By Eli Sinaiko
It is difficult to stop oneself from losing productivity to daydreams about owning these headphones. Fortunately, thanks to an incredibly successful crowd-funding campaign which has raised over half a million dollars, you can either secure your own pair of OwnPhones by contributing to the Kickstarter initiative or hope that they eventually will be sold online or in stores. Itamer Jobani, founder of OwnPhones and an avid jogger, came up with the idea in response to his earbuds constantly falling out while he exercised.
A tailored fit to the unique infrastructure of a buyer’s ear is the main draw of OwnPhones. However, a few minutes spent browsing the Kickstarter page reveals that customized snugness is just the tip of the OwnPhone iceberg. The wireless headphones are equipped with cutting-edge wearable technology, including Bluetooth 4.0, noise cancellation, programmable wireless notifications from social media, customizable aesthetics designed by the buyer, and a bevy of other features that make Beats by Dre look like a pair of airline headphones. 
OwnPhones are but one example of how it is becoming increasingly easy for entrepreneurs, inventors, and ordinary people to give form to their ideas and to solve common problems. As advances in computer technology, nanotechnology, 3-D printing and a variety of other fields diffuse to hardware from software, that hardware can be scaled smaller and smaller.
OwnPhones represent an ingenious piece of hardware that leverages the diminishing size of processor and acoustic technology and advances in 3-D printing to create wearable tech or ‘wearables.’ Wearable tech is a largely untapped industry, which is just becoming viable for entrepreneurs who lack the massive financial resources of established companies.
Take the Sweat GUTR sweatband for instance: while technically less advanced than OwnPhones, the Sweat GUTR is similar to the headphones of the future because it both addresses a common problem (sweat getting in your eyes while exercising) and it is wearable. The main lesson to take away from the emergence of wearable technology like OwnPhones and SweatGUTR is this: because the costs of designing and producing hardware and technology in general drop, that technology will become ever more integrated into everyday life. Expect to see many more wearables in the future, coming very soon!
