Strategy in TECH...
CEDIA, the trade association for residential custom integration specialists, announced this week the finalists in the contest to find the Best New Products. The organization will announce the winner at its upcoming EXPO on September 15 at 3:00PM in the CEDIA booth #4710.
iPatrol, a provider of home-monitoring solutions for the smart home, announces the availability of your own personal security robot they call Riley. Riley is an app-controlled Wi-Fi enabled roving security that patrols your house in the evening and alerts you via a notification if there is an intrusion.
Le Holdings Co. Ltd. (LeEco), a Chinese company with unusual multi-business aspirations, announced this week that they had acquired Vizio, a U.S. manufacturer of affordable televisions, in a deal worth $2 billion. The deal will serve as LeEco’s entry into the U.S. market with its unusual mix of products.
Market researcher eMarketer reports that the latest research on marketing trends for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) – and in this case, retailers – shows that email marketing remains the top tactic for both customer acquisition and retention. This research, pushes back the notion expressed by some, that email is losing momentum.
We have learned from multiple sources, and now confirmed with the company, that leading control systems provider Crestron will in fact have a presence at the upcoming CEDIA Expo this September in Dallas, TX. This news will come as a surprise, perhaps even a shock, to many considering that just a few months ago, the company announced its departure from the residential custom integration industry’s biggest annual event.
Back in the Fall of 2013, we told you about the birth of a new brand called Bluesound – a new networkable, high-quality wired and wireless multiroom music system. Almost simultaneously, and in response to the obvious success of Sonos we suspect, new systems from Bose, D&M Holdings (HEOS), and Lenbrook were all introduced. But Lenbook officials maintained that their system had an advantage over most of the other systems – they had created their own operating system called BluOS.
A dramatic new high-end line of loudspeakers, Horns by Auto-Tech, is now available from Chane Music and Cinema, the newly appointed North American distributor/retailer for the brand. The brand offers five different systems, each of which features the use of “well-tried” horn technology. Paul Klipsch would be proud!
This morning we learned a stunning statistic – Pokémon Go, that new game that incorporates augmented reality and that is all the rage right now – has hit an impressive milestone. According to data from MFour Mobile Research, Pokémon Go is now on more Android smartphones than Twitter.
ProSource announced this week the addition of 21 new members, a fairly large freshman class, even for the organization that bills itself as the “largest audio, video and integration buying group in the country.” According to the organization, this freshman class is worth about $43 million in total retail sales.
The ink is barely dry on their agreement to be acquired by Britain’s Melrose Industries PLC, and already Nortek Inc. finds themselves the subject of multiple investigations by several major law firms who have publicly notified shareholders this deal may not be a good one for them. It is not clear if these law firms intend to take action yet, but if so, it could be a complicating factor in the transaction.
