Amazon Looks To Capture More Of Your Home And Soho With Eero Acquisition.

Amazon announced it's acquisition of Eero (See the press release below), one well known company in the networking hardware space. Eero has been around for a while, has it's operations in the WiFi networking since 1915. Eero is well known for it's out of the box, easy-to-set-up mesh WiFi solutions.
Eero is namednamed after Finnish industrial designer Eero Saarinen. Eero products such as shown above have been enjoying a good customer reception and feedback. Currently it has 4.6 starts in the Amazon market place. In addition to the hardware, Eero also offers "Eero Plus" an all inclusive security package for the network.
 Neither Amazon nor Eero revealed how much money the tech giant paid in the acquisition. Prior to this Eero had raised $90 million in venture capital.

"We are incredibly impressed with the Eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work. We have a shared vision that the smart home experience can get even easier, and we’re committed to continue innovating on behalf of customers" said SVP of Amazon Devices and Services Dave Limp.
He was joined by the chief of Eero, Nick Weaver, "From the beginning, Eero’s mission has been to make the technology in homes just work. We started with WiFi because it’s the foundation of the modern home. Every customer deserves reliable and secure WiFi in every room. By joining the Amazon family, we’re excited to learn from and work closely with a team that is defining the future of the home, accelerate our mission, and bring Eero systems to more customers around the globe."

Press release

Amazon to Acquire eero to Help Customers Better Connect Smart Home Devices

February 11, 2019 at 4:50 PM EST

Amazon announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire eero, a company that offers products and services for high-performing, reliable, and simple home WiFi

SEATTLE & SAN FRANCISCO (BUSINESSWIRE)

Feb. 11, 2019-- Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and eero today announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire eero. eero’s home mesh WiFi systems set up in minutes and blanket every room of a customer’s home in high-performing, reliable WiFi. eero is already delighting Amazon customers with its products and services, as indicated by eero’s 4.6-star product rating on Amazon.com.

"We are incredibly impressed with the eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work,” said Dave Limp, SVP of Amazon Devices and Services. “We have a shared vision that the smart home experience can get even easier, and we’re committed to continue innovating on behalf of customers.”

“From the beginning, eero’s mission has been to make the technology in homes just work,” said Nick Weaver, Co-Founder and CEO of eero. “We started with WiFi because it’s the foundation of the modern home. Every customer deserves reliable and secure WiFi in every room. By joining the Amazon family, we’re excited to learn from and work closely with a team that is defining the future of the home, accelerate our mission, and bring eero systems to more customers around the globe.”

eero uses multiple access points that work together as a system to blanket a home in high-performing, reliable, and simple home WiFi. Customers can customize an eero system to meet the needs of their home—regardless of shape or size—eliminating dead zones, ensuring perfect streaming video in every room, and delivering the bandwidth all connected devices need.

With the easy-to-use eero app, customers can set up the system in under 10 minutes, share their network, program parental controls, and run speed tests on demand. Additionally, eero communicates with the cloud to receive instructions and updates. This means eero systems are self-updating, self-fixing, and self-improving all the time.

Completion of this transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About eero

The first mesh home WiFi system, eero blankets any home in reliable and secure WiFi. eero’s digital security service, eero Plus, protects connected devices, privacy, and family. eero is simple to set up, even easier to manage, and improves over time with regular, automatic software updates. Founded in San Francisco in 2014 by Amos Schallich, Nate Hardison, and Nick Weaver, eero’s goal is to make WiFi so good that you’ll never think about WiFi again.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190211005750/en/

Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

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Google Gets Google Assistant On One Billion Devices, Ten Times The Amazon Alexa’s Installed Base

The Google launched "Google Assistant" in 2016 on the Google Pixel phone and since then has spread to millions of devices, I meant billion of devices.
These devices include a range of smart speakers like the Google Home line and third-party home speaker devices from JBL, Sony, Panasonic, LG, and countless others. Joining these are the smart displays like the Google Home Hub and third-party offerings from Lenovo, JBL, and LG.
Android Auto is a mobile app developed by Google to mirror features from an Android device to a car's compatible in-dash information and entertainment head unit or to a dashcam. With a phone running Android Auto,  you can have access to the Assistant from your car's infotainment screen.
When you done with all those and get home, the is Google Assistant for TVs, there's both Sony and LG displays with Android TV and the Assistant built in, set-top boxes from Nvidia and Xiaomi, and even a plan for smart soundbars. For laptops, if they are Chromium / Chrome OS based, they all have access to the Google Assistant. If your watch is a Wear OS device, you can get the Assistant on your watch, and it's even comes on some Nest cameras.

But the biggest chunk of Google Assistant rest on Android phones. You can have it also on your iOS phoen as you can freely download the Google Assistant app on iOS. On Android the Assistant comes built into the main Google app. This app is part of the "Google Play" Android app bundle, so it's included in the box in pretty much every Android phone, save for those sold in China.

Google claims in a blog post that "active users of the Google Assistant grew 4 times over the past year" and that its distribution jumped from 14 countries in eight languages in 2017 to 80 countries in 30 languages in 2018.
When it comes to smart home devices, Amazon still shines. According to Google, the number of different smart home devices Google Assistant supports "10,000 smart home devices from over 1,600 popular brands," Then Amazon just announced that currently there are 28,000 Alexa-compatible smart home devices from 4,500 different manufacturers.

PrimeCast Is Gone, Zapped By Amazon

Prime Cast Zapped by Amazon

Just as fast as PrimeCast was announced, the developers have retracted the app, due to blocking of Amazon back end services by Amazon.

PrimeCast developers posted the following message

Dear Primecast users,

a few months ago, we set out to bring together two great products that seemed like a natural fit: Amazon Instant Video and Google Chromecast.
We spent most of our free time trying to come up with the best solution we could, while also safeguarding your privacy, honoring digital rights management and copyright mechanisms, and making the app as useful as possible.
Two days ago, we felt we were ready for an announcement, so we posted a single link on Reddit...and waited.
The feedback was amazing. In a matter of hours, we received dozens of great reviews and encouraging comments. 89% of reviewers on Google Play (many of whom are reading this) gave us 5 or 4 stars.
Since we were on track to cover our costs much earlier than expected, we started planning for the next steps – like eventually quitting our day-to-day jobs and starting to serve end users directly, giving them great products they enjoyed using.
Unfortunately, the journey came to an end after 36 hours, and we decided to pull the Primecast app from the Google Play Store. We are very sorry.
At this time, we do not know if Primecast will return. What we do know however is that we would love to continue providing you with great software and a great experience. Thank you for your support!
The Primecast team
PS: You can reach us at info@primecast-app.com.

All Amazon Videos Belong To PrimeCast <> ChromeCast.

Expand Chromecast With PrimCast http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/
Ever since Amazon Instant Video was available on Android, the most asked question from that qurter was, where is the Chromecast support. Of course it might take even longer for that support since Amazon is promoting it's own Fire TV. Leave it to the resourceful Android developers. Android Police is reporting of PrimeCast (nothing to do with Amazon Prime) an app that leverages Amazon backend services to pull together to show you a basic list of your purchased and rented movies and TV shows. The Amazon Prime Video users need to use the Browse tab and add individual videos to their watchlist as the app is unable to navigate list as yet.
Knowing how big boys operate, Amazon might close down the path but until then, all ChromCast users can use the app to expand their viewing span. My Chrome Cast sits plugged in to a TV somewhere, not used.
AndroidPolice

Fire Phone Burns A Big Hole In Amazon Pockets

Amazon, Fire Phone, Snap VoIP

Looks like the Amazon's flagship 3D phone is fizzling down. According to industry/financial sources, the Fire Phone introduced in the summer of 2014 with a big fanfare. At the time of release, a 2 year contract with AT&T cost $199.00 but if you visit Amazon, you can have it for $0.99, yes 99 cents. Off contract price has also dropped to $540.

The financials released on September 30th points to the loss it suffered from Fire Phone and $174 Million is a chump sum for Amazon, analysts all ganged up on Jeff Bezos for the mistake and of course Amazon shares suffered.

The Fire phone had features that are welcome by my needs but I would not buy the phone, I am glued to iPhone and Android (from Google) to have anything else. But I am sure those features will eventually find its way in to these favorite phones. Perhaps it is app developers who should look more closely at the Fire Phone and fire up some apps for Android and iOS market.