SPARK friends and blog readers, it has been a busy year!
With the summer upon us and a busy Fall on the horizon, what better time than now to pause, just for a moment, and look back at some of the recent SPARK highlights you might have missed amid a torrent of SPARK news announcements.
The SPARK News page has been in overdrive in recent months, and we invite readers to peruse the headlines for yourselves. Here’s a summary of what you’ll find: More customer news, more awards, more ecosystem leadership and more funding.
More momentum. More growth. More indicators that the short-range wireless domain is undergoing a foundational disruption, its first meaningful evolution in decades, with LE-UWB™ technology at the forefront.
In customer news, SPARK chalked up new wins in performance gaming and audio with a new customer (CHERRY) and a returning customer (Focal), respectively. The new products and portfolios that SPARK is enabling in these markets affirm two things.
It shows that gamers and audiophiles crave wireless performance that’s beyond the reach of Bluetooth and proprietary 2.4 GHz connectivity. Many gamers and audiophiles still rely on wired device connectivity to this day because conventional wireless platforms can’t compete with wired connectivity performance. LE-UWB™ gives gamers and audio enthusiasts the ability to finally cut the cords.
There’s important subtext here as well. Performance gaming and audio are bellwethers for adjacent applications. Historically they’ve driven innovation in human-machine interfaces (HMIs) – devices where humans perceive even tiny amounts of latency.
In this light, gaming and audio applications are an important proving ground for the performance-intensive applications of tomorrow – applications that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi weren’t designed for,– including AI wearables, AR/VR, robotics, medical wearables and implants, smart home and smart city infrastructure, and much more.
Gaming and audio are tips of the iceberg. The opportunity for LE-UWB™ is massive.
THE MESSAGE IS RESONATING
The many benefits of SPARK LE-UWB™ technology, high data throughput, ultra-low power consumption, exceptionally low latency and interference-free operation,are well known to the tech industry and product designers. The gathering swell of SPARK news and customer success stories has caught the media’s attention as well. Journalists are pulled in many directions these days, so we appreciate when they take the time to weigh in!
For a fantastic deep dive read on the implications of the CHERRY+SPARK collaboration for the gaming hardware ecosystem, be sure to check out this excellent piece from Tech Times – “Cherry XTRFY K63W Pro Debuts as First Wireless Gaming Keyboard With UWB, Double Razer’s 4K Cap”.
RFID Journal, having previously covered SPARK’s collaboration with TokenMe to make construction sites smarter and safer, recently invited SPARK’s perspective on the prospects for LE-UWB™ in presence and proximity sensing. The venerable industry trade publication has expanded its focus over the years to cover the broader ecosystem of automatic identification, real-time location and connected edge technologies. Its audience is used to hearing about the benefits of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee and traditional UWB. SPARK’s guest contributed article on the many advantages of LE-UWB™ was surely eye-opening for the publication’s longtime readers.
In India, leading embedded electronics publication Electronics For You singled out SPARK’s SR1120 and LE-UWB™ technology for inclusion in the publication’s Truly Innovative Electronics section. Here the publication’s editors “review 500-plus product announcements every month to select a few of these so that you can innovate faster…”.
You can read the full article here: “Lightning-Fast Wireless For Real-Time Apps”. SPARK appreciates the “truly innovative” distinction! And we were honored to receive it two times in a row. Don’t miss the follow-on accolade: “Ultra-Low Power Kit for Presence Sensing”.
Closer to home, SPARK was thrilled to be profiled recently in La Presse, Quebec’s prestigious and influential news headquarters. Esteemed technology journalist Alain McKenna chronicled SPARK’s aforementioned collaboration with CHERRY, with a spotlight on SPARK’s broader value propositions and aspirations beyond the gaming market. It’s an excellent read, and you can find it here: “The Bluetooth of the future is taking shape in Montreal”.
The weeks and months ahead will bring more exciting news. We encourage readers to watch this space!
