A note from the folks at Linksys:

Effective immediately, Linksys, a Division of Cisco, has become the Cisco Consumer Business Group (CBG).

CGB will be the center of expertise for Cisco’s consumer business and go to market model. CBG will focus on developing products and solutions that target the consumer and small office/home office (SOHO) market and enable the connected life. CGB will focus on consumer channels such as retail, online and consumer reseller partners. The group will also help build awareness for the Cisco brand in the North America consumer market and add value to products and relationships outside US and Canada where the Cisco brand is predominantly stronger.

Earlier this year, the company announced that the Linksys product brand was transitioning to “Linksys by Cisco”. This transition has been completed and going forward Cisco consumer products will continue to be marketed under the Linksys by Cisco brand and co-exist in the market with Cisco branded products over the near term. We will continue to examine our branding strategy going forward (as we have to date) and make changes if and when these changes add value to our customers' decision making processes and our channel partners.

The overall consumer strategy of the Cisco Consumer Business Group is to capture the market transition from Home Networking 1.0, where home networks are largely designed to share a broadband connection between PCs and their peripherals, to Home Networking 2.0, where homes will become more multimedia enabled and experience a proliferation of networking devices and services. Ease-of-use, device discovery, and access to new services are becoming paramount to enhancing the consumer experience.

By enabling the consumer to be ready for these coming trends, Cisco is positioned to maintain and extend its leadership in this space. We believe Cisco is in a great position to educate the market and enable the consumer to be ready for a connected life.

Network Magic 5.0 Release
Cisco acquired Pure Networks in July, and now they have an update to their Network Magic home networking management software. Kids are going to hate this! They've introduced some enhanced parental controls features that will be combined with Trend Micro URL blocking to give parents even more oversight. Features include snapshotting and even access control. So, parents can adjust when the Internet can be used! Kids can't even steal the Wi-Fi signal from the neighbor.

Things are different now than when I was a kid, and we used to jimmy the lock to my parents' bedroom to get into the Christmas presents. A razor blade leaves very little mark on scotch tape, by the way!