Just like a holiday turkey, this week’s KMB Comm Technology Week in Review is stuffed— skipping the carb-laden stuffing—the KMB weekly wrap-up for the week of Dec. 1-5, is however, chock full of the latest industry and national news.
With 2025 winding down and everyone looking forward to the rest of the holiday season the news cycle for the next couple of weeks will be busy. Keeping pace with holiday news cycle, KMB Comm has found compelling items from the smart home and commercial AV industries, as well as relevant national news.
What’s Happening in the Residential Technology Market
Starting with some product news from Residential Systems, the publication has an item on the new Magnetar MK II series of products. The publication points out the new product line made its debut at the 2025 CEDIA Expo show and it includes a choice of two models.
To learn more about the Magnetar MK II products, click here.
Over at CE Pro, the publication looks at the dealer software category with its software deep dive feature. Some of the deep dive’s findings include the massive leap in adoption of AI technologies, and the growing use of cloud-based software products.
To see the complete story from CE Pro, go to the link here.
Moving onto the audiophile world, the publication Future Audiophile recaps the recent Capital Audiofest home audio show.
Check out the show report here.
Wrapping up KMB Comm’s Technology Week in Review’s look at the residential market, Technology Designer has a nice story on Tommy’s Place.
Located on Cape Cod, the publication explains this facility provides a place for kids fighting cancer. Tommy’s Place also houses these kids’ families, and Technology Designer says the property features lots of gear from Snap One, including SunBrite TVs and Episode speakers.
The year-long project was handled by Adam Zell and the team at Boston Automations. Here is the entire story.
What’s Happening in the Commercial Technology Market
Shifting gears to the commercial AV industry, the AVNetwork website had a couple of noteworthy items.
The first item from the website is its annual SCN Top 50 Systems Integrators 2025 list. This year’s list resembles past years according to the site. SCN states that AVI-SPL remains the top company, and other content associated with the list includes a Q&A with former Diversified CEO Eric Hutto.
To learn more about the SCN list of top 50 commercial AV companies go here.
The other AVNetwork story to make KMB Comm’s Technology Week in Review is a digital signage case study with NowSignage delivering digital menu board solutions for the national pizza chain Little Ceasars.
To read this Hot-N-Ready item, click here.
KMB Comm Look at National News for Dec. 1-5
Widening the KMB Comm news scope, the past several years Spotify subscribers have looked forward to the streaming service’s annual end-of-year usage report. A story from Yahoo reports that on Dec. 3, the service launched its Spotify Wrapped to its 713 million users.
According to the story, new features added to Wrapped this year include the ability for users to see their, “listening age” and for them to compete in a “Wrapped Party.”
Other services, including Apple Music offer similar types of year-end reports. In the case of Apple Music, the service calls its year-end product, “Apple Music Replay.”
These year-end reports provide data on what songs users listened to most often, as well as users’ most popular albums each month, and their overall most popular artists for the year.
Concluding the KMB Comm Technology Week in Review for the week of Dec. 1-5, LinkedIn is reporting that gas prices fell to their lowest levels in four years.
LinkedIn news points out the national average now sits at $3.00 per gallon. Further down in the LinkedIn post there are White House figures that state these reduced prices could save consumers $200 per year.
To see the previous week’s KMB Comm’s Technology Week in Review, click here.
KMB Communications hosts a podcast called AV Trade Talk. Listeners can check out the podcast to learn about the latest happenings in the custom installation electronics industry. To listen to the KMB AV Trade Talk Podcast, click here.