Screen Innovations added rep firms and expanded its commercial reach, the projection screen manufacturer said Monday. One of the rep firms, House of Representatives, will work with AV dealers in New England and upstate New York. N&S Marketing and Sales, Seattle, is managing residential and commercial accounts in the Pacific Northwest. Rep firms CalWest, which covers southern California, and C&E Marketing, in Florida, will add commercial accounts to their client rosters, the company said.

Toshiba America Information Systems is recalling lithium-ion battery packs used in its laptops because of the risk they can overheat, posing burn and fire hazards to consumers, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a Wednesday notice. The battery packs, which were sourced from Panasonic, were installed in 39 models of Toshiba Portege, Satellite and Tecra laptops sold since June 2011 through Office Depot, Staples and other major retailers and at Toshiba’s online store, the notice said. Toshiba estimates about 91,000 laptops sold in the U.S., plus 10,000 sold in Canada, are affected, the notice said. Toshiba has received four reports of the battery packs overheating and melting, but no injuries have been reported, it said.

Amazon’s “critical” update for early-generation Kindle e-readers, which the company first notified registered owners of March 2, was trending online and on social media Monday, the day before non-updated devices were to lose connections to the cloud. Kindles, starting with the first-generation model launched in 2007 and running through the fifth-gen Paperwhite model, “require an important software update by March 22, 2016 in order to continue to download Kindle books from the Cloud, access the Kindle Store, and use other Kindle services on their device,” Amazon said. Kindle e-reader models introduced in 2013 and later don’t require the update. Customers who don’t upgrade their software by Tuesday by connecting through the Amazon wireless can resume access by visiting the Kindle help page, Amazon said.

The technology and “business model transitions” taking place in the market are trends that “favor” Jabil Circuit, CEO Mark Mondello said on a Wednesday earnings call. “Consumers demand more and more devices be connected, connected to each other, connected to the cloud and connected to the end user -- automobiles, appliances, meters, home security systems, drones, just to name a few,” said Mondello, whose firm provides contract-manufacturing and supply-chain services to companies like Cisco, HP and Sony Mobile Communications, but counts Apple as its top customer. “This world of massive connectivity assures that more and more data will be generated. This in turn requires more bandwidth, which requires more computing power and more storage. This is all good news for Jabil.” Mondello thinks mobile devices “are here to stay,” as they “monitor and control an infinite number of connected devices as well as connect all of us in our daily lives,” he said. “Apple remains dominant in this space and we're fully committed to serving their brand.” On Apple, “I love our biggest customer,” Mondello said in Q&A. “And we'll continue to make investments for them and we will be prudent in that. I think our ability to partner with them is outstanding, I think our ability to handle their volatility if and when it occurs is really, really good and I have a lot of confidence in Apple.” Representatives at Apple didn't comment Thursday.

Sony Electronics announced Thursday new products for its Life Space UX concept launched at CES 2014 (see 1401080023). Sony is showcasing the new products -- the LED Bulb speaker, Glass Sound speaker and Portable Ultra Short Throw Projector -- at the Architectural Digest Design Show in New York, and will begin selling in the U.S. in stores and online in May through a partnership with the Museum of Modern Art store, it said. The bulb speaker ($239) connects to smartphones via Bluetooth and allows users to access their music and adjust light settings from an app. The 360-degree Glass Sound speaker ($799) houses an LED filament within the cylinder to combine light with music. The vibration of the glass is said to mirror that of human vocal chords to create a “lifelike sound experience,” said the company. Maximum audio output for the speaker is 13W. The battery-powered speaker runs for up to four hours on a charge, Sony said. The $999 portable short-throw projector has an SXRD panel and is designed to project images up to 80 inches wide onto a movie wall, virtual window pane or work of art, said Sony. The projector, controllable from a smartphone, comes with a companion unit that can transmit signals from a PC, Blu-ray player or cable box via HDMI.

Universal Electronics (UEI) said it signed a warrants agreement with Comcast as an extension of a partnership to develop advanced technology products. That follows a development and supply collaboration renewed this year, in which UEI supplies the voice remote as part of Comcast’s X1 Entertainment Operating System, said UEI. Comcast can acquire shares of UEI stock tied to the potential fulfillment of undisclosed, pre-defined purchase milestones. The agreement positions UEI to provide “innovative products” across Xfinity Home, said UEI CEO Paul Arling.

It's “incumbent” upon HP Inc. as the “global commercial PC leader” to “reinvent what the category is capable of,” such as with the introduction this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona of the HP Elite x3 all-in-one device, CEO Dion Weisler said on a Wednesday earnings call. The Windows 10-based HP Elite x3 is a “revolutionary category-creating mobile solution that brings together mobility and computing in a truly meaningful way,” Weisler said. It “unites phablet, laptop and desktop experiences into a single device,” he said. For 2015, “the overall PC market was slower to recover than expected, but we continued to execute, manage our channel inventory and improve product mix,” he said. HP expected “tough market conditions” in the PC business for 2015, “and we expect it for several quarters ahead,” Weisler said in Q&A. “We broadly agree” with industry projections that PC unit sales will suffer “mid-single-digit” declines in 2016, he said. “However, we see in the back half of this year that revenue will begin to improve as the technology improves and as channel inventory works its way out of the system.” HP thinks “the PC lines are being redrawn at the moment,” he said. “And our goal, as it has been consistently for the past three years, is to gain profitable share.” HP will chose “where to play, where not to play,” he said. “We continue to drive innovation into the system, and we're not after share for share's sake.” Though Windows 10 is “a tremendous operating system platform,” HP has “not yet seen the anticipated Windows 10 stimulation of demand that we would have hoped for, and we're carefully monitoring any sort of price developments that could further weaken demand,” he said. “So we're operating in still a large market. The big guys are getting bigger, and we think there is opportunity in that landscape.” Microsoft representatives didn’t comment Thursday on Weisler's Windows 10 remarks.

The popular expression “Go big or go home” couldn't be “more relevant than in the cinema industry right now,” Imax CEO Richard Gelfond said on a Wednesday earnings call. “With TV technology becoming so advanced and with Netflix and Amazon becoming such efficient distributors of film and television content, albeit often on a delayed basis, studios understand that big blockbuster movies are the best way to get consumers out of their homes and into the cinema,” Gelfond said. “And those consumers are increasingly looking for differentiated experiences when they come to the cinema,” such as with the “big screens with crystal-clear immersive visuals and sound” that the “Imax experience” has to offer, he said. Imax had about 80 “signings” of luxury home theater system installations at the end of 2015 through its joint venture business with TCL (see 1403120026), Gelfond said in Q&A. “We haven't put a lot of capital into it,” he said of the joint venture. “It's a stage capital investment kind of thing,” he said, though “I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of orders we had last year. But you shouldn't look for a significant accretion or dilution from that effort in 2016. I think it's more like 2017, where you'll see an impact.”

AsusTeK Computer agreed to settle FTC allegations that it put hundreds of thousands of consumers' home networks at risk due to critical security flaws in the Taiwan-based company's routers, and exposed thousands of people's sensitive personal information on the Internet due to insecure cloud services, the commission said in a news release Tuesday. The commission, which voted 4-0 to approve an administrative complaint and proposed consent order, said that Asus must establish and maintain a comprehensive security program over the next 20 years and be subject to independent audits during that time. The company will have to notify consumers about software updates and give them an option to register for direct security notices through email, text message or a push notification, FTC said. The commission will publish the agreement soon in the Federal Register, and the pact will be open for public comment through March 24. The FTC alleged Asus "didn't take reasonable steps to secure the software on its routers," even though the company claimed the devices contained many security features to protect computers from hacking and malware. For instance, the commission said a malware researcher in April discovered a large-scale exploit campaign by hackers who specifically targeted numerous Asus router models, enabling them to hijack consumers' Web traffic. The commission also alleged that Asus advertised secure services on its routers called AiCloud and AiDisk that allowed consumers to plug a USB hard drive into the router to create their own cloud storage, but those services had "serious security flaws." The FTC said hackers could exploit the AiCloud service to get access to people's connected storage device and that AiDisk didn't encrypt consumers' files in transit. In February 2014, hackers exploited these flaws to get access to more than 12,900 consumers' connected storage devices, the commission said. Asus didn't immediately comment.

Apple recalled travelers' AC adapter kits for Mac computers and certain iOS devices after receiving 12 reports of wall plug adapters breaking and consumers receiving shocks when using them overseas, including three reports of consumers who were medically evaluated and released, said the company. The recall covers AC adapter kits and plug adapters for Australia/New Zealand/Argentina, Brazil, Continental Europe and Korea. The two-prong wall plug adapters can break and expose the metal portion of the adapter, posing a shock risk, said the company. No reports of incidents or injuries were reported by U.S. consumers, it said. Consumers should stop using the recalled wall plug adapters and contact Apple for free replacements. The recall includes 814,000 adapters (about $30), including 81,000 sold in Canada, sold at Apple stores and other electronics outlets from January 2003 through January 2015, said the company.