BREAKING NEWS
After receiving several urgent communications from multiple sources, Strata-gee.com has confirmed that Crestron Electronics – for years the single largest exhibitor at CEDIA’s Expo – has informed the trade association that it will not participate in the upcoming 2016 event. Crestron, a long supporter of both CEDIA and the Expo, has always maintained a huge presence, with an upfront positioning right at the entry, thanks to the many priority points it has earned over the years. Now, CEDIA is fast at work finding a replacement.
Apple, Inc. is starting to look brown, bruised, and past its prime in wake of the surprising quarterly results that showed growth in sales of their bellwether iPhone product to be the slowest since the company launched the product category in 2007. Not only that, but the company forecast an overall sales decline for the first quarter of 2016 – their first sales decline since 2003. Reaction from Wall Street was swift with the price of Apple stock down more than 6% in mid-afternoon trading.
TiO, the home automation division of Anuva Automation, announced this week several interesting moves, including a price drop, a new Home Starter Kit, and program changes for both distributors and dealers. The combination of these moves makes the innovative wired and wireless home automation and multi-room entertainment system easier to buy…and easier to sell.
In an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review, author Walter Frick cites several studies whose results suggest that where companies treat workers better, there is more innovation. Sound crazy? Not a connection you’d usually make? Actually, the article notes a few studies where researchers directly correlated a company’s score of worker treatment against their patent filings. The results appear to hold up, across different studies in different industries in different countries.
The media in Japan is reporting that Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., a Taiwanese manufacturer mostly known for its Foxconn OEM division that is Apple Inc.’s largest supplier, has made a $2.5 billion offer acquire Sharp Corp., Japan’s troubled LCD display manufacturer. But Hon Hai’s offer has one very special condition of sale that won’t be popular in Sharp’s Osaka headquarters…
Toshiba, who is on the verge of announcing a record loss and plans another round of layoffs, is far from the only Japanese giant who is stumbling. A new analysis by the Nikkei suggests it’s possible that Sharp Corp. may not have enough cash to survive the winter – despite the fact that multiple potential suitors are swirling around them in a head-spinning series of negotiations that, so far, are unproductive. And the news of these new troubles have surfaced after they successfully concluded negotiations for 
Thiel Audio unexpectedly announced late today that it would show and demonstrate a new product – a powered subwoofer – at next month’s CES show in Las Vegas, Nevada. This new subwoofer, called the SmartSub™ 1.12, is the first new product introduced by Thiel in a year and appears to contain several new technologies for the company including Wi-Fi integration, app control, advanced signal processing and more.
Emotiva Audio Corporation is one of those ideas whose core elements initially seemed incongruous – high-end products…sold on the Internet? When we learned of their launch 12-years ago, we predicted doom and damnation. After all, high-end audio, we posited, was as much about the experience -the audition – as it is about the product. Founder Dan Laufman proved us wrong. This week, Laufman caught our attention again when we recently received information about an impressive roster of new models to be launched at CES.
