Blogs
High-Res Audio Coming To More Smartphones
Playback of high-resolution 192kHz/24-bit music files — FLAC at least — turned up in the latest HTC One M9 flagship smartphone, and it could...
Post Type blog
Blogs
The End May Be Nigh For RadioShack
There are conflicting reports coming out of this week’s bankruptcy auction for RadioShack. Depending on whose unnamed sources you believe, either Standard General won the...
Blogs
How To Avoid Becoming The Next Meerkat
This month should have been the coming out party for Meerkat. For weeks their video-sharing app had been spreading like wildfire, with positive reviews...
Blogs
Retailers Can’t Afford To Ignore Social Media
Today social media is more popular than ever, and that popularity is only going to increase. With the rise of smartphones and tablets, consumers...
Blogs
Selecting The Right Warranty Partner
Sure, extended warranties are often misunderstood by consumers and salespeople, but for retailers they can be used as a competitive advantage that can maximize...
Blogs
Why CE Trade-in Programs Make Sense
Sales of smartphones totaled 1.2 billion units last year, according to Gartner. The opportunity for retailers to capitalize on this massive consumer electronics purchasing...
Blogs
Watch List
The Watch List is an ongoing series that focuses on CE start-ups reaching out to consumers via crowdfunding and other non-traditional methods. Freiya The...
Blogs
Internet Radio In The Car: Still A Way To Go
More people are streaming online music into the car by connecting their smart phone to a car audio system, but among people who do...
Blogs
One More Thing…
Like probably everyone else in our little industry I listened live to the Apple launch event on Monday, and this phrase kept popping into...
Blogs
Amazon Woos Start-Ups With Dedicated Site
Start-ups now have their own dedicated space on Amazon — provided they’re willing to be exclusive to the e-tailer. As the name indicates, Amazon...
Blogs
Apple Watch Features The Media Missed
The humorists at The Onion provided the following list of notable Apple Watch features that were overlooked in the launch hoopla: * 3-megapixel camera enables users to take...
Blogs
Futuresource: Traditional Watches and Smartphones on a Collision Course
At both CES and MWC this year there was a clear design drive to make smartwatches look more like analogue watches in an effort...
Blogs
MWC Shows Wireless Directions For 2015
The 2015 edition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) emitted strong signals on the directions that the wireless market will take in 2015. Samsung...
Blogs
The Pebble In Apple’s Shoes
Well, it’s another bright, beautiful March here in Silicon Valley, which can mean only one thing: It’s time to get all excited about another...
Blogs
Gaining Advantage In The Bargain Smartphone Game
This week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we’re seeing a new generation of premium smartphones take the stage from tier-one vendors like Samsung...
Blogs
And Ford Makes Three (Sync 3, Android Auto, CarPlay)
Automakers have talked about combining Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in the same dash, but Ford will go a step farther by giving consumers...
Blogs
Is Pebble Too Big For Kickstarter, Redux
I wrote a blog yesterday that wondered if a product like the Pebble Time is too big for Kickstarter. Will it make it extraordinarily...
Blogs
Wheeler Explains FCC’s Open-Internet Vote
For over a decade, the Commission has endeavored to protect and promote the open Internet. FCC Chairs and Commissioners, Republican and Democrat alike, have...
Blogs
Sears’ Lampert Lays It On The Line
Sears chairman/CEO Edward Lampert brought investors up to speed on the company’s progress and strategies this morning in one of his intermittent and revealing...
Blogs
Is Pebble Too Big For Kickstarter?
Pebble nearly imploded Kickstarter this week when it debuted the latest generation of its smart watch, the Time. Within 32 minutes, the project hit...
Blogs
Microsoft Is Leaking
This has not been a good month for Microsoft, or so it would seem. Since International CES, the notoriously tight-lipped company has become a...
Blogs
Dish: Will It Buy Or Sell?
Dish is coming up against a hard deadline. Sometime in 2016, it must begin building out a cellular network in spectrum that it owns...
Blogs
RadioShack Revisited
Hey, we hate to kick a company when it’s down, but we just couldn’t resist the following twisted timeline from satire publication The Onion....
Blogs
Autosound Aftermarket Evolves Again
In the 1980s, the autosound aftermarket focused on luxury vehicles and teens/young adults. Then the luxury market gradually faded away as luxury automakers upgraded...
Blogs
John Roach, Longtime RadioShack Chief, Bids Company Goodbye
John Roach was chairman and CEO of RadioShack and its corporate predecessor Tandy during the chain’s glory years of 1983 through 1999. He penned...
Blogs
The Real Challenges That RadioShack Faced
I served as VP of merchandising, CE products, for RadioShack from September 2010 to December 2013. This was the last corporate position I held,...
Blogs
FCC Chairman Wheeler Justifies Net Neutrality
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler delivered these remarks today on net neutrality at the Silicon Flatirons Center in Boulder, Colo. For the past several years,...
Another View
RadioShack’s Complicated Legacy
News of RadioShack filing for Chapter 11 is not a shock to many industry veterans and observers — and consumers — who began predicting...
Blogs
Origins Of The OEM Databus
The OEM databus in cars got its start in the mid-1980s when automakers used the term “multiplexing” to describe how they would send control...
Blogs
Tech The Halls: A CE Packaging Primer
Today the consumer tech market generates over $230 billion a year in sales in the U.S. market alone. The Big Four of electronics retail...
Blogs
The Connected Consumer: Top Trends In IoT
Moving The Industry Forward 2015 will be a year of intense experimentation in new value propositions for advanced technologies and services. Multiple sectors within...
Blogs
Deflategate Unlikely to Flatten Super Bowl TV Sales
We are moderate football fans at my house, but preparations for this year’s Super Bowl are nonetheless underway. Our game menu is set, my...
Blogs
Taking On Navigation-App Abuse
The potential misuse of social media has now extended to navigation apps. We’ve all known that terrorist groups use Facebook and Twitter to communicate...
Blogs
Super Bowl Spells Super Claims For Mobile Mishaps
SquareTrade, the branded extended service provider, has released its annual Super Bowl damage report for mobile devices. The numbers should either make you run...
Blogs
Sling TV Offers Compelling TV-Lite Experience
EchoStar’s new Sling TV service for cord cutters is already preparing for its commercial launch and has sent out the first wave of invitations...
Blogs
Enhancing The In-Store Experience Through Mobile
Customers now have more choice than ever in making informed purchasing decisions, and the consumer electronics industry in particular is seeing an interesting balance...
Blogs
How To Drive Business Innovation
In the consumer electronics field, market leaders often tend to associate the concept of innovation with breakthrough, game-changing technologies: Advancements such as the Internet...
Blogs
Throwback Thursday: Of Spiffs, Spliffs and Turntables
TWICE’s founding editor Bob Gerson used to argue that home video technology was driven largely by demand for adult entertainment. To that I would...
Blogs
HTiBs On Verge Of Extinction
International CES confirmed it. The HTiB (home-theater-in-a-box) system is going the way of home-audio rack systems and iPod/iPhone-docking speakers. They’re almost extinct. Sales are...
Blogs
Takeaways From The CES Daily Production Team
Unlike most of my colleagues, I spend the majority of International CES in a small meeting room way, way, waaaaayyyyy deep in the South...
Another View
My Top 10 Memories of CES ’15
The 2015 International CES was memorable to me since it was the first time in 25 years I was a contributor and not the...
Blogs
Top Five Take-Homes (Not Takeaways) From 2015 CES
If you’re looking for an incisive analysis of the macro trends that will shape the CE industry in years to come, look elsewhere on...