Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

Your Smart Light Can Tell Amazon and Google When You Go to Bed

This information may seem mundane compared with smartphone geolocation software that follows you around or the trove of personal data Facebook Inc. vacuums up based on your activity. But even gadgets as simple as light bulbs could enable tech companies to fill in blanks about their customers and use the data for marketing purposes. Having already amassed a digital record of activity in public spaces, critics say, tech companies are now bent on establishing a beachhead in the home.

“You can learn the behaviors of a household based on their patterns,” says Brad Russell, who tracks smart home products for researcher Parks Associates Inc. “One of the most foundational things is occupancy. There’s a lot they could do with that.”

From the article "Your Smart Light Can Tell Amazon and Google When You Go to Bed" by Matt Day.

Previously In The News

Digital health care: Better than the doctor's office?

Oh, how times have changed. Over this past year of COVID-19 lockdowns, telehealth saw usage by US broadband households jump from 15% to 41% between the second quarter of 2019 and the same period in 20...

Editor’s Corner—How far can Amazon reach into pay TV?

Parks Associates’ Brett Sappington said during the Pay TV Show, an event produced by Fierce parent company Questex, that Amazon is the only company to get a la carte TV right. On top of that, he said...

CNET's Next Big Thing: Will our homes remain our headquarters?

To pick apart where at-home behavior works and where it doesn't, I assembled three of the smartest people in tech to sort this out in CNET's Next Big Thing presentation at CES 2021: Jennifer Kent, sen...

Deeper Dive—Nothing’s dying in pay TV, it’s just getting segmented and iterated

In fact, I heard all of those questions posed—some of them multiple times—at our first annual Pay TV Show in Denver a few weeks back. The answers were always nuanced, often vaguely unsatisfying … and...