GM is “moving fast” in the connected car space to build on the long-term financial commitment the company made to the OnStar program 17 years ago, Mark Reuss, president, GM North America, told journalists at the GM booth Wednesday at the New York International Auto Show. The equipment GM put into vehicles to enable OnStar service in the past “we generally did not price for,” Reuss said. “That’s a long-term financial commitment,” he said, saying the company’s recently announced deal with AT&T for embedded 4G service beginning with model year 2015 vehicles is an “expansion of that pipe.”
Rebecca Day
Rebecca Day, Senior editor, joined Warren Communications News in 2010. She’s a longtime CE industry veteran who has also written about consumer tech for Popular Mechanics, Residential Tech Today, CE Pro and others. You can follow Day on Instagram and Twitter: @rebday
Calling infotainment in vehicles the “new competitive battleground,” Jeanne Merchant, a lead development engineer at General Motors, unveiled the 2014 Buick LaCrosse, including its upgraded IntelliLink system, at a media launch Tuesday to preview the New York International Auto Show Tuesday. “Customer attention has moved to connectivity and infotainment systems as a key product differentiator,” Merchant said, saying consumers have “high expectations” that the connectivity they have with their smartphones and tablets should transfer to their vehicles.
Lutron sponsored a Home Depot workshop Thursday at a Home Depot store in New York on how to install a dimmer switch. The event was part of a series of Do It Herself workshops Home Depot operates monthly throughout its stores for female homeowners. The workshop drew more than 50 people, a combination of Lutron employees, press covering the event and Home Depot customers who signed up for the workshop. According to Paul Lobo, vice president-retail business at Lutron, Home Depot averages six attendees at the Do It Herself workshops, but the Lutron event “far exceeded” expectations. Through the sponsorship, Lutron hopes to boost awareness of the energy savings made possible with lighting control products, Lobo said.
Samsung supports “as many wireless charging options as possible” for its smartphones, Michael Lin, marketing manager for Samsung Mobile, told Consumer Electronics Daily Thursday, but he sought to underscore the company’s commitment to the wireless power transfer (WPT) technology being pushed by the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) for future devices. The focus on wireless charging widened late last week when the competing Wireless Power Consortium trumpeted its Qi wireless charging technology for the much-hyped Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone that will ship in late April.
Second-screen devices will fuel the behavior of social TV consumers over the next two years, according to research from Gartner. Gartner’s latest findings coincided with Samsung’s launch of its 2013 Smart TV lineup (see separate report in this issue), which focused on the company’s Smart Hub platform, including a dedicated social TV section, for connected TVs and mobile devices.
Wireless charging is another piece to add to the lengthy feature set of the Samsung Galaxy S4 that’s due to ship in late April, and the various wireless charging organizations hope their members will reap their share of the promising S4 ecosystem. The Wireless Power Consortium wasted no time following the S4 announcement to promote the fact that Samsung demonstrated at the Samsung Unpacked event its Qi wireless charging platform in backplates and wireless charging pads that will be available as accessories from select providers when the phone ships. Samsung demonstration of Qi is evidence that “Qi is the way to go,” Menno Treffers, chairman of the Wireless Power Consortium, the industry group behind Qi, told us.
LG is running a March Madness promotion called “Do March Right” as part of its corporate sponsorship of the 2013 NCAA Basketball Championship tournament that begins this week (LG.com/NCAA). The promotion -- a contest for best “game-time recipes” -- runs across LG’s appliance, TV and mobile divisions, the company said. The sponsorship includes retailer tie-ins, print, broadcast and online advertising and on-site events, including a one-on-one LG Coaches’ Cook-Off at the Final Four hosted by celebrity chef Richard Blais and featuring the Harlem Globetrotters. The promotion is being run through Facebook with the recipe winner to be announced on LG’s massive Times Square video billboard April 8, the date of the tournament’s championship game, according to LG. The company chose 16 recipes from submissions it received, and consumers can vote on the recipes using a bracket format. At the same time they're voting on recipes, participants can register to enter a contest for LG prizes including a 3D TV, washer and dryer, and LG Optimus tablet, along with a chance to win tickets to the Final Four tournament in Atlanta next month, rules said. Participants can vote and enter the contest each day of the promotion, LG said. Last year, LG extended its alliance with the NCAA via a multi-year agreement that runs through 2015. Under the agreement, negotiated with CBS Sports and Turner Sports, LG will continue as an official NCAA corporate partner and have exclusive category marketing and promotional rights related to 89 NCAA championship events across 23 different sports, it said. LG didn’t disclose its budget for the “Do March Right” promotion. Hhgregg, meanwhile, is piggybacking on the LG promotion with its own 64 Teams/64 TVs contest that began Monday. The hhgregg contest is divided into six rounds that run over the course of the tournament. Contestants can enter each round at hhgregg’s website for a chance to win LG TVs, including 32 32-inch models, 16 42-inch models, eight 47-inch TVs, four 50-inch units, two 50-inch Google TVs and the grand prize: a 60-inch TV, 32-inch TV and home theater system. In addition to the contest, hhgregg has marked down prices on select TVs, appliances and furniture to spur traffic in advance of the NCAA tournament under the website banner “Markdown Madness.” An LG 55-inch 55LS4500 LED-lit LCD TV was slashed $300 to $699 in the deal.
Interest in smartphone trade-ins has spiked 25 percent in the last month on rumors of the much-awaited Samsung S IV, scheduled for a Wednesday evening launch in New York, CExchange Chief Marketing Officer Bob Kilinski told Consumer Electronics Daily. “When you see a product launch blurb” in the press, he said, “you know you're going to see a ton of appraisals come in because people want to know what their device is worth,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of interest in this release,” Kilinski said, comparing the Samsung S IV buzz to the hype around an iPhone launch.
LCD TV panel manufacturers are scaling back business strategies for 2013 as LCD TV demand growth slows, according to the latest quarterly LCD TV value chain report from NPD DisplaySearch. Panel makers’ shift to avoid an oversupply of LCD TV panels is a “drastic change in business models,” involving new strategic alliances, improving capacity allocation and expanding product portfolios to include larger screen sizes, said Deborah Yang, DisplaySearch research director.
The vehicle’s dashboard is the next technology frontier for content companies, said panelists in a Future of Radio discussion at the Piper Jaffray conference in New York. “The battle for the dashboard is real,” said Bob Struble, CEO of HD Radio developer iBiquity Digital. Where AM/FM used to have a monopoly position in the dash, now “you can clearly assume that the dashboard will have Sirius radio built in, it will have Internet connectivity, native Pandora or Slacker or iHeart or TuneIn and Bluetooth connectivity,” he said. It will also have HD, AM/FM and hard disk storage for the user’s music collection, he said. A vehicle-based radio world is emerging where there will be a variety of choices rather than an either/or scenario Struble said. Rather than picking from Internet, satellite or broadcast radio, “they're just going to build it all in,” he said. The competition will be for “who has the most relevant content for the consumer,” he said. “There won’t be one clear winner,” he said, as consumers will “jump back and forth” between media. HD Radio, he said, makes broadcasters more competitive in that environment by offering interactivity and the ability to show album art. Lew Dickey, CEO of Cumulus Media, compared the competition for ears in the car to that for eyeballs in the living room. “This is media today,” he said. “It’s all a competition for consumers who want compelling content,” he said. Internet radio service provider Slacker, too, is “moving into drive time,” said CEO Jim Cady. Cady noted the ability of Slacker servers to keep track of listeners, offering data telling when listeners are in vehicles and when they're interacting with the service.