LG Acquires Dutch Startup Athom to Accelerate its AI-Enabled Smart-Home Ecosystem

The story was out for a few days, but now it's officially confirmed that LG Electronics recently acquired an 80 percent stake in Athom, the Dutch smart home company based in Enschede, Netherlands. Known for its Homey smart home platform, the startup was struggling and lacked the scale that LG will provide. The agreement includes plans for LG to acquire the remaining 20 percent within the next three years. LG will maintain Athom as a separate operation, while expanding its own open smart home ecosystems globally.

Q-SYS, a division of QSC, announced a significant update to Q-SYS Reflect, including new pricing and feature tier optimizations for easier deployment and scalability. Now an intrinsic part of the Q-SYS Platform, Q-SYS Reflect enables access to robust cloud-based monitoring and management capabilities, expanding this full stack AV platform to also harness the exponential power of AI, within the data and cloud-manageable architecture of Q-SYS.

FiRa Consortium, the organization that defines the specifications and ensures ecosystem interoperability of products and services utilizing UWB technology, has announced a major advancement of its technical specifications. With the publication of FiRa 2.0 Technical Specifications, the consortium is furthering the scope and interoperability of the ultra-wideband ecosystem, introducing new use cases that include Point and Trigger features that lets users control UWB-enabled connected systems, such as TVs or smart speakers.

Wearable demand growth declined to 14.6% YoY in 2022 from 27.7% YoY in 2021 due to the economic slowdown after the peak of the COVID pandemic. This trend persisted in the first half of 2023, as longer replacement cycles and a lack of compelling features suppressed consumer demand. However, technology intelligence firm ABI Research predicts that the overall wearables market will rebound, reaching 689.33 million shipments by the end of 2028, with a CAGR of 11.3% between 2023 and 2028.