For Sonos, 2020 began in dramatic fashion. While the tech world was focused on CES, the company made a splash by suing Google for allegedly infringing five of its wireless speaker patents. Sonos said this was just a small portion of Google's overall infractions, noting that both Amazon and Google likely violated about 100 patents each. Google counter-sued in June, and Sonos filed more charges in September. Sonos is well within its rights to defend its patent portfolio -- and the company has been working on wireless music-streaming tech for longer than just about anyone, so it's entirely possible its claims have merit.

An open-source project aims to give a rudimentary eye to robots with the help of a camera that can detect, identify and track the movement of specific objects. The Pixy camera sensor board, being developed by Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University, can detect objects based on seven colors, and then report them back to a computer. A Kickstarter campaign was launched on Thursday to fund the $25,000 project, and the organizations are on pace to reach full funding by the end of the day. Adding the Pixy could be viewed as giving robots basic vision, said Rich LeGrand, founder of Charmed Labs. "Once you have vision, then you can introduce the idea of tasks," LeGrand said. "If you want a robot to charge itself, that's a simple example of a task.