Rebecca Day

Garmin announced a smartwatch and an activity tracker Friday, ahead of this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The $249 vívoactive HR smartwatch counts steps, floors climbed, intensity minutes and monitors sleep, said Garmin. On an earnings call last week, Garmin CEO Cliff Pemble said the company is targeting 10 percent revenue growth in the fitness segment in 2016 -- split among trackers and cycling and running devices -- with new products playing a “key role” in growth projections. Garmin’s Q4 revenue slipped 3 percent year over year to $781 million on currency rate changes and ongoing declines in the personal navigation device market, said Pemble. The company expanded its position with Honda and is now in the Pilot, Accord, Civic and CRV models, and Garmin navigation also is now in Mercedes-Benz C and E class vehicles, Pemble said. Garmin believes it's the market-share leader in the GPS-enabled wearables category with low- to mid-40 percent share, said Pemble. The wearables category expanded “significantly” in the past year but is still in growth mode, he said.

The Open Interconnect Consortium brought into the fold new members ElectroluxAB, Microsoft and Qualcomm and gave itself a new name, Open Connectivity Foundation, it said Friday. The consortium said it hopes to help unify IoT standards so developers and companies can create products that “work seamlessly together.” OCF will accelerate solutions leading to a single, open IoT interoperability specification, it said. Other members of the cross-industry group are Arris, CableLabs, Cisco, GE Digital, Intel and Samsung. The OCF’s vision for IoT is that “billions of connected devices (appliances, phones, computers, industrial equipment) will communicate with one another regardless of manufacturer, operating system, chipset or transport.” If it meets its goal, OCF said, anyone -- from a large technology company to a maker working out of a garage -- could adopt OCF’s open standards, innovate and compete ensuring “secure interoperability for consumers, business and industry.” Samsung’s Seung Hwan Cho, deputy head-software R&D center, said in a statement OIC had been working to develop a standard spec for IoT devices while developing IoTivity as an open-source reference implementation, and it welcomes the new members to OCF. Also in a prepared statement, Michael Wallace, president-Qualcomm Connected Experiences, said Qualcomm helped develop the AllJoyn framework to drive a similar goal, “and now we look forward to collaborating with leading IoT-focused companies to form the OCF for precisely the same reason.” Qualcomm, Electrolux and Microsoft are listed as premier members of the AllSeen Alliance, whose stated AllJoyn-based mission is to “enable industry standard interoperability between products and brands with an open source framework that drives intelligent experiences for the Internet of Things,” the website said. The AllSeen Alliance is "encouraged to see companies coming together to build new technologies through collaboration," AllSeen Board Chairman Danny Lousberg emailed us Friday on our queries about the relationship between OFC and AllSeen. "It accelerates development and innovation," Lousberg said. "Many of the companies committed to Open Connectivity Foundation remain invested in AllSeen Alliance, so we're confident that technology integration and collaboration across efforts will be a priority and can benefit the industry at large," he said. "AllSeen Alliance continues its focus on a robust code base and devices shipping with AllJoyn. As a code-first organization we are supportive of any effort to advance open specifications. We are eager to learn more about the OCF specification and the IP policies that surround it.”

The FCC vote Thursday that could open the set-top box market to third parties (see 1602180065) “may change the way in which we sell,” said Universal Electronics CEO Paul Arling on an earnings call later that day. “But it won’t change the fact that people still sit 10 to 12 feet on average from their television, and they’re going to want a product that will ease their ability to control various sources they have,” he said. “We don’t really see this as changing anything, but we'll have to see exactly how this thing shakes out." All operators are moving toward the concept of cloud-based advanced platform boxes, “making their user interface much simpler and much easier to use,” he said. Responding to an analyst, Arling said service providers in addition to Comcast and AT&T's DirecTV are moving to the latest platform.

Technology will play a major role in Fossil turnaround efforts, after the company’s first earnings-per-share decline in a decade, said CEO Kosta Kartsotis on a Q4 earnings call. Adding chips to watches “in all brands” will provide additional functionality for differentiation and make the watch category more relevant to a demographic that hasn't worn watches because they grew up with smartphones, Kartsotis said. Also Tuesday, Chief Strategy Officer Greg McKelvey cited a “significant expansion" in the number of brands that will be launched across Fossil’s connected lineup of trackers, “smarter” watches with integrated technology and smartwatches. Last year, wearables generated $10 billion to $15 billion revenue industrywide. They're expected to generate $45 billion revenue by 2019, said Kartsotis.

Qualcomm, which announced LG as a launch partner for the Snapdragon Wear platform last week (see 1602120018), said Wednesday that original design manufacturers Borqs, Compal Electronics and Infomark began offering reference designs based on the Wear 2100 SoC (system on chip), some of which include 3G, 4G, smartwatches, Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi. Qualcomm also said it’s the first company to support hardware-backed biometric fingerprint authentication for Tencent’s WeChat mobile payment service. And at next week's Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm will demo with Ericsson an LTE modem capable of gigabit data transfer speeds, 4-layer MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) in a smartphone and 5G connectivity, Qualcomm said. It will also demo Ultra HD Voice, along with IoT functions.

Walmart made strides in moving commerce online, executives said on a fiscal Q4 earnings call (see here and here) Thursday, even as it said revenue and operating income fell in the quarter ended last month. Neil Ashe, CEO-global e-commerce, cited efforts to offer consumers a “seamless shopping experience” across Walmart's app, website and stores. The company’s new Pangaea technology platform powered the shopping experience online for the first time this holiday season, said Ashe. Walmart offered early access to the Black Friday circular on the mobile app for the first time during the 2015 runup to Christmas, and the app reached No. 1 at Apple’s App Store that day, Ashe said, an indication customers “are now comfortable buying on their phone.” More than half of online sales were completed on a mobile device on Thanksgiving, doubling mobile sales over 2014, Ashe said. It had “significant growth” in mobile sales for the rest of the peak holiday period, he said. Walmart began testing Walmart Pay in “a small group of stores” during the quarter, said Ashe. Initial shopper feedback said the experience was “simple and easy,” he said. Walmart’s entertainment category continued to have “soft” wireless sales and a “slower adoption of new technology in televisions,” said Walmart U.S. CEO Greg Foran. The company's stock closed down Thursday 3 percent to $64.12.

Pandora said it plans to keep spending on music content, on-demand product development and international expansion as rumors swirled that the company is looking for a buyer. With a revenue goal of $4 billion by 2021, Pandora has an ambitious investment plan for 2016 to quickly expand, executives told analysts Thursday after regular U.S. markets closed. The next day, shares closed down 12 percent to $7.99. Content cost increases due to a Copyright Royalty Board rate-setting ruling (see 1512170063) last year will lead to a $160 million jump in content costs this year over 2015, said the company. Additional investments for 2016 include $120 million for marketing, $100 million for product development and $125 million to build “infrastructure for the future, including content licensing and reporting infrastructure,” it said. The Q4 loss was $19.4 million, reversing a year-ago quarterly profit of $12.3 million, though revenue rose about 37 percent to $336 million. Pandora expects to have its on-demand subscription offering in the market before the end of the year but it won’t generate “meaningful revenue” in 2016, said CEO Brian McAndrews on an earnings call. The timing assumes the company will have publishing deals in place with labels, he said. McAndrews wouldn’t comment on a report in the New York Times that Pandora is working with Morgan Stanley on a sale plan. Macquarie Capital has “long believed that its brand and large 81m user base could be attractive” to traditional media companies, Internet or technology giants or “anyone in the music space,” analyst Amy Yong wrote investors Friday.Despite what an analyst cited as a slowdown in growth of listener hours and active users, Pandora expect growth over the next five years from consumer electronics and vehicles, said McAndrews. Pandora’s market share for radio listening in the U.S. passed 10 percent during the year, but with just 2 percent penetration in vehicles -- “which represent nearly half of radio listening” -- the company sees “tremendous upside” as cars become more connected, McAndrews said.

Qualcomm announced new Snapdragon processors for wearables and smartphones, it said. LG and Qualcomm, which have collaborated on smartwatches based on Android Wear, will continue their relationship via the Wear 2100 processor, said LG Vice President-Wearables David Yoon. New LG smartwatches and “other wearable devices” will launch later this year, he said. The Snapdragon Wear platform comprises silicon, software, support tools and reference designs available in tethered (Bluetooth and Wi-Fi) and connected (4G/LTE and 3G) versions, said Qualcomm. It also announced Thursday three upcoming Snapdragon processors for mid- and high-end smartphones, supporting LTE with carrier aggregation and HEVC video compression.

Ford expanded on its Ford Smart Mobility plan with the Monday announcement it's working with cloud-based software company Pivotal to build a platform that will be the foundation for FordPass. The free FordPass platform, due to launch in April for Ford and non-Ford owners, is key to the company’s plan to be both a car company and a mobility company that connects more closely with consumers, Ford said.

Comcast partnered with Earth Networks’ WeatherBug Home software to help Xfinity Home customers lower heating and cooling costs by reducing energy use. WeatherBug Home provides data and analytics for Xfinity Home’s EcoSaver tool that learns the heating and cooling patterns of a home and makes automatic adjustments to the thermostat, said the companies in a Monday news release. Earth Networks processes 25 terabytes of “hyper-local,” real-time weather data daily for 20 million unique consumers, combining data from neighborhood-located weather sensors and a home’s HVAC usage to build a unique thermodynamic model of each home’s energy usage, Earth Networks Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Ferry emailed us. The cost of heating and cooling can be almost half of an overall household utility bill, and integrating WeatherBug Home with a connected thermostat can provide 16.5 percent savings on home cooling, said Daniel Herscovici, general manager-Xfinity Home. Comcast also announced new devices for the Works with Xfinity Home certification program including with a thermostat from Google's Nest.