Mergers and People Acquisitions

• Chris will be joining Hologram as a developer advocate. Past discussions around 3G projects were people like Akiba, Gerry and Brandon (wifi connectivity)
• Dave wants to see a chart of data update rate on wifi vs 3g (and how it impacts battery).
• Chris and Dave both use Sendy. which is a front end for Amazon SES.
• Acquisitions!
  • Altium has bought Upverter. Upverter was on The Amp Hour in 2013. Dave is excited about the eeConcierge service.
  • Dragon Innovation was bought by Avnet. Scott Miller was on the show back in 2012.
  • IXYS was bought by Littelfuse. They paid $750M.
• Dave got fuse quotes from a Japanese mfg that were 1/5th the cost of list fuses! These are what you can buy on his site in multipacks.
• 121GW meter will be released on October 20th. It will surely sell out, make sure you're on Dave's mailing list!
• Dave will be launching another Kickstarter. Chris suggested he does Kickstarter Gold like Zach Dunham did.
• People are building DIY Powerwalls at home. Tesla is selling theirs at a lower cost than we thought.
• Plethora wrote about why crowdfunded projects fail.
• Dave was contacted by the new owner of Lily Drones threatening legal action over the trademark. Dave had made a video about it while on vacation. The "Nominative Fair Use" case with NKOTB guides judicial action over this.
• AvE did a review of the Cubiio, but was talking about the laser but not the manufacturability.
• Chris wrote about "Solo Engineers" and was really thinking about the campaign/design that David Kronstein (Tesla500) ran for the Chronos 1.4 camera.
• Andy Gelme almost got in trouble with the LiFX bulb because of the stretch goals. This changed the rules on KS that you need a real project.
• Sonos is bricking speakers if you don't accept their terms and conditions.
• There is a pacemaker with 250K units in the field that requires a firmware update.
• An engineer was sentenced to 40 months in prison for meddling with emissions output on Volkswagon vehicles. No word yet on the executives going to jail.

Links are always available throughout the week on our subreddit /r/TheAmpHour or follow our twitter account @TheAmpHour Thanks to the Wikimedia Commons for the merge sign