How do people feel about refurbished electronics? I’m definitely on the fence about it unless I have confidence in the people who do it. When the original manufacturer does the work and inspection process — I feel more secure about it. Back Market, the leading global marketplace for refurbished electronics, today announced its Certified Renewed collection of electronics refurbished directly by top brands. The devices in the collection are guaranteed to have the highest level of quality at the best price.
The Certified Renewed collection currently features twelve top consumer electronics brands and growing. Devices vary by manufacturer, but include items typical to the marketplace including smartphones, laptops, audio and more. Certified Renewed electronics have been refurbished directly by the brands that originally manufactured them or one of their authorized affiliates.
That means that they come with official accessories and packaging, as well as the reassurance that these devices meet manufacturer quality standards perfectly. In addition to the quality consumers have come to associate with the brands, each purchase will come with Back Market’s standard 30-day money back guarantee and 1-year warranty.
Intrinsic ID announced that its flagship hardware IP product QuiddiKey has been certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The certification of QuiddiKey version 3.8.0 has been performed under NIST’s Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP) and assures that cryptographic components of the product have been tested and operate as they should under NIST’s guidelines.
“Passing the NIST CAVP certification is another important step in Intrinsic ID’s ongoing efforts towards improved standardization for security IP in general and Intrinsic ID’s products in particular,” said Pim Tuyls, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Intrinsic ID.
“Facing the problems of today’s rapidly growing device markets, such as the Internet of Things, which rely on incredibly fragmented hardware options, we believe that the only way to keep devices and networks secure is to encourage more collaborative standardization. NIST’s CAVP is one of the programs that is taking a leading role in this process, and we are happy to join this initiative, along with the many other certifications that we have already obtained for our products.”
Intrinsic ID’s QuiddiKey is a hardware IP solution that enables device manufacturers and designers to secure their products with internally generated, device-unique cryptographic keys without the need for adding costly, security-dedicated silicon. It uses the inherently random start-up values of SRAM as a PUF, which generates the entropy required for a strong hardware root of trust.
If you’re looking to save money, refurbished electronics can be a great option.
After all, you can get a 256GB iPhone 11 for $639. That's roughly $110 off the price of a new one. And these days, you can find similar savings on popular headphones, speakers, laptops, tablets, and smartwatches.
In fact, eBay is currently offering an extra 15 percent off many refurbished items listed on its site. (Use coupon code July4Savings.)
The trick is making sure the product is genuinely refurbished, not simply cleaned up, repackaged, and repriced. And that requires asking some questions before you settle on a deal.
Not everyone defines refurbished the same way.
“Seller-refurbished is similar to the Wild West,” says Carlo Salgado, e-commerce administrator at Sims Lifecycle Services. “You have thousands of online sellers offering products they refurbish themselves. Consumers have no way to determine the quality of replaced parts.”
That said, there are ways to protect yourself. Companies that sell refurbished goods often offer warranties and money-back guarantees, for example.
Last year, Covid-19 created a chip shortage that the world has yet to recover from. Demand for electronics surged as entire communities were forced to work and study from home. The shortage was first felt most acutely by the automobile industry, but has also created some disruption in the consumer electronics industry—forcing Apple to stagger its iPhone releases and Samsung to delay the next Galaxy release to 2022.
This has created a lot of conversation about supply chains around the world. In the United States President Joe Biden has focused his efforts on rebuilding the American chip industry—an arduous and complicated task. For now, the shortage is framed as a simple misalignment between supply and demand: The auto industry first canceled their semiconductor orders because they had anticipated a slowdown in business; chip manufacturers found other industries to sell their chips to, and when the auto industry picked up faster than expected they had to go to the back of the line. But there’s more to this story than basic economics.
You Can’t Make Something Out Of Nothing
Producing components for our electronics consumes a lot of natural resources. Let’s start with the nearly 250 different types of materials found in a typical smartphone, many of them mined at the beginning of the cycle, and recklessly disposed of at the end (not to mention the human toll caused by the injustices of the mineral extraction business). Then there’s the power and water that today’s chip mega-factories require to churn out these devices. A typical semiconductor fab requires 2 to 9 million gallons of water per day and uses enough electricity to power 50,000 homes.
That type of consumption has a profound impact on the Earth and the people that depend on it. Just ask the rice farmers in Taiwan. Taiwan is the epicenter of semiconductor manufacturing and it also happens to be in the middle of a drought, causing the country to go to great lengths to keep water flowing to its all-important semiconductor industry and shutting off irrigation to legions of rice growers. While the farmers were compensated for the disruption, they couldn’t put food in people’s hands. It’s also worth noting that the world largest contract chip maker TSMC, consumes nearly 5% of the total power produced in Taiwan, a percentage that will only grow as more factories come on line.
In September 2020, Prophesee made available its Metavision Intelligence Suite, a development toolkit that includes 100 algorithms available through APIs, 67 code samples and 11 open-source, use-case specifi c application modules for designing and implementing event-based vision technology in machine vision systems. This “initial offering”, the result of 5 years of work, is comprised of three components – Player, Designer, and SDK – and will be constantly expanded with new use cases modules and code.
"For the robotics sector, the role, importance, and impact of innovation has never been greater,” said Dan Kara, vice president of robotics at WTWH Media. “With this year’s RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards, Robotics Business Review highlights those critical innovations, and the organizations responsible for them, that will spur the development of new robotics solutions and drive robotics adoption forward."
Up almost 3x from its low in March 2020, at the current price of $137 per share, we believe Synaptics Incorporated stock (NASDAQ: SYNA) has further upside potential. Synaptics, a human interface hardware and software developer, has seen its stock rise from $47 to $137 off its March 2020 low, much more than the S&P which increased by over 85% from its lows. Further, the stock is up around 70% from the level it was at before the pandemic. However, we believe that Synaptics stock could rise around 10% to set fresh highs above $150, driven by expectations of steady demand growth and strong Q3 2021 results. Our dashboard What Factors Drove 269% Change In Synaptics Stock Between 2018 And Now? has the underlying numbers behind our thinking.
Synaptics stock’s rise since late 2018 came despite a 21% drop in revenues from $1.63 billion in FY 2018 to $1.29 billion in FY 2020 (Synaptics’ fiscal year ends in June). Combined with a 3.5% rise in the outstanding share count, RPS (revenue-per-share) dropped 24% from $47.70 to $36.40 over this period.
However, Synaptics’ P/S (price-to-sales) multiple rose from 0.8x in 2018 to 2.5x by 2020 end, and has further risen to 3.8x currently. We believe that the company’s P/S ratio has the potential to rise further in the near term on expectations of continuing demand growth and a favorable shareholder return policy, thus driving the stock price higher.
It’s one of those unsolvable problems – a Catch 22
We want our electric cars, our underfloor heating, our iPhones and our iPads, and all the other electrical gadgetry – but in order to work they all need power.
Recently, Texas has felt the full brunt of this problem. After the big freeze in February caused significant problems for its grid, it became apparent that Texans would have to cut back on their electricity at a time when there have never been so many electrical devices they “need” to plug in.
This might shock you, but parts of the US electrical grid are over a hundred years old!
Seventy percent of the grid’s transmission lines and power transformers are over 25-years old, and the average age of the power plants is over 30-years old. But, our electricity needs are more sophisticated and the strain on the grid is higher than ever.
We are constantly being told that clean power is the way to go. The US aims to phase out new internal combustion-engine cars within the next 20-years and will be replaced with electric vehicles (or EVs as they are known).
As anyone with an electric vehicle will know, charging away from home is a hit and miss affair right now. Traveling long distances is only viable on well-established routes between major cities and hubs.
There are not enough charging stations for the existing 1.4 million plug-in electric vehicles that have been sold since they came into the market in 2010. There are still around 282 million internal-combustion engine (i.e., diesel and petrol-driven) vehicles to be replaced.
Vision is our most important sense. It follows that some of the greatest human inventions mimic its design. Cameras, televisions, computers and smart phones all rely on the medium of vision, in turn defining the way our world works. But for nearly 200 years, we've been taking pictures the same way. Is it still the most effective method? MVPro's writer, Joel Davies, sits down with the CEO and co-founder of Prophesee to discuss the future of vision and how he's changing the way we take pictures.
Security cameras and image sensors are pretty stupid, as we’ve explained before. Yet they’re important for a range of applications that have nothing to do with taking selfies at the beach.
Thibaud Hug de Larauze is a French businessman and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer of a company called Back Market.
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