News Blast - 8/30      

• ‘MegaMIMO 2.0’      wireless routers work together to triple bandwidth and double range
•  CE Consumers      Show Stronger Than Expected Brand Loyalty 
• Philips Hue      announces a $40 motion sensor to automatically turn your lights on
• IFA 2016:      Smarthome, smartwatches and smartphones to expect
• Retailers      Reining Back Back-to-School Discounts

 ‘MegaMIMO 2.0’ wireless routers work together to triple bandwidth and double range


Wireless interference is one of those things that we tend to not think about, because, well, we can’t see it. But routers are all over the place, sometimes several in a room when you’re in an office, conference, or campus — and make no mistake, it’s an epic battle at the frequencies they share. Some enterprising researchers have found a way to make those routers work together, though. Dina Katabi and her team at MIT”s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory call it MegaMIMO 2.0, and they claim some pretty serious improvements: three times better data transfer speeds and doubled range. “In today’s wireless world, you can’t solve spectrum crunch by throwing more transmitters at the problem, because they will all still be interfering with one another,” said MIT grad student and lead author Ezzeldin Hamed. “The answer is to have all those access points work with each other simultaneously to efficiently use the available spectrum.”   

 CE Consumers Show Stronger Than Expected Brand Loyalty  

New consumer research from Parks Associates reveals 71 percent of CE buyers in 2015 considered only one brand when making their purchase. According to 360 View: CE Adoption & Trends, price and product quality are important factors, as 15 percent of CE buyers considered only one brand due to price and 10 percent considered only one brand due to product quality, but brand itself was the dominant factor in these noncompetitive purchases. Nineteen percent of CE buyers considered only one brand when buying because of their preference for that brand. 

Philips Hue announces a $40 motion sensor to automatically turn your lights on

Philips Hue is expanding its line up of smart light devices with a motion sensor. This one is pretty straightforward — when you walk in front of the sensor, your Hue lights will turn on. What’s different from other motion sensors? It works on battery, so you can put it anywhere around your home, such as the corner of a hallway, a bathroom or a garage. Philips says the device is supposed to work for two to three years with two AAA batteries. It costs $39.95. Then, it connects to your Hue Bridge and executes a Philips Hue command. It can even detect whether it’s nighttime so that it doesn’t turn on all the lights during the day. And you can choose a specific scene in the Hue app and pair it with the sensor. Based on the configuration screens in the Philips Hue app, the motion sensor is highly configurable. You can set up specific scenes for daytime and nighttime, you can adjust the daylight threshold and you can set different levels of motion sensitivity.

IFA 2016: Smarthome, smartwatches and smartphones to expect

Consumer electronics trade show IFA takes place in Berlin at the beginning of September every year. It's been the platform for some major launches over the last couple of years from the first few generations of Samsung Galaxy Note devices to some of Sony's biggest announcements. What can we expect at IFA 2016 though? We've been doing some speculating, as well as rounding up any rumoured devices we've heard about. As usual, we will update this feature as we hear of more potential announcements, as well as official announcements as they happen.   

Retailers Reining Back Back-to-School Discounts

Shoppers may notice something different this back-to-school shopping season:  smaller discounts and a bigger bill.   Consumers are expected to spend an average of $674 per household this back-to-school season, up nearly seven percent from last year according to the National Retail Federation.  For those shoppers who are looking for huge back-to-school discounts, expect to be disappointed.  “The discounting is not as dramatic as you saw last year, “ according to Chris Christopher, Director of Global Consumer Economics at IHS Markit.  He says after getting burned during the holiday shopping season, many retailers are looking to boost profit margins by better managing promotions and inventory.  “Retailers don’t have excess inventory and that is not putting pressure on them to discount,” he says.