What are they up to now?
Amazon is about to expand its smart home offerings in a big way. The company just announced its intention to acquire Bay Area-based home mesh router startup, Eero. It’s a pretty clear fit for the online retailer as it pushes to make Alexa a feature in the connected home.
The move also makes sense for five-year-old Eero, which, in spite of being early to the home mesh router game and pulling in some high-profile investors, has struggled. This time last year, the company laid off 30 employees — roughly one-fifth of its work force.
Amazon’s certainly got the deep pockets, and the addition of Alexa to routers from Huawei and Netgear last year demonstrate that this category can be a viable one. It makes sense, as these coverage-extending mesh routers, like Echo Dots, are designed to be plugged into every room of the home.
Amazon has been picking up a number of high-profile home automation startups in recent years, including Ring and Blink, as it looks to launch its own in-house Alexa smart home ecosystem. In many cases, Amazon has opted to retain the startups’ branding, which could bode well for the future of the Eero name — though the company admittedly doesn’t have the same sort of recognition as Ring.
“We are incredibly impressed with the eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work,” Amazon SVP Dave Limp said in a press release. “We have a shared vision that the smart home experience can get even easier, and we’re committed to continue innovating on behalf of customers.”
The deal is still waiting for all of the standard regulatory approval. Details of the acquisition have yet to be disclosed.
If you’re the kind of person who looks for patterns, you have a lot to work with in this batch of Super Bowl spots. Despite each 30-second commercial costing upwards of $5 million, on par with recent years, there was a lot of mediocrity. There’s also lots of jokes about robots. They’re in beer ads, potato chip ads, home security ads and, well, Alexa ads. It’s almost as if we’re afraid of something. Then there are the women: Advertisers appear to have glommed on to the fact that half the Big Game audience is female. Imagine that! Enter Serena Williams for Bumble and Sarah Michelle Gellar for Olay. Brands steered clear of any controversial issues or potential political hot potatoes. Which is for the best: Why fumble when you can blitz with gags? Well, we’ll get to that. Anyway, we heard there was a game on, too.
