Strategy in TECH...
HiFiMan, the specialty maker of high-end headphones and portable music players, announced this week the launch of a “premium” electrostatic headphone system that they call Shangri-La. Calling it a “cost-no-object experience,” the Shangri-La system is priced to sell for $50,000 at retail. The price of paradise appears to have risen lately.
Products designed to address the simple smart home market continue to be introduced at a dizzying pace – most of which will end up in the dust bin of not-so-useful, not-so-innovative app-controllable nonsense in the future. But every once in a while we stumble across items that catch our eye, and Twist is one of those.
What is Twist? If you can screw in a lightbulb, you can have a smarter home lighting and wireless audio solution.
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.
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.
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.
Leviton announced today that it has formed a strategic partnership with Samsung’s SmartThings division to offer a simple home automation starter package that will be made broadly available through distributors and the “professional dealer” market. Designed to be an affordable, whole-house, home automation solution – the package pairs products from SmartThings with Leviton Z-Wave enabled devices at discounted pricing.
GoldenEar Technology announced last week that it has earned a patent for its innovative dual-plane, inertially-balanced subwoofer technology used in its SuperSub™ line. The U.S. Patent Office awarded GoldenEar patent #9,462,39 on its technology, protecting the company from anyone copying their unique design.
At CEDIA 2016, Jetbuilt CEO Paul Dexter’s voice was holding out…but just barely. Between the loud environment and the constant talking, it’s amazing anyone can talk by the end of day 2. Yet when an intrepid journalist showed up to ask about his software, Dexter shifted into high gear and in only about ten minutes, we had a complete picture of what Jetbuilt is all about. And that’s when we realized the name, Jetbuilt, was not just a company name, but was also a description of the end product – a good looking, well designed, full project proposal – built insanely fast by a savvy software solution.
CEDIA 2016, like every trade show, for us is like trying to get a sip of water from a fire hose. There is just so much going on. And since all stories interest us – we have to go into a kind of marketing triage, quickly sorting those stories that we feel are the most compelling.
So, in this post, we want to share with you some of the more interesting things – and people – we saw and chatted with on the show floor.
We first reported on the new SpeakerCraft Dolby Atmos enabled AIM speakers at the 2015 CEDIA show (then called the Expo). A clever way to extend their line and tap into the enthusiasm many have to advanced surround sound systems like Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, and Auro3D – SpeakerCraft designed a high-performance alternative to standard in-ceiling height speakers.
