One of the more ambitious and promising initiatives announced at CES was AT&T’s Digital Life. As the flagship announcement at AT&T Developer Summit, Digital LIfe is an application and services platform that will offer a broad range of services to consumer households including media management, home security services, home energy monitoring and a broad variety of sensor-based services such as water leak detection and water main control.
The annual circus that is the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has become the most important mobile tech conference outside of Mobile World Congress and a fascinating lens into upcoming trends. With more than 150,000 attendees this year, the event continues to attract an international audience of impressive scope across mobile devices, applications, home media and all measure of things in between. While most of the major announcements focus on short-term product releases, some of the more fascinating details are those with longer term implications. This year’s CES provided a few gems with some truly interesting potential.
At its press conference, Amazon emphasized the unique nature of its business model – “We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices” – by announcing a flurry of new valued-priced products and updates to its growing line of tablets and e-readers.
Being a public company would be so great if it weren’t for those pesky financial analysts. To break with the traditional love fest that typically follows an Apple quarterly financial report, the stock market threw a conniption fit that Apple ONLY improved profits by 21 per cent, year-on-year, and managed to grow revenues a “paltry” 22 per cent over last year at this time.
The telecom industry press United States is all abuzz about the latest rumors that Amazon is in the process of testing a smartphone device that will expand the ranks of its growing Kindle line up. With the tremendous upheaval that the smartphone industry has undergone in the last five years, the opportunity for success seems increasingly limited to companies that have established business models that actually don’t require a device business to be profitable.
For the last few months, North American business news channels have been buzzing with rumors declaring that an acquisition of Research In Motion is just around the corner. The list of potential suitors allegedly includes such technology heavyweights as Microsoft, Nokia and Samsung, though none of these options offers the prospect of an easy post-acquisition reorganization or integration of product/service portfolios.
Loading ...