591 episodes
On this week's show we sit down to revisit last week's popular discussion on voice control in the home (spoiler: Jason still isn't a fan). We also chat about the future of 4K and what integrators need to know about video distribution thanks to a great article by Chris Pinder of HDAnywhere. Rounding out the show is a new home automation offering from Legrand that targets the production builder market.
Apple is rarely the first one to any party, but they tend to turn a lot of heads when they do finally show up. From portable music players, to tablets, to smart watches Apple has demonstrated this pattern time and again. True to form the company has now staked their claim in another existing market, subscription based streaming music, with Apple Music.
For this week's show we are pleased to present a conversation with Shaun Springer. Shaun is the founder and CEO of Astro, the company behind the newly released smart lightbulb / speaker combination Twist. Shaun's background in the smart home will be of particular interest to the integrators in our audience. Earlier in his career Shaun worked at Crestron, where he led research and development on the company's Core3 UI initiative.
In a couple of respects this was a rather disappointing week in the smart home. On one hand we had been looking forward to a press conference from Nest. The company has been awfully quiet since being acquired by Google in February of 2014 for whopping $3.2 billion. At the time of that blockbuster deal it was only natural to assume that, given this sort of brand-power and funding, Nest would be moving quick with further ventures into the smart home. Cue the crickets...
Smart home professionals, enthusiasts, and reporters alike were once again left wanting in the wake of an Apple event. It's been over a year since the original announcement of Apple's smart home initiative known as HomeKit. Despite recent, and rather unexpected, announcements by several smart home manufacturers that HomeKit product is now shipping, Cupertino continues to keep the platform out of the spotlight. Those holding their breath for a long-overdue update to the AppleTV, which many suspect could play an integral role in HomeKit, were also left exhaling in disappointment.
It's our first interview episode in quite some time, and well worth the wait. We are joined by Brian Leeners, CEO and founder for NYCE Control. NYCE is a company driving innovation in the sensor market with an array of zigbee devices. Brian brings a diverse background and well-educated set of opinions to the table in what proved to be a very fun and interesting conversation. In addition to covering NYCE's array of product offerings we also dive into discussions about how sensor technology will drive smart home adoption. As always we hope you enjoy!
Last week we decided to take a small breather in order to celebrate Memorial Day as well as our own Seth Johnson's birthday (be sure to send him some BDay love on twitter). Turns out taking a breather was a good idea. This week we are back with a vengeance in what feels like just the beginning of what should remain a very busy 2015.
In another guest-free-episode we discuss a number of important smart home stories from the week, not the least of which is a new announcement from Samsung & SmartThings. At IoT World the companies announced a new initiative aimed at the burgeoning market for connected devices. A combination of chipsets, dubbed "Artik", as well as the development of cloud-based backend infrastructure, called "OpenCloud", gives manufacturers of connected devices some compelling options. Additionally the news gave us occasion to dust off the new-platform-bell... DING! DING!
In this episode we sat down to discuss a number of news stories from this week in the smart home. We start of the show with a couple of follow up points related the Apple Watch. Specifically we mention the release of the SmartThings app, which made its debut the day after we recorded last week's episode in which we commented on its conspicuous absence. Also in Apple news we discuss rumors of a completely redesigned AppleTV remote, supposedly being developed as part of the forthcoming product release expected this June.
With the official launch of the Apple Watch now behind us, we thought we would take this episode to discuss the implications of the device on the smart home market. To no one's surprise details on many of the current Apple Watch smart home apps are a little sparse. A select few companies, such as Alarm.com, were presumably given a leg up on development so that their app could be featured in Apple's keynote. By and large however most companies are still scrambling to get their apps to market.
With no guest for this week's show we take the opportunity to get caught up on some significant goings-on in the smart home. To kick things off we have a brief discussion about the official launch of the Apple Watch. We sat down to record this episode the night before the product finally goes on sale. Mostly we discuss how, and which, smart home manufacturers will benefit from the product's release. We hope to have more to chat about on this front for next week's episode, so be sure to tune in to get our thoughts.
We spend a lot of time here at HomeTech talking about what it really means to have a "smart home". This terminology does, after all, get bandied about at an ever-increasing pace. The attention of everyday consumers is a surely a welcome sign to anyone with an interest in the smart home market. There are those, however, who would take care to more accurately define what the term "smart home" really means.
In our main segment this week were joined by Franz Garsombke, co-founder of CTO of Rachio. For the uninitiated Rachio is the manufacturer behind Iro, an intelligent irrigation controller. Since it's launch the Iro has gained traction with several major brick-and-mortar retailers, including Home Depot, Apple Stores, and Best Buy. We brought Franz on to chat about what has lead to the product's success. Our conversation covered everything from the basics of installation and setup, to the large-scale challenges of water conservation the product aims to address.
We started out this week's show by trying to settle a little internal debate here at HomeTech. Amazon made a big splash on the tech-news scene this week with the announcement of the "Dash Button". One half of the HomeTech team thinks the product very clever, and worthy of the smart home label most tech journalists are using to describe it. The other half thinks it's just a silly button to help you buy more crap. Tune in to hear the debate (and tweet us with your thoughts if you're so inclined).
If we've said it once we've said it a dozen times: 2015 is the year of the cord cutter. With new over-the-top offerings coming to market at an increasing pace, consumers everywhere are finding it increasingly easy to tell their big cable providers to go pound sand. While services like Netflix, Hulu, and the newly released SlingTV provide consumers with a great deal of content to chose from, they are all missing one thing - access to local, live, high-definition programming available free to anyone with an OTA antenna.
It's been a little over a year since we launched the hometech podcast. During that time we've been fortunate enough to hear from many of you with suggestions, comments, questions, and loads of positive feedback. Without fail this correspondence has led to inspiration and ideas for future episodes. In light of this fact we had a thought: why not take the correspondence itself and make a show of it?
About a month ago, February 12th to be exact, one of the most successful smart home Kickstarter campaigns in recent memory came to its glorious end. Initially setting out to raise $50,000 for their nascent "thinking remote", the team at NEEO had obliterated their goal, ending the campaign at an astonishing $1.5 million. Clearly the NEEO remote has struck a chord with smart home fans.
As the name of our show implies we consistently strive to keep a tight focus on technology in the home, and the home alone. On this week's show however we wanted to zoom out and look at the connected home as part of a larger context, namely the broad phenomenon knows as "The Internet of Things". Our featured guest, Daniel Obodovski, is perfectly suited to facilitate the conversation.
This week on HomeTech special guest host Richard Gunther from the Digital Media Zone fills in for Jason while he takes a much deserved vacation.
We had been looking forward to sharing an interview with Daniel Obodovsky this week. Daniel is co-author of "The Silent Intelligence", a very interesting book about the significance of the Internet-of-Things. Alas Daniel lost his voice the day of the show so we had to reschedule. We look forward to sharing that conversation with you in a few short weeks.
