It was a huge year for Strata-gee.com in 2015 – thanks to all of our readers like you! Not only did we sign up a slew of new subscribers to our SYNCH e-newsletter – a big THANK YOU if you were one of them – but our average weekly page views continued to grow as well. Our “heat map” that graphically displays when readers are on our website shows that there are readers on our website every hour of every day – and every day of every week. But we get a blazing “hot” heat signature on Thursdays, when the SYNCH is blasted out to you, with the hotness continuing on into Fridays.
Allnet Distributing, the large Chicago-based custom integration-focused distribution company founded by former AVAD principal Wally Whinna, announced that it has opened an outlet in Carmel, IN, an area just outside of Indianapolis. The new location will take over responsibility for servicing the Indiana market which was previously handled out of the firm’s Chicago-area headquarters facility in Elk Grove Village, IL.
Last week, Moody’s Investors Service announced that it was cutting Toshiba Corp.’s long-term senior bond rating to Ba2, or “junk” status. Considering recent reports from Toshiba, a major industry player that is stumbling in the wake of a 
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.
A new board of directors has been selected by the Home Technology Specialists of America (HTSA), one of the leading retail buying groups in the U.S. This new board, along with the recently announced new managing director (Jon Robbins), represents an all-new and fresh approach to group management and oversight – albeit from a selection of executives with tremendous history within the organization.
In a result that exceeded economists’ estimates, November overall housing starts jumped an impressive 10.5% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.173 million units. Well over the revised October rate of 1.062 million units, it also exceeded the 1.007 million units in November last year by 16.5%.
Strata-gee.com editor Ted Green made a guest appearance on AVWeek’s new webcast called AVWeek Special: Residential. Just the second episode of this all-new, residential industry-centric webcast, host Tim Albright led an industry panel that, in addition to Green, included Heather Sidorowicz, Steven Brawner, and Todd Anthony Puma commenting on several hot stories of the day.
Probably the biggest news in business today is that the Federal Reserve Board hiked interest rates for the first time in almost a decade. Wall Street celebrated by driving up stock values in the wake of the news. Yet consumer specialists and others are sounding the alarm. So is the Fed’s rate increase good news or bad news?
