltd.’’
It was intriguing to many who picked up the paper that morning. Sim had been a household name in Singapore for his Sound Blaster cards that brought audio to more than 400 million personal computers. He had also gone to war with Jobs over their portable music players. As hostility escalated in 2006, he sued Apple for patent infringements over the iPod. Negotiations with Jobs were tense, Sim recalls, and his American adversary did most of the talking. In the end, Sim walked away with a $100 million settlement. “Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent,’’ Jobs said in a statement at the time.
Since then, the fortunes of the two companies have diverged dramatically. As the iPod became part of a remarkable business turnaround, it killed Sim’s MP3 player, which was created in 1999, two years before Apple’s device. It also marked the beginning of Creative’s downfall. Shares traded on the Singapore exchange fell from a record of S$64 ($47) in March 2000 to hover around S$1 in 2017. The company voluntarily delisted its shares from the Nasdaq stock exchange in 2007.
Game Changer?
Now, after many years and more than $100 million of investment, Sim is finally back -- with a new piece of audio technology called the Super X-Fi that he thinks will be a game changer.
The technology, which is available in headphones or as a headphone amplifier, makes sound appear like it’s coming from multiple speakers placed at a distance around the listener, rather than from the headphone itself. Creative calls it “holographic audio.”
Users take a picture of their face and ear shape on the Super X-Fi app to create a tailored listening experience. Creative researched how thousands of different people perceived sound -- by, among other things, putting microphones in the subjects’ ears in a studio -- and fed the results into an artificial intelligence engine that then predicts how others will hear sounds.
Creative’s SXFI AMP headphone amplifier is sold at $150 and the SXFI AIR Bluetooth headphones retail at $160.
“I have never been so excited in my life,’’ Sim, now 63, said in an interview. “I’m literally breathless, evangelizing what we have.’’