Western Digital hosted the third edition of India Innovation Bazaar, a unique forum for employees to present ideas in the areas of research and engineering excellence. The platform paves the way for employees to curate ideas that enable themselves and Western Digital to unbox innovation and accelerate digital transformation.
The two-day event saw patent worthy-ideas, tech talks from industry veterans and engaging discussions. This year’s edition received more than double the entries of last year, standing at 585 abstracts across 39 different categories. Over 100 internal reviewers assessed the abstracts to select 160 to present at the Innovation Bazaar 2019. The shortlisted abstract went through a rigorous test categorized under four crucial parameters – clarity, usability and functionality, novelty, and business impact.
Supria Dhanda, Vice President & Country Manager at Western Digital India said
The industry is transforming at a relentless pace and we need to empower our employees to raise the bar with new ideas and innovation. India Innovation Bazaar is an exclusive platform for our highly talented and capable engineers to showcase breakthrough inventions.
We feel the spirit of camaraderie and passion to make a difference is unmatched. In India, data has the potential to solve a variety of challenges, and through this initiative, we are fueling the next wave of data innovation.
This year’s edition also saw papers from non-engineering categories as well, including documentation and process and methodology. Innovative ideas were presented at the event across categories like Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Memory/ Flash Models and Storage File Systems.
Anand Venkitachalam, Vice President for Silicon Technology & Manufacturing [STM] at Western Digital India, commented
I am delighted to see this flagship event grow in leaps and bounds from the previous years. This is a great initiative to encourage our engineers to take out time from their regular corporate routine to showcase this level of innovation. In today’s day and age, it is very important to encourage the spirit of innovation and provide a platform for disruptive ideas to flourish.
The event also saw keynotes from industry leaders who touched upon the startup ecosystem, India’s technology landscape and its innovation journey. Venkatesh Kumaran [Venki], President and Partner at AXLerateNOW, Co-Chair of IOTNEXT hosted by IESA – India Electronic & Semiconductor Association and TiE Bangalore Board Member, emphasized how the Indian startup ecosystem is a key innovation driver and plays a pivotal role in providing solutions to contemporary challenges.
Mohan Kumar R, Country Head of Wearable Technologies AGhighlighted the fast-growing wearable segment and the role of Big Data, Fast Data and Edge Computing in its transformation. The sessions ended on a lively note with Matt Crowley, Vice President, Design Systems, Silicon Technology & Manufacturing at Western Digital,speaking on entrepreneurship and managing innovation in the context of deep technology.
About Western Digital
Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. The company is driving the innovation needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and transform an ever-increasing diversity of data. Everywhere data lives, from advanced data centers to mobile sensors to personal devices, our industry-leading solutions deliver the possibilities of data.
Microsoft SMS Organizer will now make travelling by train more convenient. SMS Organizer app can be used to track the live status of an Indian Railways train anytime, anywhere even with intermittent connectivity.
Features on SMS Organizer that will make train journey more convenient
Smart reminders
SMS Organizer automatically picks up details of your travel like your train number, date of travel, point of boarding and destination, PNR number, reservation status, and seat details to create a reminder action card that can be easily accessed from the reminders tab.
Track PNR status
SMS Organizer reminds you to check your status starting two days before the date of journey and provides a single click option to check the status.
Track train status even when you are offline
Access live status of the train to know latest arrival/departure timings.
Book food in advance
SMS Organizer automatically picks up all the food options at stations on your journey route and shows them in an easy to choose interface.
On-coach services
With SMS Organizer, you can raise complaints like coach cleaning, malfunctioning AC, absence of linen, lack of water, toilet cleaning and more at the click of a button.
Apart from organizing your train journey, SMS Organizer can also organize the SMS inbox of your Android smartphone to surface offers; create a passbook of all your bank accounts and mobile wallets; remind you of upcoming bookings like restaurant reservations, movies, flight or bus tickets, doctor appointments, bill payments, and much more.
At the Huawei Developer Conference, Huawei launched HarmonyOS – a new micro-kernel-based, distributed operating system designed to deliver a cohesive user experience across all devices and scenarios.
Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, explained the company’s thoughts behind developing this new OS.
We’re entering a day and age where people expect a holistic intelligent experience across all devices and scenarios. To support this, we felt it was important to have an operating system with improved cross-platform capabilities. We needed an OS that supports all scenarios, that can be used across a broad range of devices and platforms, and that can meet consumer demand for low latency and strong security.
These were our goals with HarmonyOS. HarmonyOS is completely different from Android and iOS. It is a microkernel-based, distributed OS that delivers a smooth experience across all scenarios. It has trustworthy and secure architecture, and it supports seamless collaboration across devices. You can develop your apps once, then flexibly deploy them across a range of different devices.
Traditionally, new operating systems are released alongside new types of devices. As early as 10 years ago, Huawei envisioned a future where intelligence would seamlessly integrate with all aspects of our lives, and it began exploring how it might deliver this experience – one that would transcend the boundaries of physical space and span different hardware and platforms.
HarmonyOS is a lightweight, compact operating system with powerful functionality, and it will first be used for smart devices like smart watches, smart screens, in-vehicle systems, and smart speakers. Through this implementation Huawei aims to establish an integrated and shared ecosystem across devices, create a secure and reliable run-time environment, and deliver a holistic intelligent experience across every interaction with every device.
HarmonyOS – Four distinct technical features
An all-scenario, intelligent experience sets a high bar for connectivity, so HarmonyOS was designed with four distinct technical features to deliver on its promise to consumers.
Seamless – First-ever device OS with distributed architecture, delivering a seamless experience across devices
By adopting distributed architecture and distributed virtual bus technology, HarmonyOS offers a shared communications platform, distributed data management, distributed task scheduling, and virtual peripherals. With HarmonyOS, app developers won’t have to deal with the underlying technology for distributed apps, allowing them to focus on their own individual service logic. Developing distributed apps will be easier than ever before. Apps built on HarmonyOS can run on different devices while delivering a seamless, collaborative experience across all scenarios.
Smooth – Deterministic Latency Engine and high-performance IPC
HarmonyOS will address under-performance challenges with a Deterministic Latency Engine and high-performance Inter Process Communication [IPC]. The Deterministic Latency Engine sets task execution priorities and time limits for scheduling in advance. Resources will gravitate toward tasks with higher priorities, reducing the response latency of apps by 25.7%. The micro-kernel can make IPC performance up to five times more efficient than existing systems.
Secure – Microkernel architecture that reshapes security and trustworthiness from the ground up
HarmonyOS uses a brand-new micro-kernel design that features enhanced security and low latency. This micro-kernel was designed to simplify kernel functions, implement as many system services as possible in user mode outside the kernel, and add mutual security protection. The micro-kernel itself provides only the most basic services like thread scheduling and IPC.
Harmony OS’s micro-kernel design uses formal verification methods to reshape security and trustworthiness from the ground up in a Trusted Execution Environment [TEE]. Formal verification methods are an effective mathematical approach to validate system correctness from the source, while traditional verification methods, such as functional verification and attack simulation, are confined to limited scenarios. Formal methods, by contrast, can use data models to verify all software running paths.
HarmonyOS is the first OS to use formal verification in device TEE, significantly improving security. In addition, because the HarmonyOS micro-kernel has much less code [roughly one-thousandth the amount of the Linux kernel], the probability of attack is greatly reduced.
Unified – Multi-device IDE allows apps to be developed once and deployed across multiple devices
Powered by a multi-device IDE, multi-language unified compilation, and a distributed architecture kit, HarmonyOS can automatically adapt to different screen layout controls and interactions, and support both drag-and-drop control and preview-oriented visual programming. This allows developers to more efficiently build apps that run on multiple devices. With a multi-device IDE, developers can code their apps once and deploy them across multiple devices, creating a tightly integrated ecosystem across all user devices.
The HUAWEI ARK Compiler is the first static compiler that can perform on par with Android’s virtual machine, enabling developers to compile a broad range of advanced languages into machine code in a single, unified environment. By supporting unified compilation in multiple languages, the HUAWEI ARK Compiler will help developers greatly improve their productivity.
Developer plan and ecosystem development
Huawei also announced the evolution roadmap for HarmonyOS and its kernel. HarmonyOS 1.0 will be first adopted in its smart screen products, which are due to launch later this year. Over the next three years, HarmonyOS will be optimized and gradually adopted across a broader range of smart devices, including wearables, HUAWEI Vision, and head units for your car.
The success of HarmonyOS will depend on a dynamic ecosystem of apps and developers. To encourage broader adoption, Huawei will release HarmonyOS as an open-source platform, worldwide. Huawei will also establish an open-source foundation and an open-source community to support more in-depth collaboration with developers.
China is home to a strong app ecosystem and a massive user base. Moving forward, Huawei will lay the foundations for HarmonyOS in the Chinese market, and then expand it further to the global ecosystem. With a focus on providing new and unique value, Huawei will open up and share its core capabilities in areas like connectivity, cameras, and AI. It will work closely with ecosystem partners to deliver apps and services that provide consumers with the best possible experience and bring new life to the industry.
HarmonyOS will bring incredible new benefits to consumers, equipment vendors, and developers. For consumers, it will bring a cohesive and powerful intelligent experience across all aspects of their lives. For equipment vendors, it will help them gain a first-mover advantage in the age of holistic intelligent experience, where 5G, AI, and IoT will see explosive growth. At the same time, HarmonyOS will enable developers to win over more users with less investment, and rapidly innovate services across all scenarios.
Email is the most commonly used tool for communication and collaboration at work. Consequently, most inboxes are noisy and way too crowded. Almost 50% of the employees surveyed said they spend at least an hour a day checking emails, including 16.2% employees that spend more than 4 hours on their inboxes, according to a new research conducted by Hiver, a SaaS based email collaboration tool that improves visibility and information exchange across organizations using shared inboxes.
This survey exhibits a worrying number of employees exercising emails and how a colossal amount of time is spent by them on checking emails. More than 61% working professionals between the age of 25-32 choose to open their emails every time a new email notification appears, whereas 33% of the employees tend to check their emails every few hours.
Hiver conducted a survey in order to gauge how effectively employees working across different organizations consume emails. Among those surveyed, about 80% are working in startups and 20% are working in corporates. The survey was conducted among 450 respondents in India.
Interestingly, while 60% of the employees surveyed agree with the need to clean their inbox time and again, almost 40% of the employees don’t wish to clean their inboxes at all. Employees choose different techniques and procedures to clear their mailboxes. 32% of employees used email based filters, and about 37% employees wish to move the important events to the calendar. About 35% convert tasks into a to-do list, making it possible for the employees to use their mailbox effectively.
The report also indicates that 76% of respondents say that they read more than 40% of the mails they receive and 55% of the respondents act on every email as soon as it comes in. Given that almost a third [32.4%] of the respondents receive more than 50 emails a day, ample time is spent by them on only checking their emails.
To add to that, half of the respondents say that the maximum number of emails received are from their own organization, either from the members of their own team or others working within the organization. This raises the question – is internal email communication cluttering up employee inboxes? And how is this affecting employee productivity? This finding is particularly interesting, given that employees can often feel quite productive just by having cleaned out their email inbox, despite perhaps not creating any value for the organisation.
Professionals across organizations rely heavily on email for communication and exchange of information. Our survey highlights how email impacts work-life for many, and while it can be a tremendously useful tool, it can also deter productivity. Our inboxes are packed with valuable information, and in order to organize our work better, we must manage, classify and prioritize emails in an efficient manner. If not, the email overload can tend to become a roadblock in reaching the desired results. It’s about how to work smarter, not just harder.
About Hiver
Hiver is a leading provider of email collaboration solution. Hiver transforms Gmail into a collaboration tool by enabling teams to easily manage shared email accounts, like support@. Co-founded by Niraj Ranjan and Nitesh Nandy, Hiver is based out of Bengaluru and San Jose. Hiver has over 1,400 customers across 30 countries, including Hubspot, Harvard University, Vacasa and Shutterstock.
ThoughtWorks, a global software consultancy hosted India’s first chapter of the Technology Radar Summit 2019 in Bengaluru on 29 June. This Summit was on occasion of Vol. 20 of the Technology Radar’s global launch. The latest edition of the bi-annual report that provides nuanced advice around technologies, tools, techniques, platforms and languages highlights four themes – The Shifting Shape of Data, Terraforming an Ecosystem, Kotlin Klimbing and The Leaking Encapsulation Boundaries.
Due to busy schedule, we could not blog about this event but nevertheless, the learnings are still fresh in our minds. It is important to understand how the core team at ThoughtWorks came up with the idea of the Technology Radar. They came up with the Technology Radar to fulfil their mission to champion software excellence and revolutionize IT. The advisory board, senior technology leaders at ThoughtWorks met for several months to formulate the overall plan of the Technology Radar. The team also comprised of Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks who specializes in object-oriented analysis & design, UML, patterns, and agile software development methodologies, including extreme programming.
Martin Fowler walked the audience through the nuances behind the Technology Radar where he also touched upon the core principles of Radar
Adopt– Industry should be adopting the items discussed in Radar and use them when appropriate on the projects.
Trial– It is important to build this capability. Enterprises can try the technologies on a project that can handle the risk.
Assess– Worth exploring with the goal of understanding how it will affect the enterprise.
Hold– Proceed with caution.
Martin Fowler also added
What started off as an interesting experiment has now turned into a notable publication that receives a lot of client attention and interest from the global community of technologists. The Radar is relevant to businesses facing disruptive competition who need to understand and apply the philosophy of Tech@core. Our Radar helps these progressive businesses be aware of developments in technology that support their role in enabling the success of their customers.
The exclusive talks curated for the event featured a keynote speech delivered by Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks Martin Fowler, who is a co-author of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. His talk delved into the decade long evolution of the Radar and its pertinence to technologists. Especially in the current digital-first market, where technologists are at the center of more business decisions than ever before. Since the majority part of the audience was from the field of software, he stressed upon the importance of Continuous Delivery/Continuour Integration [CI/CD] and Agile methodologies to ensure better results from testing phase.
He also spoke about how an agile approach can be used to achieve more out of team meeting or standup meetings. The most interesting part of the presentation was that it was formulated in a simplistic manner so that even people who have minimal understanding about these methodologies can learn from his insightful talk. Since there is no recording of the talk, we recommend to have a look at Martin Fowler’s talk from 2018 where he sheds light on Refactoring that has served as the definitive guide for those passionate about continually improving the design and maintainability of code.
The Tech Radar Summit saw the enthusiastic participation of over 450 software developers, decision-makers and thought leaders from across India. The day was packed with interesting talks by thought leaders and breakout sessions spread across three tracks catering to the audience’s varying tech interests. The Summit also featured an Experience Zone that mobilized Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality to design immersive gaming experiences for the assembled tech practitioners.
Other opinion leaders who took the stage included, Padmanabhan Balasubramanian, MD at Goldman Sachs who discussed the advancement of financial and technical aspects of platform business for engineers. Ranjan Sakalley, CTO at GoPay explored the seven building blocks of reliable systems. Dr.Vivek Raghavan, Chief Project Manager, UIDAI paired with ThoughtWorker Samir Seth on a talk that explored the ways AI can improve the quality of governance.
Sauvik Banerjjee, Technology Leader at Tata Group Digital shared his journey of becoming the CTO. He calls himself an accidental CTO 🙂 The entire talk was very motivating and his passion for technology, entrepreneurship, and cricket was visible from his body language. He was the man behind the technology involved in the e-commerce website TataCLiQ. He also spoke about how techniques used in cricket can be used to solve technological problems. His was the most engaging session in the Technology Radar, a talk that should not be missed! We highly recommend that you have a look at the recording of this talk and jot down the learnings from it.
Commenting on the first edition of India’s Tech Radar Summit, Sudhir Tiwari, Managing Director at ThoughtWorks for India said
Indian businesses are going through a massive transformation as they embrace the digital-first approach. Technologists are now playing a key role in the way business are shaped and remain competitive in the market. Tech strategists are re-orienting their skill set for a new digital landscape – where emerging tech, agile at scale and product thinking define businesses.
To explore earlier editions of the Technology Radar and subscribe to their future editions, click here. You can also follow the updates on Twitter here. What was your biggest learning from ThoughtWorks’s the Technology Radar, do leave them in the comments section…
Truecaller announced that the company’s brand solutions platform has witnessed yet another milestone of garnering over 500 million impressions in a single day with its advertisers, Zoomcar and Spotify in the country for their mobile advertising campaigns. Truecaller’s proven expertise and innovation capabilities enabled the brands to scale up their brand visibility and engage with millions of users across India. Both the campaigns also received an average of 60 million unique reach from audiences present across all markets.
Truecaller’s programmatic platform facilitates brands with innovative advertising vehicles that are carefully chosen to deliver contextually relevant messages to its over 100 million daily active premium smartphone users in India. To leverage this, Zoomcar tapped Truecaller users across major cities in order to promote their special three day offer of 100% off on bookings made towards the end of May, earlier this year.
Similarly, Spotify capitalized on Truecaller’s holistic brand solutions to maximise brand visibility and yielded 30% more clicks in a single day. Using Truecaller’s contextual capabilities, the Spotify launch campaign [There’s A Playlist For That] delivered a staggering 500 million plus impressions in a day.
Speaking on the occasion, Tejinder Gill, Vice President Global Sales at Truecaller
This milestone is a testament of our massive reach of over 100 million daily active premium smartphone users in India. We are truly excited to partner with new age brands like Spotify and Zoomcar to deliver such impactful campaigns. Our scale and the expertise of our Brand Solutions platform has catapulted Truecaller into one of the leading publishers.
Commenting on his experience, Varun Jha, Chief Marketing Officer, Zoomcar, said
Through Truecaller, we managed to achieve over 400 million impressions for our brand campaign. By tapping such a large quality audience through Truecaller, we were able to generate user interest that led to direct conversions during our campaign. Having witnessed such exceptional metrics, we would surely partner with Truecaller in the future for our brand promotion.
Talking about her experience, Neha Ahuja, Head of Marketing – India, Spotify said
Being recent entrants to the Indian music streaming landscape, collaborating with fellow Swedish app Truecaller truly accelerated our launch campaign in India. It helped us gain scale and connect with potential 1.3M users who clicked on our ads through Truecaller.
Truecaller’s programmatic advertising inculcates the values of providing a safe environment for brands so the focus remains on achieving meaningful impact and constructively sustained partner campaigns. With such a large user base, the platform delivers over 400 million impressions on an average, each day and hosts creative messaging across varied formats.
We are living in an era where digitalization of almost every aspect of our lives might be possible, sooner or later. One technology that has played a major role in ensuring that people, devices, and services are connected is Internet Of Things [IoT]. With the power of IoT, you can now access the smart fan, smart electricity meter, lights, doorbell, etc. in your home from any location, as long as both the entities are accessible over the internet.
Image Source
One entity is the smart device that needs to be controlled and the other entity is the smartphone app through which the device can be controlled. IoT has already made inroads in the manufacturing, automotive, healthcare, and other industry verticals where efficiency, accuracy, and throughput are of prime importance.
Smart Homes – Driving the Internet of Things [IoT] market
As per a report by NASSCOM, the overall IoT market is expected to grow upto USD 15 billion by the year 2020 [Source]. Smart Homes is one vertical in the IoT space which is slowly getting adoption. Some of the major driving factors as far as smart homes is concerned are
Improved internet connectivity
Wider adoption of smart devices
Energy & cost savings through usage of devices like smart meters, etc.
Safety concerns leading to monitoring of home from remote locations.
Consumer awareness as far as smart home monitoring is concerned.
According to Research and Markets report, the Indian home automation industry is expected to be over Rs. 30,000 crore by 2020. Exponential growth of wireless & mobile technology, affordable products, need for energy efficiency in smart homes & apartments have had a significant role to play in the growth of the segment.
Home Automation – ‘Confusion’ with ‘wider’ adoption
There is always confusion about Smart Homes in the minds of customers and that confusion multiplies if an existing home has to be converted to a smart home. Some of the lingering questions could be
Do I need to change the wiring of my devices ?
Should I change the switch panel ?
Do I need to add internet repeaters in other rooms ?
What cost savings would I get if I take the smart home route ?
You do not want to over-spend just to convert your existing home into a smart home. Imagine you have to change the internal wiring in order to accommodate the smart switch or any other smart home product. This would be an additional overhead! A better option would be a solution that would seamlessly integrate with the existing wiring or that requires very minimal changes.
Hogar Controls, a US & India based Home automation startup is disrupting the market for smart homes, with its cutting edge technology and ‘design first‘ products.
Hogar Controls – Enabling #SmartLife Experience
Hogar Controls is a design-first smart home and building automation company delivering powerful solutions for residential, hospitality, and commercial markets. The company was launched in the year 2015 with the aim to develop simple & aesthetically designed products that combine futuristic technology with easy functionality and affordability. All the products are designed as plug-and-play solutions so that you do not need minimal/no changes in the existing infrastructure. Their products can be customized to fit the needs of your home, office or hotel, like a glove.
The products are made to be simple and timeless so that they blend with multiple decors. They can be controlled using a single touch or multi-function buttons or tactile screens to remove the clutter. Rather than focusing solely on pushing the technology envelope, their team checked the consumer needs and developed products to address them rather than assuming the market demands.
We had an opportunity to interact with the core team of Hogar Controls where they spoke about the product philosophy, future plans, and walked us through some of the recent products launched by the company. The The Hogar SmartTouch Panels from the company are beyond being just stylish alternatives to regular switch-boards. These elegant touch-enabled panels are dimmers, switches and scene controllers that are engineered to smart home wireless standards such as Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Wi-Fi.
Bloggers at the Hogar Controls Demo meet
Below are some of the products that we could get a hands-on/witness during the demo session
6-in-1 Touch Panel [PRIMA +]
The smart panel, with 6 touch buttons arranged in a rectangular order, features 6 touch switches for multi-functional requirements. The panel is additionally equipped with a light dimmer, a fan speed controller and a motion sensor. The glossy touch panel comes with a contemporary look allowing the users to wirelessly control all electrical appliances at home. Additionally, the paired devices can be controlled via smartphone and voice controlled via Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant on supported devices via sensors.
There is no additional wiring required and the Retrofit design makes the Prima+ fit into existing switch board with ease. It is equipped with intelligent light sensor which enables the panel’s back light intensity to auto adjust depending on the level of the room light, adding an additional level of sophistication, elegance, and ambience to the room.
One Touch Panel
The one touch panel, relay or scene controller comes with a max load current 5A. It consists of 1~10 programmable touch buttons. There is uniform dual back light with two-way feed back. The product is durable as it has Heat, humidity and shock proof design.
4+1 Touch Panel
The 4+1 Touch Panel can be used to set customized actions, with four programmable buttons, a two-pin socket, and a USB. It is ideally meant for the bedside of a room as four two-way switches can be used either as relays or scene mode, USB to charge mobiles and tablets and an outlet for laptops & other electronic appliances.
This allows users to set scenes, control individual devices like fans, lights, relays, blinds, and any power appliances. It is aesthetically designed and available in a variety of colors to blend effortlessly with any room’s decor.
The Pebble
Pebble is a new wireless remote-control button that combines elegant design and functionality into a simple, personalized device to control everything in the home. It allows you to customize up to nine scenes such as smart lighting, shading, thermostats, locks, and more with a single touch. The pocket-sized device with a small aluminum frame and a glass touch top cab be stick easily on any metallic, glass or wooden surface or carry around in your pocket. Pebble features customization that is unique for each user’s activity and easy-to-use with a single tap, Double tap or, Press & Hold.
Paired with any Hub, Pebble can be used as an add-on device to create additional control for Touch Panels as Prima+, Prima in various zones of a home. It is compatible with other Z-Wave devices. The Pebble is energy efficient and comes with a battery life of one-year under regular use.
Video Door Bell
The Video Door Bell from Hogar Controls is equipped with night-vision support and motion detection features. The doorbell not only lets you keep an eye at your door from anywhere in the world, but also lets you integrate with your home’s security systems to trigger lock/unlock sequences remotely.
The Video Door Bell has wireless connectivity and features two-way audio & one-way video. It has two-way audio capability which means that you can not only view who’s at the entrance, but also hear & interact with them using the user-friendly HogarCam HD mobile app.
The Hogar Hub
The Hub is the core of Hogar’s smart home automation system. The devices mentioned above are connected to the Hogar Hub which in turn is connected to the internet. There is lot of attention given to the aesthetics of the Hogar Hub. There are bare minimum LEDs on the Hub which indicate the status of power, internet connectivity, etc.
Conclusion
All the products from Hogar Controls are ZigBee/Z-Wave certified. They have been tested under rigorous conditions e.g. power fluctuations, throttling internet connectivity, etc. in order to suit the needs of different geographies. Seamless integration from a normal home to a smart home and detailed attention to design & aesthetics are two major plus points as far as Hogar Controls is concerned. You can visit Hogar Controls to request a quote or order a demo kit.
Technology products have evolved over a period of time and along with those products, the accessories that complement those products have also evolved. For example, many smartphone manufacturers are killing the headphone jack on their flagship products since wireless earbuds & Bluetooth headsets are becoming more mainstream. The same point is also applicable for Bluetooth speakers where streaming of audio content wirelessly is considered as one of the major driving factors for their popularity.
Multi-room streaming is a growing trend where consumers want their favorite type of music to follow them. It is a trend that will further boost the overall Bluetooth speaker market. Though many players are competing in the over-crowded market on price, size, features, technology, etc.; there are startups like Lumiford that have plans to redefine the audio experience. The India & US-based startup has created a new audio category/vertical where your music can be upgraded to stereo with sub-woofer. Lumiford 2.1 SubWoofer Dock is a unique 2.1Stereo Subwoofer Docking Systemthat is inspired by New York classic table top design and is integrated with Alexa voice assistant.
What makes Lumiford 2.1 SubWoofer Dock unique when compared to other audio products is the seamless transition from a normal Bluetooth speaker to a Hi-Fi Stereo Docking Wireless Speaker. You can now enjoy a full-bodied stereo HD sound with a True Bass subwoofer dock at home or just pick the handset, clutch and continue to listen to your music anywhere on the go! The supported audio formats are A2DP, AVRCP, HFP, and HSP.
Lumiford 2.1 SubWoofer Dock – Technical Specifications
The Docking system is equipped with a power-packed 3.5″ subwoofer, powered by a potent 20W down-firing sub-woofer driver. HD Quality stereo sounds are delivered through its handset engineered with 2 full-range 6W speakers in tandem. The Docking system is externally powered and once the handset is docked on to the SubWoofer dock, it charges the handset and simultaneously upgrades your music output to Stereo with SubWoofer.
The handset instantly pairs with all Bluetooth-enabled devices [2.1 and higher version], includes cell phones, audio player, tablets, desktops PC and laptops. The portable stereo handset is engineered with a fast and stable wireless connection to your phone/ tablet with a 10m/33ft range. It is designed to automatically reconnect to the last paired device. It also has an Auxillary [AUX] input. The maximum output power is 26 Watts.
Lumiford 2.1 SubWoofer Dock – Features Set & Design Philosophy
The handset/portable Bluetooth speaker is powered by 1500mAh Lithium-Ion battery with built-in Mic, enabling you to carry your music anywhere, anytime. The handset is designed to give the best results up to 10 hrs talk time and up to 10 hrs music play time. The design of the Lumiford 2.1 SubWoofer Dock is unique and the combination of wood & fabric makes the product standout. It is said to have a first-mover advantage in this category i.e. down-firing sub-woofer. It is available in two color variants – Black and Grey. Lumiford 2.1 SubWoofer Dock can be a perfect gifting option as the product has premium looks and a unique value proposition.
With the Lumiford 2.1 SubWoofer Dock, consumers can now experience clean, balanced sound quality even at low frequencies. A woofer which can be safely docked when not mobile, it is capable of crafting musical experiences to make you the king of swag.
Closing Remarks
We had an opportunity to interact with the Lumiford team where they answered queries about the product and one thing that awed us was their philosophy to develop products like Lumiford 2.1 SubWoofer Dock that are designed around ‘U’. We played different types of tracks and the audio experience was great. There are major pros of having down-firing subwoofers and the 2.1 SubWoofer Dock has all the ingredients that make a good all-round product!
The 2.1 SubWoofer Dock is currently available at a discounted price of Rs. 8,869.00 [M.R.P – 12,999.00] on Amazon.
