Technology

In a truly fascinating exploration into two smart speakers & the Sonos One and the Amazon Echo & BoltVCBen Einstein has found some interesting differences in the way a traditional speaker company and an infrastructure juggernaut look at their flagship devices.

The post is well worth a full read but the gist is this: Sonos, a very traditional speaker company, has produced a good speaker and modified its current hardware to support smart home features like Alexa and Google Assistant. The Sonos One, notes Einstein, is a speaker first and smart hardware second.

&Digging a bit deeper, we see traditional design and manufacturing processes for pretty much everything. As an example, the speaker grill is a flat sheet of steel thatstamped, rolled into a rounded square, welded, seams ground smooth, and then powder coated black. While the part does look nice, thereno innovation going on here,& he writes.

The Amazon Echo, on the other hand, looks like what would happen if an engineer was given an unlimited budget and told to build something that people could talk to. The design decisions are odd and intriguing and it is ultimately less a speaker than a home conversation machine. Plus it is very expensive to make.

Pulling off the sleek speaker grille, therea shocking secret here: this is an extruded plastic tube with a secondary rotational drilling operation. In my many years of tearing apart consumer electronics products, I&ve never seen a high-volume plastic part with this kind of process. After some quick math on the production timelines, my guess is therea multi-headed drill and a rotational axis to create all those holes. CNC drilling each hole individually would take an extremely long time. If anyone has more insight into how a part like this is made, I&d love to see it! Bottom line: this is another surprisingly expensive part.

Sonos, which has been making a form of smart speaker for 15 years, is a CE company with cachet. Amazon, on the other hand, sees its devices as a way into living rooms and a delivery system for sales and is fine with licensing its tech before making its own. Therefore to compare the two is a bit disingenuous. Einsteinthesis that Sonos& trajectory is troubled by the fact that it depends on linear and closed manufacturing techniques while Amazon spares no expense to make its products is true. But Sonos makes speakers that work together amazingly well. They&ve done this for a decade and a half. If you compare their products & and I have & with competing smart speakers an non-audiophile &dumb& speakers you will find their UI, UX, and sound quality surpass most comers.

Amazon makes things to communicate with Amazon. This is a big difference.

Where Einstein is correct, however, is in his belief that Sonos is at a definite disadvantage. Sonos chases smart technology while Amazon and Google (and Apple, if their HomePod is any indication) lead. That said, there is some value to having a fully-connected set of speakers with add-on smart features vs. having to build an entire ecosystem of speaker products that can take on every aspect of the home theatre.

On the flip side Amazon, Apple, and Google are chasing audio quality while Sonos leads. While we can say that in the future we&ll all be fine with tinny round speakers bleating out Spotify in various corners of our room, there is something to be said for a good set of woofers. Whether this nostalgic love of good sound survives this generationtendency to watch and listen to low resolution media is anyonebet, but thatAmazonbet to lose.

Ultimately Sonos is strong and fascinating company. An upstart that survived the great CE destruction wrought by Kickstarter and Amazon, it produces some of the best mid-range speakers I&ve used. Amazon makes a nice & almost alien & product, but given that it can be easily copied and stuffed into a hockey puck that probably costs less than the entire bill of materials for the Amazon Echo itclear that Amazongoal isn&t to make speakers.

Whether the coming Sonos IPO will be successful depends partially on Amazon and Google playing ball with the speaker maker. The rest depends on the quality of product and the dedication of Sonos users. This good will isn&t as valuable as a signed contract with major infrastructure players but Sonos& good will is far more than Amazon and Google have with their popular but potentially intrusive product lines. Sonos lives in the home while Google and Amazon want to invade it. That is where Sonos wins.

Autodesk has made a name for itself among designers, engineers and architects with its 3D and other modelling software. Now, as it continues to build out its business in adjacent business areas like construction, it has acquired Assemble Systems, a startup that has built a platform to help plan and run building projects — and more generally building information management (BIM) — across the network of people and jobs involved.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed as Autodesk says the value is not material to its previous guidance. The deal will be a mixture of cash and stock: Autodesk had led AssembleSeries A last year, so it was already a strategic investor in the startup.

This will not be Autodeskfirst move into construction. It had recently launched a project management platform calledBIM 360, and the plan will be to integrate Assemble — which provides software that lets construction firms plan projects, but also manage bids, estimate costs and carry out assembly works — with that. And it will also bring a lot of potential customers into the Autodesk fray: Assemble has 174 unique customers using its software across 1,000 sites, working on 12,700 projects.

&I welcome the Assemble Systems team to the Autodesk family, as part of our efforts to digitize and improve the construction industry,& said Andrew Anagnost, president and CEO of Autodesk, in a statement. &We are connecting project data from design through construction, creating the cloud-enabled tools necessary to make the critical preconstruction phase of a project more predictable and profitable.&

The rise of &construction tech& has been part of a bigger trend in the last decade, where startups have increasingly applied the advances of technology — in this case, mobile apps, cloud computing, collaborative working, graphics that quickly render, and data-heavy computations that complete faster than the blink of an eye — to fields of work that have yet to be digitised and have not traditionally been associated with tech. Now, every company is a &tech company.&

Startups like PlanGrid helped put the concept of construction tech on the map when it became a part of Y Combinator in 2012 with its early concept of using iPad tablets as a better way of creating and sharing blueprints. But given that construction goods and services is estimated to be a $10 trillion industry— and employing seven percent of all of the worldworkforce, making it one of the worldbiggest — itno surprise to see rising demand and valuations for startups in the field. Katerra earlier this year raised $865 million from Softbank, and Oracle acquired construction collaboration software maker Aconex for $1.2 billion last December.

This is the opportunity that Autodesk is hoping to capitalise on, which makes sense, as it flows directly from the software-based services it already provides to sectors that are directly linked to the world of construction.

&Autodeskis an [architecture, engineering and construction] technology leader and was the majority investor in our Series A funding last year,& said Don Henrich, CEO of Assemble Systems, in a statement. &We partnered closely with Autodesk to make the greatest impact on the construction industry. We&re excited about joining Autodesk and continuing to make BIM data more useful across construction project workflows.&

Another day, another data breach. This time, it has affected 21 million users of the popular time capsule app Timehop.

Timehop revealed that the attack, which took place on July 4, has exposed the personal data, including names and email addresses, of practically its entire user base. Of those affected, a fifth – 4.7 million – also had a phone num