Strategy in TECH...
Stephen DeFuria, a top specialty audio industry sales executive uniquely conversant in both high-end AND more mainstream audio, died early Sunday morning after a long battle with cancer. DeFuria was 61-years old and passed away at home with his family at his side.
My assistant spotted it immediately. “There’s a strange letter in today’s mail,” she said with a slight hesitation in her voice one day last week as she handed me a small stack of mail that she had just picked up from our company post office box. That hesitation in her voice wasn’t so much concern as it was uncertainty as to whether she should bother to bring it to my attention. After all, it could simply be just another example of cleverly disguised junk mail.
Just one month after Delaware District Court judge Richard G. Andrews ruled against D&M Holdings’ attempt to have four key Sonos patents invalidated, we learn that Sonos was successful in winning a dismissal of three of D&M Holdings’ counterclaims of patent infringement against them. However, four additional counterclaims filed by D&M survived the challenge and the counter-lawsuit will continue.
In an amazingly swift, one-year shift in consumer preferences, a new survey says that most consumers would rather watch TV programming on a computer than on a TV. Just one year ago, the same survey produced the exact opposite result. Although the number of consumers watching TV content on computers has been increasing over the years, this is the first time that computers were picked by a substantial majority.
You know things aren’t going well when divisions of your own company want to break the chains of their association with you. That is essentially what happened when Toshiba Machine “bought” its independence by buying out the shares of its stock held by parent company Toshiba Corp.
New research results released this week on the smart home market were wildly bullish on the recent impressive growth of the segment, as well as the continuing prospects for growth in the future. The survey, sponsored by PlumChoice, Inc (a technical services provider for IoT and cloud brands) and the Z-Wave Alliance (a consortium of companies promoting Z-Wave wireless technologies), offers a deeper view of the market’s momentum with some surprisingly positive results.
A lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court in Northern Illinois against Bose Corp. alleging that the popular brand is spying on consumers, collecting personal usage data, and selling or otherwise using this data for profit. All of this, the suit claims, is done in violation of various Federal and State privacy laws and with no warning or notification to the consumer.
James Loudspeaker announced today that it has appointed Pulse Cinemas as its distributor for both the U.K. and Ireland. A custom installation and home cinema specialist, Pulse’s team of twelve professionals spread out to service the region’s A/V dealers and custom integrators.
THX announced this week that it has joined the Streaming Video Alliance, an organzation that addresses ongoing video streaming issues through the development of best practices. THX says it is “uniquely qualified to make significant contributions to the Alliance.”
Toshiba, once the embodiement of Japanese industrial might offering everything from rice cookers to nuclear reactors, has released financial results for the first three quarters of the current fiscal year and it’s not good. For the first time in the over-century old company’s history, the results announcement warned of doubts about the company’s ability to continue as a “going concern.” And that wasn’t the only bad news included in the report.
