Chinese manufacturing company PCH International has announced its 2011 full year results – reporting a big rise in revenue and record profits off the back of strong demand for smartphones, tablets and ereaders. The company, which has its corporate headquarters in Cork, Ireland and operational headquarters in Shenzhen, China, designs and makes consumer electronics in partnership with PC makers and consumer electronics brands.
PCH International reported a 72 percent increase in revenue for the year — to $ 710 million — while gross profit for the year totalled $ 70.7 million, an increase of 46.6 percent year-on-year, translating to a net profit of $ 17.9 million. EBITDA amounted to a record $ 24.5 million — a 37.9 percent year-on-year rise.
Commenting on the results, CEO Liam Casey pointed to the company’s focus on supply chain and speeding up time-to-market for its customers’ products as key factors contributing to its growth
We operate in a very fast-paced and dynamic industry and we are working with the world’s top brands and world’s best entrepreneurs. This means we have to continuously adapt to offer our customers the best possible services. PCH is revolutionizing traditional supply chain models, and as a result we continue to dramatically shorten the time-to-market for the latest products on the market.
Our continued focus during 2011 facilitated not only strong growth for PCH but also continued success for our customers. We recognize the opportunities to further scale the business and are investing heavily during 2012 to ensure that PCH continues to expand our service offerings, expand the geographies in which we operate, deepen our skillset and most importantly to deliver peace of mind to our customers. We are very excited by the opportunities that lie ahead of us.
Last year PCH raised $ 30m in funding from a combination of existing and new investors — taking its total investment pot to-date to circa $ 77 million. It also launched its own business accelerator program — called PCH Accelerator – to partner with startups on projects including Intuitive Automata’s heathcare robot, Autum.
Once, buyers were overwhelmed with choice. Now, they’re just overwhelmed with a choice of tools to help them choose. But gdgt, one such site, is hoping that it can build the ultimate solution for consumers looking to make smart gadget buying solutions, is launching new custom search tools it hopes will make using it to clear up shopper confusion a no-brainer.
Gdgt is the brainchild of former Engadget founder Peter Rojas and former editor-in-chief of the same site Ryan Block, offering users a huge database of products to rate, review, compare and declare both their ownership of and desire for. For the gadget space, which is pretty strongly rooted in conspicuous consumption, it is a mecca. You can search for search for virtually anything that runs on electricity and get a look at how it’s been reviewed around the web by professionals, and what other users think. Lately, the team behind it has been quietly and steadily adding new features to make it even better at its job.
“We look at everything holistically when we make an evaluation of a product,” Block told me in an interview, explaining that a lot of what gdgt is has to do with what the founding team saw at Engadget. “We kind of sat down and we took a look at what was wrong with the consumer electronics buying experience online, and we came up with this idea that was somewhat akin to Rotten Tomatoes for personal technology, and that is that we wanted to look at everything there was to know about a product and come up with a very simple, easy-to-digest assessment.”
The new gdgt is all about providing a clear ranking methodology to help users get an at-a-glance look at what they should be buying in any given category. All devices get a score, which is built from a variety of different source data, including reviews at tech sites including this one, user reviews, and first-hand research and testing from the gdgt staff themselves. Categories each get Must Haves taken from the highest scoring gadgets (no more than three per) to help make sure that there’s very little digging to do to come up with the best devices overall.
Gdgt’s latest addition is the redesigned ‘Finder’ (the one for cameras is here, but it’s active for all popular product categories and should be available across the site within the week), which uses simple sliders for important factors like price range and screen size, as well as a couple other simple check box filters to instantly narrow the pool of available products. That process is manually tailored for each individual product category, meaning you’ll never have to wade through unnecessary or irrelevant criteria, and Block is keen to note that gdgt also never scrapes its data, instead using a team of editors and curators to manually prune its results so that you won’t run into the sort of screw-ups typical when you hand these kinds of duties over to a robot.
The people-driven approach also means that gdgt can apply a rubric to reviews from sites that don’t necessarily quantify reviews with a firm number score, and still incorporate that input into its recommendations, something a site that scrapes can’t achieve. That leads to the inclusion of high-quality sources, like the New York Times, which otherwise might go overlooked at sites that depend more on strictly data-driven models like Decide.com and Snapsort.
It hasn’t happened overnight, but gdgt’s approach to the world of consumer tech now puts it in the same basic space as something like The Wirecutter, looking to find a better way to help consumers shop. Block notes however that the approach taken by former Gizmodo editor Brian Lam leans even more heavily toward the editorial side of things and away from data-driven techniques, and he sees the two sites as complimentary, not competitive.
The new focused identity of gdgt as an aide for consumers looking for the best way to spend should help the site with its affiliate revenue from retailers, and overall the site’s reputation and growing library of gadget-related knowledge help it with its growing event-driven business. Overall, gdgt has tied its fortunes to the appetites of early adopters and the rapidly growing community of tech consumers, so if it can continue figuring out ways to continue better serving that community, it should be in a very good place.
Windows desktop gadgets, originally introduced in Windows Vista, will reportedly be removed from the final version of Windows 8. That’s the word from Win8china, a site that has obtained one of the latest internal builds of Windows 8. Despite being supported in Windows 8 Consumer and Release Preview editions, build 844x of Windows 8, which is not available publicly, contains no references to desktop gadgets in the control panel or desktop mode.
Microsoft originally introduced a desktop widget engine in its Windows Vista operating system, utilizing a special sidebar. The mini-apps are based on HTML and can obtain information from web feeds. Microsoft removed the sidebar part of its gadgets implementation in Windows 7, but continued to…
2 DOF Slope Pan & Tilt Kit + 2 Servos Round Horn Mount Robot Arduino - SEE VIDEO
$11.99 (0 Bids)End Date: Sunday May-26-2013 5:21:45 PDTBid now | Add to watch list
WIRELESS RC SPIDER ROBOT #18144 ACADEMY SCIENCE MODEL KIT w/IR REMOTE CONTROLLER
$47.00End Date: Sunday Jun-23-2013 14:41:20 PDTBuy It Now for only: $47.00Buy It Now | Add to watch list
NEW VEX Robotics Design System Transmitter and Receiver Kit - with torn box.
$39.99End Date: Sunday Jun-2-2013 5:38:52 PDTBuy It Now for only: $39.99Buy It Now | Add to watch list
There are plenty of ways to get your flight school kicks with your smartphone or tablet — this missile shooting Griffin chopper comes to mind — but few manage to ooze as much style (or cost as much money) as Parrot’s AR.Drone 2.0.
Getting the thing ready to fly is surprisingly simple. Once you’ve popped the battery into place, and turned the thing on, the Drone creates its own Wi-Fi network that the control device connects to. From there, just fire up the FreeFlight app on your iOS or Android device and you’re off to the races.
The big draw for some will be the ability to record the Drone’s aerial journeys. In addition to providing the pilot with an idea of where the drone is going, the small camera pod mounted on the drone’s nose is capable of capturing photos as well as 720p video. The camera’s small sensor means that quality tends to take a hit in low light, but the bigger issue for some is the tendency to see a wiggling effect in recorded video because of the four rotors whirring away.
Let’s be honest here — it’s not the most useful thing to have in your gadget closet (doesn’t everyone have one of those?) unless you’ve got a thing for aerial photography or not-so-covertly spying on people. What it lacks in pure utilitarian functionality it makes up for in sheer fun. There’s something terribly fun about tilting your smartphone around and watching this little quad-rotor aircraft dart around in response to it.
It’s even surprisingly easy to fly, provided you start out slow and put in a few minutes of fiddling first. Sadly, our Mobile Editor Matt Burns didn’t take that rule to heart, as he quickly crashed our own Drone at Disrupt. C’est la vie, but be prepared to do your due diligence if you don’t want to screw up a pricy piece of machinery. That said, Parrot has made it terribly easy to wow your friends with some neat aerial tricks — just double tap a button from within the app to make the Drone flip, and take in the applause.
The Drone is a hell of a lot of fun to play with, but there’s always that price tag to consider — it’ll run you a considerable $ 299. The responsible thing may be to take that money and use it to buy a rock-solid juicer instead, but I think your mental well-being is better served by the ability to explore the skies (or annoy your neighbors).
In this first installment of Gadget Of The Week I decided to try something a bit different. Rather than focus on some obscure cellphone or wonky laptop, I decided to take on one of the biggest questions in the average small and home office: which juicer should I buy? After trying a number of juicers – and investing in a few – I’m pleased to report that the Omega J8006 is definitely worth the investment.
I am what they call, in the medical literature, a fat and lazy blogger. There’s nothing I love more than scarfing down cookies as I sit at my computer. With that in mind (and inspired by Brian Lam’s article at The Wirecutter), I decided to try my hand at juicing.
I began by picking up the $ 99 Le’Equip model which uses a swiftly rotating blade and an ejection system for squeezing the juice out of almost any fruit or vegetable. The price was right – under $ 100 for a fairly sturdy juicer is good – and the reviews were excellent. I also tried the Breville models but those didn’t support the juicing of greens as readily. Obviously there are more (this dude made 290 videos featuring all of his favorite) but I was going for the lower end.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s important to understand the various aspects of juicing that are important to the average consumer. There are multiple types – the Le’Equip is an ejection system that uses centripetal force to push out the juice out of a spout. Then there are masticating juicers. These juicers either use a worm gear or two larger gears to chop food into finer and finer bits. These bits are then smashed to render the juice. They move much more slowly than ejection systems and, in turn, work a bit more efficiently.
What does juicing do for you? The science is still out (and many nutritionists state that juicing isn’t much better than eating a bunch of vegetables and the process removes much of the fiber, rendering the juice less biologically useful) but I personally find that after a big glass of kale, cucumber, and maybe a lemon or apple, I’m less hungry and less inclined to sit at my desk idly snacking on Bugles. I would never eat, say, a head of kale by itself. Juicing takes the tedium out of veggies.
Working with the Le’Equip was quite enjoyable although it tended to spray pulp out of its back end and spit juice out of the top. The speed of the blades – while excellent for rendering juice – didn’t allow for much control.
That’s when the Omega came into my life. This massive, heavy juicer – more a home motor than a real juicer – takes it slow and steady. You feed veggies in, they’re slowly masticated with the thick, 80RPM rotor. As the food moves through it is chopped up and squeezed out into a plastic cup while the pulp falls into another cup. Clean-up is simple. You take the juicer head off, move it to the sink, and uncouple all of the pieces. Then, with some soap and water, you can just rinse off the four pieces and clean the metal screen. You can also run the gear through the dishwasher.
The device also makes nut butters and can extrude pasta. You can even use it as a slow food processor.
The bad news? At $ 299, you’re really going to have to be into juice to pick this thing up. However, compared with the swiftly moving and messier “cheaper” models, I’m very pleased with the 8006′s performance. If you used this in an office, for example, you’d have considerably less to clean up and the system is far more durable than other machines I’ve seen. No one wants to clean up a scrim of flung orange pulp off of the kitchen wall, which is why the 8006′s slow-moving auger is a much better choice.
Has juicing helped me lose weight? Not yet, but here’s hoping. Does it make me feel a little better and less inclined to eat junk. I think so. And anything that can keep my fat face out of a bag of M&M-laden Chex mix is the thing for me.
Click to view slideshow.
Two gadgets enter, one leaves. It’s that simple. Welcome to the TC Gadget Review Battle where two competing products are pitted against each other. No wishy washy conclusion based on an arbitrary numbering system, just a reliable buying recommendation.
These two speaker docks couldn’t be more similar. They both use the same overall design, have nearly identical feature sets and the same $ 399 price tag. But one is a Sony and one is a Logitech. Well let’s get to it: The Logitech UE Air Speaker vs the Sony RDP-XA700IP.
FeaturesThese are AirPlay docks. They’re designed to sit on a shelf, look pretty, and blast music streamed from an iOS product. That’s all they do. For better or worse, these $ 400 speaker docks lack any other feature besides the arguably trivial feature of a 3.5mm input on the backside. Both lack an FM tuner, digital display, or on-board EQ functions. A remote ships with the Sony, though.
This feature-lite philosophy actually works well in this case. All the functions besides power and volume are tasked to the docked iDevice. It further enforces the draw of AirPlay in that the speaker is just that: a speaker. The real power lies in the iPhone or iPad.
Both speaker docks claim to work with iPhone cases. The Logitech is much more friendly to cases with a taller dock connector. The Sony doesn’t work with anything thicker than a thin bumper.
DesignSony knows design and it shows. The RDP-XA700IP is gorgeous with a slight strip of metal on top of the hefty dock. It’s the perfect size, really. At just 15-inches long and 7-inches tall, the footprint isn’t substantial enough to eat up space on a table but at the same time not small enough that a docked iPad looks out of place. Conventional wisdom would suggest that an iPad would block the sound but it doesn’t thanks to the large port sitting opposite of the iPad.
The Logitech looks cheap in comparison. Its outer shell is comprised mostly of lightweight shiny plastic and the whole thing feels underwhelmingly light. The extra long casing doesn’t seem to improve the overall sound dynamics; it’s just a waste of space. That said, I do prefer the volume dial on the Logitech verses the rocker buttons on the Sony — volume controls should always be a round dial — but the Sony looks and feels like a $ 400 kit where the Logitech does not.
Both of these models have retractable docks. The Sony’s dock deploys with a measure of confidence. A gentle inward push causes the dock to extend with the hiss of a high-end automobile component. The Logitech’s snaps out with the same elegance as a plastic plaything.
AirPlay SetupThe magic of AirPlay is often in the absolute lack of setup required. Once these speaker docks are on a local network with an iDevice, they’re instantly available for media streaming. However, the Logitech is a lot easier to set up.
It only takes downloading an app and running through several screens to set up the Logitech model. It’s idiot-proof. With the Sony, the owner is still prompted to download an app when docking for the first time. However, Sony’s implementation isn’t as clean and straightforward as Logitech’s. The app is much cleaner.
If the iOS app fails to work, both speaker docks can be connected to the local WiFi network through WPS.
Sound QualityWith such a small feature set, sound quality is the most important factor in this comparison. It’s the only deciding factor between the two docks. Thankfully it’s an easy decision. The Sony is the clear winner but the Logitech still sounds fine.
The Sony RDP-XA700IP produces a surprising amount of bass, which is often sorely lacking in desktop speakers. The stronger low-end helps dramatically. I dare say the Sony RDP-XA700IP is the best tabletop speaker dock I’ve heard — including the B&O Zeppelin. The sound is deep, rich, and very satisfying at both high and low volumes. The confident bass will make items on your desk dance around.
The Logitech fails to produce the same rich sound. It lacks a strong low-end response, making the sound much more flat and lifeless. At high volume levels the little bass it does have starts to clip and distort. This is not a party speaker.
WinnerIt’s pretty rare nowadays to find two products just so similar. The physical differences between the two amount to nothing more than design decisions and meaningless quirks. The Sony is a bit smaller, comes with a remote and is harder to set up. The Logitech on the other hand is very easy to setup and is more friendly with iPhone cases.
But these are speaker docks. Their primary lot in life is to reproduce sound. On that thought alone the Sony wins by a magnificent mile. It produces sound that’s much more rich, bold, and accurate. It easily rivals high-end 2.1 speaker setups with a powered subwoofer. The Logitech is flat and muffled in comparison. Superior sound wins over easier setup and a more friendly dock connector.
Buy the Sony.
Click to view slideshow.
Two gadgets enter, one leaves. It’s that simple. Welcome to the TC Gadget Review Battle where two competing products are pitted against each other. No wishy washy conclusion based on an arbitrary numbering system, just a reliable buying recommendation.
These two speaker docks couldn’t be more similar. They both use the same overall design, have nearly identical feature sets and the same $ 399 price tag. But one is a Sony and one is a Logitech. Well let’s get to it: The Logitech UE Air Speaker vs the Sony RDP-XA700IP.
FeaturesThese are AirPlay docks. They’re designed to sit on a shelf, look pretty, and blast music streamed from an iOS product. That’s all they do. For better or worse, these $ 400 speaker docks lack any other feature besides the arguably trivial feature of a 3.5mm input on the backside. Both lack an FM tuner, digital display, or on-board EQ functions. A remote ships with the Sony, though.
This feature-lite philosophy actually works well in this case. All the functions besides power and volume are tasked to the docked iDevice. It further enforces the draw of AirPlay in that the speaker is just that: a speaker. The real power lies in the iPhone or iPad.
Both speaker docks claim to work with iPhone cases. The Logitech is much more friendly to cases with a taller dock connector. The Sony doesn’t work with anything thicker than a thin bumper.
DesignSony knows design and it shows. The RDP-XA700IP is gorgeous with a slight strip of metal on top of the hefty dock. It’s the perfect size, really. At just 15-inches long and 7-inches tall, the footprint isn’t substantial enough to eat up space on a table but at the same time not small enough that a docked iPad looks out of place. Conventional wisdom would suggest that an iPad would block the sound but it doesn’t thanks to the large port sitting opposite of the iPad.
The Logitech looks cheap in comparison. Its outer shell is comprised mostly of lightweight shiny plastic and the whole thing feels underwhelmingly light. The extra long casing doesn’t seem to improve the overall sound dynamics; it’s just a waste of space. That said, I do prefer the volume dial on the Logitech verses the rocker buttons on the Sony — volume controls should always be a round dial — but the Sony looks and feels like a $ 400 kit where the Logitech does not.
Both of these models have retractable docks. The Sony’s dock deploys with a measure of confidence. A gentle inward push causes the dock to extend with the hiss of a high-end automobile component. The Logitech’s snaps out with the same elegance as a plastic plaything.
AirPlay SetupThe magic of AirPlay is often in the absolute lack of setup required. Once these speaker docks are on a local network with an iDevice, they’re instantly available for media streaming. However, the Logitech is a lot easier to set up.
It only takes downloading an app and running through several screens to set up the Logitech model. It’s idiot-proof. With the Sony, the owner is still prompted to download an app when docking for the first time. However, Sony’s implementation isn’t as clean and straightforward as Logitech’s. The app is much cleaner.
If the iOS app fails to work, both speaker docks can be connected to the local WiFi network through WPS.
Sound QualityWith such a small feature set, sound quality is the most important factor in this comparison. It’s the only deciding factor between the two docks. Thankfully it’s an easy decision. The Sony is the clear winner but the Logitech still sounds fine.
The Sony RDP-XA700IP produces a surprising amount of bass, which is often sorely lacking in desktop speakers. The stronger low-end helps dramatically. I dare say the Sony RDP-XA700IP is the best tabletop speaker dock I’ve heard — including the B&O Zeppelin. The sound is deep, rich, and very satisfying at both high and low volumes. The confident bass will make items on your desk dance around.
The Logitech fails to produce the same rich sound. It lacks a strong low-end response, making the sound much more flat and lifeless. At high volume levels the little bass it does have starts to clip and distort. This is not a party speaker.
WinnerIt’s pretty rare nowadays to find two products just so similar. The physical differences between the two amount to nothing more than design decisions and meaningless quirks. The Sony is a bit smaller, comes with a remote and is harder to set up. The Logitech on the other hand is very easy to setup and is more friendly with iPhone cases.
But these are speaker docks. Their primary lot in life is to reproduce sound. On that thought alone the Sony wins by a magnificent mile. It produces sound that’s much more rich, bold, and accurate. It easily rivals high-end 2.1 speaker setups with a powered subwoofer. The Logitech is flat and muffled in comparison. Superior sound wins over easier setup and a more friendly dock connector.
Buy the Sony.
Click to view slideshow.
An interesting thing is happening in hardware marketing these days and I think Devin noticed it yesterday when he pointed out that Samsung, in their marketing of the Samsung Galaxy Note, is changing the script when it comes to gadget advertising, a tendency that is becoming more and more apparent in newer ads from many big players.
First, let’s look at the history of CE advertising. For most of the 1980s, computer marketing didn’t really exist. Take a look at this gem from a 1984 issue of Analog:
This is a true classic: an advertisement that tells nearly everything about the product in 10 point type. Similarly, you had games advertisements like this:
Here the “renders” (really acrylic on cardboard) take center stage while the actual game screens appear amazingly small in the lower left corner. The sale was about the sizzle because the customers knew that they weren’t getting much steak.
This continued for most of the 1980s and then into the 1990s. Let’s call this “nerd-to-nerd” advertising. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but if you were reading Analog in 1984, you probably were hurting for a prom date.
Suddenly, in 1996, however, Sony created a parallel message to their standard advertising by featuring futuristic scenes of models walking into cyberspace while holding Vaio computers. This was, to the best of my recollection, the first time that CE marketing was aspirational (I could be wrong, but this is the first time in my memory that a CE manufacturer didn’t talk at a demographic and instead suggested you could attain a demographic through their products.) Nerds, it seemed, were suddenly cool.
Thus was born a dual marketing message. The first message appeared in the trade press – in PC Magazine and Laptop and the like – the advertisements were a step removed from the two ads above: for geeks, by geeks. I remember, for example, the Laptop magazine ad sales team marketing the magazine as the one title that will ensure an advertiser that the reader will come out of the issue ready to buy a laptop or accessory. Interestingly, this sort of advertising has actually been supplanted by the gadget blogs who, in fact, do a lot of the nerd-to-nerd dialogue in their reviews. Who needs to buy ad space when someone will write a 2,000 word article about your product and you can expect thousands of people to read it in a famished frenzy?
The second message appeared in the glossy magazines and on TV. This was a lifestyle message, a message that swept much of the technology under the rug and instead focused on how the technology would fit in your home. For example:
Nintendo was selling “fun” and not hardware. Or take a look at this oddly prescient Lisa ad:
Or this downright embarrassing iPod ad:
The message here was one of utility. It said “You will have fun/work better/be able to rip music” with this product. In short it was “You can do X very well and we know you absolutely love doing X.”
For years you had two synchronous marketing plants. The script was simple in most cases: speeds, feeds, an image of the product. Aside from a few odd examples like the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercials, most nerd-to-nerd CE advertising focused on hard claims. This sort of marketing appeared in magazines and newspapers and was focused on a crowd that, upon seeing a specific item, would immediately grasp its utility. The other side of the coin was the more esoteric lifestyle ad focused on non-adopters who knew they probably needed a computer but didn’t want to get bogged down. Thus was born an amalgam of the two, the “speeds and feeds” ad, allowing manufacturers to compete on nebulous claims of speed and memory sizes. For example, check out:
What do you notice? Numbers, numbers, numbers. You have prices, you have screen sizes, you have (in the Macs’ case) a clock speed. More is better, right? In fact, this style of advertising offered a false sense of safety for confused buyers. The Speed and Megapixel Wars drove manufacturers to crow mostly meaningless numbers until recently when the chip industry essentially flatlined. In the days when 800MHz vs. 1GHz meant something, it was fine to share those numbers. Now, when many more aspects of a PC are considerably more important, they don’t mean much at all.
In terms of television ads the focus was on “Us vs. Them:” Mac vs. PC, PC Hunters, iPhone vs. Everyone else. For example, you could argue that the recent Samsung ads maintained this nerds-to-nerds messaging but with a soupçon of ridiculousness, culminating in Superbowl Sunday’s wildly aspirational street party ad:
Additionally, marketers have gone in a very weird direction when trying to differentiate multiple Android products. When everything is a tablet, how do you stand out? Last spring there was a short push to grab the “early adopter” with tactics familiar with the speeds and feeds consumer yet with a bit of tongue in cheek. The best example of this? A nice little Verizon fantasy made for the Xoom last May.
As markets converge, there is less need to worry that the audience won’t understand a particular product. The fact that Verizon used the words “Tegra processor” on national TV points to the assumption that the watcher a) knows what a processor is at all and b) is aware that there is something called a Tegra. Intel pull off brand awareness with a cute jingle. Nvidia has a long way to go before “Tegra Inside” is a household name.
So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us in the enviable position of being talked to like intelligent consumers and it leaves marketers grasping at how to market their products to a less sophisticated consumer. One solution is luxury branding. Take, for example, the above photo of Edward Norton and some woman holding a Prada phone by LG. Now, to be clear, the only people I know who own Prada phones are my niece and sister-in-law who bought them because they were on sale. LG knows that the hard-core geek wouldn’t look twice at a Prada phone in the wild. Therefore, they need to add a bit of glamor. In fact, Norton(‘s PR representative) writes in the press release:
Mr Norton also added: “It was a pleasure collaborating with PRADA and LG, both Global brands with impeccable reputations for being the most innovative and respected in their fields.”Amen, guy who played a skinhead in American History X and a schizophrenic sociopath in Fight Club! See also: Lady Gaga working as creative director of Polaroid (a position that didn’t last past the duration of CES 2011, but at least she got benefits), Ashton Kutcher:
And so on.
I also saw a move towards luxury branding at CES when Tumi (the luxury bag brand) show some iPad cases and other junk behind a red velvet rope. Tumi gear, to be clear, is actually made by Jasco, the same guys that license the GE brand to sell cut-rate electronic components. Rather than just show their wares, they kept things behind a roped off door, suggesting an exclusivity that is, in truth, quite alien at CES. Their booth was more similar to one of the booths I visit expensive wristwatch events than anything at CES I’ve ever seen. This sense of exclusivity is quite disheartening, especially in an industry that revels in open dialogue.
CE marketing is constantly in flux but recently it has been trending towards the vacuous. While I don’t long for the days of full page ads featuring reams of techspeak, I think that, as Devin noted, these marketers are trying too hard. Our generation has been raised on marketing and intense pressure rarely works anymore. Just because you can hire Ashton or Ed doesn’t mean you should and just because The Darkness wasn’t doing much this year doesn’t mean they should represent a product that is, at its heart, a very complex piece of machinery. Respect us, CE manufacturers, and we’ll respect you.
Good news, gadget hounds! The new “try before you buy” subscription service called YBUY is exiting its public beta, backed by $ 750,000 in seed funding. The concept is simple, and should have major appeal for the gadget-obsessed: for just $ 24.95 per month, you can test drive the latest electronics, home and kitchen gadgets for 30 days before deciding to purchase or return the items.
At launch, the site is serving up highly sought-after gadgets like the iPad 2, Dyson heaters, Jawbone headsets, iRobot Roombas and more.
The gadgets are shipped to customers for free, and also include a return label for free shipping on the way back to YBUY if you decide you’re not interested in purchasing. However, if find that you can’t bear to part with your shiny new iPad 2 (as is the exception, of course), you can proceed to purchase the item minus the $ 24.95 you already paid.
The company says it will also discount items under regular retail prices, too, to make buying through YBUY more compelling. This isn’t always the case, though. For example, YBUY lists the iPad 2 for $ 499.99 and the Jawbone Jambox for $ 199.99 – those are the going rates. Explains CEO Stephen Svajian, “for manufacturers, we provide an easy-to-use sales channel that allows them to offer refurbished products to consumers without the added cost of marketing and sales.” In other words, not all the gadgets are the cheaper (but manufacturer-certified) refurbs.
The Manhattan Beach, Ca.-based startup was founded by serial entrepreneur Stephen Svajian and Kevin Wall, a Managing Partner at Craton Equity Partners and CEO of Live Earth, among other things. The company’s $ 750,000 in seed funding comes from the founders themselves and other angels.
