HomeTech.fm - Episode 277 - "Back" at It

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

On this episode of HomeTech: We take a deep dive into the numerous smart home announcements unveiled by Google during their recent Pixel event. Plus the latest home tech headlines including: US blacklists several major Chinese surveillance companies. Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video nears launch. Apple adds an option to delete Siri's history. Disney+ unveils its content lineup ahead of its November 12th launch. 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, October 18th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? Good. Jason, how are you? I'm hanging in there. Hanging in there. Yeah, I'm soldiering through some back issues this week. Unfortunately, for better or worse, I've had this happen a couple of times,

so I'm not terribly worried about it, but just having some muscle spasms in my back. So I would probably normally be sitting this one out, but you and I took a week off last week, and I'm feeling good enough today to get back in the saddle and get a show recorded. Busy week. This is commitment guys. So listen, if you're listening to the show, Jason, Jason's is what you're drugged up. I'm sure I'm drugged up. Yeah. So yeah, that helps. There we go. Well, thanks. Thanks for, thanks for taking the time. Let's let's, what do you say? We just jump into the home tech headlines and just blow through the show so you can get back to rest because i those back injuries are just they're horrible so what do you say sounds good the united states is adding eight chinese technology companies

to its trading blacklist barring some major producers of surveillance equipment from working with american companies in a filing released on monday the commerce department said it was adding 28 entities to the list that have been, quote, implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China's campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high technology surveillance, end quote. Those companies include Hikvision and Dahua Technology. massive international purveyors of video surveillance cameras also included in the list was since time a chinese ai startup and speech recognition company if tech if if he tech yeah if you take uh if you should use that or not uh yeah i mean the i think the the lead should have been dohua and what hick Hikvision band in the United States. I mean, that's insane.

Those are massive, massive. Yeah, big news. Huge, huge. They're not only like big brands, but like they are the two major OEMs that I can think of. And like Dohua OEMs, Honeywell. Let's see. I find a couple that we know on we have, we know on here. Amcrest, uh, Bosch.

Uh, let's see. There's, there's tons of these things on here. Um, I saw one on here a second ago. Oh, I see real time. It's another big one for our industry that we, we have. Tough Dog, uh, OEMs from, from them as well. These are, these are massive. This is like a massive amount of, of product that could just kind of go away.

And like the IC Realtime, sorry, IC Realtime, the OEM on the other side, on the Hikvision side, that's even worse. Like I think Snappy V has cameras that are made by those guys. Like it could get crazy if this goes through and stays in effect long enough to like have people run out of inventory right because i think that's that's what we saw last time is that this like took a while for um for it to run out of inventory i've got two pretty good links here i'm going to copy them and put them in our show notes it's it's all the dahua oems and hickvision oems over at a site called ipvm they they have have two pretty cool articles I reference every now and then. I'll put them in there as well.

Yeah, important to stay up on this story, especially for the pros in the audience. If you do any sort of surveillance as part of your business, this is certainly one you'll want to be keeping a close eye on. Speaking of security cameras, announced back in WWDC, HomeKit Secure Video is Apple's answer to recording and storing encrypted video from network cameras around your home. Now, according to a post put up on Reddit, it looks like HomeKit secure video is getting closer to being launched. A recent beta release of 13.2 prompted users to enable HomeKit secure video,

but that also requires an update to your camera's firmware to a full advantage of these uh these new features jason i saw i saw the picture there that they they posted on on that reddit post and i i i i thought it was funny because it looks familiar and if you go back i think they discovered this in the in the reddit post if you go back and look at the announcement on on stage it's it's the same like camera that they made the announcement and showed like uh it's the same driveway not not necessarily the same camera but like the same driveway very very uh very interesting yeah i don't know if there's like a promotional image that somebody dug up like that was on a website somewhere but um it certainly looks clean i like the interface yeah the interface looks nice and this was reported by ZatsNotFunny. Who else gets the scoop?

Once again, he does great work sniffing these stories out that don't tend to surface in many other places. So, yeah, I mean, I love the idea of HomeKit secure video. I think it's a great concept and excited to hear that it's getting closer to launch. Just as a sort of a reminder here, at WWDC, Apple had indicated that Netatmo, Eufy, not familiar with that one, Security and Logitech would be some of the first companies to take advantage of this.

So yeah, keep an eye on this story. It looks like it's getting closer to market. Yep, yep. It'll be exciting to get some camera feeds in the HomeKit app. That'd be pretty cool to see. Yeah, absolutely. It'll be exciting to get some camera feeds in the HomeKit app. That'd be pretty cool to see. Yeah, absolutely. Well, staying on Apple here for a minute,

this week's iOS 13.2 beta introduces a new option that allows iPhone and iPad users to delete their Siri and dictation history, as well as opt out of sharing audio recordings. These are features that Apple promised after being called out for its Siri quality evaluation processes. If you don't recall that, it was earlier this year, it had been discovered that Apple had hired contractors to listen to a small percentage of anonymized Siri recordings to

evaluate Siri's responses with the purpose of improving the assistant's accuracy and reliability. Now, in closing here, we'll comment, Seth, you and I have talked about on the show, in case people didn't catch it or don't recall, this practice of having people listen to these recordings is not unique to Apple. We've heard about this from several other companies, and it sounds like a fairly standard part of the process. But what is interesting is that this story follows similar moves made recently by Amazon with Alexa, as well as Google Home. And I know Amazon was really the first out with this just a few weeks ago. I mean, these three have all happened in very rapid succession. And I know when we originally talked about the Amazon story, we both said it would be cool to see other companies follow suit, and it certainly happened a lot quicker, I think, than either one of us would have predicted.

Yeah, I think Amazon's had this well I'm pretty sure Amazon's had the feature where you could review whatever was the echo picked up on on their like within the app or on

their website when I know that I've looked at that and looked into it on my personal setup when we had that up and going I'm just glad to see these features

being pushed out the way not necessarily the way they um i'm just glad to see these features being pushed out the way not necessarily the way they are i'm just like i think apple should have always had this feature i think google should always have the feature too um but i'm glad to see like the big three uh you know voice control assistants uh actually having this same normalizing this feature and making it something that people expect to see when you get a voice assistant. Right. Well, I think it's a great example of where having this competition from several large companies in the market is a good thing. Absolutely. And one makes a move, and privacy and network security are big on the minds of people, as they should be.

And like we said, I think this happened in more rapid succession than any of us would have predicted. So it's good to see. Yeah. Yeah. I think that original Bloomberg story about Amazon was like back in March. So it's been a couple of months. But in that story that they were like really hitting hard on Amazon, they mentioned that Google and Apple have the same exact practice. Now that was buried like down in paragraph 15. Uh, right.

If you had gotten that far, you would, you would have read that. But most people read the headline that Amazon's listening to everything that you, you know, you do. And,

uh, and, and that story got picked up, run over, you know, run over sensationalized. Yeah. Sensationalized.

Exactly. A number of times from a number of different outlets and then uh it's been google and and apple's turn too to kind of have the same story written about them even though the same information was hasn't hasn't changed for the past year but i'm glad to see uh that they have uh they've come out with these features where you can go in and delete things uh on on all three of these platforms it's good it's good progress i think yeah yeah i totally agree It's good progress, I think. Yeah, I totally agree.

Speaking of good progress, Disney's foray into online streaming service. The Disney Plus is set to launch globally on November 12th. Jason, I've got my alarm clock set. Coming right up. Yeah, I'm so excited. The company used a massive Twitter thread, more than 300 tweets in total, to make the full announcement. The thread included obvious titles like Star Wars, The Force Awakens, and Frozen, alongside older titles like Three Men and a Baby, The Three Musketeers, Swiss Family

Robinson, and Fantasia. Disney also used the thread to name some popular TV series that will be available on day one, including Liz mcguire recess and the animated x-men series uh from 2002 uh that's that's pretty cool i'm glad to see the old back catalog coming in jason i gotta say i don't know if you've you've come across this but like some disney movies uh from like the 50s kind of kind of problematic kind of yeah kind of kind of problematic are you talking about like in what sense in in in in like certain like political correctness and oh yeah roles and that kind of thing like it's a different era and i get that i understand totally i we were watching uh uh i was peter pan the other day and we're like

wow did not do not remember any of this yeah it's interesting sometimes to go back and watch some of those shows, you know, with a new lens on things. So I agree. Yeah, that's exciting to see. I don't remember if I mentioned it on the show, but after you had talked about the three-year deal that Disney Plus was offering for that really, really cheap price, we went out and pulled the trigger on that as well. So we'll be looking forward to that in our household as well. This will be another good addition to our lineup. And I think the kids will find a lot to watch on here that they'll really enjoy. So looking forward to that.

Absolutely. All right. Well, moving into the big news of the week, of course, Google had their Pixel event this week and focused, as you would expect, a lot on stories that aren't quite so relevant to our show here, you know, smartphones and Chromebooks and things of that nature. With that said, there was plenty to talk about here. Lots of interesting stuff going on with Google and really under the Nest branding now. You're seeing a lot of that from this event. And so, Seth, we thought we would take a few minutes here and spend some time dissecting some of the stories that came out of

Google. And I'll start right away with just jumping into the Google Nest Mini. So this is one that had gotten leaked a couple of days before the event. There were several leaks actually around this Google event. So if you've been paying attention, attention, none of these were, I should say many of these were not a surprise for you. New Google Nest Mini comes with a wall mount, improved sound, including quote, twice as strong bass

is what they're advertising. Three microphones to better hear users in louder environments. A faster processor with improved software. A greener footprint. This one is interesting thanks to a top made from plastic bottles and a body that's 35 recycled plastic this will be available for 49 starting on october 22nd in four colors including a new blue shade so a little upgrade

to what was used to be the google home mini and of course is now the google nest mini again seeing that new nest branding yep and another product uh to not buy on october 22nd or pre-order because you you should absolutely wait a full month uh from then and get it for like less than free uh you know on on uh november what 29th right's right. Already starting to see some of those Black Friday stories creep into my feeds. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, that's my PSA. Like, don't fall for it, guys. Don't fall for it.

Wait until November, and you're going to get these things at a super, super nice price point. Still really crazy to think back, like just five, even five or six years ago, to think that these devices would five, even five or six years ago to think that these devices would be so prevalent and so inexpensive. I mean, $49 and it's only going to, only going to come down from there. Um, it's still like we, we start to take that for granted now.

I think we've quickly become numb to that, but, um, it is pretty amazing. Yeah, absolutely. Well, uh, next, next thing I heard quite a bit about uh was the they have a new google nest wi-fi system yeah yeah this one looks pretty cool google google launched their wi-fi stuff about what three years ago uh this new base router uh comes with now this is kind of like a departure what we found out from amazon's event when they announced their um ero uh devices uh they had the google is still running with the base router with the extenders that they're calling points. And each point comes with a speaker and microphones so they can double as Google homes. So you get a little and you lose a little by going with Google, I guess, or just depending on Eero or Google, which one you want to go with. But I think having the extra ability to have

a couple of extra, what did we call them the other day? Voice access points or something. I think Amazon was trying to coin that term. I think that's a pretty cool, good advantage that they would have using Google Nest over something like Eero. You can buy one router and one point for $269, and that should cover up to 3,800 square feet. Or you can purchase a three-pack for $349 and add additional individual points for $149 each. Got it. Yeah, now these do say, I just looked really quickly

because you were kind of comparing there to Eero. I'm not sure if you were, these do look like they use a mesh technology, so I'm not sure if you were, these do look like they use a mesh technology. So I'm not sure if you were referring to maybe a different, I know like older extenders used a different technology. Now most everything has moved to mesh. It does appear according to a story here on The Verge that this is a Nest Wi-Fi mesh router system no i i think really what i'm was uh referring to was more of the the like ero when i watched that event or uh had looked into it they were they were selling the ero it would do mesh just like this uh and it was famous for that uh but what they would sell you the single router base point

for 99 or you can buy a three-pack bundle for 249 oh right right they're not starting off with like hey get these mesh points they're starting off with like here's one good router we'll put in the middle and you can put the mesh points in if you need them um so i don't know like it's it's a trade-off if you ask me um but for about the same price as a three pack of ero you can get the google with one extender but it also comes it has like the extra google mini built into it so i don't know you're gonna have to weigh what you want in your house uh and go that direction i think again something don't buy it now because it'll be cheap right right. Yeah. I think the fact that they have these, uh, points that come with speaker and microphone, so they don't double as Google, uh, Google homes, even though, you know, you get a,

uh, one of these Google nest minis now for dirt cheap. Um, it's still kind of cool to kill two birds with one stone, I guess. I, you know, that's, that's certainly a compelling feature, uh, that Euro can't really check that box at least yet. Um, so it'd be interesting to keep birds with one stone i i guess i you know that so that's certainly a compelling feature uh that euro can't really check that box at least yet um so it'll be interesting to keep an eye on that and they made them look good too they don't look bad yeah yeah uh moving on to one here that's not quite so smart home specific but uh this is definitely an emerging uh category is a Pixel Bud. So earbuds, AirPods, obviously wildly popular now. This is a Google option. They're giving, it said giving Google headphones with built-in assistant another try. So of course it's not their first foray into headphones. The new Pixel Buds are

true wireless earbuds, claim to have an improved fit, a five-hour battery life, 24 if you use the charging case, strong Bluetooth connection for long-range use. And the story says here, the most notable feature is hands-free access to Google Assistant. All you have to say is, hey, Google, or okay, Google, won't be ready until 2020 when they're finally available. They will start at $179. These are in-ear too, the little kind with the little, like you have to plug them all the way into your ear. So a little bit different. I mean, some people like those.

Some people like the on-ear. Some people prefer having that. And, you know, the Apple, what are they called? EarPods or AirPods now? AirPods, yeah. Yeah, they kind of just like hang in your ear there's really no good way to describe it uh they just kind of like dangle in there and if you if you bump your ear just the right way they'll just pop right out and yeah you lose them and that is one

of the things that i i've experienced with with my airpods is exactly that and i had a friend turn me on to some inexpensive little rubber, uh, things that you can put over it, uh, earbuds, ear buddies or something like that. I think they're called. Um, but they're just inexpensive little covers that you put on there that help them fit into your ear better. So like, I just noticed when I would go to work out, for example, my AirPods were kind of constantly feeling loose or like they were going to fall out so that that may be one advantage for the pixel buds but again there are inexpensive uh solutions out there if you're an airpod user um and are having that issue uh you know go go

search around because there's there's little covers you can put on them interesting yeah well these uh the i think what's interesting about both of these, like both the new AirPods that have the Siri thing built into them, and this has the Google Assistant built into them. I use that all the time. Like if I'm just walking around, I'll yell out, you know, remind me to do this. And the Siri thing will eventually answer and say, oh, yeah, I put that on your reminder to make you do that. And it may not be translated 100% correctly, but, you know, at least it got written down somewhere and maybe I'll remember what that, you know, it means.

Right. Siri's not so great at transcription. Hopefully the Google Assistant will be a little bit better. Yeah, no doubt. Another really cool thing that came out that they were talking about was this Nest Ultrasonic Sensing. Jason, did you see that? Yeah, Ultrasound Sensing is what they're calling it and uh sort of reminds me of like uh you know

bats like bats ping i was just like a radar type yeah it's like a radar where it sends out like this high frequency chirp uh that presumably is inaudible uh ultrasound uh inaudible to humans and that mic will listen for feedback, and it'll use that feedback to determine if there's a person nearby. And so some of the examples that they gave where this could potentially be useful is it would allow a device, for instance, to show touch controls and detailed info when a user is standing close by, or if a user walks past in the four- or five-foot range,

the display could switch to large font and remove on-screen controls that the user can't reach anyway. So some interesting use cases there for this technology, and it'll be intriguing to see how they implement it. Yeah, I like this. I really do. And the one interface thing that they gave there with the Nest Hub Max, just making that a better product by enabling those features is huge for that product.

But I'd like to see something like this be built out into more things, right? Like into more products where you could figure out if someone is actually truly in the room and walking around. And it would go a long way we talked about i'm trying to remember the name of the company right before cdia that they were going to be showing up there at the show and showing off their like presence in the room presence type product but i think you had to like carry around a phone with an app running on it and you know not a lot of people do that they would rather like just leave the phone sitting on a on a tabletop somewhere and wander around their house freely um so it it would be nice to have like this is this is one of those sensor things that

can go a long way into having like a a fully aware home um you're just gonna have to we're i guarantee you in like uh like six months to a year after they they launch this somebody's gonna be like yeah those microphones are always on listening for that chirp and that means that that microphone hears other things too i bet they're listening and there'll be hit pieces written about it sensational stories and yep yeah absolutely yeah it's a never-ending game of uh i guess cat and mouse in a sense but uh you're you're right um i i think it's a cool step forward. And like I said, it'll be intriguing to see the different use cases that they can find for that technology. Moving on here, simplifying subscriptions. Another kind of a cool thing, if you have

a lot of Nest devices, this will streamline the Nest Aware subscription plan. So rather than having to add a subscription for each device, Nest Aware will introduce whole home subscriptions. These will start at a flat fee of $6 per month. Pretty inexpensive there. That's for the standard or $12 a month for the premium. And users can sign up for this on as many devices as they'd like. That's pretty good.

It's always good to kind of have like these packages that you can get that you can bundle things together with. Yeah. All in favor of that. One thing notably absent in the hardware updates, no Chromecast updates. So we didn't see anything on the Chromecast front. It feels like it's been a little while

since they updated that. Three years. Yeah, three years. So that one seems to be getting a little long in the tooth. And Google does have a track record of kind of abandoning projects after a while if they, I guess, lose interest or maybe their business just isn't there. So I'm not sure. I wonder a little bit what's going on with Chromecast. It's a pretty basic uh device but with all of the yeah the progress we've seen in that

in that category uh you just wonder why it hasn't gotten even even a facelift yeah i i mean they did kind of update the basic one a couple of years ago maybe last year sometime but like i the chromecast device isn't there's not much to it like it basically has to receive video from your phone which is doing all the heavy lifting and and and pipe that video into an acmi cable so i you know the question not a lot there yeah do they really need to update it i'm sure i'm sure they will over time have to like update the internals of it to have like like chips are gonna yeah that's you would just wonder just about every other device out there roku amazon fire tvs they can all do this same thing um they don't they don't need to be so like heavy uh like like like an apple apple tv has

the um the airplay stuff built into it but like you don't need to be that heavy like to have a 200 device you could get away with a 69 or 40 device or whatever it is that that right you can just plug in and and stream directly to and your phone does all like the decoding and downloading and everything just kind of hands it over to the chromecast to do the video rendering which it doesn't have to be a very complex thing to do i i don't know that it's one of those it's like okay it works why why why fix it right right no it's a good point um so yeah that's the bigger question in my mind is like you said well they could kill just the internals right what's that i said well they could kill it too also like right like you pointed out google

has a there's a you got a track website yeah there's a website that lists all the projects that google has killed over the years and it's like you just scroll and scroll endless scrolling like of all the things that have gone right yeah that's right all right well a couple more updates here on more of like the software side i would say so number one the device access program they did appear to release some more information about this. Now, this, as a reminder, was a pretty controversial move when Nest first announced that they would be moving to this because it had implications for all of the manufacturers that were previously integrated under the Works with Nest program. So long story short, Nest, you know, basically pulled the plug on that program and revised how they do third party integrations. And of course, there are winners and losers here.

Lots of losers on the on the integration side companies whose integrations will no longer work. On the positive side, this move will enhance security. And that's really what the whole move is all about. So some some more details about this, it will allow qualified partners to ask for access to your Nest devices. They give the example of like a home security system that supports the platform, then through the API, you could view and control your Nest cameras through that device's app. Third parties will have to pass an annual security assessment. So anyone in this device access program will have to be regularly assessed for security practices. The device access API is available today

with new device integrations, quote, coming soon. Nest, again, had already offered third-party integrations through its Works with Nest program. This is a move to enhance security. One interesting thing that they mentioned in this story from Engadget, if you consider yourself a smart home enthusiast, Nest is also working on a device access program for individuals. The program will allow you to control your own Nest devices

and create private integration and automation routines that work with them. So not a ton of information in the story about that, but something to look into, certainly, if you are an enthusiast or prosumer who wants to really get in and dive in, and perhaps you've had integrations that were under that Works with Nest program that were affected by that, this might be an option to look into. Yep. I mean, this is Google basically just locking it down. They needed to, to kind of have like a, I say they needed to, they didn't have to, but it makes sense for them to do this because what's the next hit piece going to be when, you know when they realize that you can get your address by pulling some random device API that they Google and acquired a company? Maybe they acquired Nest, say Nest made this API that leaks specific personal data out.

They don't want to be liable for that and be part of the next hit piece that comes along and take bad press. And all it does is it just makes the home technology stuff look bad right like nobody wants you don't want to get involved with something that looks like it's like not work not not set up correctly um i i think people will there's a comfort factor like that extends beyond all the first adopters and the early adopters that were like oh a around thermostat with a touchscreen on it let me get that and then like we find out that uh we find out that oh it may be leaking personal data oh who cares we're early adopters but you get into like the mainstream people who want to have these things in their homes they don't want to have all that kind of going on in the background they just want to know that they put thermostat on the wall it turns on

and off the ac and you're good to go. Like, that's really, they can use their phone, and they don't want to worry about all these, like, APIs and everything. So I'm glad they're coming out with a new API. It looks like they are dangling a few carrots for developers to get involved with it a little bit faster. So hopefully we'll see some more come of that. It's kind of sad that we're going to lose a bunch of integrations on it, but they've got to lock it down.

I completely understand what they're trying to do here. Yeah, yep. Got to look at it from both sides there. Finally, expanded home routines. So new and expanded home routines will allow your Nest devices to trigger other smart home products. Company plans to launch these early next year. So these are not available right away, but appear to be coming right up. Some examples they give, again, in this Engadget story, you could have a Nest Protect in your home integrated with, say, lights that could

flash certain colors if the Nest Protect goes off. Another example would be, of course, turning down your Nest thermostat to turn off your lights at the same time whenever you leave your home. So some of these are, you know, fairly basic, but nice to have the ability to integrate these into routines. It does say you will be able to build your own routines as well as enroll in pre-made ones created by the company. And then starting in the second half of next year, it talked about being able to use routines made by third parties.

So I'm not sure what exactly that might look like, but interesting nonetheless. Nest was quick to note here that they would safeguard your Google data to their standards as you integrate these routines with other products. Yep. That's one of those carrots that they're dangling out there for the new API. Like, if you want to do this, third-party developers, get involved with our new API because this is where we want to go with it.

So good for them. Good for them. I'm glad to see that they're rolling this out full steam. And I'm curious, you know, as we get to the second half of next year to see what people start really doing with it. Yeah.

And, you know, a lot of movement out of nest finally like it's been years and that's kind of become a tired joke um that we just didn't see much of anything out of nest uh for a long long time and so uh this this felt like a big event for them you know like really this is the first big one under the new nest brand everything under that unified nest branding um and quite a few releases both on the hardware and uh software side um so good to see yep absolutely do you remember like the nest tabs what is it tab like uh it's like a little device that they had like a drop cam thing they got i thought it was more like a like a bluetooth sensor or something that they were going to pair with their cameras.

Because Dropcam had tabs, but those got killed off when they were acquired by Nest. That's what it is. They got killed off, but they might have gotten brought back at some point. I don't remember. But, yeah, that was a Dropcam thing originally. Hmm. Yeah. I was kind of going down the list of, it's called Google, killedbygoogle.com.

Well, there you go. Yeah. Pretty fun website to kind of going down the list of, it's called killedbygoogle.com. Well, there you go. Yeah. Pretty fun website to kind of go through. And it reminded me of like, maybe I should have a little website like this for my museum. And it reminded me of the little tab things that they had. Seth's smart home graveyard. Dropcam wireless movement sensor for Dropcam Pro. Comes in black.

Unavailable on Amazon. The Google graveyard. They got little headstones on here. That's funny. Yeah, it's a cool website. But you can see a lot of things in here that were pretty popular things. Google Plus is in here. Google URL shortener.

The Google Reader. I mean, don't get me started on that. But Revolve's in here. Revolve is right down there. Yeah. Well, you know what? Like, we joke about it, but these companies, it's good that they're out there experimenting. And it's also good, you know, frankly, that, abandon things that aren't working, right? Like we all

can think of, of examples, surely in businesses that we've worked in, or perhaps currently work in where, you know, projects don't pan out the way we want them to. And, uh, the gravity can sort of be to hold onto those things sometimes. And that creates a lot of overhead over time. And, um, so in a sense that, you know, although, although there's always losers when this happens, um, it's a necessary evil, especially when you have companies innovating at the pace that they are today. Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't have said it better. Good point. Hopefully, well, I mean, I think Nest, they paid $3 billion for this thing. So like, I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. I doubt it. Even for Google, that would be a big one.

Hopefully for their push here into privacy and everything. The new APIs kind of bring on kind of a new era for the company where they can be even more integrated and safely integrated than what we saw before. So I'm happy to see that. I'm hoping to see more of that kind of come out of other companies as well. Because we really, it's,

it's that integration that makes our lives work, right? Like that, that's what, that's what we do is integrators. And if we, if there's a way, if there's a will,

there's a way, right? And we have the will, we just need to find that path and the official way to do it right without breaking things six months down the road. Yeah. Well said. All right. Well, all the topics we've discussed on this show can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 277. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great things going on here in the world of home tech. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 277. And don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room

on Wednesday, starting 7 to 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more at hometech.fm slash live. Absolutely. All right. Well, moving into our pick of the week this week, Seth, I think you found a good one. Well, speaking of speaking of, uh, integration, right? Like, yeah, yeah. Some cool applications here. Cool applications. And Jason, we've been talking about like NFC tags for years. I never could think of a good thing to do with an NFC tag. Yeah. That's what I was going to say. Cool applications for NFC. Exactly. Like that. That's where it's one of those technologies you're like okay it sounds really cool but like what's the actual use case what practically can i do right yeah so this is this

is kind of cool um so whoever has this has a tesla right and they have all these fancy features on on the tesla including an api for the car which is is wild to think about like there's there's an actual api for the car i guess um so you can remotely open like the the trunk or hood i guess i don't know how the boot depending on what part of the world you're from uh and you can open like the doors and maybe like the gas cover or gas cover listen to me i almost said that too a little plug uh so somebody's outfitted like nfc chips on the tesla itself and they're walking up uh with their you know ios phone and their apple phone ios 13 phone and uh just tapping it onto the the car hovering right over the car and the trunk opens and and the trunk opens and the little charging port motorized thing door flies up. So it's just a really cool thing that you can actually,

like who would have thought you could do this? It's kind of like what we've always wanted to do, but who would have thought that just a couple of like 10 cent NFC tags, a car with an API, and like one of the most advanced supercomputers you can put in your pocket. Here we are. It's 2019. It's the way of the future. Yeah, pretty neat. So definitely go check that out. Might give you some ideas here about the possibilities of NFC. Again, one of those technologies that gets talked about quite a bit, but finding new and unique applications for it

can feel a little bit challenging. So hometech.fm slash 277, we'll have a link to that. I gotta mention that this is using shortcuts too, which is a fairly approachable automation thing that's built into your iPhone now. I say approachable because I know it's there and I haven't found anything I've wanted to do with it yet, but, um, it's there and it's built into the phone.

And if you, if you really want to get in there and do something like this, you, with a few simple steps, if you knew what you were doing, uh, you could recreate this. If you had a, you know, um, a Tesla and whatnot, you got a Tesla sitting around that you don't need, you probably have a phone and you can get a Tesla, like, make this happen. That's right. It seems like it's a pretty easy thing to do. Yeah, pretty cool.

All right, well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or ideas for a show, topic, or guest, give us a shout. Our email address

is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out our online form and 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

home tech dot fm slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as one dollar a month any pledge over five dollars a month gets you a shout out on the show but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat hub. It's automated too. Automated Slack invite. Fancy. Yep. Where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about automation.

Yay. Yay for automating Teslas. Indeed. Yeah. Indeed. All right. And if you're looking for another way to help us out here, you could take a few minutes to leave a review on iTunes or in the podcast app of your choice. Those reviews definitely help more people find the show.

So if you enjoy what we do here in the world of the Home Tech podcast, please take a minute to leave us a review. We would really appreciate it. And Home Tech is a proud member of the Technology.fm Collective of Podcast. You can find other great shows like Home On, The Smart Home Show, and DTNS over there at technology.fm. Absolutely. All right, Seth. Well, I am going to go crawl back into my bed and put the heating pad on.

Glad we were able to get this show out, though. Busy week and a lot of really cool updates here, especially from that Google event. So had a good time sitting down and chatting with you. Well, I'm glad you, uh, I'm glad you, you were able to make it. I, we were, we were chatting earlier in the day and I'm like, man, I, I don't know if I could do this as much pain is that I know back injuries can be. I, yeah, it's much, much better today, thankfully than it, than it has been.

So I'm, I'm on the mend here and, uh, through the miracle on the mend here and through the miracle of modern medicine was able to join you. Well, I'm glad you're here. Your speech wasn't too slurred and, you know, get better and we'll jump back on it next week. All right. Sounds good. Take care, Seth. Have a good one, Jason. Take care.