CEDIA announces Michael Sherman, owner/director of Henri, the French CEDIA Member of Excellence company, is the recipient of the 2019 CEDIA Young Professional of the year award.

The award recognises Sherman as an emerging leader making an impact on the home technology installation industry. It elevates and celebrates the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit of industry professionals under the age of 40.

Designflow presents the Outsourced Design Shop, a platform for installers wanting to make quick purchases of design services for either entire residential, marine and commercial projects or simply filling the gaps within a design and documentation.

The web shop includes Desingflow outsourced design services individually, as well as Site & Engineers packs. To simplify the buying process, the installers just needs to enter the number of floors in the project to purchase a suitable Site Pack bundle, and buying other bundles involves a similar process.

For instance, the Cinema Site Pack provides all design and documentation required to install a cinema system with one to three rows of seating and options such as with or without fabric walls and acoustic treatments. Meanwhile the Engineers Panel bundle includes a panel layout and schematic for items such a slighting, blinds or control panels.

LG Electronics announces an executive shakeup-- one seeing the promotion of Brian Kwon, head of the Mobile Communications and Home Entertainment wings of the company formerly known as Lucky Goldstar, to CEO.

Other promotions include Park Hyoung-sei as president of the Home Entertainment Company, new Mobile Communications Company president Morris Lee, William Cho in the newly created Chief Strategy Officer position and Chief Financial Officer Bae Doo-yong.

An LG veteran, Kwon has been at Goldstar since 1987. He held a variety of positions, including business planning at LG Wales and head of the monitor division, before promotion to oversee the Home Entertainment Company in 2014. He was born in Busan and received a bachelor's degree from Seoul National University and an MBA from Aalto University, Finland.

Sonos might be looking to reduce dependence on 3rd party voice assistants with the acquisition of Snips, a Paris-based developer of an AI voice platform for connected devices. The cost? $37.5 million.

Founded in 2013, the Snips team counts over 50 engineering, machine learning and product development staff. The solution from the company features proprietary technology allowing for voice processing on the device, something it says allows for accuracy, efficiency and privacy while minimising footprint and dependence on the cloud. The voice assistant is also custom-built for specific tasks, and should run alongside other general purpose assistants currently available on the Sonos platform.

CEDIA announces the four elected directors to serve on the board for the 2020-2021 term. Melanie Malcolm fills the open EMEA position and Jamie Briesemeister, Bill Skaer and Amanda Wildman fill the open positions for the rest of the world.

The results follow a 41-day voting period for CEDIA members, where they also voted to approve the move of domestication of CEDIA from Illinois to Indiana.

“The collection of skills and experiences our board leadership brings to bear is exceptional and the four elected directors will answer the call,” CEO Tabatha O’Connor says. “As the industry, organisation, and needs of membership continue to evolve, we’re excited to have a board of directors that can respond and take action that moves us to the next level.”

According to Canalys, global smart speaker shipments total 28.6 million units in Q3 2019-- a 44.9% Y-o-Y increase with Amazon in the lead, followed by online retail giant Alibaba reigning supreme in China.

The open retail channel makes it increasingly challenging for smart speaker vendors to stimulate sales, even as it regularly offers promotions and discounts. The Amazon "Echo Upgrade Program" helps entice users to trade-in old Echo or non-Echo Bluetooth speakers to further increase Echo device penetration, while Google is looking into partnerships with the likes of Spotify to drive sales through different channels. Alibaba is also running collaborations with local and international companies in order to boost the consumer appeal of Tmall Genie devices.