Home Automation Week in Review

Report Type: 
Week In Review
Overview

Amazon Releases Echo Hub 

Last week, Amazon announced Echo Hub, a smart display designed specifically for controlling home automaton devices.   The Hub is reminiscent of Amazon’s well-known Echo Show devices and it plays music, videos, and features Alexa, but the Hub’s interface and touchscreen controls put smart device monitoring front and center with a new UI.  A smart hub in addition to a control panel, the Echo Hub is capable of being a Thread border router and Matter controller and features Bluetooth LE, Zigbee, and Amazon Sidewalk.

The Circana Take: 

  • As smart home devices continue to proliferate in consumers’ homes, users will need easy to access, centralized locations to monitor their devices.  Further, hubs will be of increasing value to households with different generations of devices who will need support integrating legacy technologies with current generation products. 

Problems Warm This Space Heater 

Though most space heaters generate warmth by heating metal resistance coils, The Heatbit Mini uses problems. More accurately, Heatbit Mini harnesses the heat put off by solving computational problems such as those involved in cryptocurrency mining or training AI models- to create warmth. The heater is powered by 5 nm chips and 20 billion transistors and has a computational power of 10 TH/s which is circulated by a fan. When not in heater mode, the device can double as an air purifier equipped with a HEPA filter. 

The Circana Take: 

  • As interest around blockchain and Artificial Intelligence continues, solutions designed to harness the byproducts involved in the computational processes will hold some interest for consumers. While the scale of such solutions remains small, the innovation surrounding them is promising.
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