Rebecca Day

INDIANAPOLIS -- A Meridian store will open in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., this fall to showcase the high-end CE company’s products and bring its retail format to the U.S. for the first time, Ken Forsythe, director of product management, told us at the CEDIA Expo.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Nortek’s move to bring its sprawling roster of custom install brands under a single management structure will promote a better sharing of technologies among them, executives at Nortek-affiliated SpeakerCraft said at the CEDIA Expo Wednesday.

Start-up turnkey systems provider G2i is heading to the CEDIA Expo this week with an ambitious plan to take on high-profile interactive service providers ADT and Comcast, overhaul the business model of CEDIA dealers, build value into their companies and largely replace the “custom” portion of the genre with pre-packaged systems, a key executive told us.

Skullcandy said “there’s no proof that Hitachi, its licensees or a third party can replace more than a small part of the volume of articles potentially subject to an exclusion order and a cease and desist order within a commercially reasonable time,” in comments Friday on an ITC complaint brought by Hitachi over unfair trade practices on the manufacture of sintered rare earth magnets. The commission “should not simply take Hitachi Metals’ word for it,” Skullcandy said. Skullcandy said China manufactures 75 percent of the world’s neodymium magnets, a lower number than other projections that have put China’s share of rare earth production at more than 95 percent. “Even if U.S. rare earth production ramps up, much of the processing/alloying and metal fabrication would occur in China,” it said.

Pandora was among the most actively traded stocks early Thursday, up as much as 20 percent following better-than expected results for fiscal 2013 Q2, ended July 31. In an earnings webcast Wednesday, the company said an 86 percent spike in mobile revenue year over year helped fuel revenue growth of 51 percent to $101.3 million. Net loss for fiscal Q2 widened to $5.4 million from a loss of $1.8 million in fiscal Q2 2012, Pandora said. The company raised full-year revenue guidance to $425 million-$432 million from $420 million-$427 million.

Chatter about whether an near field communication (NFC) chip will be included in the next iPhone continued to challenge industry observers Tuesday, several weeks before the sixth iPhone is rumored to hit stores. Some analysts attributed a selloff in shares of NFC chip maker NXP Semiconductors Tuesday to a report on the AnandTech blog late Monday speculating that the next iPhone won’t have an NFC chip. AnandTech’s post was in response to conjecture by Chinese blog Apple.pro and others Sunday that a squarish module not seen on previous iPhones, which appears at the top on leaked photos of the purported front assembly of the latest model, was most likely an NFC chip that would be used for mobile wallet applications. AnandTech countered that theory, maintaining that the primarily metal backside of the new iPhone, and the limited space available for glass RF windows at the top and bottom of the assembly, would present alignment and positioning problems for an NFC antenna and smooth NFC communication with other devices. “Most NFC implementations at present place the inductive coils as near to the center of the device as possible,” AnandTech said, “partly because this is the most optimal way to maximize the area which can be dedicated to it, partly because it makes alignment natural.” An NFC antenna located at the extreme top or bottom of the phone would make alignment with non-iPhones -- including payment tokens or reader tags -- a “much more confusing task” that would fall short of the “Apple-like level of polish everyone is waiting for to drive NFC adoption,” it said.

Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1 could realize a better margin than the iPad if target selling prices hold, said a preliminary report by the IHS Teardown Analysis Service. The HSPA+ version of the Samsung tablet has a bill of materials (BOM) of $283 that bumps to $293 with manufacturing costs added, according to IHS, while the Wi-Fi-only version tallies to a $260 BOM. The modem-equipped tablet sells for roughly $640 in the world market, IHS said, and the Wi-Fi model has U.S. retail pricing of $499.

The PC market is “weak” and channel inventories are “high across the industry” ahead of new product releases, HP CEO Meg Whitman said Wednesday on the company’s fiscal Q3 earnings webcast. HP’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) revenue dropped 10 percent year over year in the quarter to $8.6 billion on the weak market and “aggressive pricing” from competitors, Whitman said. HP is “locked in serious competitive battles,” she said, but the company will “fight to sustain our leadership position,” through targeted marketing and promotions in Q4.

General Motors is taking a segmented approach to the connected car, Sara LeBlanc, GM’s global infotainment program manager, told Consumer Electronics Daily during a press tour to promote the new Chevrolet Spark Tuesday evening in Manhattan. The radio in the downsized Spark, targeted to young, urban drivers, banks off the brains and connectivity of the smartphone, LeBlanc said.

Brother announced a new all-in-one printer called Business Smart with faster print speeds, a smaller footprint and mobile device compatibility that enables users to print and post images from smartphones and tablets. Brother is touting mobile device printing capabilities on the new all-in-ones, Joyce Santos, director of product planning, told us, as a hedge against a falloff in home printing in general. HP has cited a slowdown in home printing in its past several earnings reports, and Santos acknowledged that home printing has generally been flat for Brother, but she said there’s been an uptick in consumers printing from mobile devices. The Business Smart printers come with Apple’s AirPrint “driverless” technology that enables consumers to print photos from an iPhone or iPad, she said, and Brother will release at the end of the month an updated version of its iPrint & Scan app that adds Microsoft Office document printing to a palette that includes photos, PDFs, and Web pages, Santos said. Brother doesn’t have data on how many consumers are printing from mobile devices but customer questions to product managers have shown a strong interest in the feature, she said. The Business Smart printer offers mobile compatibility via Wi-Fi Direct and Wi-Fi 802.11 versions b, g and n, Santos said, and users who want to print over the Internet can do so via a Gmail account and Google Cloud Print. The touchscreen interface has a swipe feature to mimic operations of smartphones, she said. The printer, designed for the small and home office market, outputs up to 11 x 17 prints from a footprint measuring just over that size owing to new paper loading technology that switches paper orientation from portrait to landscape, Santos said, adding that the footprint of the printer is 35 percent smaller than other all-in-one models (with print, scan, fax and copy functions) currently on the market. A new ink cartridge design with thinner walls holds more ink for better print cost per page, she said. Color printing is 7.6 cents per page and monochrome is 2.3 cents per page, she said, and the printer will list for $199 when it ships to office superstores and Best Buy in October. Printing speed was boosted to 20 pages per minute black and 18 ppm color, compared with 12 ppm and 10 ppm in the previous generation, she said.