David Hyman is an American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of , 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.
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, Gizmodo, and Endgadget.
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 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.
Beats Music
In 2012, Hyman was CEO of Beats Music, the music subscription service created as an offshoot to Beats By Dre. Beats Music was subsequently sold to Apple along with Beats By Dre for $3 billion.
MOG
In 2005 Hyman founded MOG in Berkeley, California. As founder and CEO of the award-winning music subscription service, Hyman developed what has been described as one of the world's best music listening services. MOG provided consumers with over 19 million songs for a flat rate of $10/month with an easy, intuitive interface and the highest quality audio. Hyman also was responsible for creating the MOG Music Network, noted at the time as the largest music-centric advertising network, with over 1500 music publishers represented across 70 million unique visitors a month. While at MOG, Hyman worked with hundreds of publishers and labels to negotiate deals that would end up providing music catalogs that contained 19 million songs across every major label and hundreds of independent labels. Hyman also closed deals with large distribution partners across Carriers, ISPs, CE manufacturers, and Auto, including Verizon, AT&T, Telstra, Ford, BMW, Samsung, LG and many others. MOG was consistently voted "Best Music Service" by countless review publications.
Gracenote
In 2000 Hyman created Gracenote and was its original President and CEO. There, he took fledgling compact disc identification technology 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 for $260 million in 2008.
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 Interactive as the Senior Vice President of Marketing, where he oversaw all marketing functions for MTV.com, VH1.com, Nickelodeon.com, and Sonicnet.
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.
Personal
Hyman holds three patents: one in automatic meta-data sharing of existing media through social networking, another in automatic meta-data sharing of existing media, and a third in multiple-step identification of recordings. He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as SXSW, CES and Midem. In 2008, he founded Musica Tecnomica, a regular gathering of music-focused innovators in San Francisco.
