Providing Market Intelligence for 40 Years

In The News

IRobot faces a murky future amid rising Roomba competitors

The company is still “number one,” said Elizabeth Parks, president of market research firm Parks Associates in Dallas. But it’s a shaky number one. Parks estimates that iRobot had nearly two-thirds of the robot vacuum market in 2018, but now holds only a 48 percent share. Meanwhile, rival robot makers like SharkNinja, Roborock, Eufy, and Ecovacs have been steadily chipping away.

One possible reason, according to Parks, is concern about data privacy. More advanced versions of the Roomba and other robots use visual sensors to generate detailed maps of the user’s home. This information is shared with the manufacturers to develop more advanced products, but it could also potentially be used to monitor users.

From the article, "IRobot faces a murky future amid rising Roomba competitors" by Hiawatha Bray

Previously In The News

Is The Increasingly Crowded Streaming Marketplace Going to Turn Consumers Back to Piracy?

In the short term, consumers are more than happy to keep paying for multiple services. According to a report published by Parks Associates in June 2021, 46 percent of US homes with broadband-level Int...

Smart Home Evolution: Elephant in the Room

While I’m eager to watch the unfolding evolution of smart home technologies, with mind-blowing features like voice-enabled technology, machine learning, virtual reality, location services, and demand...

For years, Amazon ruled the smart speaker market. Now the crown is slipping

And these aren’t the only signs that Amazon’s dominance starting to shake. “We are seeing Amazon-branded devices are going down compared to the other players,” Dina Abdelrazik, a smart home research a...

The Market For Hearable Devices 2016-2020 – And Then There Were Airpods…

The hearables market goes back to the first Bluetooth headsets which were launched in 2001, followed by wireless stereo headphones, which arrived a few years later. Neither made great waves in the mar...