technology

Being Smarter About Smart Home

by Joe Derochowski, The NPD Group In the first 11 months of 2017, U.S. dollar sales of home automation products increased 40 percent, with strong growth across all device types, according to The NPD Group’s Retail Tracking Service. Home automation products were among the fastest selling items during the 2017 holiday season – over Thanksgiving week and Cyber Week, home…

Speak, Swipe, Smile: How Virtual Assistants Are No Longer Just About Voice

By Chris Albrecht Amazon’s Alexa plays a central role in my family’s morning routine: she tells us the weather, plays the radio and sets timers so we can catch the bus. Alexa is great for simple tasks, but she and other smart speakers stumble when it comes to more complicated requests. That’s just a limitation of having only a voice and speaker interface. But the way we…

Housewares Are Becoming Connected. Is Your Company Ready?

By Michael Wolf The housewares industry is changing, but I wouldn’t blame you for missing it. That’s because industry evolutions happen subtly and slowly and, as a result, it’s often easy to miss the big shifts. Most of us, after all, are busy doing our job. But the old adage “the days are long but the years are short” applies just as much to market evolutions as well as…

Cleaning Up: How Robot Vacuums Work and What’s Next

By Carley Knobloch In 2002 when they hit the scene, robot vacuums were the stuff of curiosity and silly videos of cats who climb on them and sail around the house. They’re not the stuff of viral videos anymore: With major technological advancements, boosted power and prices falling, robot vacuum cleaners are becoming a mainstay in American homes. A recent study, in fact,…

Alexa, Show Me the Future: The Emerging Interfaces of The Smart Home

By Michael Wolf For most of my adult life, doing things around the home meant pushing buttons and turning dials. In fact, for almost everyone who isn’t a teenager or younger, the process of cooking, making coffee or doing laundry meant using mechanical controls. But that’s beginning to change. Touch screens have become massively popular over the past decade, and more…

Incorporating Technology Into Your Independent Homewares Retail Mix

Technology is no longer isolated to tech-heads and gadget nerds. There are a large range of products that integrate technology into your décor, going by the category name - fashtronics . These design-focused objects integrate technology for function – not for technology’s sake. Fashtronics is a growing category in home décor. Examples of this fashtronics trend include…

What’s Influencing Design and Technology for the Home in 2017?

In this article, we take an exclusive look at one of four trends forecast for Spring-Summer 2017. Recently revealed at the International Home + Housewares Show during our Home and Interior Design Trends 2017 presentation, we share Activate. Activate takes influence from the rise of smart technology assisting our everyday routines. This trend highlights how these changes in…

Knowing Innovation: David C. Aaronson, WSI 4 Real Web Digital Internet Marketing

By Vicki Matranga, Design Programs Coordinator At the International Home + Housewares Show in March, the Innovation Theater in the Lakeside Center will present 21 educational programs, every hour beginning Saturday morning and ending Tuesday afternoon. At the Theater, located in Room E350 (near the entry to the Level 3 Lobby), experts in new product development and launch will…