Providing market intelligence for more than 35 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

Second-tier boom to drive global OTT to more than 400MN subs by 2022

Overall globally, Parks calculates that there are more than 265 million households worldwide and that there will be more than 400 million OTT video service subscriptions by 2022. While Netflix, Amazon...

Smart Homes: The Power, the Pleasure and the Pain

Amazon's servers were down for a large part of the morning on the day the outage occurred, taking Alexa-powered devices out of commission. Incidents like this may occur more often as the popularity of...

A Home Robot Could Be Amazon's Next Gamble

Robot vacuum cleaners represent a thin market sliver, according to Parks Associates. They can be found in just 5-6 percent of broadband households. "It's not a breakout product, but it's far and ah...

Amazon just announced 5 offerings to shake up the home security market

It also hopes to bring new consumers into the market. The US smart home market has long been plagued by slow growth, largely due to device and platform fragmentation and high prices. However, consumer...