Strategy in TECH...
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.
Two stories out of Japan caught our attention and, to our thinking, combine to show that Japan’s tech industry is still not yet out of the woods. The first story, by the Japan Times, says that troubled Toshiba’s half-year fiscal results show that their profits have now tripled. The second story, also from the Japan Times, announced that Japan Display will be laying off thousands of employees – almost a third of their workforce.
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.
In news coming out of Asia, multiple Chinese panel makers are planning to build large production factories making OLED panels – mostly for the smartphone market. Motivated in part, by Apple’s commitment to the technology, companies like BOE Technologies – China’s largest panel manufacturer – has announced plans to launch an OLED factory capable of producing 10 million smartphone panels per month.
Logitech announced this week that it has developed an Amazon Alexa skill that will allow users to control their entire AV home entertainment system with simple spoken commands. Voice control has become a hot topic in the industry since CEDIA 2016, when one of the keynote speakers was Charlie Kindel, an Amazon executive working on their voice-enabled products like the Echo and Dot.
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.
In our wrap-up of the top stories from CEDIA 2016, #3 was “Managed Services are Growing.” One such service was OneVision Resources, which will partner with integrators to offer remote system monitoring and customer support. At CEDIA 2016, residential networking provider Access Networks also announced that they will be launching a new Live Monitoring solution.
Most new start-up companies like Millson Custom Solutions (MCS) choose to develop a new product concept and spend their first year setting up distribution, making sure internal systems operate smoothly as sales begin to happen, and in general scale slowly before they take that next step in expansion. It’s sort of a crawl before you walk – walk before you run strategy.
But not MCS – no sooner did they get their remarkable CinemaFrame launched, then the company rolled out a second product, their RSMS Roller Shade Mounting System and then a third product, the FutureFrame.
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.
