Strategy in TECH...
Cool Things I Saw at CEDIA Expo 2018San Diego, we hardly knew ye’! CEDIA Expo 2018 wrapped up this past Saturday and after three days of running between meetings and walking the show floor, I emerge relatively unscathed. The bottom line – this first Emerald Exposition-produced show was a bit of a mixed bag with some positive elements and some dropped balls. But overall, most came away satisfied that it was a good show.
As usual, our first official CEDIA Expo press conference was Origin Acoustics. And as usual, Origin begins the show by putting on the Dave Donald show. Donald, who is Origin’s “Worldwide Ambassador,” is a showman at heart with a dynamic speaking style and sprinkles of exciting hyperbole. I have to say, while Donald seemed slightly lower key that at past shows, you certainly won’t drift off to sleep when he’s verbally throwing new models at you.
Welcome to San Diego for the first for-profit CEDIA Expo, the first Expo to take place under the full control of professional show producer Emerald Expositions. It is also the last CEDIA to be held in San Diego, at least for the forseeable future. Next Year, the show moves back to Denver, one of the locations that is considered most popular with CEDIA members.
Sonos announced a new product today called Amp. Amp is essentially everything Sonos offers for wireless powered speakers…for a normal wired passive speaker system. This opens the door to allow the integration of a wide range of third-party speakers into the Sonos ecosphere. But Sonos views Amp as much more than that – as the heart and start of integrating Sonos into a sophisticated smart home installation.
Are you ready for this? LG shows the “world’s first” 8K OLED TV at the IFA 2018 show taking place in Berlin right now. Noting that their are a leader in advance TV technologies with OLED, LG pushes the technological envelope again with 88-inch 8K OLED TV being shown to consumers for the very first time.
Five Steps to Take Now to Protect Your BusinessOccasionally, I’ll chat with an integrator or other industry colleague about that ugly shared nightmare experience, otherwise known as the recession of 2007-2009. This recession, unlike others in the past, zeroed in like a torpedo on the residential construction market and dramatically reshaped the custom integration industry. For those of you joining the industry since that time, you dodged the bullet…but you also missed the lessons that survivors were forced to learn in order to keep afloat.
Monoprice, the company most successful at pursuing a low-price, cut-rate strategy in regards to cables, adapters, and accessories, and the bane of many upscale cable companies in the consumer electronics space, has continued to grow and expand, now adding housewares and home goods to their growing assortment.
A new report by The Information has roiled Amazon, punching a hole in the concept that users of their Alexa-powered smart speaker devices will use them to buy billions of dollars of goods through voice ordering. According to sources from inside Amazon, the company is disappointed that only about 2% of users of their devices use them for voice-enabled shopping – a result that throws shade at the company and industry analysts who predicted a tsunami of voice-powered purchases. The company’s spokesperson disputes the report.
In June, after significant outreach by many Strata-gee readers, we posted our take on the Monster Products, Inc. (Monster) S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in which Monster sought to launch its own Monster Money cryptocurrency in a major shift in the company’s direction. This SEC filing by Monster was at the end of May, and our story [see: Is Monster Money a Massive Mistake?] was posted June 13th.
We have just discovered that days after our story appeared, Monster received an SEC staff letter dated June 15th titled “SERIOUS DEFICIENCIES.” But that’s not all we discovered…
Control4 Corp. announced today that it has appointed Charlie Kindel, an ex-Amazon executive in charge of their Alexa project, to fulfill the role of Control4 Senior Vice President of Products & Services. Kindel is replacing Eric Anderson, who announced his retirement recently after holding the same role since 2012.
[Read more…] about Control4 Announces Appointment of Charlie Kindel, ex-Amazon
