Friday, February 24, 2012 -- Way back when I worked at the Good Guys, Boston Acoustics was one of two "high-end" speaker lines we had in the car audio department. Thomas, the install manager at the time, had a pair of the Pro 6.2 separates in his front doors, and even to my then-untrained ear (as if it's really trained now), those speakers sounded awesome. As for me, the bucket I was driving at the time didn't deserve speakers that good. Today Boston Acoustics released a statement saying that it was exiting car audio. I caught wind of this a couple of days ago with the rumor that reps were being quietly contacted with the news. The company plans to focus on its home audio products, though it will retain its OEM partnerships on the car side. From the statement we can glean that this is a financial decision, since Boston—as with other companies—is beholden to a higher power, namely its stakeholders. Profitability is the watchword, and nowadays it can come from cutting as easily as increasing sales. It's just unfortunate that its principals don't see aftermarket car audio as a part of the company's profitability matrix. There is still…

Friday, February 17, 2012 -- A few days ago CEA put out a release that said it's developing a working group to bring together "content creators, aggregators and app developers." The stated purpose was a little vague, but that's not the important part. If you think about app development, it's following the common course of social media: get people first, then figure out what to do with them. OS producers have catered to developers to simply produce, produce, produce to build acceptable, marketable numbers of applications for their devices. Apps have also become revenue generators of their own (my 7-year-old constantly bugs me about buying clothes for her avatar in a game on her iPod.) Now, CEA is taking the lead to provide some direction to the process. Why do we need this? Think of where you see apps now. They have moved from portable devices to live in TVs, DVD players and set-top boxes. You can download them for your computer browser as well. Apps have become the de facto standard for distributing capability in a device: they are small, easily upgradeable, and the learning curve for consumers is nil because of their experiences with existing devices. Simply put,…