Rebecca Day

Control4 acquired networking and cloud network-management company Pakedge Device & Software for about $32.7 million cash, the company confirmed Thursday. The next day, Control4 shares closed 22 percent higher at $8.08. “As more and more devices are connected in the home, and as streaming services become more prevalent -- especially high-definition streaming services and video over IP -- the demand on the network becomes exponentially greater,” said Jeff Dungan, Control4 senior vice president-supply chain and business development, in a pre-briefing to us.

Amazon shares closed 7.6 percent lower Friday at $587 on what analysts largely viewed as disappointing Q4 results. Revenue rose about 22 percent to $35.7 billion from the year-ago quarter, while profit more than doubled to $482 million. Wedbush's Michael Pachter said a higher concentration of third-party goods sold via Amazon’s fulfillment services (FBA) will lead to higher Prime membership engagement and higher services revenue. Amazon said worldwide paid Prime memberships grew 51 percent in Q4. Credit Suisse's Stephen Ju said stronger media revenue was offset by "elevated shipping losses" from “rapid” FBA adoption. Amazon highlighted milestones of its Fire device lineup: Fire TV is the top-selling streaming media player in the U.S., having added more than 1,000 new apps, channels and games since September, including NBC, NBC Sports and Watch HGTV. The company said its Alexa voice platform is growing, and it added news sources from Bloomberg and CNN. Amazon Web Services announced general availability of AWS IoT.

STMicroelectronics is scrapping its set-top box/home gateway business after a cumulative $500 million loss over two years as it focuses on smartphones, the IoT and other digital areas. The company has reorganized operations and is targeting the connected car and IoT markets, said CEO Carlo Bozotti on an earnings call. For the year, ST’s financial results fell short of expectations due largely to a weak semiconductor market and the winding down of legacy products in what Chief Financial Officer Carlo Ferro called the company’s “post-Nokia phase.” For the year, STMicroelectronics revenue was $6.9 billion below projections and down 6.8 percent from 2014, said Ferro. The decision to shut down the set-top box and home gateway business followed a turnaround plan that didn’t produce desired results, said Chief Operating Officer Jean-Marc Chery. He cited a “much slower than expected market take-off,” operator takeovers and “box manufacturers delaying rollouts,” which led to increasing competition on low-end boxes and high R&D costs. STMicroelectronics plans to “redeploy” roughly 600 employees from its set-top business to support what it called growth areas including digital automotive, Chery said. This year, job cuts are expected to affect about 1,000 employees, he said.

Chipset makers and content providers are among those that will be a key part of high dynamic range (HDR) becoming a broadly accepted feature among consumers, said Dolby CEO Kevin Yeaman on a fiscal Q1 earnings call (its replay can be heard here). Speaking after regular U.S. markets closed Wednesday, he cited the importance of meeting the needs of the content creation, distribution and TV manufacturing communities -- along with the consumer. He said MGM, Sony, Universal and Warner will deliver Dolby Vision HDR content for home distribution, Netflix is creating original content in Dolby Vision that will be available to 75 million subscribers globally, and Vudu is streaming content with Dolby Vision. Gaming and virtual reality are opportunities for Dolby Atmos, its audio technology, said Yeaman, and Sony and Warner have announced software support for Blu-ray titles with Atmos. Vudu is streaming in Atmos and Comcast’s X1 service will support Atmos later this year, he said. Shares closed up 12.5 percent Thursday at $35.71.

With Apple projecting its first revenue decline since Q1 2003 -- amid a slowing smartphone market -- the company needs to leverage its iPhone installed base “to cross-sell these devices to iPhone owners now, while the iPhone is selling well, to set up its business for the long term,” said Ian Fogg, IHS Technology head-mobile analysis, in a research note Wednesday. Apple shares closed 6.6 percent lower Wednesday at $93.42.

By 2020, 40 percent of all wearables shipped will have wireless charging capability, an IHS report said Tuesday. It said smartwatches will lead the category, at 40 percent of wireless charging receiver shipments in 2020. Last year, 23 million wireless-charging-enabled wearable products shipped, IHS said. “Smartwatches are a key driver for wireless charging adoption in the wearable market,” analyst Vicky Yussuff said. Apple Watch and the Samsung Gear S2 use inductive wireless charging technology as the sole means of recharging their batteries, she said. Yussuff cited progress shown at CES. Challenges need to be addressed before wireless charging matures for the wearables market, she said. The goal is “to avoid negative customer experiences that could create further barriers to adoption in the future.”

Consumers’ expectations about in-vehicle connectivity are rapidly changing and carmakers need to adapt, said separate reports from Parks Associates and Strategy Analytics Thursday. Roughly two-thirds of current car owners will look for “some kind of connectivity built into their next car purchase," said Parks analyst Jennifer Kent. Connectivity will “eventually disrupt the entire ownership model, to the point that millennials will have a very different relationship with their vehicles than their predecessors,” she said.

The Digital Living Network Alliance is “greening” its guidelines through mandates for the use of low-power modes across networked devices, DLNA said. A low-power requirement is now part of DLNA guidelines for subscription-TV streaming devices and other devices used for sharing personal content in the home, it said Tuesday. Other parts of the pay-TV and CE industries have likewise been working to cut energy use of devices (see 1506250038), as advocates want energy-efficiency rules for some devices (see 1508070059). It's "the first time that the power of the network has been harnessed to tackle the consumer electronics industry’s energy management challenge,” DLNA board member Stephen Palm emailed us. “As devices are added to a home network, instead of multiplying household energy usage, they will interact with other devices on the network to reduce overall power consumption beyond what is possible by focusing exclusively on the energy efficiency of individual devices." Most energy initiatives focused on improving the efficiency of individual TVs, set-top boxes, PCs, gaming consoles, routers and other devices. DLNA guidelines now mandate low-power modes for VidiPath-Certified Mobile Digital Media Server and Digital Media Renderer devices used to stream personal and subscription TV content, the alliance of CE companies said. DLNA ties together connected devices’ power-saving features and activities at the network’s application layer, improving the efficiency of these devices both individually and collectively, Palm said. More than 4 billion DLNA-certified devices are on the market, it said.

As cybersecurity becomes a growing threat in IoT circles, efforts to combat cyberattacks are rising. Cybersecurity company WISeKey announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos Wednesday it signed a collaboration agreement with CenturyLink to explore a relationship offering a managed identity system for IoT providers in the U.S. It would secure firms’ IoT infrastructure and ensure privacy of their data, said the companies. WISeKey is looking to leverage CenturyLink’s data center presence in the U.S. to establish a Root of Trust, which it said provides the foundation behind trusted computing and allows IoT device verification at the hardware level. As the number of connected devices expands, “collecting and exchanging huge amounts of data along the way, the need for strong Internet of Things security services is becoming increasingly important for businesses and consumers,” said Gary Gauba, CenturyLink Cognilytics president. Cybersecurity will be a featured topic at the International Wireless Communication Expo in Las Vegas March 21-25, said show sponsor Penton Wednesday.

An unexpected spike in U.S. online sales via smartphones in the week before Christmas led to a 12.7 percent bump in holiday season sales versus the 2014 period, Tyler White, manager-Adobe Digital Index, told us. A record $83 billion was spent online Nov. 1-Dec. 31, for 28 percent of total 2015 online sales, Adobe said. U.S. online spending jumped 56 percent year over year on Dec. 23, generating $920 million in sales. Traffic from smartphones drove most of the growth, White told us. A big shift occurred with what consumers could accomplish shopping with their phones this season, White said. Retailers have done a good job making the mobile shopping experience easier and more useful, said White. Cyber Monday led all online shopping days with $3.07 billion in receipts, he said. Retailers will gear e-commerce sites toward the smaller screen shopping experience, he said. “It used to be that you designed for the traditional PC first, but going forward I think people will develop a smaller format for a phone and then make it work on the desktop as well.” Other researchers have predicted similar trends (see 1601080061).