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Anker sets bold new course with AI, robotics and solar at IFA Berlin
BERLIN: Anker Innovations, the Chinese consumer-tech firm best known for power banks and chargers, is no longer content with cables and batteries. At IFA 2025 in Berlin, chief executive Steven Yang unveiled a sweeping new brand direction, positioning the group as a global leader in “smart hardware” and pledging to “ignite new possibilities through ultimate innovation.”
The company will now operate under three unified marques: Anker for charging and energy, Eufy for home and security, and Soundcore for audio and entertainment. Yang told the audience that the pivot is rooted in three principles: break problems down to fundamentals, pursue higher standards rather than easy wins, and grow together with partners and users. The rhetoric, he said, would drive a “maker spirit” across the group — more workshop than corporate HQ.
IFA saw the debut of the EufyMake UV Printer E1, marketed as the world’s first personal 3D-texture UV printer. Already the most funded Kickstarter hardware project ever — raising $46m from 17,000 backers — it ships to early adopters now and will reach retail in December at $2,499 / €2,499. Bundled with upgraded AI design tools, it promises to turn sketches or photos into textured prints on wood, leather or metal.
Eufy’s Omni S2 robot vacuum introduced HydroJet 2.0 scrubbing and a 30kPa AeroTurbo cleaning system capable of deep-cleaning carpets and crossing five-centimetre obstacles. More eye-catching was Marswalker, a robotic carrier that lugs the S2 up and down stairs — a long-standing Achilles’ heel of robot vacuums. Marswalker will ship in the first half of 2026.
In security, Eufy announced AI Core, a large-model agent running locally in the home to detect over 100 scenarios, from package deliveries to trespassers, while keeping data off the cloud. Its companion, the eufyCam S4, is a hybrid 4K/2K PTZ camera promising panoramic views and facial detail up to 15 metres.
Soundcore meanwhile stretched from earbuds into wellness and theatre. The Sleep A30, a pair of ANC sleep buds already selling in the US, has reached Europe. They adaptively cancel noise and play AI-generated brainwave audio to tackle snoring and other disruptions.
The brand also introduced a coin-sized wearable voice recorder with real-time transcription and 97 per cent accuracy across more than 100 languages, aimed at students, professionals and journalists.
Perhaps the boldest move was absorbing Anker’s Nebula projector business, reborn as Soundcore Nebula. The flagship X1 Pro projector, launching on Kickstarter on 23 September, combines a 4K triple-laser engine with Dolby Vision video and Dolby Atmos multi-channel audio. Its detachable wireless speakers and powered subwoofers turn it into what Soundcore dubs the world’s first “mobile theatre station.”
Anker’s own division doubled down on power. Its new Prime line adds AnkerSense View smart displays to show charging speeds and temperatures. The Prime 160W charger, Prime 300W power bank, Qi2 wireless charging station and triple-display docking station all pitch efficiency and compact design as their edge.
The group’s energy arm, Anker Solix, launched the Solarbank Multisystem, a modular kit linking up to four Solarbank units with 14kW solar input and 4.8kW output. Targeted squarely at Europe’s high-tariff households, it promises up to 80 per cent savings on energy bills and a four-year payback period. Its semi-DIY installation is marketed as 85 per cent cheaper than conventional solar. Complementing it is the V1 Smart EV Charger with gesture-based control and tariff-synchronised charging. The starter kit begins at €1,898, with the EV charger priced at €499. Germany gets it first, with France and the Netherlands following on 11 September.
The showcase in Berlin marked more than another tech fair launch. Anker is re-casting itself as a systems company, fusing AI, robotics and renewable energy into everyday hardware. If successful, Yang’s bet could move the firm up from niche accessories into the ranks of household consumer-tech giants. The risk is execution: a vacuum that climbs stairs and a solar charger that pays for itself in four years are promises the market will hold him to.
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How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
