Strategy in TECH...
SnapAV announced Wednesday that it has acquired Autonomic, a leading music server solutions provider. This is SnapAV’s latest in a string of acquisitions, as the company continues to seek solutions that will fulfill the needs of their extensive national network of custom integrators.
One of the keynote presentations at CEDIA 2016, was from Amazon – the monster online retailer. Amazon executive Charlie Kindel introduced the custom integration attendees to the Amazon Echo, Tap, and Dot…essentially Internet appliances that all feature their Alexa voice control technology. Then, late in the presentation, Kindel announced the company has developed a way for Alexa to interface with home systems – and even forged integration partnerships with Lutron, Crestron, Control4 and others.
Sony told the Nikkei this week that – to paraphrase – after years of painful dieting, the company has reached its fighting weight and is ready to go to battle to grow its sales worldwide. The company has spent the last few years spinning off divisions, cutting back on employment levels, and reducing overhead – all for the express purpose of improving profits. That goal achieved, the company will now focus on sales.
Just a couple of weeks after we reported on GoPro’s recall of thousands of defective Karma drones and other business problems, now comes word that the company is in the process of cutting more than 200 jobs, or about 15% of its total workforce, amid a sales decline. The company has also decided to shut down its Entertainment division and rededicate itself to its core wearable camera business.
Ann Arbor, MI-based Leon Speakers, known for their high-end A/V solutions that juxtapose the drama of art with the pinnacle of sound, announced this week that they have launched a line of wood trim encasements that bring the warmth of richly detailed woodgrain to the normal gray and black boxes of popular SONOS brand speakers. Known as Tonecase Hardwood Cabinets, Leon manages to bring a new form of richness to SONOS- a visual one.
Two stories out of Japan caught our attention and, to our thinking, combine to show that Japan’s tech industry is still not yet out of the woods. The first story, by the Japan Times, says that troubled Toshiba’s half-year fiscal results show that their profits have now tripled. The second story, also from the Japan Times, announced that Japan Display will be laying off thousands of employees – almost a third of their workforce.
Looking like a giant modern sculpture of industrial art made out of marine-grade, black powder-coated aluminum, we first told you about James Loudspeaker’s Modular Indoor/Outdoor Theater back in August when the company previewed it to a small group of journalists there for a factory tour. Designed to be a freestanding, all-inclusive, high-performance outdoor theater, the MIOT was a brute, conceptually, visually, and sonically. Now the company is officially launching the product to the custom integration channel.
Startup software provider TRXio announced this week that it has joined Home Technology Specialists of America (HTSA) and fully participated in the organization’s Fall Conference last month in Chicago. The move is seen as another step on the road to greater awareness and acceptance of the company’s prime offering – inventory tracking software.
GoPro Inc., the individual sport camera maker who has recently diversified into the drone category, has lately seen their fortunes rise and fall…but mostly fall in the wake of their announcement that it would recall about 2,500 of their recently launched Karma drone. The news sent their stock price into a steep dive of more than 4% of its value.
In news coming out of Asia, multiple Chinese panel makers are planning to build large production factories making OLED panels – mostly for the smartphone market. Motivated in part, by Apple’s commitment to the technology, companies like BOE Technologies – China’s largest panel manufacturer – has announced plans to launch an OLED factory capable of producing 10 million smartphone panels per month.
