HomeTech.fm - Episode 257 - Does Not Work with Nest

Episode Date: May 10, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: We take a deep dive into Alphabet’s decision to bring Google Home, Nest, Chromecast, and Google WiFi all under a new unified brand, Google Nest. Additionally, we discuss the controversial decision made as part of this merger to kill off the Works with Nest program, bringing an end to many popular third-party integrations. What do these moves mean for the company, consumers, and for home tech pros alike? That, plus: Echo and Google Home Mother’s Day deals. Amazon and Blink team up to launch a new wireless outdoor security camera. A first look at the AirPlay 2 and HomeKit integrations on new Vizio TVs. A look at the new Nest Hub Max 10-inch smart display. And more…

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 10th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How you doing, Seth? Pretty good, man. What's going on? I seem to hear we might have a third post this week. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know how this goes. You put the kid in the bed. I do.

I had like a herd of elephants running around about me last week, so I can relate. You put them in the bed. It doesn't necessarily mean they're ready to go to sleep. So she's in there just singing away. Yeah, we record at night, for those of you who don't know, and Seth is on the east coast so his his daughter's in bed and he's got the monitor there and we're getting treated to a little i

think it was twinkle twinkle uh little star through the baby monitor a minute ago so she's quite the singer yeah it was like a scream version of it yeah yeah i don't know what she was doing so all right well you know it'll add some ambiance. Yeah. Yeah. There'll be some more background music. Exactly. Any big plans for Mother's Day this weekend?

I know we're kind of getting together for kind of a family brunch. And then I think I'm going to, you know, my daughter and I are going to take my wife out to, I don't know, do something like maybe a day at the beach or some favorite restaurant of hers. Whatever she wants to do. What about you guys? Indeed. Yeah, same thing. We're going to just try to lounge a little bit and hopefully let her relax a little, head out to brunch. And then I am actually on a red-eye flight that night out to Boston for the week. Very nice. So we'll be out there with the team. We're having a bunch of our partners come into town and having a little summit with them. That'll be a lot of fun. So really looking forward to that, but excited to sit down with you tonight

here, Seth, and record a show. What do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. Well, speaking of Mother's Day, Amazon Echo and Google Home smart home devices have significant price cuts in place for the holiday. Digital Trends has gathered the best deals on Amazon Echo and Google Home devices. We'll include a link to this in the show notes, hometech.fm slash 257. A few highlights here include, Seth, Echo Dots for $29, so that's 20 bucks off. Echo Dot 3-pack, $70, normally $149. So you get three of those for $70 if you're looking to round out your collection there. And then on the Google side, you've got Google Home Mini also for $29. Down 20 as well on that one. And the Google Home Hub for

$99. Kind of got my eye on that one. I've been thinking about one of these smart displays. That's a pretty good price. So we'll see. Yeah, $100 is a that one. I've been thinking about one of these smart displays. That's a pretty good price. So we'll see. Yeah, $100 is a great price. I mean, we're going to get to the new version that they have coming out, but it's significantly more. The Home Hub at $99, though, that's hard to beat. Yeah, Anthony makes a good point in the chat room.

Just what my wife would want. Hey, here's some technology. You know what's funny? To get through yourself. my wife would want hey here's some technology you know what's funny for yourself the uh this last week uh the the echo dot that was in the bedroom kind of came it just ended up on my desk and i was like what happened and she said i just i would it's not useful and it sounds it doesn't sound good and i don't use it like i thought it would and it's not useful like okay and here you go get it out of my room yep exactly get it out of would, and it's not useful. Like, okay. And here you go. Get it out of my room.

Yep, exactly. Get it out of the room. It's not there anymore. Well, there you go. Amazon and Blink have teamed up to launch a new wireless outdoor security camera, the Blink X-T2. The X-T2 boasts two-way audio, live streaming, and motion recording, and enhanced motion detection,

which allows you to set custom sensitivity levels and zone control of the area. Your camera watches the product claims to have a two year life on a pair of AA batteries. It's not bad. I guess if it's off for two years and it will have a two year life. Yeah. It did say varies based on use.

So slight qualifier there. The XT2 starts at $90 and goes on sale Wednesday, May 8th, which is actually today. It did say varies based on use, so slight qualifier there. The XT2 starts at $90 and goes on sale Wednesday, May 8, which is actually today, and is estimated to begin shipping on May 22nd to U.S. customers. All right. Well, it looks like there's also, I'm not super familiar with Blink stuff, but I think there's also like a sync module that you need. So you can get that in a package with the module for $100. There's also some other additional plans that include cloud storage and things of that nature. So if you're in the market for an outdoor wireless camera, seems like a viable option, definitely go check that out.

Moving on here, we got a first look at the AirPlay 2 and HomeKit integration on Vizio SmartCast TVs. And this one is a video that you might want to go check out. I thought it was really interesting and it shows it's a beta version of what this integration will look like. And you can see the host here. It's from, I believe it was CNET, sending music to the TV and then really highlighting like the HomeKit integration. So turning the TV on and off, changing inputs, some bugs in there. He definitely was having some issues with volume control, getting certain apps to launch. He did get HBO to work.

It looks like this is all set up through the SmartCast app. So if you do have one of these Vizio AirPlay 2 and HomeKit-enabled TVs, you can go to that SmartCast app and get it all set up and start testing it yourself. So I thought it was a pretty neat video. Go check that out at hometech.fm slash 257. Yeah, looks interesting. Imagine having problems controlling a Vizio TV. Yeah, it definitely looked a little bit buggy.

Who would have thought? In the video, yeah. But you know, it is beta in fairness, and so we'll buyer beware, I guess, so to speak there. But it was was cool to see it gave me a much better idea for what this actually looks like in practice i guess i should consider the vizio ir to be in beta as well yeah perpetual beta they got better they did get better and give us discrete for a long time clients i would just remember clients would show up with those vizio tvs and we'd be like oh god i'm leaving yep yeah toggle yep. Talk alone, talk alone. Toad, Toad is what we call those. That's it.

Reading from the Tableau website, in January, we announced a new feature, automatic commercial skip. And that's coming to all subscription enabled Tableau OTA DVRs. We're thrilled to announce that the open beta for this feature begins today on our latest firmware update.

The update is being distributed in a random phased out rollout. When your Tableau is eligible for the update, you'll receive a notification in the Tableau app. Sounds pretty cool, Jason. I know you have a Tableau. It sounds like you have to kind of wait around for this feature to show up, but does this sound like something you're going to use? Yeah, I don't know. We don't have the subscription right now. We are very light Tableau users. So I use it for locally broadcast Broncos games when football season comes around. And occasionally I'll watch the news or Jeopardy or something on there. And my wife uses it a little bit, but she's kind of, honestly, it's what made me, it made me think of this because she sort of moved over to using Hulu as listeners to the show are very familiar, Seth.

Like the soap opera thing was a very, very big deal in our house. And so she moved over to Hulu because the commercials were very annoying on Tableau. And like with the Apple TV remote, you've got the trackpad. It was very hard to get the level of sort of precision that you needed. And you didn't really get a thumbnail preview all the time, unless it was like the recording had completed. So there's all these sort of challenges around the user experience when it came to skipping commercials.

So this is definitely a welcome feature. I don't know how important it will be to me. Again, we don't have the subscription in place right now. And my uses are pretty light of that device. I love having it around. It's a great option. But we'll see. All in all, though, a great feature. And it certainly does look like a big step forward for Tableau users. You know what makes a great Mother's Day present? What's that? Tableau subscription. You teed that one up beautifully there you go all right well moving on here officially unveiled at google io earlier this week the nest hub max is the first member of google's newly expanded nest

product family it's also the first google made smart display with a built-in camera has a 10 inch hd screen the camera does double as a nest cam it's got some bigger speakers and is competitively priced at 230 which is you know comparable with like the amazon echo show i believe is what the story said well it would have been yeah it wasn't a fire sale yeah yeah exactly because that's down to it's from 229 $179 now on sale. Right, right. The Nest Hub Max combines the best parts of every other smart display, plus a few other nifty features, including the ability to play and pause music with gesture controls. That was an interesting one, Seth. Camera can recognize your face and show you personalized notifications.

You can, of course, make video calls, but pretty neat, the camera will also follow you around as you walk within the field of view. So sort of like Facebook Portal came out with that feature, and this will have it as well. So it looks like a pretty compelling offering. Not cheap. You know, $230 is for their target market. Straight-to-consumer type of product is definitely not insignificant. But if you are intrigued and interested in a smart display, this looks like a pretty good option. I love how we're saying a 10-inch

touchscreen with all the world's magical information at the fingertips, a completely built-in AI assistant, a Nest Cam. I built a Nest Cam and something that will play YouTube videos and HD video is only $230. It's a not cheap product. Sign of the times. I know, right? We just like think back to like what this would have cost even five years ago. Or I just, wow, that's...

Thousands. Yeah, thousands and thousands of dollars. You're right. This is, this is, it's still pretty cool. And this is, this is Google's, you know's first step into making a unified product line with their Nest brand that they purchased. I was looking at this back in 2014 for $3.2 billion. Yeah, right after we started the show. It was right after we started the show.

And Nest has kind of been at arm's length since then. But now we've seen them kind of move Nest kind of back into Alphabet and then it's gone back into Google and then this guy has been in charge, this guy has been in charge. And now it looks like Google is kind of consolidating everything and, and bringing everything under one company, like all the home smart home efforts under one part of their company, one company within the company. And you're going to see really cool products like this.

This is like a completely unified line of the Google Home Hub and the Nest camera. It's like all in one. And I don't see how this seems like a really great product. Yeah, no, I agree. And that segues perfectly into really the big news this week, which did take place at Google I.O. And there were several announcements.

This one was the most relevant, certainly in terms of like smart home products. I agree that this sort of combination, it's been very confusing to watch the relationship between Nest and Google and to try to figure out what is happening there. They bought the company and then it was sort of stagnant for a really long time. No new products came. We talked about that a bunch. Then, like you said, there was a sort of winding road of it becoming part of Alphabet and then

back to part of Google. Now it's being merged and they announced, really more officially merged, I should say, they announced at Google I.O. this week that it will become Google Nest. So that is the unified brand. And there's a lot to pick apart with regards to this story. Reading from CNET here to sort of tee things up, Google and Nest have joined forces, but for real this time. The two companies are combining into a single smart home brand aptly called Google Nest. Google announced the change at its IO developer conference this week. For now, Google Nest Hub Max, the smart display we just talked about, as well as Google's

first smart display, the Google Home Hub, are the only products that will carry the new name in their official branding. The Google Home Hub will now be called the Google Nest Hub. So the Google Home brand and the Nest brand are, again, being merged into this single entity called Google Nest. And so are all the product teams that we've talked about and scratched our heads in the past, like, why doesn't the Wi-Fi have a built, you know, why doesn't the Hub built into the Wi-Fi router?

Because now you're seeing with all of the smart speakers, Google Home smart speakers, the smart displays like the Google Home Hub and those kinds of things, the Google Wi-Fi routers and Google Chromecast, like the video streamers, they're all being brought together under this Google Nest company, within the company.

I say company because, like, Google is alphabet, and then there's Google as part of alphabet. And then you've got all these little silos underneath that. You know, search is part of Google. But, you know, it's like this is like a tiny little part of Google, but it's still a company within the company. And so you kind of have to think of it that way. But, man, it will be interesting to see what they can do with all of those teams

kind of being under the same umbrella with the same direction and the same focus. I cannot wait to see what they do. Yeah. Yeah. It is going to be interesting to watch. Reading from the Nest website here, there was a story, you know, what's happening at Nest. And paraphrase a little bit, today we're committing to our long-term goal by bringing together all Nest and Google Home products under the Nest brand, introducing Google Nest. Over the coming months, you'll begin seeing changes across our products, accounts, services, and policies as we bring everything together under Nest. Moving forward, Nest and Google Home devices will share the following things. And then it goes

on to sort of itemize. You're going to have one Google account to manage your Nest and Google Home devices. So those are going to merge into one account. You'll have one set of core commitments that apply across the connected home devices and services. So this has a lot to do with privacy. And you're hearing more, I thought, as sort of a sidebar. It was interesting to see the emphasis Google is placing on that and some of the other announcements they made at I.O. that related to that. But then really the big one, Seth, in our world here, in the smart home, and especially, I would say, in the professionally connected smart home, this is going to wreak havoc, is the one third-party device ecosystem. And what this means is they are actually killing off the Works with Nest program, which, as anyone who follows the smart home knows, is how

third-party devices like, we'll talk about a more detailed list, but think Control 4, Lutron, Savant, Crestron, et cetera, et cetera, are all tied in through this Works with Nest program. And that is all now going away. If this than that. If this than that, yeah, you go down the list and pretty much, well, really, every third-party device that can control a Nest thermostat will be, or any Nest product for that matter, will be affected by this. Yeah. So this is a big deal, obviously. We'll talk a little bit about some of the specific companies in the industry, and they've already come out with various announcements and updates about what they're doing. But, yeah, it's kind of a bum deal.

I mean, I guess I get why they're doing. But yeah, it's kind of a bum deal. I mean, I guess I get why they're doing it. They've got to clean this up and get things consolidated so they can move forward and build on a solid platform that isn't bifurcated. But ultimately, this is going to have a lot of nasty downstream effects for end users, unfortunately. Yeah, it's kind of like the sins of the past, right? You've got to take care of those. Technical debt. Yeah, exactly.

And one way to do that is to kind of like phase this out gradually. And one way to do it is certainly rip off the Band-Aid and start over. Break out the meat cleaver. Yeah. And they've certainly ripped off the Band-Aid because this has made waves within our industry. I think, I can't remember who,

when it was tucked away within one of their press releases, I saw somebody on Twitter had identified that they were shutting down works with nest. And then you slowly started seeing like people in the smart home space kind of get wind of this and realize, wait, works with nest going away means I have no more integration with the product that I purchased. And when I thought it had this works with Nest label on it.

So, um, we'll be very interesting to see how many, cause you can't go from like works with Nest. You basically had to have a pulse and an email address, I suppose. And you would get all this information about what, you know, the thermostat's doing from the API. Going from that to the works with Google Assistant program, like Google is a lot more strict on who they're going to let in. They're going to have their own walled garden for this. And smaller players out there who are not like,

I'm sure Crestron, Control 4, if this than that, I'm sure those guys will be fine right but think about like this like haas like haas.io the home automation assistant like the third party like the diy software stuff that's out there um those guys aren't even on the radar for somebody like somebody like google um to look at or talk to. And they're not going to be for a very long time. So it, man, this is a, this is a big deal for those types of, uh, those types of companies and those types of projects, uh, and those types of, of people who have set up like DIY crowd who has set up stuff to work with their Nest thermostats and protects and, uh, cameras.

And, you know, tomorrow or not tomorrow, but like later this year in August, I think it was confirmed August 31st, they're going to pull the plug on it. So, yeah. Yeah, I was just going to say reading from tomsguide.com here, a story I found that summed it up pretty neatly here is, in a controversial move, Google plans on August 31st to end its Works with Nest program. If you want to continue having your Nest products work in conjunction with these devices, it will have to be done through Google Assistant routines. Google says that this shift will help protect

users' data because third parties will no longer have direct access to Nest products. Unfortunately, none of the current works with Nest interactions are available through Google Assistant. It goes on to list, here are some of the smart home devices that will be adversely affected. And again, reading from tomsguide.com here, Control 4, Lutron, Crestron, Harmony, Hue, SimpliSafe, Abode, ADT Pulse, MyQ, and it goes on to list probably 10 more at least I didn't want to read them all there but yeah point being this is going to have a wide footprint and I agree with you I think the bigger companies like control 4 are going to have an easier time navigating this

simply by virtue of like you said they're going to to be more on Google's radar or able to get on Google's radar than the smaller DIY products. So yeah, there's going to be some shakeout there. Control4 did send out a press release today. We did receive that. Looks like Residential Systems did a good job of summarizing it. And basically, Control 4 is advising customers that the company will embrace the Works with Google Assistant program. They're developing the drivers in cooperation with Google's certification standards. So like you mentioned, there is a certification process involved here. This will, of course, require updates to all Control 4 systems. Customers don't need to do anything at this time. However, beginning June 25th, 2019, new Nest devices cannot be added to Control 4 projects. So again, starting in late

June, you can no longer add new Nest devices using the current drivers. On August 31st, 2019, which you alluded to, all works with Nest integrations will shut down. So Control Forward is currently working on these new drivers. They're going to make them hopefully available, they go on to say, before the shutdown of Works with Nest. However, this is dependent on receiving Google certification. So they're advising users to wait to make any changes. And they're doing their best to to make any changes. Yeah, don't touch it. They're doing their best to get out in front of this,

but the problem is going to be that, of course, you think of a typical Control 4 dealer or any Crestron, Savant, Lutron, they've got a very wide base of legacy systems out there that are installed, and reaching all of those users to let them know what's going on is very, very difficult. So this is definitely going to result in some frustrated or confused

service calls, to be sure. Yeah, especially since this is something that the homeowner may come across or Google is going to send them an announcement and say, oh, look, it says I should click here to upgrade my account to the Google Assistant thing. And they push that button and it changes everything over. And, you know, they didn't, the homeowner didn't go out and read this residential systems trade magazine to know. Or listen to the Home Tech podcast. Yeah. Or listen to Home Tech. I mean, that's their problem. They're missing out. Yeah. Could have known already. But yeah, they're not going to know. And they're going to get an email from Google, say, click here to already but yeah they're not going to know and they're going to get

an email from Google say click here to continue and they're going to click here and their integration with the rest of their system is going to be gone until these manufacturers or can or I mean I got to think

like we've heard from Control 4 but we haven't heard from like uh but we haven't heard from like Elan we haven't heard from you know RTI or any of these other guys out there that are that have a lot of projects in the field that date back to you know the era where yeah I remember like the nest API that got like announced at Cedia I think like. Like it was like a huge deal when this thing was coming down the pipe. And when it was finally released, you know, people were all over it. I mean, Nest drove a ton of business into this market or this channel

and general awareness of the smart home because it was kind of like this cool product at the time. And it was easy to use and set up for like anybody to go out and just buy one off the shelf and get the time. And it was easy to use and set up. For anybody to go out and just buy one off the shelf and get it installed, it was really easy to do. And you could control your thermostat from your phone. And forget that, you know, smart home pros have been doing that for years.

But, like, it was round and it had a color screen on it. So I guess, you know, that means something. But I remember, you know, months and months would go by where people were like, when does that Nest integration get done? You know, cause I, I've been living in my house without this integration and, you know, they've, they've announced it and it's like, it was like a year after they announced it before that API showed up. So we'll be, we'll be interesting to see what happens because there's definitely gonna be some fallout to this and some busy service vehicles uh on the smart home pro side because

yeah there are a lot of those things out there yeah and you just have to imagine the teams over at companies like control for august is not not a long time from now and it's the end of august so you're looking at you know three four months i I guess. You have some time to figure stuff out. But that's not a lot of time, I have to imagine, for the level of complexity involved here in terms of figuring out. Like, it's not just sitting in a lab and figuring out how to make the code work. There's a whole strategy that has to go into how do you roll this out? How do you communicate with your dealers? And how do you communicate with end users? And all of that stuff that just has to go into how do you roll this out? How do you communicate with your dealers? And how do you communicate with end users and all of that stuff that just has to go on that takes so much

time and effort? I think it's a bummer. It really is unfortunate. Josh AI put out a, they sent out an email that, Control 4 sent out an email saying, you know, here we're working with the assistant program and here's what we're doing. And Josh AI's response was definitely one that was a little bit more maybe of the opposite side of the spectrum where they doesn't sound like they may be as far along as where Control 4 was in terms of having a solution because the email came out from uh from alex over there alex caposolatro who's a friend of the show we've had on before and said in case you missed the news from google they announced the works with nest program will be shutting down goes on to say unlike previous updates in our industry where companies deprecate old usually unofficial integrations in order to approve the ecosystem. This move appears to make it impossible for companies like Josh AI, Crestron, Control4, and Savani, goes on to say,

to access and control Nest products. So again, some uncertainty there around which companies are going to be able to do it. And it sounds like some aren't going to be able to do it at all. And I think it'll really just depend on that certification process. It's a good email that he wrote. If you're not on that list, you can probably reach out and get it. And it goes on to just sort of spell out why this is a bad thing.

They did a blog post that will... Yeah, there you go. And anyways, towards the end, he talks about some of you might be thinking Nest is a DIY product. This doesn't matter. But remember, companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple are acquiring products we care about all the time. And moves like this hurt our businesses, hurt our clients, and make for a closed walled garden environment. Well said.

Yeah. It's kind of the other side of the sword of like they they're updating this there's there's a really cool um they're really different article that was out of the verge they do they usually do a a different take on things where they had uh rishi chandra who's the vp of google who's kind of in charge of all the nest and smart home products uh and and they they have this goal of getting, what do they call it, kind of moving away from the computing that they're in now and kind of going into more of a creating a unified, more cohesive platform to advance AI and build AI and that into the home. But he had some challenges on here that I thought were pretty cool that Google has to solve before they can build this kind of ecosystem. I'm going to go in a little order. He said the third one is the privacy one,

which is the one we've been talking about, which is why they're shutting off the Nest. It works with Nest API. It's to lock down privacy. And that's the double edged sword of like yeah you lock down and and save somebody's name and email and private information going out but then you cut off integration with josh ai and lutron and if this and that and all those like we we've all been clamoring for this privacy unfortunately this is

this is kind of what it looks like this is the fallout from it um but the the first two points that he makes are really really good But the first two points that he makes are really, really good. The first, he says, designing devices that exist within the system instead of trying to do everything on their own. And to like take a step back and think about that, Jason, like when I was designing systems, I never really wanted to, I mean, there were certainly points that you could have, but I never really wanted point, like a certain point in the house to be like, if this fails, there's nothing you can do. Right. Like you would try and design your way around that. Like, and the places that weren't like the video distribution or the audio switch or something like that, like you'd put in the best

quality parts and just like, okay, we're not, these aren't going to break because they just cost too much money to break. Right. Like that's what you would do. Yeah. But I, I think this is kind of like a, you know, we're going to obviously have these 20 or $30 products, but they're all going to exist and do their own thing. And there's not one device that makes everything click and work together. Like this may be like their idea of like exploding the hub and getting rid of the hub all altogether, which,

which could be pretty cool to see what they do with that later on. Yeah. And the second one is like the most important one to me. The second challenge is that Google nest is focused on the home and you don't probably live alone. Ding, ding, ding,

ding. Yeah. So, so I am so glad that they are taking, you talked a little bit about the hub, like recognizing you and displaying alerts that are tailored towards you. Well, to do that, it has to understand

that you aren't the only person living in the house. You may not have the only account connected to it and that kind of thing. So very excited to see where Google goes with this. There are positives to what they're doing with this. And unfortunately they have to go down, go down this road to kind of like protect privacy a little bit. Again,

double-edged sword to privacy. You're going to have, we're going to have some people lose out because they can't integrate anymore because Google's locking off and walling off the garden around products like this. Not making an excuse for it, but it kind of is what it is. But the other two, if they can make these other two things work, I think the Google ecosystem is going to be pretty amazing in the next few years because of those. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good place to wrap this conversation

up because it is very easy to get totally lost down the conversation, abate the level of altruism involved with them wanting to protect privacy. A lot of this, I suspect, is really around... They were guilted into it, right? Well, and I mean, I think the privacy thing is real, and I think there's a real benefit there. But to me, this is probably much more driven by the fact, the obvious fact, what they were doing. got these two with all kinds of valuable intellectual property and products and horsepower. And to bring those in under one unified brand is the path forward for Google. This is a logical move. So whether you're affected negatively by it or not, you have to, as this is, this was a logical move. And this is a very compelling long-term strategy by Google to bring these two brands together, get rid of all this confusion, because that's not just external. That's internal.

We've worked at companies where we know when you don't, you just imagine the size and complexity of Google, and when you don't have clarity about what are the effects of that. And so ultimately, I do agree that this is a compelling path forward. And Google, if they weren't before, they're certainly one to watch now in terms of what they're going to be able to do with this strategy. There are still questions, of course, and it'll be very, very interesting to see how this plays out. But it's not terribly surprising that they're doing this when you really think about it. And ultimately, there's pros and cons, like you alluded to. There's going to be some winners and losers. And eventually, this will all shake out. and Savant and Crestron are all able to find their own ways of dealing with this as efficiently and quickly as possible so that their users aren't too adversely affected.

And again, it'll be really interesting to see how that shakes out. Yep. Well said. All the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 257. That's hometech.fm slash 257. While's hometech.fm slash 257. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for the newsletter, which includes even further analysis,

as well as other industry news that may not have made the show. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 257. Absolutely. And don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room. We've got a couple of folks hanging out tonight. We appreciate that. We typically record on Wednesday evenings, starting around 7 to 7.30 p.m appreciate that. We typically record on Wednesday evenings starting around 7 to 7.30

p.m. Eastern. You can head on over to hometech.fm slash live if you want to find out more. We'd love to have you. Jason, let's go ahead and check the mailbag over here. We've got some feedback from one of our previous guests on the show. We did. Anthony Rainer. Yeah, we had Anthony on a couple of weeks ago, and Anthony, I know, is hanging out in the chat room here tonight. We wanted to clarify some of the conversation that I had with Anthony around Hubitat and specifically around the ability to do remote control. And so on the original interview, which was two episodes ago, the conversation that Anthony and I had about Hubitat was that the ability to do remote control wasn't there. And so if you were listening to that, we do want to actually make a correction there. It turns out that Anthony found out from the user community and was kind enough to come back and let us know that there is some level of remote control available. It does sound

like it is somewhat limited, but you can, when you create what's called a dashboard in Hubitat speak, it can have a local link or a cloud link. So there is the ability to copy this cloud link to your device desktop. And when you're off the LAN, you can access the dashboard, but not like the device configuration. So you don't have the ability to really set things up, which is natural. I mean, you would expect that. I think typically you want to be on the LAN to do that sort of thing. In Anthony's opinion, it's not super intuitive the way that they have it set up, but it does work. And we wanted to take the opportunity to issue that correction yep that makes sense makes a lot of sense hey it it it it also should be said like hubitat i think one of the

things that people are thinking like you can't you can't set it up right like you can you can control it but setting it up like it's a it's a in-house device which again you would expect right like i can't think of any use case where I would need to set up now. You're in Boston next week and you need to set up your house. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Now maybe some sort of light configuration. Like I can, for instance, think of incidents where,

just to think of one use case, I've been traveling and maybe I've been getting too many, maybe I cranked up the motion sensitivity or monitored motion zone on a camera in my house. And maybe a curtain, like there was one time where a curtain was, when the air conditioning would come on, it was very close to a curtain that was moving. And so I wanted to go in and adjust the zone to get that curtain out of the frame because I was getting a lot of motion alerts. Right? So there are use cases where it's nice to be able to go in and make a couple of tweaks

to the settings, but in fairness to Hubitat, those have been very few and far between. So if you do have the ability to do some remote control, then that's a great thing. And again, we did want to issue that correction in case you heard it and were considering Hubitat, we want you to make sure, we want to make sure that you have the accurate information. So thanks again, Anthony, for following up on that. We do appreciate it. So we're in a pick of the week. Google wasn't the only one to have an event this week. Microsoft. Microsoft actually had their build conference, which is their developer conference. It's kind of weird having them back-to-back like this. There wasn't really much that came out of Microsoft.

It was all heavily developer-focused. On the developer side, some really cool stuff, because that's what Microsoft is focusing on these days. But one of the things they did is they came out with this HoloLens demo, a demo with technology, a live event that they're supposed to start at a particular time. And, well, they got out there, they walked up on the stage, and they couldn't get to work. Didn't work.

Didn't quite go to plan. Yeah. They delayed the whole show for like 20 minutes. And then they let everybody in and said, yeah, we can't get this to work. So no good. They had to kind of like walk off stage. It was two guys, John Knoll, who is the creative officer, chief creative officer over at ILM, Industrial Light and Magic. And Andy Chaykin, he's a space historian and author of, I think, Man on the Moon or something like that. I can't

remember. He's written a couple of books. But evidently, they pre-recorded their warm-up version of this, right? And it worked for that uh so i i got i ran across this thing after this awkward thing went out and everybody was kind of kind of giggling about it but you know i kind of feel bad for these guys yeah no that's a bummer i mean it is major major bummer that it didn't work but you don't want a blue screen of death on your on your demo, wait, that happened too. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, they came out and released, like, the warm-up thing where they kind of were just kind of going through the motions with this. And it's a really fascinating presentation of the Apollo 11, like, going over the Saturn rocket, going over, taking off and, and the stages that deploy off

of it and what things do, uh, all the way up to the point of like the moon landing and the first step on the moon. And, uh, this has all been like re not painstaking, well, painstakingly, it's taken this guy 20 years to put this all together, but he found all this, uh, telemetry data and everything from like, they have all these numbers that were recorded from the Apollo 11 mission. And what they've done is put them, you know, punch them all into a computer and, and, and figured out, you know, exactly what this, what, what was going on, uh, during this mission. And, and they can put something like this together now. And you can, you can sit with these goofy looking glasses and things on your head. And if it works in your living room, you can you can sit with these goofy looking glasses and things on your head and if it works in your living room you can literally re-watch like you're there on the moon uh neil

armstrong stepping on the moon and this is i i was going to skip through this and kind of skim it this is like an eight minute video and i watched every bit of it like i was like a five-year-old like it was amazing yeah it is it is pretty neat. And this HoloLens technology is not something that I candidly am super familiar with. And it's really cool. I mean, it's like they call it mixed reality is the term that I use. AR, yeah. AR. It's basically that. It's just sort of a different term for it, I suppose. But the demo is really cool. And I know, Seth, you and I don't typically venture too far out of the smart home realm. But yeah, when it comes to stuff like this and space and astronomy, there's some really, really cool stuff going on out there.

And this was a really neat, I agree, a really cool demo. And I'm going to sit down. You pointed, drew my attention to this right before we sat down and recorded tonight i'm gonna i'm gonna make some time to watch this full thing later because i'm very very intrigued to see this demo and i thought it was so cool how they were able to take all of this data and really use it to very realistically map out like you can see the two guys standing there with the hololens things on and the apollo 11 like the lunar lander or whatever they call it is actually hovering down and he's talking through

like how it was shifting to the left and he needed it to go to the right and like he was couldn't see because of this or that like very very detailed reproduction and talking through like all of the details and all of the considerations and the things that were going through their minds while this was playing out was really neat so definitely again stepping a little bit outside of the smart home here but go go take some time and watch this video really really cool something like this could be i mean this is this if this isn't the future of education i don't know what it's like i this has got to be used in schools like this very thing they could just take this tomorrow and bring it to any school and if it the future of education i don't know what it's like i this has got to be used in schools like this very thing they could just take this tomorrow and bring it to any school and if it worked you

know this would be awesome uh right i mean other things could be developed around this kind of technology including like move full-on movies i mean we're at the point where i don't know if you've seen avengers yet but like half of those characters and more than half of those characters are all cg and you you just accept them more than half of those characters are all CG. And you just accept them as real. I mean, the environments are all CG. They were they were posting, you know, behind the scene pics and they had like a couple of like practical things on the set. But then everything around them is all green. You know, all this stuff has been edited in. So we're at the point where the movies don't even have to be the actors on the screen that you're seeing physically there.

They could just encode them in just like this. And entertainment, this could be the home theater of the future where you're sitting around and watching something happen and able to move around it in real time and in 3D. And not see the full camera crew behind them and everything. I don't know. This is definitely one of those little, this is one of the few times you get a glimpse of the future and think, oh, this could happen. This could be real. Yeah, very cool.

Richard is in the chat room saying, if you haven't seen their HoloLens demo of instructing how to replace an outlet, go find it. It is so cool. So very neat. There are definitely some very practical applications of this technology, and it's fun to imagine and think about.

And this technology is real. It's happening now. And love it. This was a great find. So go check that out. Again, we'll include a link, hometech.fm slash 257. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout.

Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Once again, that's feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out our online form. We want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about our patron page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a shout-out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack channel, The Hub, an instant automated invite, where you and other supporters of the show gather every day for the inside baseball conversations of all aspects of home technology. Absolutely.

And if you do want to support the show but can't do so financially, we totally get that. We would appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave us a review on iTunes or your podcast app of choice. Those reviews definitely help more people find the show. So if you're a fan or supporter of what we do here at the Home Tech Podcast, take a few minutes to do that. We would appreciate it tremendously. I'm laughing over here in the Home Tech Live channel. Anthony is pointing out that if they had one of these HoloLens things, they could easily erase the Starbucks coffee cup. You don't know how close we were to making that the pick of the week. The Game of Thrones, the infamous Starbucks coffee cup in the Game of Thrones.

Too funny. It has been erased from all of Westeros history. Yeah, it never happened. Rewriting history, that's it. Yep, yep. Can't believe what you see. You can't even believe what you see anymore. Yeah, exactly.

All right, Seth. Well, fun show. Definitely look forward to recording again next week. And thank you, everybody, for tuning in. We really appreciate it. And we'll talk to you again very soon. Yep. Thanks, Jason. And have a great weekend. All right. Take care.