Strategy in TECH...
Creston, one of the industry’s largest and most respected brands of control and automation solutions for the residential and commercial channels, is holding their Crestron NEXT virtual event next week – and it looks extremely interesting. Taking place over two days – September 15 & 16 (yes, during CEDIA’s virtual show), there are two versions: residential and commercial.
By now, most in the industry know that Crestron Electronics, the widely renowned luxury residential electronics systems manufacturer, is also a large major supplier of high quality and mission critical solutions for the corporate commercial and industrial markets. Today, the company is announcing that their two divisions worked together to create a new product called the Flex MM – a unique, flexible, unified communications solution that is just about perfect for the new Work From Home…or as Creston likes to call it…the Work from Anywhere…remotely distributed workforce.
Sonos Inc. and Lenbrook Industries announced today that they have reached a settlement agreement bringing the patent litigation brought by Sonos to a close. The agreement is confidential, so no terms were disclosed.
A national network of sales representatives have formed a group to promote and sell products supporting the residential wellness segment – sometimes known as the “healthy home” segment. Called the PureTech Alliance, the organization was conceived and formed by two former founding members of another national group – this one of regional specialty A/V distributors – known as the Alliance of Value Added Distributors (AVAD).
AVAD went on to become a successful $200 million national distributor that helped drive the growth of the custom installation channel and was ultimately acquired by Ingram Micro. Will lightening strike twice?
On Monday morning, during my usual morning health walk, I listened to a podcast where the host proclaimed – quite proudly – that nobody is better at technology than the U.S. Just a couple of hours later, the Nikkei reported that Japan had bested both the U.S. and China with an all new and mightily powerful supercomputer. Step aside America!
Wow, surprising numbers from a new research report from Parks Associates shows that control system adoption jumped a full 38% in 2019 as compared to 2018. That’s a really big jump in a really short period of time.
Crestron Electronics has launched a handy new Configurator for their Creston Home system that gives integrators the ability to pre-configure systems in-house prior to deployment. This new configurator helps integrators efficiently setup and test their Crestron Home systems configuration and cuts deployment time dramatically.
What if every time you rolled a truck on a service call with a Level 1 tech, you could be fully assured of a complete resolution to the client’s satisfaction no matter how complex or sophisticated the system issue? Does that sound like a dream? No…that sounds like Help Lightning.
AudioControl, a specialty electronics supplier with growing influence in the residential custom integration channel, has recently expanded into the commercial space with their CM Series of products. At ISE last week, the company announced a significant expansion of that lineup with three new 70-volt amplifiers that feature Dante digital audio networking capability built-in.
Two new research reports from two different research groups came to basically the same conclusion – smart speakers (and IoT devices) show no signs of slowing down with eye-popping growth rates in just the last two years. One of the researchers, Comscore, is calling the trend, “The Smart Speaker Frenzy.”
