Vivint Smart Home announced compatibility with Google Assistant voice control on Google Home in a Tuesday release.
Consumer optimism toward tech spending and the overall economy took hits in March but remained above their March 2016 levels, CTA said in a Tuesday report. “Despite an aggregate decline around sentiment to buy tech, respondents are showing a higher inclination to spend more on tech in the coming months than they reported last March,” said Chief Economist Shawn DuBravac in a statement. That the stock market “lost some momentum” in recent weeks appears to be the factor that's lowering consumer optimism toward the overall economy, DuBravac said: “While respondents aren’t indicating they expect the economy to be worse off in the near future, a weak equities market coupled with other indicators are likely holding back overt optimism.”
Google’s dispute with Symantec over the validity of Symantec-issued certificates “imposes considerable costs on a range of companies that have no legal relationship with Google,” said Ariel Rabkin, an American Enterprise Institute Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy visiting fellow, in a Tuesday blog post. Google said last week its Chrome web browser will begin applying special scrutiny to Symantec-issued certificates because it no longer has “confidence in the certificate issuance policies and practices of Symantec.” Symantec-issued certificates didn’t accurately identify the certificate’s owner in some cases, Google said. Websites with Symantec certificates “will need to pay for more renewals and perhaps will need to switch to certificates from another vendor,” Rabkin said. “Symantec itself will doubtless have increased costs or lost business.” Google “has no evident legal obligation to trust Symantec’s certificates. Manufacturers have no general duty to make interoperable products,” Rabkin said. “When Apple changes its laptop design and previous third party add-ons no longer work, the add-on vendors cannot sue for lost business.” Congress and the FTC shouldn't impose a standard of care on certificate authorities in response to the dispute because “the technology ecosystem changes too quickly, the level of harms here are fairly small, and the cost of regulation is potentially high,” Rabkin said. The companies are having "an ongoing discussion, and we look forward to continuing our conversations with Symantec about this issue," a Google spokesman said. "We want to enable an open and transparent assessment of the compatibility and interoperability risks, relative to potential security threats to our users." Symantec didn’t comment.
“The story of Google Fiber seems more or less over,” MoffettNathanson said in a research note Monday. The analyst firm looked at the ISP’s pay-TV subscription data through Q4, as released by the Copyright Office. “The data reveals a sharp deceleration, not only in new markets but in existing ones as well,” it said. Year-over-year growth across all markets slowed to 57.7 percent from 78.8 percent one year ago, and Google Fiber still has only 0.1 percent of the U.S. pay-TV market, MoffettNathanson said. In the past six months, Google Fiber added only five video subscribers in Stanford, California, and the company has fewer than 3,000 in Provo, Utah, the firm said. In Greater Kansas City, the company added 19 percent fewer customers over the past six months than the previous period, with its six-month growth rate slowing to 17.4 percent from 27.4 percent, MoffettNathanson said. The firm said the data shows only linear video subscriptions. But a Google Fiber spokeswoman painted a brighter picture, saying Fiber service is available to nine metropolitan areas, with three more planned or under construction: "Demand for Fiber speed continues to grow, as more consumers move toward over-the-top streaming and skinny TV offerings.”
CTA is offering smart home technology installers a security checklist for internet-connected devices, it announced Thursday, with protocols for installing and configuring products to help protect consumers’ smart home devices from malware or hackers. “Trust is at the heart of the smart home business, and to succeed we need to equip experienced installers with the latest best practices,” said Dan Fulmer, CTA TechHome board member.
Cisco closed a $3.7 billion acquisition of application-performance monitoring company AppDynamics (see 1701250060), Cisco said in a Wednesday news release. AppDynamics CEO David Wadhwani will continue to lead as the company becomes a software business unit in Cisco's IoT/Applications business, Cisco said. "We acquired AppDynamics because they are a market leader in a category that will be a cornerstone for how enterprises drive their business forward," Cisco Senior Vice President Rowan Trollope said.
Acting FTC Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen scheduled a Twitter chat Thursday with Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) on economic liberty, she tweeted Monday. Ohlhausen recently created a task force that will look at removing or narrowing occupational licensing regulations when they don't have a public safety or health rationale (see 1703160032). The chat starts at 3 p.m. EDT.
The adoption rate of smart speakers with voice assistants grew from 5 percent of U.S. broadband homes in Q4 2015 to 12 percent in Q4 2016, said a Parks Associates report Tuesday. Some 56 percent of consumers want to use voice-activated personal assistants to control smart home devices, similar to the percentage (55 percent) who want to use them to control entertainment devices, said Parks, which estimates 15.3 million Amazon Echo devices were sold in 2016. Voice interfaces are advancing due to “continued improvements in machine learning and natural language processing,” and their implementation in portable devices, said analyst Dina Abdelrazik. Amazon’s Alexa has taken the “clear lead” in the category since Apple’s Siri launch in 2011, Abdelrazik said. "Adoption for voice assistants will increase as these devices add more and varied capabilities to match the many use cases possible in the smart home and IoT," Abdelrazik said. The Alexa Skills Kit has grown about 40 percent since January 2016, recently topping 10,000 skills, and Amazon plans to release new Alexa devices that also can make phone calls and work as intercoms, she said. Google Home, meanwhile, countered by adding its Google Express delivery network for home shopping. Parks plans a session on voice assistants at its Connections conference in San Francisco May 23-25.
The Internet Security Alliance released a fact sheet the group says illustrates that the “tremendous growth in cybersecurity rules and regulations is diverting scarce security resources and actually undermining our nation’s cyber defenses.” Some corporate chief information security officers' reported spending almost 40 percent of their time meeting government-mandated compliance measures and audits, and some firms reported spending up to 30 percent of their cybersecurity budget on compliance, ISA said in the fact sheet. “We now have cyber mandates springing up like weeds as virtually every governmental entity, federal state and local, fight to be the ‘cyber guy,'” said ISA President Larry Clinton in a statement Monday. “The result is an uncoordinated, inconsistent and often counterproductive set of requirements that actually hurts, not [helps], increased security.” ISA and other groups aren't “saying we ought not to have cyber controls or assessments,” Clinton said. “But, we need to have a rational and well-thought out system or we will waste vital resources and undermine our security.”
Twitter received more than 6,000 government requests globally for information targeting more than 11,400 accounts during the second half of 2016, it reported Tuesday. That's a 7 percent increase over the prior six-month reporting period, but it affected 13 percent fewer accounts. Three new countries -- Guatemala, Taiwan and Ukraine -- were added to the list. The U.S. made the most requests of any government, about 2,300 targeting more than 5,600 accounts. The company said its latest report shows "modest growth" due to decrease in total requests from the U.S. and France. Twitter said it didn't comply at all or only partially with 39 percent of all global requests. It provided noncontent information -- such as email address, phone number associated with the account or to/from information of a direct message -- in 88 percent of the cases, and content information, which is the contents of the communications, in 11 percent of the cases, similar to the previous reporting period.