Blog articles from 01/2014

This is an insane amount of money to spend on a start up. My estimate is that $3.2B is more than 20X earnings. So why does Google think that is worth $3.2B? Nest has reported 100% growth in both 2012 and 2013. In order to sustain that growth, they must have a great product roadmap. It is likely that they will introduce products in other categories that will bring technology to stale products in the same way that they have reinvented the thermostat and smoke detector. Nest has been...

When I was in college, I was a cord-cutter, just as Parks Associates data suggests. The 18-24 crowd is often prone to subscribing to only Internet and neglecting pay-TV in favor of OTT services such as Netflix and Hulu+. Back then, I sat my desktop next to my entertainment center and did everything on the computer using the TV set as a monitor, not just watching movies. There was a wireless keyboard and mouse on the coffee table, and sometimes on the floor, but none of my friends cared....

zonIn the past few years, a number of ingredients have coalesced to bring about dramatic change in the home audio market. Take, for example, the concept of multi-room audio systems. Until recently, these were only possible by running wires to in-wall or in-ceiling speakers and fed through an A/V receiver. In other words, they weren't the purview of the mass-market. Several factors have significantly changed this paradigm. Wireless networking, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth -...

Parks Associates and Lowe’s are co-hosting a complimentary webcast, "Partner or Compete: Utility Decisions on Home Energy Management” on February 4 at 1 PM CST. The market for home energy management (HEM) offerings is expanding, bringing in new players and more options to consumers. This webcast presents new research and strategies to transform energy solutions into mass-market offerings through bundling and partnership opportunities. It also examines the role of...

The battle between T-Mobile and its competitors is getting intense. T-Mobile’s challenges, including its latest “Uncarrier 4.0” initiative and its CEO’s guerilla PR tactics at an AT&T conference, both at CES, have reasons for its competitors to concern. The assaults that T-Mobile has launched since mid-2013 appear working—T-Mobile reported 4.4 million net subscriber gains for the year 2013, the largest among its peers. Its competitors’ responses have been swift, too....

At Mobile World Congress last February, GM OnStar shook up the connected car market by switching its wireless connectivity provider from Verizon Wireless (Hughes Telematics)—its in-vehicle connectivity provider since the service’s launch in 1996—to AT&T. While Verizon will continue to support current vehicles already on the OnStar platform, the auto OEM chose AT&T as its provider of the future, connecting new models across AT&T’s 4G/LTE network. AT&T is building on...