HomeTech.fm - Episode 241 - Meet ConnectSense with Adam Justice

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: We are joined by Adam Justice, CEO and Founder of ConnectSense. We discuss the company’s new Smart Outlet 2, as well as how ConnectSense helps other product manufacturers and OEMs implement their own connected solutions. Adam also shares his perspectives on developing products for all of the major DIY platforms (Alexa, HomeKit, and Google), as well as some of his takeaways from CES 2019. That, plus the latest home tech headlines including: how to turn any speaker into an Alexa speaker, a new partnership between Sonos and IKEA, NBC to launch a new streaming service, a truly novel approach to privacy in the connected home, and much more…

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm slash support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 18th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? Pretty good. Pretty good, Jason. I've solved something for us here on the show. I hear we've solved a dilemma. We're the notorious podcast for saying inappropriate words. Inappropriate wake words, I guess I should refer to. I mean, maybe we do say inappropriate words as well. It's a family-friendly show, but yes.

Yeah, I mean, I don't have to check the explicit tag, but if there was one that was said Alexa tag, that one's going to get tripped every time. Yes, it most definitely will. So there's this thing called Project, what is it? Project Alias. Alias. Okay, yeah.

And they have made a fungus or a virus to hack your Amazon or your Google Home, your Amazon Echo or your Google Home. And basically what it does, it's like a little device that you put on top and it plays white noise into the microphone of the Echo or the Google Home, right? So it never hears anything in the room until you wake the device up with your own special wake word. So if I wanted to name my device, you know, Jason, and I said, you know, hey, Jason, it would wake up. But if I say, hey, Google, it doesn't do anything. So there you go. Problem solved. Pretty cool. Yeah, this took me a minute to figure this one out. I read this story, and we'll include it in the link of our show notes at hometech.fm. A quick read there on Fast Company. Yeah, Project Alias, definitely an interesting one.

They've got a really entertaining video on there. You'll have to take a minute and go check that out. But we're— Custom wake words. That's right. And nobody can ever get on us for overusing the word Alexa ever again. Never ever again. Point out to this episode word Alexa ever again. Never ever again. Pointing to this episode.

Not playing sounds. Yeah, right. Not playing sounds. And yeah. What are you going to do? Well, we're certainly not going back to the buzzer. No, no. Not going to do that ever again.

I'm so sorry. All right. Well, we've got a great show here this week. We were very excited to welcome on a friend of the show, Adam Justice. And Adam joined us to talk about ConnectSense, which is his company that does not only services for other manufacturers, so IoT services for product manufacturers and has support built into it for all of the major platforms, Google, Alexa, as well as HomeKit. And really enjoyed our conversation with Adam. We also jumped into some conversation about CES. He was just out there recently and shared some of his perspectives on that. So be sure to stay tuned.

Yep. Well, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it amazon launched the echo input a tiny little box that can connect to any speaker and instantly add hands-free alexa support the device looks like a small disc sports a 3.5 millimeter output for connectivity and is available now for only $19.99 on amazon.com very interesting yep $20 get you in gets you in the door. That's killer. I mean, I don't really,

I'm not a big fan of that product line, but it's a very good product line for what it is. And for $20, I think it's a great deal. We know that about you, Seth. Yeah, yeah. But I wish Google had something like this because I would use that every day. I have these really nice.

It's a good idea. Yeah, yeah. IKEA and Sonos are teaming up to design a new line of connected speakers with the IKEA look and feel. The Symfonisk branded devices. Yeah, that's IKEA. It's all caps. That's one of the easier ones from IKEA. Right. Branded devices will be designed by IKEA, but powered by Sonos to bring sound and music into the home in a more beautiful way, according to Bjorn Block, business leader at IKEA HomeSmart.

The Symfonisk speakers will work alongside any other Sonos speaker and should be available after summer this year. Very interesting. IKEA continuing to make forays into the connected home. So we'll be really interested to see how this one takes shape and how it does in the market. Moving on here, LG, we've got the Super Bowl coming up, Seth. My Broncos will not be in it this year, to say the least. But LG is determined to capitalize on what will surely be another busy Super bowl year with everybody looking to watch the big game the company has cut prices on its b8 series oleds oled tvs now through february 2nd the 55 inch model is down to 1500 which is an 800 discount and if you need a bigger picture the 65 inch version is down a full $1,000 discount to

$2,300. So some pretty steep discounts on these granted they are, I think about a year old. These are their older models, but still fabulous TVs. And if you've been holding off on, uh, on, uh, getting a good OLED from LG now may be your time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, everything's cheaper the day after you buy it, right? But that's still a pretty good deal. $1,000 off a TV. Why not? According to a report by The Intercept, beginning in 2016, Ring provided its R&D team based in the Ukraine with access to a folder on Amazon's S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world. The Intercept source said that the video files were left unencrypted because Ring's leadership team felt the encryption would make the company less valuable.

Quote, interesting, due to the expense of implementing encryption and lost revenue opportunities due to restricted access. The unencrypted thing is weird. I'm not terribly sure what that means, but Ring having the video, I mean, duh. First of all, duh. Don't you read Terms of Service? You're recording these videos. They're not stored at your house. They're stored on Ring servers. They own them. They can do what they want with them. And the second thing I thought was weird is, you know, this story kind of got blown out of proportion was like what the screenshots they provided. I don't know if you can see on the intercept there. Like they provided some screenshots of this guy's front porch and it's clearly like one of those machine learning things where you train a machine like the the picture in the video is like there's vehicle one two or let's see vehicle

three four five and six and like it basically says annotate every object even stationary instructive objects for the entire video and so like somebody is training some AI somewhere on what a person is, a vehicle is, a tree is, you know, that kind of thing. And, um, that that's completely normal. Where are they going to get this video from? They have all these millions of doorbells out there. Of course they're going to use video from them. So, right. I don't know about, you know, if they weren't, uh, if they just had it like publicly just had it like publicly accessible on a S3 bucket somewhere, you know, and anybody could have gone and gotten that. That's one thing. Whether it's encrypted or not doesn't make a difference.

If it's publicly accessible, then that's another thing. But it didn't sound like it was. So I don't know it's it's a very strange thing uh a very very strange story it sounds like a lot to do about nothing and this story certainly made its rounds this last week yeah um and i'm you know i'm i like reading i like what they're doing uh but i i don't see problem with this. I don't have any issue with this at all. On The Intercept, there's actually an update on January 11th after the publication. Ring spokesperson said Ring employees have never have and never did provide employees with access to live streams of their Ring devices. So you can't go in and look at what's going on live,

but they could certainly take the recordings, which ring has on their own servers and do what they want with them. And right. They're doing that. I mean, they're, I don't know this, this story seems a little blown out of proportion for what it is.

Yeah. I, I agree, but it got, got us to click on it right those privacy stories usually do you kind of have to read between the lines yeah yeah comcast nbc universal plans to debut a free ad supported streaming service to anyone who subscribes to traditional pay tv service including competitors such as charter at&t coxish, in the first quarter of 2020, the company announced on Monday.

From those who don't subscribe to a pay TV service, the streaming product will cost somewhere around $12 a month, a person familiar with the company's plans told CNBC. Very interesting. So they want you to pay that $80 base price, and you get this for free, just to have the old cable company around, or $12 a month. Interesting. It is interesting.

The most interesting thing to me is that you can be a subscriber of competitive networks like Cox and Dish, et cetera, and still get it for free. So I'm not sure how the economics work there or what the business arrangement is. It's probably fairly complicated, but interesting. And as we've talked about numerous times, just more and more options becoming available for anyone looking to get away from strictly using traditional pay TV. So Amazon has announced an update to its base level fire TV stick, which retails for $40, a great deal on that. Starting now, the base model stick will also come with the Alexa voice remote, allowing buyers to search for their favorite content with their voice rather than having to navigate the menus by hand. So originally this base model did not have voice built into the remote and now it does and it'll still be retailing for $40 so pretty good deal yeah good deal I unfortunately haven't heard very many positive things about the fire tv type devices very good nice things I've never used one I've

come across them in the field back when you know the first generation was out but I haven't heard very many nice things about the interface and uh how it works uh lately so i'm hoping that after they get all this you know hardware stuff worked out uh they they work a little bit on the interface but it's amazon so you never know i know seth isn't holding his breath i'm not much no i'm not yeah i used one for a couple of weeks when i was traveling in my staying at my in-laws over the holidays. And, you know, I thought it was okay. It wasn't the best interface, but I got used to it pretty quickly.

Yeah. So. All right, Seth. Well, that does it for our headlines. What do you say we go ahead and jump into our interview with Adam? All right. All right. So without further ado here, we'll welcome Adam Justice onto the show.

Once again, Adam joined us from ConnectSense, and we hope you enjoy the conversation. We'll come back out at the end here with a few thoughts of our own. Hey, Adam, welcome to the show. How are you? Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure. We're looking forward to getting you back on the show. I know you've appeared here on Home Tech before, and we thought it'd be a great time to reconnect.

Coming off the back of CES here, I know you've got some exciting things going on at ConnectSense as well. So we'll look forward to jumping in to all of that and more. But before we do that, for anyone listening to the show who may not be familiar with you or your work in the connected home space, why don't you give us a quick personal introduction? Sure. So Adam Justice, I've been working in this space for a number of years now. Myself, I got started in technology out of college, working for Accenture, and then joined into the networking space, joining a family business. Our parent company is called GridConnect, and it was started by my father.

And I'm actually going on next month will be my 10th year with the company. So I kind of got some initiatives started early on. I saw an opportunity in the market where actually in the sensor side of things. And so a number of years ago, we launched some Wi-Fi connected sensors, which was sort of our first go into IoT. The company had long done a number of things in networking technology. So we had proper experience on the networking side of things, but we had never really done that full integrated product. So we really got our start there. And I got my taste in IoT there. And then from there, we, you know, right about the time HomeKit was announced, was when we were kind saying, what's next for us? And so you

may or may not know this about me, but I'm a huge Apple fan just as a consumer. And so when HomeKit was announced, I was like, all right, I want to do something with this. And we came up with a smart plug being a place we wanted to work on that and then launched the ConnectSense smart plug a couple of years ago. So in addition to our own products, ConnectSense also has worked with a number of different companies on the product side. So there are various people that kind of saw the stuff we were doing with our own products and then said, hey, on the product side. So there are various people that's kind of saw the stuff we were doing with our own, own products and then, uh, said, Hey, can you help us with that as well? So, uh, in addition to our own products, we have kind of the other side of the business where we've

helped, um, big and small companies add connectivity to their own products. Um, so some examples of this are, are like the Moen Smart Shower. That's something my team worked on. We helped them with the firmware, the module that powers that, as well as the cloud and the apps. And we continue to work with them for a number of years. So they just made some announcements around HomeKit in a new version of their shower. They're working with Google and Alexa and that. We also did some work with Schlage Locks. So their bridge is a product that we worked on as well as some other companies. So yeah, while we have our own stuff, we've also kind of worked across the board in all aspects of the smart home.

Yeah, no, that's very, very cool. I would love to hear just a little bit more. Obviously, we're going to talk about the smart outlet two that you guys just came out with and get into a little bit more of the ConnectSense branded product offerings. But this work you do with product manufacturers and with OEMs, I think is really, really interesting. So talk about the need there. And what I mean by that is, you know, we see a ton of products coming to market every day, literally, in the connected home and the challenges around developing and, you know, developing these integrated products, as you talked about earlier. What are some of the sort of specific areas that you work

in and help? You mentioned a couple of sort of high level examples there. But, you know, what sort of headaches, I guess, are you solving for the companies that you work with there on the OEM side? So yeah, on the OEM side, a lot of these companies are faced with a challenge. I think Moen's a great example of this and probably one of our best success stories. But, you know, they had never done, they'd done very little with electronics, let alone connectivity. So as a company, they were like, all right, we're new to this space. Thankfully for them, they were very open to working with outside parties to get this done. You know, a company like that has two decisions. They can either try to grow it

internally, which often takes a lot longer and is faced with more challenges, or they can find a partner like us that can help them get there faster and can kind of leverage their experience to get there quicker. So I think that's one of the challenges these companies are having to decide is, do we do this ourselves? Or do we find somebody who has some experience in this space to get it done faster? And then from there, it's, it's, the challenges are all over the place. We often say hardware is hard. And so there are things like certifications. There are things like what cloud platform to use, what Wi-Fi chipset to use, things like that. That's another thing that these larger and smaller companies look to us to help just kind of be their advocate and help give them advice in all these spaces where they don't have experience. And so we're able to leverage not only our experience of doing this before, but also all those relationships that come from that.

So, you know, we know all those relationships that come from that. So, you know, we know all the Wi-Fi chipset guys. We're able to, you know, have conversations with them. We know folks at Google, Apple, Amazon. So we're able to, you know, get, you know, knock down barriers in those places too. So those are things that our customers get to leverage and work with. Right. Right. And ConnectSense can help with not only the, you're saying that you guys help with not only the software part of that, but the hardware as well? Yeah. So, I mean, we've always been a hardware company first and we added on all the software aspects, so cloud, firmware, apps, as ways to break down barriers for our customers. So we needed it ourselves for our own products. But then we also found that somebody who utilizes us for all those things, we're able to work a lot faster. We play well with others too.

And some of those products we've worked on, either they have their own app team or they're working with another cloud provider, things like that. And that's fine. But anytime you have multiple companies at the table, things just generally take longer because there's a lot more coordination and that kind of stuff involved. So we do find when we are able to do it all, we can move a lot faster. Right, right. Well, let's talk a little bit about your ConnectSense products that you have. You mentioned the Smart Outlet earlier. I know now you have a Smart Outlet 2 as well. So tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So when we launched the Smart

Outlet 1, it was a HomeKit only product. And that wasn't necessarily the intention. Initially, we had broader plans for that product. But we ran into some limitations on the hardware, um, specifically the wifi module of what we could put into that product. So, um, ultimately we knew we had to change out that wifi chipset if we wanted to add support for the other ecosystems. And also the time we did that, you know, Alexa wasn't even a thing. Um, you know, we wanted to have some cloud backend and stuff like that, but it wasn't even a thing. We wanted to have some cloud backend and stuff like that, but it wasn't as big of a deal when we first launched that original product. So in the background, we've been working on the Smart Outlet 2.

And with the goal of, one, leveraging our cloud infrastructure that we have. We're a very close partner with Amazon on the IoT side and AWS. So we wanted to be able to leverage the power of that, as well as being able to play nice with all the other platforms. So with this, we've also added support for Alexa and Echo devices, as well as Google Home and their assistant ecosystem. Very interesting. Are you using the AWS IoT stuff, the MQTT? Or are you using your own AWS EC2 servers? Just a geeky question to ask, I guess. Yeah, that's fine.

We can get in the weeds. Yeah, so we are using AWS IoT. We basically have built an entire platform on top of AWS IoT. So the way I always phrase it when I talk to people about it is like, think of AWS as like hardware. You'd buy it at Lowe's or Home Depot. You know, they're the building materials. You still have to come up with the architecture plans and build the house.

So we built a house. We use that house and those plans for our stuff for our customers as well as, you know, we also sell that as a license to customers as well. And I think something that's unique about us is, other than other service providers in this space, is because we have our own products, we live and breathe this stuff ourselves. So it's kind of one of those things where if it's good enough for us, then it's good enough for our customers. And we also know the pains that our customers go through by having our own products on this platform. Right. Dogfooding, I think, is the industry term there. Eat your own dog food. Absolutely. And we do a lot of that. So, yeah. And also with this product, we added Android support as well.

So originally we were iOS only. So now we're able to serve both sides of the smart home market and then able to maintain a lot of the same features we had in the first one, which is be able to have energy monitoring, scheduling, and a lot of the basics that a customer wants in a smart plug. So, yeah, it's available today. It is $59. It's available on Amazon as well as on ConnectSense.com, and I'm sure you guys can throw those links in the show notes. Yeah, I just put one in the cart.

There you go. Yeah, this is a pretty cool product. And at $59 for two controllable outlets. And you said it has energy monitoring in it as well. That sounds like a great deal. Oh, and don't forget the two USB charging ports on the side. That's somebody thinking. They're designing a product.

Yes. So, yeah, that was our added added bonus there's a usb charging port uh so you can charge a mobile phone or anything else that just uses standard usb charging without taking up one of your sockets so i've got a quick question in regards to uh the different platforms that you work with um and i don't know how much of this you can answer and how much you can't answer because we've we've all heard of like all the special NDAs that go around. Um, but you've worked, you've said you started with HomeKit when it came out and you've worked with all three now. Uh, there has been like over the past, uh, over the past, what, two, three years, I guess,

Apple has slowly kind of opened up and made it what seemed to be made it a little bit easier to work with HomeKit outside of like, if you're trying to develop a product, and we heard like, when HomeKit first started up, we heard all these stories about how tough it was to work with Apple to make HomeKit product. And in the meantime, we saw Alexa and Google starting to take off really, really Amazon took off more than anybody. And then Google has been kind of pacing and catching up. And I think they're all kind of like today, we were talking on our CES show, Jason and I were talking about this, like, now when I go buy a product, if I didn't see these three badges, like I may not buy it because

I expect it to work with HomeKit. I expect it to work with Alexa and I expect it to work with Google. How has your experience changed with working with, I mean, Apple, Alexa and Google over the past, what, five years? How has it changed between these companies? Are they mostly on par now or is one kind of harder to work with than the other still? Yeah, I'm certainly not going to throw anybody under the bus, but I will say it's fundamentally different. Um, so, I mean, I think one of the reasons that Amazon and Google have been able to move so quickly is because they're cloud-based, um, integration. So, um, by the nature of that, it just makes it a lot simpler to integrate with them.

It doesn't mean there's still not a lot of work involved, but you don't necessarily have to change anything on the actual hardware of the device. Whereas Apple is primarily a firmware effort, and so just a different kind of effort that usually involves used to be a hardware revision, because there was the chip that you had to put on the device. And now, you know, Apple has made that easier. And there's other options out there in the market. So I think it's just different. And I think with those differentiations are different advantages to each platform. You know, one of the huge advantages to HomeKit that I don't think a lot of people talk about is the fact that it's talking on your local network. And, you know, the integration that comes with the Home app and, and tightly with all the other Apple hardware and things like that.

And so the other platforms have done a ton to make that latency of those requests super, super minimal. But I guess depending on where you live in the world and what your internet's like and things like that, you may see a different experience there. The other one that I think makes a big difference is just the privacy implications as well. I had a really interesting conversation with somebody from another smart home vendor who had decided to go all in on HomeKit and very was anti anything that required a cloud connection. And so, you know, I think often we think about our own kind of state in the U.S. and kind of how we view technology. And we all seem to be very whatever with giving Amazon and Google all of our data and signing up our accounts and stuff with them. The rest of the world doesn't necessarily feel that way. And Apple has taken a really, really hard stance on privacy. And so for some

people, that's that aligns with kind of what they're interested in signing up for from a smart home perspective. And that's, you know, they, they don't want their data in the cloud, they don't want to give access to those other ecosystems for that. So I think that's kind of interesting thing to consider. But I totally agree with you that I know on my own purchases, I look for stuff that has all three as well. And it's actually a smaller club than you'd think. There's a lot of people that do just Amazon and Google now, but not a ton that can do all three. Interesting.

Yeah, when HomeKit came out, not so much the security aspect of it, I think that's kind of like a topic that's kind of organically grown over the past couple of years, maybe the last two or three years. But when HomeKit came out, what did excite me was that it was locally controlled. And I think the bigger thing for me is actually that I didn't have to use no offense. Like, I'm sure you guys have an app. Maybe you don't have an app. I don't know. But I didn't have to use a third, a third party app to control everything. I could, I, and if I didn't like Apple's app, I could put another app on top of

HomeKit and, and use that. Or I can make my own app. Like they, they, they complete, completely opened up the interface to be used by, you know, third party app applications outside of like the, you know, the, the quick launch thing where you swipe down and get to it from that way. But like, if I, if I wanted a different interface for the house, I didn't have to use one vendor's like the you know the quick launch thing where you swipe down and get to it from that way but like if i if i wanted a different interface for the house i didn't have to use one vendor's app i could it all kind of summarized everything in one spot and i i thought that was genius because the database is actually on the phone rather than you know in the cloud or somewhere else so uh yeah no we we do have an app um but as a manufacturer devices, I don't really care if

you use it. I just want you to have a great experience. And wherever you're going to have that experience, however, that is, it works for me. So yeah, I agree with you. That's definitely an advantage there. And I think now with voice and things like that, um, you know, I think manufacturers can always offer unique features in their app and there's going to be things you're going to want to go to the manufacturer's app for. Um, but you know, if we're doing our jobs right, you shouldn't have to go to the app for everything. Right. Right. Well, I I'll jump back in here in here. I'm kind of the dumb guy in the room. So I wanted to let you guys geek out on the hardware side. But no, a lot of great observations there. I particularly enjoyed hearing your perspectives about the different platforms

and the pros and cons there. I think that's really some great insights. And like you said, some things that not everybody thinks about, right? Like the privacy thing, I think is a great example. And Apple's become more vocal about that, but that's been a kind of a slow and steady drumbeat from them, I think. And you're starting to see that crescendo a little bit for obvious reasons. It's a competitive advantage for them and presumably something that is attractive to a lot of people. But shifting gears a little bit here, and we wanted to spend a little bit of time with you. We know you were just out at CES. Seth alluded to it a moment ago.

We did our CES wrap-up show recently here, and another busy show, of course. CES is known for that, and this year was no exception. So let's dive into that and just talk about sort personal experience out there and how did the show treat you? Yeah. I mean, it is always a total grind for us. It's a busy, busy time. And we've been doing it the last five years, like you said. We're kind of a come-up story.

We started in the initial, I think it was the very first year of the Eureka Park, which was like one aisle of booths. And we just had a little stand up there. Now we've grown to be, we do a 20 by 20 in the smart home area. And it's always a very busy, exhausting week. So thankfully, I've had a little bit of time to catch up on my sleep since being out there. But yeah, it's always a great opportunity to get in front of consumers, customers, folks from the industry, and show off whatever we're doing that's new, as well as get a chance to, you know, talk to various partners and, uh, and friends in the industry. So I think overall, um, it was a good year. We had some good quality conversations and traffic and, um, and yeah, um, I think from

a smart home perspective, uh, cause I never get to leave the sands. Um, unfortunately we're just always so busy and slam between that and meetings that I'm lucky if I get a chance to kind of go and look at all the booths in the smart home area. But just walking around, I didn't see a ton of new stuff. I feel like, you know, we all expect there every year to show up and see these massive new innovations. But the reality of this industry is the slow, steady stuff always moving forward. So in that way, I didn't see anything earth shattering this year. I was impressed with some of the new stuff from Ring and some of the stuff they're

doing. Our friends at Schlage, of course, put out a new Wi-Fi lock. So interested to follow where that goes. And yeah, just a bunch of stuff moving forward little by little. Right. When we went to Cedia this last year uh it's something that jason and i picked up on is that it felt like there were there weren't any earth shattering things this year we just kind of had like everybody was there they were showing off their product they were showing off what you know what things they've added on to it but it felt like a very not so much a plateau but like we've gotten here we've gotten everybody on board with with the smart home let's like iterate on the product and it felt like felt like it was more of an iterative

year than it was um like an earth shattering year like you were saying i think that kind of fell into ces um if you know if 8k tvs on it or 16k tvs don't excite you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I think last year the big story was Google kind of going big and they were in everybody's booth and they had their people all over the place. And they did that to some extent again this year. I think we saw a bigger presence from Amazon this year as well. They had a nice big room right outside the stands, kind of showing all the ways you can work with the Echo ecosystem and just that. So, you know, we saw, you know, support from all of our ecosystem partners. We were showing off voice in our booth with all of the smart speakers. So that was kind of fun this year and good to get participation from our partners to help support

those kinds of demos. And yeah, it was just generally a good solid year and good to always see everything moving forward, you know, even at a slower pace, but the industry being alive and lots of new stuff going on. Yeah, definitely. And I can relate to that. I have gone to CDF for many years and only just in the last couple of years have moved over onto the vendor side of the industry and working with One Vision and not getting to see a whole lot of the show floor, right? Lucky if I get to spend an hour or two is really lucky. So it's hard. It's hard to get the perspectives. Seth and I both watched CES from afar this year and in years past and observed some of the same things. Obviously, big developments in TV, 8K next year, it'll be 16K and who knows, right?

So TV is always a big story out of CES. But from a smart home perspective, I agree. Google, Amazon, big presence. A lot of Apple stories in the press this year, more so I felt like at least than in years past. I felt like they made a little bit of a push. So that was cool to see and Ring doing a lot of great stuff. But beyond the big headline grabbers like those guys, I agree with you. Just kind of that slow and steady march, right, which I think is typically the case at these trade shows.

We always go in looking for the big story, but most years are really about that slow and steady progress, and you get those rare exceptions. So, cool. Well, you know, let's run it up against our time a little bit here. And we want to start to close out and talk about looking forward. You know, what is next for ConnectSense? What are you guys getting really excited about as we enter 2019? So our big thing we were showing off at CES this year was our in wall outlet. And that's a product we're very excited about this year. You know, I think we learned a lot with our first two smart outlets that are in the market. And we've taken that, that knowledge and just kind of ramped it up to

really deliver what we feel is a premium experience in an in-wall product. So our team coming out of CES is working really hard to get that product out the door. Our goal is to ship that in the second half of the year. And that's something we're really excited about. So from a capability perspective, that product has kind of the way I phrase it, if the smart outlet two had standard definition power monitoring, the in wall outlet has high definition power monitoring. So we're really focused on being able to let customers be informed about how they're using power and do some really great things with that. So, you know, I think for kind of your audience and the Cedia world, we're really interested to work with installers and that kind of those kinds of folks on that product and getting it in people's hands. So certainly for the audience of this show, you know, I'll give my information at the end.

But we definitely want to hear from your guys' kind of audience and the folks in that world about what they're looking for in a product like the MWALL outlet. So, you know, we're working on kind of putting the wraps on it. But we want to do that in such a way that we're really listening to the market and what customers want. But also, we know that installers are a customer in and of themselves too. So we have some cool stuff that we're planning that we think are going to make those kind of folks excited as well. Cool. Very cool. Well, that segues into perfectly into our final question here. Adam, we appreciate you taking the time to join us today. And if our listeners did want to connect with you and or find out more about Connect Sense

and all of your work there, what would be the best way for them to do that? Sure. So you can find me on Twitter at Adam Justice. Find out about the products at ConnectSense.com. Or if you want to email me, I'm adam at connectsense.com. All right. Well, we really appreciate it, Adam. Thanks for coming on and don't be a stranger. All right. Of course. And thanks for having me. You got it. Take care.

All right. Well, that does it for our interview with Adam. And I really enjoyed it. Learned a lot about what he's been up to. And I think one of the particular areas that I was interested in was, as I alluded to during the interview, was hearing him talk about developing for all of the different platforms, right? And we've talked about on the show, you mentioned during the interview that really having these voice platforms built into products is sort of table stakes now. But the comment he made about a lot of products are, and it got me to thinking, a lot of products are developed for Google and for the Echo platform, but you don't see as many, now that I think about it, developed for all three. You know, HomeKit, Echo, and Google.

So some interesting observations there, and also enjoyed his commentary about Apple and privacy and how you're continuing to see them sort of push in that direction. And I think that's becoming more and more valid as these companies just become so ubiquitous. These platforms, I should say, become so ubiquitous in the home. I think that's a growing concern for many people. Yep. Especially in light of the ring, you know, things that we talked about this week. And I know there's another story floating around that we didn't really touch on, but like Vizio was talking about, they basically use tv tvs to spy on you to to subsidize tvs so like there's there's a lot of privacy concerns and and things you didn't even know about that were spying on you uh to to pay for products so it's

it's very interesting there it will be very interesting to see where all that stuff heads on in the future i want to i do want to thank Adam again for his time to come on the show and chat with us about the ConnectSense. And I definitely like that outlet. And I'm very interested in the outlet he's coming out with, the in-wall outlet. That sounds pretty cool. Yeah, definitely. I'll echo what you said there, Seth.

And thank you, Adam, for coming on the show. We appreciate you taking some time out. If you're interested in learning more about any of the links or stories we've talked about on this episode, all of that can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm. Once again, that's hometech.fm. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which includes occasional updates here, weekly show reminders, and other fun stuff here from the world of home tech. So head on over to hometech.fm and sign up for that newsletter don't forget you can join us in the chat room live wednesday starting somewhere around 7 to 7 30 eastern a little early tonight uh you can find out more at home tech.fm live

absolutely all right seth well i think we had uh something in the mailbag this week we wanted to dive into we did we we got a little bit of feedback from a listener named Scott. This is a round of discussion we were having about everyone striving towards input zero. And Scott made a pretty interesting point, and I wanted to kind of talk about it with you on the show tonight. He said, I need to disagree with the benefits of striving for input zero by virtue of running solely on apps baked into your TV. This is a really bad situation to have as a goal since not only are the CPUs, RAM, et cetera,

and TVs anemic to begin with, but they become quickly outdated extremely, I'm sorry, but they become outdated extremely fast. Think of your phone. People get fed up and want to upgrade the phone every two years or so due to the app performance. Now imagine if you started with the lowest-end phone to begin with. That's what you're getting in with these, quote, smart TVs. Do you really want to upgrade your whole TV every two years

because Netflix or Plex app now run like molasses just for the sake of input zero. So he goes on to talk about, you know, having a 75 inch TV costing $1,600 and a Roku costing under $100. So it makes sense to swap out. What he's saying is it makes sense to swap out that device rather than have the apps rely solely on the apps tv right yeah uh no it's great i mean it's a great observation i think maybe a slight difference in in how scott is defining input zero or maybe how he thinks at least i define it um you know to me input zero is not it doesn't necessarily mean the app is baked into your tv. And I completely agree with Scott. I'm totally averse, generally speaking, to relying on the apps that are built in to TVs for all of the

reasons that you've listed here. To me, input zero is just more about like, what is that default, the one box to rule them all, right? Like everybody's trying to be that one input that we all default to. And for years and years and years, for the vast majority of people, that was cable. You know, and before that it was broadcast TV. And now it's like, there's this whole new generation of streaming devices and all kinds of different ways to consume content through various apps and subscriptions and over the air. And at the end of the day, like, what is the device that you're going to use as your default to aggregate all of that? And that may be a box, like he goes on to say, having a single HDMI plugged into your TV is hardly the end of the world.

Totally agree. I think that, to me, is where I see our house going here on a personal level for the foreseeable future, right? It's a TV mounted on the wall and an Apple TV or a Roku tucked behind the TV, and that's it, right? Very simple. And so to me, input zero is less about having it actually baked into the TV, although we've certainly talked about that on the show, you know, the days where you'll be able to just plug the TV into the network and, and call it a day. But yeah, to me, input zero is more of a more of a concept related to what's going to be that that sort of default device that you end up using. Yeah, I, I think right now it is. But I'm going to put this to the infinite timescale argument on an infinite timescale. What do you think?

Like, you play this out five years. You play this out ten years. The apps are going to be on the TV. You're not going to have plug-in devices. And, I mean, that's the long and short of it. I think that's where we're headed. Yeah, quite possibly. Right now, I think that Roku is way better than the apps on the TV for sure, hands down. And I can swap that out as it needs to get better.

But there's going to come to a point where the software inside these TVs is going to be as good as it needs to be to deliver the services that need to be on the TV, right? So in the video, they're pretty good right now. I don't think upgrading every like they're going to be, they're pretty good right now. Um, I, I don't think upgrading every, you know, every so often is going to be, I think once these services get settled out, I think you're going to have a minimum spec that you're going to need to meet, uh, to get, you know, like 4k video into the TV and play it on the screen. But I don't, I don't think you're going to need to swap out a box every, I think, I think, I don't think you're going to need that swap out a box every, I think, I don't think you're going to need that to swap out an Apple TV or a Roku or whatever every, you know, so often. I

think the processors are going to be fine. I think the computers inside will be just fine. And, you know, what it'll come down to is maybe a service or some type of application that lays on top of the TV that basically gets streamed into your TV where you plug into the wall and you get it online somehow or maybe that's part of plugging into the wall, I don't know. And the interface just gets streamed in along with everything else. So I don't know. Yeah, that's kind of what I was wondering.

Yeah, I think right now I think he's absolutely right. Like why would I go out and rely solely on these, these TVs, especially in light of them spying on me? Why would I rely on the TV apps? I think, I think he makes an excellent point. But I do think that's where manufacturers are headed, you know, that input zero. And I think we'll be there sooner than you, sooner than you think. I think it's right around the corner.

Maybe within five years, we'll have the ability to plug in and have all the apps we need there. And then we're just coming out of the TV into an amplifier to do surround sound and that kind of thing. So I don't think we're that far off. It may be within a year that starts to be considered to be the norm. All right. Well, you heard it here first. First prediction of the year. Yep.

Yeah. Well, it was a good email. Thank you, Scott. Yeah, absolutely. I definitely agree with you right now. This is how it looks right now. But I think in the future, we're going to look at this differently and think about this differently.

Time will tell. All right. Well, like you said, Seth, thank you, Scott, for taking the time to send that. We really appreciate it. Moving on here, we've got a pick of the week. And a lot of people have probably seen this already. I mean, it's been all over the internet. And I think this was in the Bay Area.

Yeah, Salinas, California. I think it's up near San Francisco. And a guy walks up to a door and he sees that clearly he sees the camera and looks right in the camera and then goes over to a doorbell on an adjacent wall and proceeds to start licking the doorbell while he continues to look into the camera in front of him. It's very creepy. Supposedly the guy did it for like three hours straight. And of course, whoever got the footage sent it out and it's totally gone viral.

So if you want a good laugh, definitely go check this one out. It's a little disturbing, but funny all the same. Oh man, the image on that story is moving now. Like they looped a gif. And the guy is just going to... Wow. I mean, so he started around 5 a.m. Either he was really drunk or, you know, on something.

Yeah, got to be on something. I don't know how you... I mean, it'd be weird enough if you did it for, like, 10 seconds. But he did it for like three hours. All right. Well, there you go. I mean, that's, yeah, I guess I'm like this. Three hours is a long time. I mean, think about that. The, yeah, I'm, I'm thinking about it. Wow. Individual, let's see, what was funny is the police department said they were able to identify the suspect because the footage is especially clear.

Like he's sitting there looking right into it. It is very clear. That is for sure. Oh, man. So anyways, that's a good one. If you haven't seen it yet, definitely go check that out. HomeTech.fm slash 241. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or great

ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm and feedback and fill out the online form like Scott did there. Absolutely. And as we always do, we want to take this opportunity to give a big thank you to everybody who supports our show, and especially to those of you who support us financially through our Patreon page. If you're not familiar or you want to learn more, head on over to hometech.fm slash support, where you can learn how to support our efforts here at the podcast for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5, we'll give you a big shout out on air, but every single pledge gets an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other

supporters of the show can gather every day for the inside baseball conversations about all things home technology. And Slack is great, but the app icon is not. We're so sorry. We are so sorry for that. I don't know. I'm not sure what's going on. Unbelievable.

We can only do so much, and we can't change the Slack icon. So sorry. That's it. Well, Jason, I think that wraps up the show for this week. I guess we'll come back next week and sit down and talk about what happened in the week's news. Yep, absolutely. Look forward to reconnecting with you. Have a great week, and we'll talk soon.

Yep, have a good weekend. All right, take care.