Smartphones are a key part of modern life but with prices routinely in excess of £1,000 for the latest high-end handsets, should you be considering cheaper secondhand or refurbished models instead?
These have the potential to be good for your wallet and the planet, as any device that is given a second life instead of being recycled reduces its lifetime environmental impact and, with it, your footprint.
Among those likely to be mulling over their mobile phone options at the moment are many parents of children going back to school after the summer break. Starting secondary school in particular is traditionally a time when many kids receive their first – or an upgraded – phone.
But when buying secondhand, there are some potential pitfalls to avoid, so here’s what you need to know to grab yourself a bargain.
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Back Market, meanwhile, is essentially a marketplace for smaller refurbishers, and its website was this week listing more than 1,300 smartphones with an average price of £228. It offers a “12-month minimum” warranty.
When looking into retailers and websites, check out the reviews on sites such as Trustpilot. On Trustpilot this week, Envirofone, musicMagpie and Back Market all had “excellent” scores of 4.6 to 4.7, while CeX had a score of 4.3.
Which? points out that in addition to the various retailers and websites, most major UK networks will also have deals on refurbished handsets, although you will be tied into a contract with that network.
Most everyone agrees that timely and targeted consumer research is key to extracting valuable insights that can be critical across all aspects of a business, whether its product development and positioning, marketing and strategy, customer experience and satisfaction, or major company decisions about market expansion, M&A, or corporate transformation. Having a finger on the pulse of your key stakeholders is essential.
But existing market research methods have limitations, particularly in the pandemic age. Phone surveys, web portals, focus groups all have been used for decades to gauge consumer sentiment, and they still have a place in the researcher’s toolbox. But in today’s ubiquitously connected, ultra-mobile world, new ways to reach consumers need to be explored.
The rise of social media offers such an opportunity. Today, it is possible to survey a very vast population directly by recruiting respondents via channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. There are approximately 4.48 billion social media users worldwide (and the number just keeps climbing). That equates to about 57% of the current world’s population and that’s where most consumers are spending their time nowadays.
Those channels have become one of the most effective, time-efficient and inexpensive tools for recruiting target respondents and collecting data on their consumption habits. This is a natural evolution from the more passive social scraping and social listening tools that are used to gauge sentiment and drive analytics. It’s a proactive and targeted method we call social sampling and it borrows from the highly effective playbook of advertisers who have recognized the precision and effectiveness of targeting niche audiences on a global scale.
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While I am not a financial analyst, as a tech analyst, I make a habit of tuning into many tech companies’ quarterly earnings reports. It really is “ground truth” for companies as they’re under the scrutiny of the SEC and investors. I make myself available for comments and questions from the media, but it’s rare that I feel moved enough to write an entire column on a company’s quarter. That said, Synaptics’ Q4-2021 earnings report was special enough to warrant a more in-depth analysis in my opinion. The company is really the bellwether high-end for IoT and I had the chance to chat with Synaptics CEO Michael Hurlston to get a deeper dive.
Background
To make sense of the company’s latest financials, it’s worth looking at Synaptics’ journey since its 1986 founding. Though the company originally distinguished itself as a manufacturer of computer trackpads, fingerprint readers and other biometric interfaces, its purview has expanded dramatically to include the likes of the IoT, mobile and automotive sectors. Amongst other things, it now builds touch controllers for car console displays, audio processors, neural network accelerators and video interfaces.
The company found itself floundering in the late 2010s, from an operational and market standpoint, trading below its value and struggling with its gross margins. I believe Synaptics has done a good job of refocusing under the recent leadership of Hurlston, developing product roadmaps and streamlining its portfolio to take full advantage of its impressive library of IP. Synaptics has even revamped its logo over the last few years, in case you hadn’t noticed.
London remains the undisputed heavyweight of the European startup ecosystem, but in 2020 Paris replaced Berlin in second place, attracting $3.4bn in investment (London accounted for $10.5bn of venture capital). Paris’s rise is rooted in government strategy – the introduction of a tech visa; the establishment of a public investment bank; changes in tax codes – as well as a series of seasoned founders reinvesting in the ecosystem; a generation of highly-educated students from the grand ecoles choosing not to go into private industry but start their own business; and grand projects such as Station F, Europe’s biggest startup incubator, which has attracted global talent.
“When I was appointed, President Macron decided that France needed 25 unicorns by 2025 – at that point we had three,” says Kat Borlongan, director of La French Tech, the government-supported agency that oversees national startup strategy. “We see it as a pipeline and the goal is to build the biggest possible talent pool by having the most open tech visa in the world and to lower the barrier to entrepreneurship.”
The government spends €1.3 billion in seed and pre-seed funding and “after that it's a velocity game,” Borlongan says. “The goal is to get from pre-seed to seed, from seed to A, to B, to C, to D all the way to the top.” There are now 120 companies that have passed through this process and each has an account manager at La French Tech who connects each business with government. “Every single ministry, government agency or administration has a touch point with startups,” Borlongan says.
Sustainability is increasingly a factor in purchasing decisions and consumer behaviour. Back Market is a marketplace for refurbished electronics offering devices at varying price points. The startup, which has five million customers, closed a series D round of $335m in May 2021 aims to expand to the US and make previously owned products the first choice for consumers. backmarket.co.uk
As interest in climate-tech grows, so are the mega war chests.
Growth equity and buyout investor TPG announced earlier this week that it had raised $5.4 billion to invest in climate solutions, while Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management followed up Tuesday by raising $7 billion upon the first close of its fund aimed at companies seeking to reach carbon neutrality.
Design and verification of automotive SoCs that utilize the emerging CAN XL and TSN Ethernet 1/10G networking and control protocols integrate CAST’s validated design IP for both standards with Avery’s verification IP (VIP) that streamlines the design and verification process to an ensure higher quality designs as well as compliance with the standards. The new solutions include the CAN XL and TSN Ethernet design IP from CAST and the corresponding VIP from Avery, which is one of the most comprehensive verification suites available.
CAN XL is the third generation of the CAN data link layer that enables net data rates of up to 10 Mbit/sec averyand supports an extra-large (XL) payload of up to 2048 bytes. High-speed Ethernet in automotive supports the need for multiple streams of data from cameras, sensors, and radars to be transferred and processed in real time. Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) addresses the scheduling, low-latency, and safety requirements of mission-critical control systems like braking, steering, ADAS and other functions.
The expanded partnership builds on the companies’ thirteen-year-long relationship and creates best-in-class, robust, pre-validated CAN FD/XL and TSN Ethernet MAC solutions, streamlining the design and verification process for mutual customers. Avery’s virtual prototype solution for CAN XL and TSN Ethernet enables running CAST’s CAN XL IP and TSN Ethernet MAC reference designs and software stack in a QEMU/SystemVerilog co-simulation solution running on RTOS and supports RISC-V, Arm, and Microblaze embedded processor solutions.
“As an increasing amount of data gets moved throughout and around the connected automobile chip developers need the latest high-bandwidth and high-speed connectivity solutions enabled by evolving networking standards. CAST has a long track record of providing reliable and accurate IP solutions to incorporate the latest automotive networking functionality in SoCs, and this expands our established partnership to deliver high quality VIP to further accelerate the verification of these designs. We look forward to continuing our collaboration to address the current and next-generation protocols being used in a rapidly evolving automotive electronics market,” said Chris Browy vice president of sales and marketing at Avery.
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world.
Despite the geopolitical headwinds for foreign tech firms to enter China, many companies, especially those that find a dependable partner, are still forging ahead. For this week’s roundup, I’m including a conversation I had with Prophesee, a French vision technology startup, which recently got funding from Kai-Fu Lee and Xiaomi, along with the usual news digest.
Spotting opportunities in China
Like many companies working on futuristic, cutting-edge tech in Europe, Prophesee was a spinout from university research labs. Previously, I covered two such companies from Sweden: Imint, which improves smartphone video production through deep learning, and Dirac, an expert in sound optimization.
The three companies have two things in common: They are all in niche fields, and they have all found eager customers in China.
For Prophesee, they are production lines, automakers and smartphone companies in China looking for breakthroughs in perception technology, which will in turn improve how their robots respond to the environment. So it’s unsurprising that Xiaomi and Chinese chip-focused investment firm Inno-Chip backed Prophesee in its latest funding round, which was led by Sinovation Venture.
If you read InsideHook’s posts on tech deals — as you should — you’ll sometimes find seemingly unbelievable discounts on speakers, smartphones, laptops and headphones.
We’re talking 30-50% off brands like Sonos, Apple, Bose and Samsung; these are deals that you wouldn’t find during big shopping events like Black Friday or Prime Day.
The big sales secret? These are “refurbished” products, a phrase that can mean different things on different sites. It’s not quite the same as “used” or “open box,” and depending on where you buy this refurbished gear, you’ll be subject to different warranties and the products may (or may not) have cosmetic blemishes.
Is a big discount worth buying a not-quite-new product? To get some background, we spoke with Lauren Benton, the U.S. Managing Director from Back Market, a refurbished marketplace that just launched a Certified Renewed collection from brands like Samsung, Microsoft, Sennheiser and more (we’ve previously recommended Back Market due to their excellent supply of not-quite-new Apple gear).
China’s economy is roaring back to pre-pandemic levels and has considerable growth potential. For any European company, entering the Chinese market and implementing its business strategy can be a long and perilous process, unless you are inducted by artificial intelligence (AI) guru Kai-Fu Lee.
“It is the recognition of the work that has been done and it is perhaps the beginning of a new phase with new objectives, with each time the challenge of having to progress both on product development and on commercial development,” said Luca Verre, co-founder and CEO of Prophesee, in an interview with EE Times Europe.
7 years, $100 million
The amount of the investissement was not disclosed, but a quick calculation provides the answer. In 2019, Prophesee indeed raised €25 million ($28 million) in funding, bringing the total to $68 million since its creation in 2014, and Verre said, “We’re getting very close to a total investment of $100 million.”
The prices of flagship smartphones keep climbing higher and higher. At this point, if you want to buy the latest and greatest, you need to shell out more than a thousand dollars. But before you do that, it’s a good idea to take a look at refurbished smartphones. Refurbished smartphones—especially those sold straight from the manufacturer—offer you the same flagship device (that is not even a year old) at a discounted rate.
Read on to learn what refurbished smartphones are, what you need to know before buying a refurbished iPhone or Android smartphone, and the trusted sources to purchase from.
What is a “refurbished” smartphone?
Although there’s no official definition for “refurbished” products, it generally refers to a smartphone that has been used (even if just to take it out of the box), and then returned to a company (manufacturer, carrier, or retailer), that then performed some checks and fixed things that needed to be fixed (if any).
That’s why it’s important to note the words “refurbished,” “certified refurbished,” and “renewed,” are used interchangeably. “Manufacturer refurbished” means that repairs or upgrades were done by the manufacturer themselves (which is better than it being done by third-party companies).
Other than that, there is no fundamental difference between a new or refurbished smartphone.
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Back Market
Back Market shines with it comes to transparency. It has a transparent grading system for each device, for both appearance and technical condition. Every device goes through rigorous testing, and if there are any issues, they are fixed.
Back Market offers a 1-year warranty and a 30-day return policy.
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