Strategy in TECH...
MQA Limited has notified Companies House, the U.K. government agency that is roughly equivalent to our Securities and Exchange Commission, that it has changed its name. After nine years as MQA Limited, the company will now be known as Wave Realisations Limited.
After receiving an extension from the court giving them more time to respond, AVA, Inc. and Josh.ai, Inc. formally filed their responses to the Snap One, LLC lawsuit filed against them this past summer. With these filings, we have completed the end of the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a long dance marathon of patent and trade secret litigation.
RTI, a leading control and home automation manufacturer, announced on Thursday that it has expanded its sales team. The company announced the appointment of Brittany Delgado as regional sales manager.
Sonance surprised us at CEDIA Expo 2023 with the launch of an all-new Visual Experience line of architectural loudspeakers. Embodying several true innovations, and available in both Sonance and James versions, the Visual Experience line will supersede the highly successful and award-winning Visual Performance series – a series that was a best-seller for most Sonance integrators.
In new data released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, residential construction – otherwise known as housing starts – returned to growth again, after registering a concerning double-digit decline in August. However, most analysts believe housing will continue to be challenged by a combination of high prices and high interest rates combining to make housing unaffordable for most buyers.
On Monday, WiSA Technologies, a developer and licensor of spatial, wireless sound technology, publicly announced the pricing of a new $4.8 million public offering of Series B convertible redeemable preferred stock and warrants. Separately, and a little less publicly, the company also filed a Form 8K with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealing that it is “pursuing a potential strategic transaction.”
The result of both of these pieces of news is that the company’s stock value nosedived as investors turned thumbs down on this latest turn of events at the troubled organization.
In a shocking twist to a long-running patent battle, U.S. District Court Judge William H Alsup declared Sonos’ ‘966 and ‘885 patents at trial are unenforceable and invalid effectively countermanding a jury decision on behalf of Sonos and a royalty award of $32.5 million. Furthermore, the judge’s order suggests that Sonos abused the patent system by attempting to use it to “punish an innovator” and to “enrich a[n] [innovation] pretender.”
VOXX International Corporation (Voxx) (NASDAQ: VOXX), a manufacturer and distributor of a wide range of automotive and consumer electronics products, late on Tuesday released its second quarter of fiscal 2024 financial results for the period ending August 31, 2023. These results mostly echoed those of its first quarter and the company says it is still dealing with multiple negative macroeconomic factors such as a durable drop in consumer spending, inflated retail inventories, a UAW strike, and remaining supply chain challenges. However, the results in the second quarter were slightly more moderate than in the first quarter and there was a modest improvement on a sequential basis.
A new study recently released by TiVo Platform Technologies (TiVo) – a subsidiary of Xperi, Inc. – called Smart TVs Paving the Way quantifies a marked shift in trends in consumer consumption of streaming entertainment – as well as spending on streaming services. Top findings noted a decline in both the number of services to which consumers subscribe and the amount of money they spend monthly to obtain such services.
Yet, the same study showed an increase in consumers’ average daily consumption of streaming entertainment content.
Last week, Sonos quietly let the Securities and Exchange Commission know that Panos Panay resigned from the Sonos board of directors, effective September 27, 2023. They made no public announcement that I am aware of, even though this news could have a major impact on the company’s direction. Why? Simply because Panos Panay is one of the most respected technology product gurus in the industry – so much so that Sonos trumpeted his arrival loudly when they convinced him to join their board in 2020.
Separately, and within just days of the exit of Panay, the company announced three “new” (I’ll explain the quotes around the word new below) additions to its executive team, including a new, promoted from within, Chief Product Officer…
