HomeTech.fm - Episode 258 - Saying "Alexa" as Many Times as Possible with Guest Co-Host Richard Gunther

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: Guest co-host Richard Guther joins Seth and discusses the weeks news including the Control4/SnapAV merger, Alexa getting a new Guard feature to watch your home, and some interesting news about a few other voice control assistants not named Alexa.

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 17th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson, and this week, not joined by Jason Griffin. He's out in the way on special assignment, I guess we'll say. But friend of the show, Richard Gunther, has agreed to come on and help me out with this week's news since there was so very much of it. Richard, how's it going? It is going well here in Annapolis, Maryland. I'm glad to have a chance to talk to you. You know, we don't really get to see each other at all. And the extent of our relationship is usually through Slack or through like these one-sided conversations that would get there. And no, what we do is we talk to each other through our podcast and then respond and like, oh, okay,

I see what he said and get back to you on that. It's a little bit convoluted. It was very nice to have you live and in person. Yeah. Thanks. Glad to be here. Glad to go through this news with you. And like you said, there's a lot to cover. Yeah. But first, first, while I had you on the show, I want to ask you about if you have seen, I know your, your affinity for, uh, for space and rocket launches and that kind of thing. Uh, have you seen this SpaceX Starlink stuff that's going up? So I have not. And when I heard about this, I was kind of fascinated about it. So you're going gonna need to kind of walk me through this it under the radar for me as well um until they started posting you know i knew i know when generally when rocket launches are going to happen in florida and i like to see if i can stand outside and see them go up

and or at least watch them on on on the internet like everybody else and um they put a picture of the cowling of this thing uh with like thing with the Falcon 9 completely packed with 60 satellites ready to go. And I'm like, what in the world is this? I started reading into it. They're 500 pounds each, and they're going to put these 60 satellites up at once. I'm like, wow, 60 satellites. That's a lot. Well, 60 satellites is nothing compared to what they plan on doing.

They plan on launching 12,000 of these satellites. What? Putting them in what they call, well, some of them, they're going to put in very low orbit, down to the point where they will eventually decay and fall in. So they're just constantly going to have to replace those. Some of them will be a little bit higher up, and then some a little bit higher up than that.

But the idea is that they will become a, an ISP for people here on, on the ground. You'll have to have a little satellite dish. You'll point it up in the air. I guess one of these satellites that's floating around up there. And since they're going to be so much lower than you, I don't know if you've had the pleasure of dealing with like the, the dish network satellite or dish that satellite where like it's seven or 800 milliseconds just to get the command out to the first satellite. Like it's slow, slow. These are going to be in the, in the neighborhood of like 10, 10 milliseconds.

So it's going to be down there with what your cable provider provides now. Not, not as good as like 5g stuff, but if you are in rural areas and you want to have internet, like 10 milliseconds satellite internet is the way to go. This, I mean, you don't, this is going to cost them $10 billion to get this entire constellation, that's what they call it up. But 10 billion is nothing if you consider that when Google was rolling out their Google Fiber, it cost them about a billion dollar per city that they rolled those out to. And they're going to be able to cover a lot more than just one or two cities or 10 cities for $10 billion.

This is going to be stunning. I mean, they will be a fast Internet backbone for basically the globe once they get this thing up and going. Yeah, and to clarify this, just in case anyone's wondering, this isn't them doing something as like a contract job for a vendor. They are, in theory, going to be offering this service. Them and many others. Amazon evidently has a permit for about 3,200 satellites that they're going to put up. So there's a lot of these mini, little, that they're going to put up. So there, there, there's a lot of these like mini little small 500 pound satellites, I guess, uh, that are going to go up

in these orbits. And now if only Amazon had a way of, Oh, right. They do. Yep. Yep. All these billionaires have their own little space companies, right? So I just thought it was pretty cool. I think it was something, especially, I something especially i mean we we we try and keep our ear to the ground with streaming and and and honestly this this is straight up streaming news like if they go over and beyond all of these these uh these companies like uh you know you're going past comcast and nbc universal with this to put a completely different network up. And you're going to be able to bypass the local ISPs anywhere in the United States and put up fast Internet for people. One, it's great news, but it's going to be good competition for those terrestrial based Internet service providers. They're going to have to do something about it and improve their product

as well. So very, very cool stuff. I'm excited to see if the launch got scrubbed last night. Hopefully it'll go up tonight. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because I checked the status of the launch this morning and so I was delayed and I was like, oh, good. I might actually be able to see it then because I always end up tuning into the SpaceX site or the Blue Origin site, which by the way, Blue Origin just needs to learn how to do this. They're not exciting launches, but SpaceX launches. They need to get those, those people in there cheering and everything and screaming. They need the pep rally going at the same time. Yep. Yeah. There's, there's, there's two, there's two schools of thought on that, I guess. You have the old NASA old school of thought.

Everybody has their head down, focused on doing the work. And then you've got SpaceX, which basically has a pep rally going on alongside those people who are actually doing the job of launching a rocket. But it's definitely more entertaining that way for the viewing public. Yep. Well, what do you say we jump into some of these home tech headlines? Let's do it. Sonos has finally announced

that Google Assistant will be joining alongside Amazon Alexa for voice control assistance on its smart speakers. You'll need Sonos Beam or the Play One, the new one, whatever they call that thing, to run the assistant.

But the rest of the Sonos devices can be controlled from it as well. Users, unfortunately, can only choose one assistant per speaker. I guess it's not really an unfortunate thing. Seriously, I've been seeing people complain about this on Twitter. Are you kidding me? I never had the expectation that both would work at the same time. Right? Because they never said that they would.

Well, that too. Yeah. So this is a long time coming. They are finally delivering on a promise that they made literally two years ago. So it's nice to see that this is finally happening. I'm hoping it is going to be reliable. I saw some updates on Twitter also yesterday suggesting that there might have been some problems. So we'll see how this goes.

I haven't had a chance to try this yet. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm hoping it is as capable as what you can do using your Echo, where not only do you have Amazon's Assistant on the device, but also you can use your other Echo devices to command it. Right. And I'm hoping that's the same way that it works with Google Assistant. I believe it is in reading all of the information that's out, but I don't see that explicitly stated anywhere. Right. I'll have to investigate that as well, because I've got the Google Assistant and the Amazon Echo in the house, and I have never really gone through the process. I think I've done it

once, like pairing them together where Amazon would work, and I kind of shrugged it off and have never really gotten into that as well. But I'm curious as to how well the integration is with Google. And like you said, the reliability, because I saw those tweets go by yesterday where they were experiencing issues with both assistants, not just Google, but it was both of them. So I'm hoping day one launch jitters have gotten over

and all will be well moving forward. I think this is great. I have largely stopped using the crappy Sonos app as much as I can get away with not using it now because I can just tell any Echo in the house to play music anywhere I want it. So it's really nice. Yeah. This week, Google backpedaled on some of its works with Nest shutdown news in a blog post titled We Hear You. Google announced that they have decided to not disable working integrations for existing connected works with Nest products. They will not, however, allow new connections after August 31st.

They also clarified how they'll be working with developers going forward. Well, that's a relief. Seriously, what were they thinking? Man, it certainly made the headlines and made a lot of people sweat on our end where going out and repairing these things is not something that is done for free. Like it's something that involves a service call. And I know a lot of guys were discussing, you know, how do I charge for something like this? Oh, well, I guess, you know, I guess, you know, this is one of those things that comes up. We have no control over devices that run on somebody else's server. When they make changes, we're kind of at their whim and

we can't do anything. So, you know, it's going to cost a customer to get their system to working like it was for the past, I don't know how many years. It's been a while, three or four years. So yeah, they weren't too happy about it. But this at least will mean that those service calls don't need to happen as soon as they thought they were going to need to have happen. Right. And the other thing that's good for people who just want to maintain integrations themselves is that if you go in before August and connect all the things that you want connected with works with Nest, then they will continue working after that deadline. You can do that yourself if you have those capabilities with the products that you own. And this also means that stuff like IFTTT and other services that

everybody was really dreading are not going to stop working after August 31st. But you have to have it connected before then. You won't be able to make that connection afterward. Right, right. That's interesting. So there are some steps that device owners have to take in the interim to make sure that this still stays up and going. Yep. Well, I mean, it's going to be a mess, just not as big of a mess as it was potentially previously, because man, a hard cutoff would have been tough for everybody involved.

Security researchers found a development lab used by Samsung engineers was leaking highly sensitive source code, credentials, and secret keys for several internal projects, including the SmartThings platform. The server used by staff to share and contribute code to various Samsung apps, services, and projects was spilling data because the projects were set to public and not properly protected with a password, allowing anyone to look inside each project,

access, and download the source code. At first, Samsung denied the claims, and it took over two weeks for them to finally disable the access the researcher had found. Not a good look. Not a good look. No. No, not a good look at all. Particularly when the SmartThings Cloud and the SmartThings platform is what you're heralding as your big new solution for everybody to use. Right. And I understand these things happen, like security

issues happen. No, humans are not perfect when writing code and setting these things up online. And security is a pain for developers. We just love to like put things up online. So, hey, I got to get to this over there. Let's just put it up online. I can download it and I'll remember to turn it off. And then you forget. The thing is, is like how quickly you react to something like that. Uh, Samsung kind of pushed back on this developer and said, no, that's, that's not, you know, that's not a, uh, that's a, that's is a public repository. It's not a private one. And the researcher was like, no, look, I am looking at the source code and the access keys and I can see everything in your company from here. And then they, they, they

took two weeks to turn that off. So man, uh, not, not a good way to react, I guess. Um, hopefully it's one of those like company, uh, culture on this culture. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, this is just, it's instant denial is not the way to approach this. The right answer is, this looks very serious. We'll investigate it and let you know as soon as we find out what's going on. Exactly, exactly. So hopefully some culture changes over there at Samsung and they can figure out how to not let this happen again. Agreed.

Well, in more kick them while they're down news, Samsung Galaxy Home has missed its April launch date, and the company will not say why. The Galaxy Home was originally announced in August 2018 when the company also unveiled the Note 9. The speaker was supposed to take on other smart speakers like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and the Apple HomePod, with the exception that it would run on Samsung's own voice assistant, Bixby. When reached for comment, Samsung representatives told The Verge that the company is planning to launch Galaxy Home in the first half of 2019 and did not give any further details. That leaves Samsung with another month or so to put the speaker on the market.

They still have time, Richard. They still have time. Oh, I am so thankful. I've been dying for this. Not, not, not. My only problem is, is when this comes on the market, I'm going to have to get one because I know that it's going to end up

in my museum of reckless toys over here yeah it's going to cost me a lot of money so i'm gonna i generally i wait till they're they're gone but uh yeah it's it's going to be it's going to cost some money probably to pick one of these up and just go ahead and plop it there put it in the museum i'll bet you'll be able to find some pretty cheap on ebay in just a couple months. I don't know. I'm just saying. Yeah, the first wave comes through and people realize Bixby isn't all that great.

But I don't know. We'll see. See what happens to it. I was just going to say, I just don't know what they were thinking on this. I know they're continuing to stand behind Bixby and promote it, but it's... Give it up. Yeah. Just give it up. It's time to join the fold. There's the big three right now, and it's quickly becoming the big one or two. It's a hard race to be in. Speaking of things that are not too popular, Alexa is not a popular name, at least according

to The Atlantic's reporting on baby names in 2018. Alexa, the 65th most popular name for baby girls in 2017, fell to the 90th in 2018, making the fastest-falling name of the year in terms of actual number of babies given the name. Just 3,053 American girls were born and named Alexa in 2018, down from 3,833 in 2017, and more than 6,000 in 2015. Okay, now I think you picked this story just to troll me. How many times can you say her name? It's just a story. It's just a story, Richard. I want everybody to know that when I sent the links of the things that Richard and I were going to

be talking about today over, he said, I am not saying that name. So I tried. I tried, everybody. It's not working. Not working out too much. Yeah. Not happening. I have to wonder if the reason it isn't a popular name so much anymore is because it's getting too confusing. Yep. Yep. It is very confusing. I've, I've met a couple of people in retail situations who had the name Alexa and I have been tempted to ask them how they felt about

having their name Alexa, but have avoided the conversation just out of pure awkwardness. Because I, if I had, you know, if it was a Samsung Seth assistant, I know I would probably not want to ever talk about it. Yep. Yep. I guess so. All right. Well, I'm going to have to try and not say her name in this next story. Amazon this week introduced the guard feature for its assistant, a new smart home security function that notifies Echo owners when it detects nefarious sounds. If Echo devices detect an acoustic pattern matching the selected sound, it automatically sends the homeowner a smart alert with a 10-second audio clip of the event. This feature is available to Amazon Echo owners in the U.S. only, but should roll out to other regions in the future. Also,

worth noting, only Amazon Echo devices, not third party devices. This is taking advantage of their far field mic array that these devices have on them to hear sounds in your home. And those sounds can be either glass breaking or the sound of an alarm that you might have in the home, like a smoke alarm or a CO2 detector or something like that. CO, CO detector. No. Yeah. CO. You want CO2. CO2 is important. Right. CO detector. Exactly. CO is bad. CO2. Okay. Yeah. So it's a neat feature for them to add on. And I can see why it's only on the Echo line of products, because if they're modeling those sounds, they're going to get less false positives on sounds that they know the array on. They know that the hardware reacts this way, and they'll be able to model the sounds and take the algorithm and say, learn this sound and do this over and over again with that same speaker. And they can't guarantee that if you're using, say, a Sonos Play 1 or something like that.

They can't guarantee that the sound will sound the same to the AI. So that makes sense to me. So I know that you and Dave Zatz were kind of going back and forth and setting this up this week. How is it working out for you? I haven't honestly had a chance to test it yet because I work from home and I haven't left in the last 48 hours. So I honestly don't know. But I know that he was having some problems with it. He was getting all sorts of false notifications. He was getting disconnected device notifications. So I don't know what's going on there. Again, they just rolled it out. So they probably had some stumbles along the way. But, you know, speaking of kick them while they're down,

it's easy to pick on Amazon's app for its assistant because... Ugh. Right. Because, ugh. Because it's terrible. It is terrible, terrible, terrible in so many different ways. For the app is the reason I haven't really set up anything with the smart home and done the Sonos integration. It involves, like, jumping through these hoops and going in and finding device.

It's just a horrible, horrible app. Just finding, just finding anything. Like, I don't know how they've managed to do this with every release. This app gets worse in terms of trying to find the stuff that you need to manage in there.

And then once you do find it, you hope that it doesn't crash or maybe just ignore your request and spin and spin and spin. But you don't know it's spinning because there isn't a spinner because it's not a real app. It's just a website wrapped in something to make it look like an app, but it behaves like a website. It's terrible. It's terrible. I agree. Oh, I agree. And, and it, this is, I didn't include this particular link in our show notes, but I'm sending it over to you in Slack right now. Um, I ran across this the other day and I thought it was fascinating. Um, there is a, this, this report linker did a survey of Americans, uh, only 508. So not very many, but, uh, what they what they found is they went out and asked them,

in 2017, how likely are you to buy smart home products? And why do you want to buy them? What is keeping you back from buying them? That kind of thing. What are you interested in? We saw a ton of these surveys in the past decade. But in this case, what they have found in this one, going from 2017 and then two years later, doing it in 2018, they have discovered that a large number of Americans are not interested in the smart home anymore. Either they've gone out and they've bought the products, and they've determined that they don't want to deal with them. They were harder to set up. They were more expensive than they thought. The privacy concerns are huge out there.

And they said, let's see, why won't you be interested in a smart home solution? 32%, I don't see the benefits of such solutions. 29%, it's complicated to install and monitor. 23, it's more expensive. Of course it is. A light switch is more expensive. It has a computer in it. And then 7% privacy concerns and 10% other. So yeah, I think this is a pretty big problem. This represents a 10% drop over people who are 10% rise and people who are unlikely to buy a, I guess, rise and drop, unlikely and likely. Same 10% of people who are just going to the unlikely column of buying smart home products in the future, um, because of these reasons. So fascinating survey, kind of small, but still interesting to look at and kind of make note of is that, you know, for so long, we've been kind of writing this right up and of people who want to get into this stuff.

There's interest in it. Um, when I had a shop, people would come in all the time and say, I want to do this, this, and this. And I know you can do it because I saw it on TV and we would show them all sorts of stuff. And now there's going to be fewer of those people that come in to the offices of integrators who are going to Best Buy and picking up, you know, smart devices to control their home. Just because it's, to me, what I'm seeing is that it's just not living up to the hype that was promised. And, and of course, very hard being very hard to set up is one of the promises, right? It was supposed to be easy, we were supposed to set up this stuff, it was supposed to be easy and just work. And it turns out we have to deal with these garbage apps that Amazon has, right? Well, I'm gonna pick on Amazon. And I think that, well, yeah, I mean, that's, that's fair.

But there are a number of factors at play here, right? If the top reason is I don't see the benefit of the solutions, then that means companies are not doing a good job of communicating their value. And that's something that can be fixed. It's complicated to install and monitor. Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes. With the exception of HomeKit, which even occasionally has its stumbles, I think that any sort of kind of configuration or setup of a new device is way more complicated than it should be for normals. And for geeks, we're probably like, oh, yeah, whatever.

You know, you just have to play with it a little no you shouldn't have to play with it it's just right it should just be easy and the third one is that it's more expensive that is true but again if your issue is with price then you have to have some perceived value for that additional price and that is the specific drawback that they called out. It's expensive compared to the value it gives. And I agree. There has to be a little bit more that a smart switch or a smart bulb gives you than just being inherently like a smart thing, right?

So it needs to do more for you to get value out of it. And that's a tough thing. Like, what is the value? What's the next checkbox on that list, right? It's a smart light. It dims, you know? Like, what is the next thing that they have to go to to figure out? That's a tough place to be in for a manufacturer.

Yep. So this week, some big news happened right after the show. And I'm just going to blame Control 4 and SnapAV for not having their act together, so we couldn't talk about it last week. But SnapAV and Control 4 announced this past week that they entered into a definitive merger agreement whereby SnapAV will acquire Control 4 in an all-cash transaction for $23.91 per share in cash,

representing an aggregate value of approximately $680 million. Control 4's board of directors has unanimously approved and recommended that stockholders stockholders vote in favor of the transaction man i gotta tell you richard i don't know if this kind of like made it out into the diy into the world but on the integrator side like that i think it was friday thursday or friday last week that it came out this news came out this news was, you couldn't be on any discussion board without people talking about this news story. This puts some shockwaves through the integration space that I haven't seen in a while. Yeah, I didn't actually catch this until

you were talking about it on your Slack. And this is, I think, huge, particularly given some of the moves that Control 4 has made. We know that they're, this is kind of like a new Control 4, right? Like they've, they've made some big moves with people like, like bringing people like Charlie in, Charlie Kindle, formerly from Amazon, like some of the acquisitions that they have recently made to bring technology and staff onto the team. And so this kind of came out of left field for me, and I tried to reach out to get a little bit more information, but nobody's talking because it's too early. But when I, you know, I look at this, I'm like, well, okay, what does this mean? Because the press release about this just talks about all the synergies of them working together and how this adds to their portfolio and yada, yada, yada. But there are so many unanswered questions,

like does Control 4 continue to work as an independent entity? Does it suddenly have to expand to support the portfolio of products that SnapAV owns? You know, I mean, how is this going to play out? I can kind of tell you from, there's been a number of these types of mergers

and acquisitions in the past, I don't know, two, three years in this space specifically, where big companies like Nortec and Legrand, those two really come to mind, have been snapping up other integrated partners. It's like Legrand snapped up like QMotion Shades. They snapped, I assume snapped up because this is part of the SnapAV story, right? But they grabbed Middle Atlantic a couple of years back. shades they snap they i seem snapped up because this is part of the snap av story right but they grabbed uh middle atlantic a couple years back like and they make racks and heavy equipment not

heavy equipment racks but av uh it data racks and accessories that go along with it um those companies by and large have not changed what they're doing on a day-to-day basis um they just kind of have the backing of a bigger company behind them. And from like Nuvo is another one I think that got purchased, was purchased by Legrand. They have like a streaming audio system that's integrator only. You find builders putting in this in homes all the time. They have been able to take the R&D money from Legrand and invest and get

bigger products and networked products and that kind of things brought into their product line that they wouldn't have had access to before. So I think from that respect, these mergers are great when you have basically two companies with very similar customers.

There's probably a massive overlap on Control 4 dealers and Snap AV dealers. I'm the, there's probably a massive overlap on control for dealers and snap AV dealers. Like I'm, I'm guessing that there's not very many who, who aren't in this, the control for, um, you know, who are control for dealers who don't buy something from snap AV. It would be, it would be difficult to, to separate those two, but snap AVs, a manufacturer in its own right, They have their own deals with vendors in China and bring their own product over. And what I think this means and what it looked like to me when I kind of got over my initial shock and marketing, sales, even support, I mean, you could find yourself duplicated with somebody over at SnapAV. And at that point, you follow

these mergers all the time. About a year later, maybe a little bit more, 12 to 16 months later, you see some layoffs happen. And that's kind of what I predict will happen first. And then later on, maybe two years down the road, you'll start seeing them meld things together that makes sense, that strategically makes sense and getting to work together in that particular way. But I don't see, I mean, Control 4 is pretty massive brand, even in the consumer space, like not massive, but it's known at least. SnapAV's not known at all. So there's really no reason for SnapAV to buy Control 4 and rename Control 4 SnapAV. Right. Like, they're going to keep the SnapAV branding and just be kind of the parent company of Control 4 as a brand. And I don't think very much will change on a day-to-day operation, day-to-day, for either one of these companies.

There may be some synergies between them where they can work, work on product projects together. But I mean, these are both big companies. That stuff's not going to happen until the pipeline gets cleared out from their current projects that they're working on. So that you're still looking at another year or two for that. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. It is interesting. It is interesting. It's also apparently controversial. Yeah. There have been a couple of lawyers step forward and say, hey, this isn't a good deal. Control 4 stock is worth more than $24, even though it's 17 right now, or it was 17 at the time that they made the announcement of the purchase. But at some point back in 2018, the stock was traded as high as $37.

And they're saying that Control 4 has to be worth more than $24 because at one point it was traded at $37 or almost $38. And they are accusing the board of directors of not obtaining the best possible price for Control 4 shareholders. And they want to determine whether SnapAV is underpaying for Control 4, and they want them to disclose all the material information necessary for Control 4 shareholders to adequately assess the value of this merger. Very, I mean, lawyers, what are you going to do, right? Well, yeah, I mean, that's kind of exactly how I take this. I don't know that I, I mean, the market works the way the market works, right?

And for whatever reason, certain people have decided that the market has not properly valued Control 4 as it stands today. I, for one, full disclosure, as a Control 4 stockholder, am happy it's back up at 24. Right, right. Because I mean, it looks like when this announcement was made, Wall Street jumped on the stock. I mean, it went up from 17 to 24 within a couple hours. And that's where it stayed, because why would you pay $25 for a stock that's going to be worth 24 in 30 days. Right. So it looks like that Wall Street is fairly confident that this deal will go through. And Control4 will join kind of the SnapAV family. And right now in our industry, we have these three big companies.

We have SnapAV, who's controlling a lot of distribution and product development. And now they have a wing of their company that does home automation. You have brands like Legrand and Nortec that are doing kind of almost the same thing in some respects. They may not have the distribution that SnapAV has,

but they have distribution partners they certainly work with. So it is a very interesting time to see these big three companies come online. And we'll be looking forward to see what it brings in the future. Yep, absolutely. All the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at

hometech.fm slash 258. 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 258. See, Richard, no mailbag this week, but I do have the pick of the week. Yeah, now I specifically have not opened this until just now because I want to be surprised. Well, you'll be surprised.

So you know about our nerds on birds affinity where we go to San Diego and decided to hop on these little bird scooters and try not to kill ourselves. I do indeed. Bird has announced that they're now selling the very first bird that you can actually own. You can choose from three unique colors for every kind of, quote, joy ride, and then leave traffic behind and give your commute a higher purpose with zero carbon emissions for $1,300. Limited supply.

Delivers in summer 2018. Cheaper than a car. I guess so. I rode one of these things, and I didn't think they were worth $30, but... Oh, come on. I mean, it's a toy, kind of. I don't know.

Like, the ones that you can rent for a dollar and scoot around on, they're fun. Evidently, those were like Xiaomi type versions that were made by Xiaomi, and they were probably around the $300 or $400 mark. They didn't hold up very well, and I guess Bird decided to go ahead and go on their own and make their own scooter, and they're allowing people to buy it as well for $1,300. $1,300. I don't know if that's worth it. I would probably do the $300 one, but not, not $1,300. I have to wonder if they aren't helping to fund building their fleet by trying to sell this at a high premium price. Right, right.

Because you know, these things get broken. They get thrown in lakes and rivers by angry people who don't like bird scooters. Can you imagine if you bought one of these $1,300 things, you come out of the store that you were just in and somebody is out there trying to get on it and ride off on it because it's thinking that, yeah, hopefully they're well marked as privately owned. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting product. And they're through the pick of the week. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the 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 Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page head on over to hometech.fm slash support

to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as $1 per month. Any pledge over $5 gets you a shout out on the show but every pledge gets you an invite

to our private Slack channel The Hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and post pictures of riding on birds because that's i guess that's what we should do uh so if you can't if you can't uh support the show financially but like to support us we'd appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice richard thank you very much for coming on the show this week. Definitely appreciate you dropping by here at the last minute to discuss some pretty major stories that happened.

Glad to have you. Yeah, I was glad to join you. It was a lot of fun. I am a little frustrated, though, that once again, this happened at our fireside chat. Once again, we agreed on everything we didn't have anything to argue about this time i don't know who i don't know who that what that says about who right like we should uh we should figure this out and bring the drama back to the home tech slash home on podcast we're in opposition on something absolutely yeah anyway, so just before I get out of here, let me pimp my show home on over at the Digital Media Zone. If you're in the DIY space

and you're interested in more about product itself and oftentimes some of the manufacturers behind those, you can join us. Most recently, I was joined by Jennifer Patson-Tui, a journalist who also covers smart home technology in a number of outlets like The Wirecutter and Dwell and The Ambient. And actually, I want to pimp The Ambient too,

because if you don't know about this, or if you're in the UK, you should be reading The Ambient. A lot of good information in there about smart home technology. Very cool. Very cool. Well, thank you for coming on the show this week.

Really do appreciate it. Once again, go ahead and give that address for HomeOn out one more time. Yeah, absolutely. Just go to thedigitalmediazone.com and you will see it on our homepage. Excellent. Well, Richard, thank you very much and have a great weekend. Thanks. Good talking to you.