Rebecca Day

After nearly a decade in the works, Amazon is planning to launch its drone delivery service this year with customers in Lockeford, California, among the first to receive Prime Air deliveries, Amazon blogged Monday. The drone program is a combined effort of “hundreds of scientists, engineers, aerospace professionals, and futurists,” it said.

The European Commission’s Tuesday ruling that devices must have a common charging method by 2024 -- by 2026 for laptop computers -- will have minimal impact on device makers, including Apple, Futuresource analyst Simon Forrest emailed us Thursday. Most products affected by the ruling have at least one more design cycle ahead that can be accommodated before the fall 2024 deadline, the analyst said.

Amazon Fashion launched a virtual try-on experience for shoe shopping Thursday. The interactive Virtual Try-On Shoes mobile experience uses augmented reality to help customers visualize how they will look wearing a pair of shoes in varying colors and angles, it said. Participating brands include New Balance, adidas, Reebok, Puma, Superga, Lacoste, Asics and Saucony. Shoppers click a virtual try-on button in the Amazon mobile app, point their smartphone's camera at their feet and images of the shoes are superimposed over the shoes they’re wearing. We found mixed results in a brief audition of the AR technology. While viewing Reebok sneakers, we found white shoes to look natural, while a black version of the same shoe looked artificial. A different black version of the same shoe style effectively showed alternating fabric and leather textures. A pink version looked cartoonish. Digital artifacts appeared in most renderings, showing as jagged lines between our jeans and the start of the shoe. A glitch on an adidas shoe presented the left shoe in white, the right shoe in gray. We noticed our iPhone was warm after a few minutes of taxing processor usage.

Snap One is “one of the few software companies in the world that don’t charge an ongoing fee: We need to change that,” said Chief Financial Officer Mike Carlet at a Tuesday investor event. The company is working on monetizing its software offerings to reflect the maintenance required for a smart home, he said.

The macroeconomic environment is an “acute challenge" for TVs and game consoles, said Dolby Chief Financial Officer Robert Park at an investor conference Wednesday. Broadcast, comprising TVs and set-top boxes, is down high-single digits following a “huge take-up” in TV sales in FY 2021, Park said. Broadcast generates about 39% of Dolby revenue, he said. The drag on TV sales could be economy-related or "the tail end of a pull-through from COVID where people were loading up their living rooms," he said. Park cited Sony, noting a “serious shortage” of the PlayStation 5. “And with that, headsets don’t go and other things don’t go,” he said, referencing a trickle-down effect on accessory sales that embed Dolby technologies. Dolby is also feeling the brunt of lower auto sales in its core technologies business, but it's benefitting from manufacturers’ focus on premium technology amid declining sales, Park said. “The higher end SKUs … are faring better than the lower end,” said the executive: “If you only have 100 chips to ship, you’re going to ship the ones that have the highest margin.” Dolby hasn’t seen any deferment of OEM partnerships or adoption of higher end Dolby technologies as a result of slowing macroeconomic trends, Park said, but they could affect licensees' ability to ship product. “We get paid when it ships,” he said, and there are shipping delays even at the premier end. Commenting on Dolby Live, a Dolby Atmos-equipped venue at the Park MGM in Las Vegas, Park said the initial event featuring Aerosmith, scheduled to start this month, was delayed due to an issue with the band. The event, billed as the first live concert experience presented in Dolby Atmos, is now slated to premiere Sept. 14.

Target warned Tuesday that rising inventory will squeeze profits in its July quarter, and it slashed operating margin rate guidance to “around 2%.” That’s down from the “wide range” around 5.3% guided to by Chief Financial Officer Michael Fiddelke last month on the company’s fiscal Q1 earnings call for the quarter ended April 30 (see 2205180037).

Personalization, personal safety, digital wallet and enhanced health features stood out in Apple’s product, iOS 16 and watchOS 9 announcements from its virtual Worldwide Developers Conference Monday from Cupertino, California. The company also launched the latest round of MacBooks, powered by the next-gen M2 chip, with laptops starting at $1,099 for the education market.

With the delayed Matter specification now pushed to an expected fall release, IoT industry companies remain hopeful the standard will bring compatibility, ease of use, reliability and security to the disparate smart home space, said panelists on a recent Matter webinar sponsored by Silicon Labs.

Sonos is skimming 20% off the price of its portable Move ($399) and Roam ($179) voice-controlled speakers in a summer promotion running through June 12, it emailed Wednesday. It’s one of the few promotions the company has run since supply chain constraints began straining inventories during the COVID-19 demand surge. Sonos Chief Financial Officer Brittany Bagley said on a November earnings call (see 2111180049) the company wouldn't run its typical Q4 holiday promotions due to manufacturing shutdowns and component shortages that were expected to continue into 2022. Also Wednesday, the company rolled out via a software update Sonos Voice Control, the on-device voice service built from its purchase of Snips in 2019. The control feature, voiced by actor Giancarlo Esposito, works alongside Amazon Alexa, and is accessible via the trigger phrase, “Hey, Sonos.” Sonos continues to offer Google Assistant control, but the Sonos and Google voice assistants can’t be used together, a customer support rep told us. We were able to use Sonos Voice Control on our Alexa-enabled Sonos One speaker Thursday, but we could use Sonos to access music only from our Apple Music account, not Spotify or Pandora. The company said last month it will add control for other music services in the future. The Sonos community webpage lists commands available for Sonos Voice Control.

Same-store sales tumbled 9.5% in Q1 at Conn’s for the FY ’23 quarter ended April 30, due to lapping stimulus comparisons, the “challenging macroeconomic environment" and continued third-party lease-to-own tightening, said CEO Chandra Holt on a Wednesday earnings call. CE sales slid 13.5 to $33.6 million, said the earnings release.