Headworx

I never thought I would become an expert on China and I'm still far from being one. But our business relationships with Chinese partners have been growing strongly and that is reflected in much more frequent China trips. So here is the mini series of blogs with some tips which you may find helpful. China is not straightforward for Western visitors. It is just different and small things matter when preparing for a trip. Or just knowing what to expect. May marks my second trip to China in 2025 an I plan to be here back in June. What is different is I'm the first time on my own, which I find both exciting and liberating. Being able to do things on my own has always been important, be it soldering a PCB or writing a piece of assembly code or trekking in the mountains of Georgia or Kirgizstan. Organized trips and telling people to do things for you or carry your bags is simply not my style. So you are going to China - where to start? Passport. Obviously the number one step is making...

SILVAIR published the Q1-2025 report on May 15th. Bound by the corporate governance rules I could not share our progress earlier, but now the cat is out of the bag. We had a stellar quarter. Q4-2024 was record and always in such cases the worry is if the trend would continue. It has continued. Even stronger. Despite the US trade wars introducing uncertainty in the markets. Fundamentally I think there are couple of jointly contributing factors to our overall progress: Brand recognition. Despite very low marketing budget, we continue to be increasingly more recognized. And this is both Bluetooth NLC as the only truly interoperable wireless lighting control standard, and Silvair as the leading product based on this standard. Both brands are associated with performance, quality, robustness and ease of use. A perfect combination of features. The product feature set is increasingly more complete, particularly addressing the needs of customers in the enterprise segment. Network scalability ha...

The news of Enlighted shutting down the lighting controls business have been a real earthquake for the industry. Once the absolute champion and the leader in the lighting controls and IoT space has ceased to exist. Sadly, they have not been the first ones. There was Universal Douglas in 2023  and  Touché in early 2025 . But the Enlighted case has really transformed the company name into a verb. In a very bad way: "to be enlighted" almost feels in line with "to be musked": "to be musked" can mean to be treated poorly or "screwed over" by a company, often without apology. For example, buyers of Tesla vehicles might say they were "musked" if they experienced unresolved issues with their cars. This is a play on Elon Musk's surname and is used pejoratively. So have you been enlighted? We can help. The common theme across all the above mentioned "gone out of business" events is - they all were proprietary / vendor - locked solu...

Push notifications are now everywhere and apart from being super annoying, they have really become useless. By default every app (and most web pages too!) try enabling all forms of notifications by default and it takes a lot of fluency in handling phones and computers to set them up properly. Which mostly means "disable". I think the time has come to really reverse the defaults. They should be "do not notify me about anything". And then users would be able to select the small set of really important things they want to be actively poked about. The problem has gotten even worse as most apps / services are multi-modal - they live on PCs, phones, watches, even in earbuds. And a single event gets multiplied by being pushed to all the devices. Then some services, apart from sending a notification send an email. Which sends a notification f its own. Shopping and payment apps are the worst. "we have received your order" - "we have started processing your pay...