Jan 7, 2026 4 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ The Speaker Era Ends

Plus: The Car Becomes Platform, Sport Becomes A System

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

CES 2026, day one—and the message is blunt: the speaker era is over.

NEW TECH

Ultrasound Moves Into Silicon and Quietly Resets Audio Design

👀 What’s happening: At CES 2026, SonicEdge announced its modulated ultrasound audio technology is being integrated directly into a major semiconductor vendor’s next generation audio chipsets. Instead of bolt on components, sound generation moves into silicon, letting chips natively drive ultrasonic speakers designed for ultra small, always on devices.

🌍 How this hits reality: Audio has been a stubborn bottleneck for wearables and AI hearables. Traditional speakers limit size, battery life, and thermal budgets. Silicon level ultrasound integration removes OEM friction and resets the stack. With over 25 patents and active deployments, this shifts audio from mechanical tuning to chip design, similar to how image signal processors reshaped mobile cameras.

⛵ Key takeaway: Once sound generation becomes a native silicon feature, audio stops being a constraint and becomes a design lever. Expect faster iteration in AI glasses, earbuds, and wearables, and pressure on legacy speaker suppliers who sit outside the chip roadmap.

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AUTOMOBILE

AFEELA Signals a New Fight Over In-Car Platforms

👀 What’s happening: Sony Honda Mobility used CES 2026 to frame AFEELA as more than a car launch. Alongside its prototype, it outlined an on chain mobility platform and creator program that treats the vehicle as a programmable entertainment space, not a closed product, signaling a shift from selling hardware to governing in cabin ecosystems.

🌍 How this hits reality: Car software has followed the phone model where OEMs host an App Store while Apple and Google own distribution logic. AFEELA breaks that assumption. Tokenized incentives, open APIs, and persistent identities pull developers, users, and data into a parallel economy that traditional OEM revenue models were never built to manage.

⛵ Key takeaway: If this pattern holds, the car becomes a governed platform, not a feature bundle. OEMs that cannot control incentives, identity, and developer economics risk being reduced to hardware suppliers inside someone else’s mobility stack.

SPORT

Amazfit Is Assembling a Full Stack Sports Technology System

👀 What’s happening: Amazfit showed a full sports tech stack at CES 2026, not a single hero device. Watches, nutrition sensing concepts, HUD running glasses, and software all fed into one training graph. Elite athletes were used less as endorsements and more as validation of an ecosystem approach.

🌍 How this hits reality: Sports wearables usually compete on sensors or price. Amazfit is pushing integration. Training load, recovery, food intake, and live visual feedback sit in one loop. That pressures rivals who still ship devices first and systems later, especially below the $200 tier.

⛵ Key takeaway: Amazfit is treating sport like a data supply chain. If this holds, midrange hardware becomes the control point for performance intelligence, not premium labs or pro only gear.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Meta’s $2B acquisition of Manus is welcomed by U.S. regulators but faces scrutiny in China over potential technology export control issues.
SGH and Steel Dynamics made an all-cash bid for BlueScope, proposing a split of its Australian and North American assets.
Vistra agreed to buy Cogentrix Energy for about $4.7 billion, adding gas-fired capacity to meet surging U.S. power demand driven by data centers and AI.
xAI raised $20B in Series E to expand data centers and Grok, as regulators across multiple countries investigate safety failures involving illegal deepfake content.
LMArena raised a $150M Series A at a $1.7B valuation just four months after launching its commercial AI model evaluation service.

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