Strategy in TECH...
Association Breaks Ground on $14 Million HQ BuildingCEDIA announced today it has broken ground on its previously revealed new $13.7 million headquarters building being built in Fishers, Indiana. The project is expected to take about a year to complete, with the organization taking residence in November 2018.
Consumer’s Front Door an Impenetrable Barrier to Online Delivery PeopleGifted visionaries like Jeff Bezos can image amazing products and convenient services. For example, like designing the world’s easiest online shopping site…and, dreaming of having consumers purchase goods online to be delivered IN their home. Today, in 37 cities across the United States, Amazon is launching its new delivery service where deliveries are placed past your temporarily unlocked front door and placed into your home…thanks to a special $250 door lock and cloud camera packaged solution that can be temporarily opened for the delivery person, called Amazon Key.
CEDIA has wrapped up the election process for three open board seats that we first told you about here in a post from September. There were a total of seven candidates vying for three open slots. The election is over and ladies and gentlemen we have a winner, er, three winners.
As we perused the newswire services Monday, one release, from a New Jersey criminal defense law firm, caught our eye. Titled, “Are Your Smart Devices Betraying You?” the release was written more like a poison warning label than a news release. Your smart device, Westfield, NJ-based Stahl Criminal Defense Lawyers said, are “always on and potentially recording or transmitting.”
It was just months ago in February, when we learned the improbable news that Control4 Corp. had acquired Triad Speakers, Inc. The news both surprised and confused us, as it did not seem to be an obvious acquisition choice for one of the industry’s leading control and smart home solutions companies. Analog speakers? Who would want to get into that business??
But Control4 jumped in with both feet, rolling out new Triad models at CEDIA, and now post-CEDIA.
Recent developments have thrust Gibson Brands back into the spotlight once again – a spot that CEO Henry Juszkiewicz doesn’t particularly enjoy, unless he’s there on his own terms. But this time, two tidbits of news have conspired to bring Gibson, and their financial challenges to the fore. And as we try to digest all of this, it’s clear that Gibson is continuing to show signs of strain due to sluggish results from its aggressive diversification into consumer electronics jeopardizing its ability to deal with looming huge debt payments on the loans used to acquire CE brands.
Emotiva Audio Corp. announced today two new amplifiers that they call “variations on its configurable XPA Gen 3 modular amplifier.” The XPA-9 and XPA-11 Gen 3, one a 9-channel amplifier and the other a 11-channel amplifier, both employ the advanced performance of their X series electronics and are said to be perfect for advanced surround technologies, such as Dolby Atmos home theaters.
September housing starts, the government’s measure of new residential construction activity, showed an overall decline to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,127,000 units. This rate is down 4.7% from the revised August rate of 1,183,000 units. This is the third monthly decline in a row indicating a softening in the construction of new homes – and the lowest level of construction since September 2016.
Korean media is reporting that a nasty fight has erupted in South Korea, where Samsung has uploaded a video that compares its QLED screen versus an LG OLED screen. The slickly produced comparison video allegedly shows “image retention” (commonly called burn-in over here) on the OLED screen after gamers play on both screens for twelve hours straight. LG, understandably, cries foul…
New research conducted by NPR and Edison Research has revealed what is likely the key motivation for Amazon and Google to aggressively attack the mass market by offering attractive smart speaker products at ever-decreasing prices – they are a Trojan horse. The data also shows the remarkably rapid adoption of the technology in just a couple of short years.
