The number of home broadband subscriptions is expected to surpass the number of home pay-TV subscriptions over the next few months, said a report by The Diffusion Group. While residential broadband penetration will soon top 100 million U.S. households, "legacy pay-TV subscription services have peaked and are in decline," TDG said Tuesday. The report, "Pay-TV Refugees," said 14 percent of adult broadband users don't use a legacy pay-TV service. That's 9 percent higher than the amount in 2011, said TDG. The consumers "provide an excellent opportunity for new video purveyors," like Netflix and direct-to-consumer TV networks, it said.
A Strasburg, Virginia, company called Genius SmartWatch needs to raise $100,000 through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to bring to market what it calls a "new generation" of smart watch containing an "advanced" micro-projection display technology, the company said in an announcement Tuesday. The display function on the wearable device it has developed, also called the Genius SmartWatch, increases the size of the image on the back of the hand using the newest LED technology "that works both day and night," the company said. It can also be personalized by changing the color of the projection image. The watch can be synched with a smartphone or tablet using a special Genius software app that enables the watch to display notifications, reminders, incoming calls, text messages, social media and a "wide variety of other customized projections," it said. "As part of the user-friendly functionality, you simply shake your wrist to dismiss a notification." The $100,000 raised in the crowdfunding campaign will be used for engineering, software development, testing, manufacturing and shipping, it said.
Hulu and Viacom extended their partnership by bringing more Viacom content to the streaming service. Hulu will add top titles from Nickelodeon to Hulu’s kids’ offering, like Drake & Josh and Hey Arnold!, Hulu said Tuesday on its blog. Hulu also will expand its Latino programming for kids by adding some Nickelodeon shows, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in Spanish, it said.
IT management company BigPanda raised $7 million in a Series A round, said a company news release Tuesday. Mayfield led the funding, which included Sequoia Capital, BigPanda said. It also launched the first “data science platform," which will automate its IT Incident Management system, it said in a separate news release. The platform will analyze the “flood of alerts" IT teams receive and cluster them into "high-level incidents,” which will then automate the "manual processes involved with detecting, investigating and collaborating around every IT incident,” it said.
SiriusXM’s year-old $530 million acquisition of Agero's connected vehicle services business (see 1308160071) "continues to produce good results," SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer said on a quarterly earnings call Tuesday. "It has brought us even closer to the OEMs and opened the door to long-term cooperation on a variety of decisions relating to the next generation of connected vehicles." SiriusXM is "actively engaged with our existing OEM customers in defining the connected vehicle services that will be deployed in their vehicles over the following years," Meyer said. "The safety, security and convenience side of the connected vehicle is important, but so is our ability to innovate in the connected car on the audio side and integrate satellite radio with the benefits of two-way connectivity." Asked in Q&A whether SiriusXM was beginning to see "meaningful" penetration of new cars in its "mix" with Internet connectivity built in, Meyer said General Motors has begun rolling out LTE in its vehicles "at a pretty aggressive rate." But he cautioned that "GM's implementation of how they want that to work ultimately is still in a variety of phases in their vehicles." Still, "there's no question, built-in connectivity in vehicles is beginning to increase and, I think, will continue to increase every year going forward for many, many years," Meyer said. "I think this is an incredible opportunity for SiriusXM. I constantly get questions from analysts and investors about, ‘Isn't this bad for your business?’ And my answer to that question is, ‘Are you kidding me?’" Meyer thinks the rise of the connected car will "let us do a lot of exciting things for the next 10 years," he said. But as for giving a solid answer on the question about whether there has been any meaningful business impact yet, "we're just going to have to wait several months to make sure none of this is a head fake," Meyer said. "I've learned now, over the 10 years, we need to watch for several months to see how these trends roll out. But I promise you, we're watching it. And when we think we really understand what's going on, we'll be very public about it."
Zebra Technologies completed its $3.45 billion purchase of Motorola Solutions’ enterprise unit, Zebra CEO Anders Gustafsson said in a Monday news release. The deal, disclosed in April, will allow Zebra to “provide the building blocks of Internet of Things solutions, as customers worldwide increasingly take advantage of data analytics and mobility to improve business performance,” Gustafsson said. Some 4,500 Motorola Solutions employees will transfer to Zebra, the company said.
BeBop Sensors, a wearable sensor technology company, announced a smart fabric sensor that measures bend, location, motion, rotation, angle and torque. The fabric sensors provide continuous real-time data for force, x/y location, bend, twist, size, stretch and motion that’s applicable for markets including clothing and protective wear, shoes, healthcare devices, athletic equipment, automotive, robotics, gaming, biometrics and appliances, the company said Monday. The sensors were initially created for musical keyboards by Keith McMillen Instruments, which spun off BeBop Sensors as a separate business to target the wearables market. The technology could be employed in a variety of use cases including car steering wheels to sense driver awareness; to measure gait and flexure of toes and feet in socks or shoes; and in grip sensors to measure finger positions on a bat handle or golf club, the company said.
Multifunction, cross-linked infotainment systems and related electronics are a “growing reliability plague” for many car brands, Consumer Reports said Monday. First-year models from Cadillac, Fiat, Ford, Honda, Infiniti, Jeep and Ram have seen “significant problem rates from infotainment bugs and glitches,” it said. Of the 17 problem areas Consumer Reports asks about in its Annual Reliability Survey, the category encompassing in-car electronics generated more complaints than any other category, it said. Problems included multi-use controllers that don’t function properly, unresponsive touch screens and challenges pairing phones to the vehicle, the report said. “Infotainment system problems generally don't exist in a vacuum," said Jake Fisher, director-automotive testing at Consumer Reports. Cars with a lot of in-vehicle electronic issues “usually have plenty of other troubles, too,” Fisher said. Infinity’s Q50 sedan tops the list of problem vehicles in the report with more than 20 percent of owners reporting a glitch. The Infiniti QX60 SUV, also rated low in reliability, dropping Infiniti’s reliability rank 14 points to 20th overall, the farthest drop of any of the 28 brands this year, Consumer Reports said. Some carmakers showed improvement in infotainment problems, it said. “While hardly trouble-free, updates and changes to Ford and Lincoln's notorious MyTouch systems have made them less troublesome year after year,” Consumer Reports said. In 2011, the Ford Explorer had a 10 percent infotainment complaint rate and peaked at 28 percent, but the 2014 Explorer's revised system improved to a 3 percent complaint rate for the same trouble areas, it said. Honda appears to have fixed a glitch with HondaLink that kept the redesigned Accord V6 off of last year’s recommended vehicle list, and the vehicle is now recommended, Consumer Reports said, and Chrysler's UConnect touch-screen system “was buggy in its first iteration but recent software revisions may be ironing out the wrinkles." The survey was sent to more than 8 million subscribers, and 1.1 million responses were received. The survey asks about subscribers' experiences with their vehicles over the course of the previous 12 months and covers 10 model years -- from brand-new models to models that are 10 years old, it said.
As rumors abound that Microsoft soon will bow new wearables with super-long battery life, the Patent and Trademark Office has been studying the company’s radical re-think on the way future batteries will be used. For example, US 2014/0129162, filed in November 2012 by Microsoft and a team of 10 American inventors, has the core idea of incorporating sensing, computing and communication capabilities into "the one common component that a vast number of electronic devices employ -- namely batteries." By integrating these capabilities "into disposable and/or rechargeable batteries," said Microsoft, "new functionality and intelligence can be provided to otherwise stand-alone (‘dumb’) devices." According to the patent, it’s not even necessary "that the host electronic device is aware of the presence or capabilities of the electrical battery apparatus." Electronic intelligence can be built into a battery at the factory or added later by using physically smaller cells in a standard-size case with embedded electronics, the patent said. For example, dumb AAA cells can be inserted in an AA-size case, which has built-in smart electronics, it said. The smartened battery case is then used in a dumb device designed for AA cells, it said. Examples cited in the patent of dumb devices given intelligence by their batteries include: (1) A child’s toy with accelerometer in its battery that builds a usage pattern to tell "if the toy is still being played with, or if it is just sitting around and should be discarded or sold"; (2) A TV remote that will beep when a Wi-Fi sensor detects that it has been taken outside the room; (3) An accelerometer in a tablet that detects rough use of its screen and switches off. Multiple stand-alone dumb devices powered by smart batteries can swarm to create their own "vast" network, and provide "an opportunity for these stand-alone devices to operate collectively," the patent said.
The percentage of U.S. households that get broadband service at home increased from 20 percent in 2004 to 79 percent this year, a Leichtman Research Group survey found. Adults reported spending an average of 2.8 hours online at home a day, up from 2.2 hours per day in 2009, said a Friday Leichtman news release (http://bit.ly/1ruAw9b). Those aged 18 to 34 spent an average of 3.3 hours online at home daily, compared with 2.1 hours daily among those aged 55 and older, the release said. It said 63 percent of adults get Internet on a smartphone, up from 44 percent in 2012. The findings are based on a phone survey of 1,261 households in September.