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This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 29th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson.
And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth?
Pretty good. Pretty good. I'm a little delayed today. I'm a little delayed.
I have upgraded my Comcast internet service, which means no less than two days after I thought it was all worked out and working that it's not working great. So pardon the technical difficulties tonight. I'll try and it'll be a second delay between, like, I can tell when I stop
talking and the words are getting to you. So that'll be a little bit of a challenge,
but we'll get through it. And I'm sure you'll work your magic in editing. So we've got a fun
show here. But before we jump into it, Seth, I have to imagine as a space geek, you're a little
bit bummed about the weather delay today. Today's wednesday by the way this will release on friday
but uh failed space launch yeah yeah historic launch uh they were there was uh spacex was doing
their uh commercial crew launch today which means it's the first time that um well it's the first
time in nine years that they have launched uh from people to space from american soil which is kind of a big
deal we after the shuttle program shut down we haven't been able to do that but i think the
bigger thing in like in the history books is going to be like this is the first time that a commercial
spacecraft or commercial platform has has brought people to space and so that will be that will be
pretty interesting uh and i think that's going to go down in the history books. So can't wait. It's rescheduled for Saturday. So at a pretty good time, 3.30 in the afternoon Eastern, the one to true time zone. And and that one you can catch on. I mean, it was on just about everything today. YouTube had three or four live channels on it. I think they were even some of the network feeds started to pick it up, but got down to the last couple of minutes. And of course, wouldn't you know it
Florida weather it's summer here, whether it's summer in real life, it doesn't matter. It's
summer here. That's right. Florida weather is going to stop anything you try and do, uh, in
the summer. So it's bumped till Saturday. Hopefully they'll get it off the ground. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
uh, pretty exciting stuff. Uh, definitely looking forward to seeing that on Sunday. Speaking of,
of difficulty and launching here, uh, Seth, I haven't seen this reported in CE pro or anything
like that. So I don't know if this is the official word, but I, I I'm, as I've mentioned on the show, was slated to be an instructor, um, at Cedia
this year. And I did get an email as an instructor that, uh, at this time they have determined that
the conference will be held over the course of two days only, September 10th and 11th. Um, again,
I'm hedging a little bit because if you go to the Cedia website, it still says all, whatever, September 8th through 12th,
I think is what they still have listed.
And I haven't seen this reported anywhere else,
but I guess you heard it here first.
The inside scoop looks like they are going to,
at a minimum, trim it down to a two-day event
based on what I'm seeing here.
So yeah, that makes sense.
If they have people that are like vendors
that are saying they're going to show up,
you know, Crestron, we covered a couple of weeks back,
said Crestron was going to be on the show floor as well.
If they have vendors that are still insisting on showing up,
it makes sense to still have it.
The question will be,
so I'm looking at the 10th and 11th,
that's Thursday and Friday.
Those are typically the two busiest days anyway, right?
I mean, that's from our experience.
Yep.
If they're going to have people come to the show for, you know, the meet and greet and see the new product, those would be the days to have it.
And having the extra Wednesday afternoon.
Wednesday is not really a busy day.
There's a couple of classes there. Uh, there's a kickoff ceremony on Wednesday. Uh, and then Saturday's like always that wasted
day where it's like, you don't really want to be at the show, but you have like five meetings.
You still have to blow through before you can leave. And, uh, yeah, yeah. So the Wednesday
or Thursday and Friday, I think that's going to take into account too, like
a lower attendance number as well.
Yeah.
So anyways, you heard it, heard it here first, um, again, kind of unconfirmed at this point,
but the way the email was worded, it didn't sound like there's, um, any more debate going
on.
It sounds like this is what's coming down the pike.
So, um, if you're listening to this, uh, plan accordingly and, um, plan accordingly and reach out to confirm through
secondary sources. Certainly don't take this as the final word, but it does appear that that is
what's going to happen. Transitioning from there, Seth, let's move into our show. We had a really
fun interview. Kenny Kim, Vice President of Connected Products at SnapAV, he's been a guest
on the show before, came back on to talk about Oversea 2.0, big release that the team at SnapAV. He's been a guest on the show before. Came back on to talk about Oversea 2.0, big
release that the team at SnapAV put out just this past week. We alluded to it on last week's episode.
Didn't jump into it on last week's episode. We wanted to keep our powder dry because we knew we
were going to have Kenny coming on the show to talk all about it. And here we are. So really
enjoyed the conversation with him. Learned a lot about not only the updates and the enhancements that they made,
but Kenny also shared some of the backstory behind the development, some of the things that you won't necessarily see in the press release.
So that was really fun to have a chance to chat with him.
So be sure to stay tuned for that.
Good interview.
But what do you say first we jump into some home tech headlines?
Let's do it.
If hosting barbecues and backyard parties is your thing, you may want to up your game with an outdoor TV. And if picture quality is a concern, Samsung's new Terrace TV, I feel like I'm reading a
commercial here, could be worth checking out. Built specifically for the outdoors, has a 4k
resolution, uses QLED technology for precise color fidelity. And in terms of standing up to nature,
the Terrace has a weather resistant rating of IP55, provides 2000 nits of brightness,
easy enough to see clearly in the daylight, and an anti-glare coating. So pretty interesting here
to see Samsung coming out with a dedicated outdoor TV. We haven't seen a lot of that in the space
other than, you know, those specialty companies like Sunbright and Sierra have those. And this is, I think,
if memory serves, the first sort of consumer brand dedicated outdoor TV, at least that I can recall
seeing. Yeah, I would say it's the first, that's it, consumer brand. This stuff has been in like
commercial spaces for the past years. It's been it's been
there for so long. I can't even count anymore. But yeah, as far as like hanging a TV outside
roughly in the weather, as much as you want to hang one of these more expensive TVs than they
should be outside in the weather, the this is how you would do it.
This is an IP55 rating means that it will keep most of the water off of it and most of the dust out of it, but not all of it.
So don't go pressure washing it.
But that 2000 nits brightness is key for outdoor televisions.
You really have to have these things bright to be able to see them in daylight time.
And even then, sometimes it's tough to compete with the sun. So I'm able to see them in, in, in daylight time. And even then sometimes it's,
it's tough to compete with the sun. So I'm glad to see something like this coming to market because,
uh, it's, it's been needed for a long time. And I think, I think the technology has been there.
It's just been, manufacturers have been kind of hesitant to put anything out first party, uh,
in the consumer space that would, you know, end up on somebody's lanai or i guess terrace as they put
it here uh and in back home in texas we called them porches uh here they call them lanais i don't
know unsophisticated i don't know what you got what do you have there in denver probably probably
porches as well yeah i think i'd just go with a porch it's a weird florida thing i don't know
they have to fancy it up here to it's it's a It's a porch. Oh, Los Angeles was the same way.
Yeah, for sure.
So it looks like a few different sizes in this.
The story did not list out the prices for all different sizes, but I'm looking here on the Samsung site,
and it looks like $5,000 for the 65-inch available for pre-order.
Also comes in a 55 and a 75 yep so premium price for the size right
i mean size and features it's probably a premium price q led 2000 nits brightness 4k tv
five grand that's that's a bit up there but yeah you do get the weather resistance you do not have
to worry about ruining a warranty by sticking TV outside, which is,
which is what we tell people all the time here.
Um,
and I don't know,
even,
even then I'd be kind of suspect to how that would work here on the beach.
And,
and there in Los Angeles,
if you,
if you had a home on the water,
you could just pretty much forget about doing anything except one of those
like fully enclosed in case sun bright tvs or something like specifically
made to to live on the water with stainless hardware and everything for sure it they would
the salt salt air would just eat everything away yeah absolutely well big news over at savant
savant has announced that it signed a definitive agreement to purchase ge lighting uh which was a
division of ge uh the financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
The transaction will bring together both GE's legacy and expertise
with Savant's best-in-class smart home solutions
and renowned culture of innovation, creating a union of trusted,
see, now I feel like I'm reading commercial,
and recognizable premium brands in the lighting
and connected home
technology markets. Jason, this story blew up in the chat this morning, and I don't think anybody
could figure out what this deal was about. Yeah. By the way, I swear we're not getting paid
for these headline placements. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I don't quite know what to make of it other than, you know, just Savant trying to expand the arsenal here. Savant founder and CEO Robert Madonna said Savant's mission from the start has been to create the number one smart home brand in the world. And I'm confident the acquisition of GE Lighting has moved us significantly towards that ultimate goal. We are committed to ensuring that GE Lighting's long history of industry leadership continues
while bringing exceptional value and reliability to retail partners and consumers
as the number one intelligent lighting company worldwide.
Interesting word there, retail?
Retail?
Yeah.
I'm hearkening back to the, what it called just the savant remote is that what they
called it i don't remember what they call it i don't remember yeah i remember seeing that in
best buy but like ge lighting i was kind of on their website perusing around this is do you
remember a couple of like i don't know months back uh we did like a parody video of their
ge c lighting which was like they had this reset dance that you had to do.
And like we did this parody.
Yes, I remember.
I basically looped it basically like 30 times.
So you could watch it for all of like 20 minutes.
But it was just a loop of them resetting their lights.
Yeah, that that that's part of it.
That's like the smart side of it.
But G lighting has a ton of other stuff so i you know i can't imagine that you're going to see ge lighting disappear from home depot because
savant bought them you know like that's not going to happen this is this has got to be a mostly
profitable division of ge or was uh i would assume and savant picked it up for the talent it says
here 700 employees are going to transfer to Savant when this transaction completes.
So that's a ton of people that are working on selling light bulbs for GE Lighting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it will be interesting to see what happens here.
It's hard to know, man.
I mean, Bob Madonna's got sort of a reputation for being a mad scientist and, you know, innovative thinker.
And it's hard to tell sometimes if Savant is brilliant or crazy, I feel like.
But, you know, they're doing their thing.
And, gosh, it'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.
I'm with the consensus of the chat room.
I'm scratching my head a little bit.
But I'm sure they've got their reasons. Well, speaking of lighting, Crestron Electronics
has announced its Crestron Home software will now integrate with lighting and shade control
products from none other but Lutron. This is big news here. I feel like burying the hatchet.
Through the newly formed partnership
crestron home will integrate seamlessly with uh lutron raw to select raw 2 and homeworks with qs
and qsx control systems so very interesting i guess there can only be one right so like
in the premium lighting space uh you always had crestron you had lutrestra and you had Lutron and control four to some extent,
right.
Um,
kind of on the lower side of that.
I mean,
Lutron and Crestron definitely had the better key pads and finishes.
Uh,
so like,
this is huge.
Like as far as on the integration side of new things goes,
this is two,
two behemoths of the industry kind of playing nice,
calling it truce,
right?
Like I,
yeah, yeah. This is wild to see. Yeah. John Clancy's quoted in here. Our top priorities to help dealers deliver the best user
experience in the industry to their clients, regardless of what brand of lighting control
and shades are installed. Um, so again, Seth, you and I have talked about it on the show. I,
I think John Clancy is a really dedicated guy when it comes to Crestron in the home and making Crestron Residential a really attractive option.
He's got a really strong background in residential.
He's been around for a while and knows his stuff.
So I don't know.
I suspect he was probably a big advocate for this partnership.
And I think overall, it's overwhelmingly good news. We talk about the importance of interoperability and companies playing nice with each other. We talk about
that a lot in the consumer space when we go into that realm of the business. We don't talk about
it maybe quite as much on the professional side with companies like Crestron and Lutron, but
all the same principles apply. This is overall very
good news for dealers and consumers alike. It's still kind of one way because it's not
like Crestron has an API that you could put underneath. I mean, Crestron, totally, you can
do anything you want, right? But I guess you would have to write your own API and joins and all that
kind of thing within the software. So it's still a one-way street. Crestron's still the, I'm going
to steal a quote from our interview last week, Godbox. It's still a one-way street. Crestron is still the, I'm going to steal a quote
from our interview last week,
God box.
It's still the God box of the house, right?
For sure.
But I mean, it's good to see them
integrating and not,
you know, essentially trying to force you
to use Crestron lighting.
Which they definitely tried to in the past.
Right.
All the links and topics we discussed
tonight can be found on our show notes
at hometech.fm slash 305.
Wow. 305. While you're
there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly 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 305. Absolutely. And don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room on Wednesdays,
typically starting around 7, 7.30 p.m. Eastern. Find out more at hometech.fm slash live.
All right, Seth, well, that'll do it for our news this week.
Let's go ahead and jump right in.
Again, we got Kenny Kim on here.
He is the vice president of connected products over there at SnapAV.
And Kenny joins us to share a lot about this new Oversea release,
as well as some of the interesting stories behind it.
So we hope you enjoy. Hey, Kenny, welcome to the show. How are you?
Good. How are you? I think very good.
Doing great. Yeah, we're excited to have you back. It's been a busy time for you guys there
at SnapAV, a big, big release that we're looking forward to jumping into and sharing with our
listeners. But before we do that, just in case anybody's listening and is not familiar with who you are
and your work at SnapAV,
just provide a quick personal introduction
and talk about your role at the company.
Yeah, absolutely.
I've been with SnapAV for about five years,
a little over five years now.
I started as a product manager for Oversea,
so it's kind of come full circle now.
My role has evolved.
I'm now leading connected and infrastructure products at SnapAV.
This includes all of our networking brands, both Package and Arachnus, our power brands,
Wattbox, Luma, Vigilance, all the surveillance lines, Intercom, as well as our
infrastructure, our racks, mounts, cables, mounts, all those types of things.
So my role has evolved quite a bit, but still oversees dear to my heart.
That's what I started with.
Sure.
Yeah.
That sounds like enough to keep you busy.
So again, we appreciate you coming on.
Let's jump right in because we've
got a lot to cover. This is a really big release for you guys and looking forward to jumping in.
So I wanted to start with, right out of the gate, just the mobile app. We obviously live in a very
mobile-centric world. You shared with me actually some interesting data about the rate of use with
regards to mobile. So certainly feel free to touch on that. But talk about the enhancements to the mobile app starting at a high level.
I know that the old version of the app used to contain some core functionality, but it was kind
of limited with regards to the overall scope of Oversea. And it sounds like you guys have really
expanded upon that. So talk about that. Yeah, absolutely. When we first started Oversea, we really focused on the web experience as our primary interface, and mobile was a secondary
interface. And so as we evolved before this launch, we only really had about 30% of the
capabilities on mobile, and the rest of all the capabilities only existed on desktop.
And that just got worse over time. So in this release, we've completely redone the mobile app
where we're providing all the features that are available on desktop on mobile. So dealers have
full capabilities to take care of their customers and have all the access to the feature sets. When we look at the data, we saw that dealers were using mobile over two times they
were using desktop. So we know that dealers are on the go and that's usually when they're handling
the support calls. And so this was really important. And it was really funny during our
beta testing that dealers told us, hey, I didn't know this feature existed. That's a cool new feature. When that already existed on desktop, they just never had access to it.
So it was quite an interesting transition.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a mobile world, and I'm certainly not surprised to hear about that usage.
But still, pretty high numbers there in terms of the overall usage on mobile.
So highlight some of those key features maybe for somebody who's not yet familiar with the new release and hasn't dug in.
Because I know there was a ton of stuff you guys did.
And we'll talk about some of that later.
Clearing out the backlog and hundreds of enhancements that you guys did.
But talk about some of the flagship ones in terms of adding functionality to the
mobile app. Sure. So on the mobile app, some of the really advanced functionalities, these are
most valuable functionalities that we have. So let's talk about Wapbox, for example, being able
to schedule reboot of problematic devices, being able to configure auto healing capabilities on certain outlets and the modem on our wireless,
setting up guest networks, setting up oversee home commands.
Like these are very value added feature sets that dealers have access to that that was only available on desktop.
And now it's all available on mobile. And so these are just some of the examples.
But dealers will be pretty excited to see all the features available now. Very, very cool. And one of the big things,
I think that a lot of dealers have noticed and passed on, you know, I've heard about in my neck
of the woods, even though I don't get to use Oversea, I've heard that you guys made it faster.
Like it's easier to get to and it just works a whole lot better because it loads up a lot faster for you oh yeah absolutely and i'll talk about um how fast
this like we made some core architectural changes to the platform that allows us to
cache more data in the cloud and that just makes like i mean what that really means is this is much
faster like we're not working off of every time you clicked on, for example, a WAP box in the past, we would actually go to that device, collect all that data, and then present it to the customer.
And so depending on how congested that network is or how slow the device responds back, that experience was pretty bad.
And, you know, some dealers call it the three dots of death.
And you see that on your experience. But by us doing right, right, changing this.
Yeah. You know about that. Yeah. And because we change this architecture, we're now pulling from the latest cached information in the cloud.
So it's instantaneous. And so that allows us to do a lot of other things.
Like one of the other improvements coming out of that is offline device information.
When a device is offline, the dealers didn't know about what was plugged into that WAP box or what was plugged into that PoE switch.
Now they know the last known state before the device fell offline.
And that's critical for troubleshooting and allows the dealers to be more proactive when they reach out to their customers.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So one of the things, Kenny, when you and I had a chance to
connect and talk about this update, as a fellow product person, I definitely
can relate to this. You put out any product and the feedback comes and it builds up and it builds
up. And a lot of times there's these little things that you know they're important, you know that they're sort of nagging at your users, but
maybe they're isolated or for whatever reason, they're just hard to prioritize.
And I know that you guys took this opportunity on this big Oversea release to really go into
that backlog and clear out. Again, when you read the press release and you read the stories about this release, you see hundreds of improvements. And that was really, I think,
an effort on your guys' part to finally go through and get the chance to address some of those
little nagging feature requests. So talk a little bit about that opportunity, both from
what it means for dealers as well as a product
person, what that opportunity meant for you guys. Yeah, absolutely. When I joined on five years ago,
we collect all feedback from dealers and we really pay attention to dealer feedback,
but there's these small things. The feature works, but it's nagging for a dealer and it's really hard to
prioritize that specific enhancement into a release we work on new feature sets that provide value
and those usually get prioritized over you know small enhancements like that so we just collected
all of that and for this release by the way, this took over two years in the making.
And what we did is the core of it was changing all this architecture so we can be much faster
and scalable and allowed us to develop a lot more better feature sets. But what we also did is we
collected this list, prioritized this list, and gave it to the developers and said, hey, while
you're making these changes, feel free to go make some updates.
And they went through over 100 little enhancements that the dealers are going to love to see.
So I have a few examples here. Tables. We have a lot of tables that we present in Oversea.
And a lot of times those tables, you couldn't sort those tables for each column.
And in this instance, the developers said, okay, well, let's make all tables sortable by every single data field.
And that's just one example.
Another example is notes.
Today or before, our notes was just terrible. Let's just admit it. Like dealers
couldn't format it. They couldn't put bullet points. They couldn't put bold. So it's just a
simple text capturing notes. And so it wasn't very usable, but it was, our dealers loved it
because that's one way they can capture data about a job site. And so we said, hey, in this go around, let's update notes to the latest
standards with formatting and bullet points and text and all of those things. Another one,
improve search capabilities. Like if you go into search now, you can go into and search for
addresses, location name, and customer name to allow you to find customers much faster when
you're dealing with customer
issues. So these are just some of the examples that we've just made improvements across the board.
And it's really hard to list this, all of it in a marketing release because you don't want to
distract everybody. But if you go to our blog posts, we just capture some of these things and
just the bullet point list of all the things we've improved.
Yeah.
Yeah. That would make for a pretty long press release.
It starts to detract from the main story you're trying to tell.
I can totally empathize as a fellow product person.
And I'm sure it was, I'm sure it's just a big relief for you and your dev team and everybody
involved to get some of that stuff cleared out and be able to kind of start
fresh. So congrats on that. I'm sure that for you guys internally, that was probably just as big of
a deal as anything else as part of this project. Because again, you just know like, oh man, these
things are just suboptimal. And to again, have that all cleared out. That's great. Great news
for you guys and for, of course, for your dealers. Let's shift gears a little bit.
Yeah, go ahead.
Oh, no. Is that what to say?
It's funny because those little things are what dealers really comment about and say,
wow, that has really improved my experience.
I'm really excited for how it's going to impact dealers' experience.
Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Because those little things, like you said, they're often, you know, for those dealers that you're hearing the feedback from, it's typically because that's a core part of their workflow, right? The dealers who are kind of nagged by not being able to format notes probably rely on notes a lot. So for them, that's a really, really big deal. So that's great stuff. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about
PackEdge specifically. I want to start on the hardware side. So talk about this release and
how you guys are now sort of enhancing or providing more visibility and management
capabilities into PackEdge networking hardware. Yeah. So this was a big announcement, not only
because it was an update to
a huge update to the Oversea platform, but we also made the announcement that Oversea is going to be
the platform of the future. And we're starting to enable package products onto Oversea. So with
this release, you have package PDUs and SX switch lines that are supported through Oversea Pro.
So if you have any Oversea Pro device on that job site,
you can control and manage these devices today.
We've also opened up a program called Early Access Beta.
And if you sign up and you can sign up at the Control 4 portal,
we are currently internally testing package access points.
That's talking with the new firmware, talking directly to Oversee, where you can fully manage it, as well as Ahiji Appliances.
And so if you're part of this beta program, we'll get you access to the latest firmware.
And we're going to do this across the board for all the products in the field.
And that's our plan moving forward.
Yeah, I think we've been talking about these systems for such a long time.
And for a while, there were a couple of players.
And then they started, you know, Control 4 first bought up.
Let's see, they bought up Pack Edge, I guess, with the backpack stuff.
And now you guys have Snap AV has acquired Control 4.
So it's all kind of like it all makes sense it
all makes sense to me like there definitely has to be one product at the end of the day
um just like you know that old show the highlander they're gonna only be one so you can't you can't
have three different uh networks within within one shop it just kind of gets kind of crazy so
um yeah it totally makes sense to me that oversee would be kind of like the one that that that peers
out over the top.
So you're basically able to utilize the Oversea platform to like dig down and point into package products now.
Yeah, and that's a great point you made.
We want to continue to offer Arachnus and package because we feel like they have different feature sets and price points that can help dealers address a variety of the jobs that they're going after.
So we want to continue to do that.
However, we don't want the dealers to learn two experiences and manage two experiences.
So by us getting these devices fully managed in the cloud, it shouldn't matter to a dealer whether they're installing and configuring an Arachnid product or a package
product.
Makes sense.
And that's the beauty of bringing it all into the cloud.
Yeah.
So let's dive into that a little bit more specifically and talk about Backpack and IHG
both as platforms.
There's the hardware element of this with packageEdge and having networking gear. But let's zoom in and
talk about these other remote monitoring and management or RMM or platforms. So again,
high level, you mentioned that the plan is to get everything to oversee. So you guys have one
unified platform. Makes perfect sense. Let's talk first. I want to try to break these up a little
bit for clarity, because probably there are people
listening who are either Backpack or iHeG.
So let's start with Backpack.
And what does the migration path look like for dealers out there who are, you know, reliant
on Backpack for their business?
What's your roadmap look like?
What are some of the things that they should be thinking about?
Yeah, first of all, let me mention that we are preparing a wide communication that really
details out the migration process and experience. But to share some here, first, we're targeting...
One of our goals is to make sure that dealers don't have to roll out a truck
or deploy new hardware in making these migration efforts.
And so the way we're doing that is we're working on new firmware versions on these products with a package and a HIGI,
where once you do the firmware update, it immediately starts calling home to Oversee,
just like any other Oversee-enabled product.
And so if we do this right, then dealers won't have to roll out
their truck, which is great. And they can do it all from their desk. Even our support teams can
help the dealer, which is going to be great too. And they're going to be on call ready to support
dealers. Now, there are going to be some limitations on really old legacy products. We have some
HeG appliances that we stopped selling
I think three to five years ago. From a hardware capability, it just cannot support the new
Oversea requirements. And so we're going to manage that on a case-by-case scenario. But
so far, we've been able to support most products that we have. At least all the products we're
selling today we can support and most of the legacy products that are already in the field.
Got it. So, so pretty similar migration plan for both backpack and IHG dealers. Broadly speaking,
again, you guys are, are really aiming to do this where they don't have to get out to the client
site. Hopefully you don't have to sell the client some new hardware, but it sounds like there are
some edge cases where if you've got really old, say, IHEG appliances out in the field, you may want to start digging into that
if you're a dealer. Approximately, do you know when the release is going to come out, the details,
more of that? I would assume our teams are actively working on it. Probably within the next
two months, we'll have a lot more details that we can share,
but you'll start to see us releasing new firmware that dealers could test
through the early access beta as soon as a month from now.
Got it. Very good. Well, let's keep moving through this and talk a little bit more,
shifting gears again back to the product um, kind of the, the product, uh, side and the
product development side, uh, friend, uh, of mine in the industry and somebody that many of our
listeners will probably know by name, Evan Marty, um, former integrator was part of, um, a via, uh,
Paragon, I think before that, uh, and anyways, then was, was part of IHEG control for, um, now
part of snap AV, of course. And I know you and I again had a chance to connect and, and anyways, then was, was part of IHEG control for, um, now part of SnapAV, of course.
And I know you and I again had a chance to connect and, and I heard a little bit about
Evan's role.
So just talk about that.
I think there's an interesting backstory there and kind of what, what Evan sort of brought
to the table in terms of, of moving this big release forward.
Yeah.
Um, I've, I have a ton of respect for Evan as I think most of his peers do in the industry.
Evan now is the product manager for RMM platforms within Snap Baby.
So under his responsibility, he manages Overseat, Backpack, and Envision.
He has 20 years of integration experience.
He basically did a homegrown remote management platform.
He joined Ahiji to work on their platform. And then once Ahiji got acquired by Control4,
he was managing Backpack. Now he manages Overseas. So he has all types of flavors of experience on
what makes the best RMM platform with the 20 years plus context
of what it means to a dealer
and what's important to a dealer.
And I came from outside the industry.
I had to heavily rely on dealer feedback
to make the right decisions.
For Evan, it's almost second nature.
He knows it by heart.
He's lived it.
And he has the context
to continue to make improvements and hear dealer
feedback. So I'm really, really excited. We're all excited that Evan's now leading the charge
on RMM platforms. Yeah. He's a really, really knowledgeable guy. And like you said, really
well, well-respected. I don't know anyone in the industry who's had a chance to work with Evan and
doesn't have good things to say about him. And that combination of experience, literally working on like just about every RMM platform
in the industry now, give or take,
and then that former integration experience.
I know I'm a former integrator as well.
And at One Vision, we rely on that a lot.
Like having somebody who's been down in the trenches,
who's lived and breathed that experience,
there's no substitute for it. So it was really cool to hear about. I was glad to hear, and not at all
surprised, that experience and Evan's overall, just Evan played a big role in this release.
Speaking about that, you and I had a chance to also chat a little bit about product management,
product development processes, and you were sharing with me some of the enhancements that you guys have made to really streamline the process and as a result, deliver better, faster products to your dealers.
So talk about some of the changes you guys are making there or have made there, I should say, in terms of enhancing your overall product management and development processes?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, when you're in a product company, your marketing and press releases just really talk about the launches and the features that come out.
What I'm really actually excited about this launch that we just had, this release that we had, is more so internally. We've really transformed
the team in terms of makeup. We have a lot of new talent on the team. We changed our processes.
We are much more agile now. We're doing a release every two weeks. Like a week after we did the
release, we fixed 50 bugs right out of the gate. And that's
immediately from the feedback. We're now able to do A-B testing. So what that means is we can
release a new feature to a subset of the population in production to get testing results and get that
feedback and iterate on it for the next release. We adopted this new process
called continuous integration and continuous deployment, CICD. And that's one of those
software engineering principles where you're continuously doing development and releasing
that code over and over again. If you look at previously, the previous methodology we took was
more of a waterfall approach where you're doing a release every three to four months.
And so now dealers are going to see very rapidly new things that are going to come onto their platform every two weeks.
And that's going to be amazing. But most exciting part is actually what we did with the feedback loop.
So we built this feedback capability within Oversea
where dealers can now tell us what's most important to them.
And they can also upvote other recommendations
that other dealers have made.
And so from our perspective, we review it every single week,
if not daily, to recognize what's most important
to a dealers and based on that priority and the most votes,
we can actually immediately take that into the next release and build that feature.
So this, I think to me,
yes, the release was exciting
because of all the features we enabled,
but more importantly,
how this accelerates our team
in developing more valuable features quicker
and relevant features that dealers actually want.
Very cool. Yeah, from a software development standpoint, this, uh,
this is, this is all ringing true. It sounds like you guys are moved from waterfall to agile and,
and that's, uh, that's, that's a big, big leap to make. And it definitely speeds up the efficiency
and getting those, uh, features and, and, uh and different code.
Like getting your code,
you get smaller features put out rapidly over time.
But then what that means is at the end of the year,
you look back and you go, wow,
look at all this stuff that we were able to add on.
So that's really cool to hear.
I'm really excited to see what you guys come up with there.
And what's next?
What are you excited about today?
What's next on the horizon?
What's next on the horizon, man?
A lot of things.
I think we spoke a little bit in our press releases around,
there are some features we held back on.
So like, let me give you an example.
In Oversea, in the legacy Oversea, you had this thing called Wi-Fi setup. And it's a capability that we allow dealers to set up a wireless network from one single interface and then deploy it to multiple access points.
It wasn't fully featured. There was a lot of things missing out. You couldn't do channel selection. You couldn't do power selection. You couldn't set up multiple SSIDs. There were some limitations to that feature.
We decided to hold that back because we are redoing the entire feature set. That's one of the
biggest features we're going to launch pretty soon here, leveraging the new agile process.
And I think that's going to have a pretty big impact and help dealers in
setting up and managing wireless networks and a much more intuitive interface. So excited about
that. Excited about bringing the entire ecosystem of package and Ahiji products into the ecosystem
so dealers don't have to go to multiple platforms to manage it. They immediately get benefits of everything that's already been in Overseas.
So, for example, if you have a packaged device, now you get access to all the Overseas Home capabilities that it didn't have access to before.
And so I'm really excited about bringing some of those dealers forward into this Overseas platform and get them access to all this valuable feature sets and improving our industry. I mean, in this world, during this pandemic, I think we all realize, you know,
remote monitoring is essential. It's critical to a dealer's business. And so I'm just really
excited that we can be a part of that and help dealers out, especially in these times.
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm equally excited to see what you guys are able to do. Listeners of the show will be very familiar with my stance on remote monitoring and management. I think it's still a lot of greenfield in front of us as an industry. And I think it's come a really long ways, certainly over the last three years with a lot of consolidation. That's been really the big overarching trend of the last
three years and continual improvements. But I just get the sense that now that you guys have
these platforms sort of focused in one direction, I think there's still a lot of opportunity for
remote monitoring and management to really expand and become a more prevalent, more common part of
every integrator's business. And that results,
of course, in a better end user experience as well. So I think all around, it's super exciting
stuff and really appreciate you coming on to share not only some of the things about the product,
but also some of the methodologies and stories behind it. Really fun to hear about that.
So appreciate it. If, if anyone's listening
and had maybe follow-up questions for you or generally about oversee wanted to connect,
uh, what would be the best way for them to do that? They can email me directly at, uh, Kenny,
um, Kenny Kim at snap baby.com. Um, they can also leave comments and feedback directly into the
oversee app, which, you know, we're going to respond and
we're going to look at that, which is going to be great too. Get it in the backlog, right?
That's right. Get in the backlog and vote. Absolutely. Your voice actually counts.
Yeah, absolutely. All right, Kenny. Well, we appreciate it. Thanks again for coming on.
Yep. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
There you go. Always good to hear from Kenny over at Snappy V. I really appreciate him taking the time to meet with us and talk about all the, I mean, Jason,
tons of stuff that I didn't, I mean, I stopped by the booth at Cedia and you could see that there
was a lot going on, but man, it sounds like these guys are just really hitting it out of the park
with moving features forward in the Oversea platform. So that's really cool to see. Yeah.
Yeah. It's really exciting to see. And, yeah, it's really exciting to see.
And I think it bodes well for the future
of remote monitoring and management.
I'm excited to see what they're able to do
with the platform and really enjoyed hearing from Kenny
about some of the thought processes behind it
and especially just the opportunity to really go in
and kind of get a fresh start with the platform
and go not only push new features
forward and new enhancements, but also take the opportunity to go back and listen to that feedback
from their customers, from their dealers, and get a lot of that feedback that had accrued over time
incorporated as well. So I think it's overwhelmingly good thing for the industry and really excited to
see where it goes. Yeah, my audio was cutting out, but I really wanted to hit on that feedback
a little bit more in our conversation.
But man, feedback is so, so hard to get sometimes
from dealers in the field
and embedding it directly there in the app
where you can upvote or downvote
the features you like to use the most
or the features you want to see is a brilliant idea.
Absolutely brilliant idea
because the way dealers work,
they get on site, they find some frustration, they do
what dealers do, they fix it, and then they leave, right?
And it's hard to gather all of that when you're dealing with dealers out in the field doing
their jobs.
Like, they're not going to provide you with that feedback.
I deal with this, if you can't tell.
It's hard to get that feedback in a substantial form. Yeah, touch the nerve. Yeah deal with this. If you can't tell, it's hard to get that feedback in a,
in a substantial form. Yeah. Touched a nerve. Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, it's, it's not a
nerve. It's just, it's just, it's hard. I understand that they don't have time in the field to do
essentially my QA job, right? And that's what they're doing when they provide that feedback.
Hey, this doesn't work. Hey, this would be really cool if I did that. Um, that's really, uh,
something that's on me to do. But again, you know, it, it, I may not see it because I have a
different perspective, but having that built into the, uh, their, their app, they're genius,
absolute genius. So they will get some really good feed, really good features out of that for sure.
Yeah. You got to make that process, uh, as frictionless as possible. Definitely. I hear
you a hundred percent. So cool stuff.
All right, Seth, moving on.
Pick of the week.
This week's mine.
This is cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got this cool news.
So I'm a total nerd when it comes to
just like learning and information.
And I'm getting into this whole area called,
there's actually like a name for this.
I didn't know this until just recently,
personal knowledge management.
I don't know if you've ever heard of this,
but anyways, you can Google it.
There's a whole world
and a whole sort of culture behind this,
but I'm getting really interested
because I'm just a learner.
I love learning and accruing new information.
So I'm constantly sort of taking notes,
debasing books with underlines, which I know you love.
And that's all well and good.
Savage, I know.
But where I've struggled in the past is I listen to a lot of podcasts.
I love podcasts and I love hearing interviews and new ideas, but I've never had a good workflow know, simply bookmarking ideas. Like when I'm listening to a
podcast, I'm often exercising or on a bike ride or doing dishes, not sitting in front of my computer.
And so I need like a, a quick way to just essentially bookmark and say, ah, that was a
good idea. Like I want to capture that and I'll, I'll come back to it when I'm in front of my
computer or something like that. Um,, I found out about this app called
Air Audio and spelled A-I-R-R. And if you're into podcasts and you have this sort of similar
challenge of wanting to be able to capture and bookmark things, go check this out. It's available
on the App Store. I'm an iPhone user, so I'm not sure if it's available on Android or not, but it is available for iOS.
And basically at its core, it allows you to do exactly what I described, which is very quickly in the moment while you're listening, just tap a button and it'll essentially create
what amounts to a bookmark.
It'll actually create what they call air quotes.
And then you can add like a little note to it.
So you can jot down like some of your own thoughts of why you thought it was interesting
or important.
You can also go in and edit the quote so you can like trim the start and end times.
It's got some sharing features in there.
So if you want to share those out on social or email them to yourself, whatever you want
to do to export them out of there, it's got some features for that as well.
So really neat app.
And if you're a geek like me
and are looking for a better way
to kind of extract information or ideas from podcasts,
definitely go give it a look.
Sorry, I should mention very quickly,
still very early.
It's a very early version of the app.
So it still kind of has some of that feel
of like an early version.
They're soliciting feedback.
I've gotten in touch with,
uh, one of the code co-founders of it. They're doing some active outreach in some communities
I'm a part of. So, uh, you know, I'll, I'll preface it by saying like, it does feel, uh,
like a little bit of an early stage app, a little bit of bugginess here and there,
uh, that you'll run into, but I know they're developing aggressively to get that worked out.
Um, and it's really cool. Cool idea. Yeah. You shared with this week earlier and I was like, Oh, overcast does what you're
talking about maybe. And we kind of shared screenshots back and forth. And, uh, what,
what overcast doesn't have is, is basically what I will call your hot take that you can put on
there where you can, you can like, you can write in your own like quote or what the quote was about
that you're highlighting or the, the, the bookmark on the podcast that you're highlighting.
So what a great idea.
What an just absolutely great idea.
All the time you may be listening somewhere and the podcast is playing in the background.
You're like, oh, that's an interesting note.
I should probably remember that.
And you want to like, there's no real way to bookmark it.
It's kind of almost ephemeral, I i guess like where it just kind of like disappears and i i'm bad you're not gonna like me
for saying this but like i'm an auditory learner so like i remember what i heard in the podcast and
what what's bad is like i will remember things and go like have to go back like i'll remember
ad reads and have to go back and listen and find the podcast. I was like, I know that was two weeks ago on this podcast and I'll go back and find it. So like this
doesn't have the same value to me, but I can totally see how it, it would be an aid, uh,
for things I can't remember. So, um, right. Very, very cool. I like what they've done. I like what
they've done here. Yeah. It's really neat. It's free for now. I don't know what their plans are
in terms of, uh, making it paid or not in the future. Um, but go check it out. it's really neat. It's free for now. I don't know what their plans are in terms of making it paid or not in the future, but go check it out. It's really cool. So anyways,
for the geeks, that's my contribution to Pick of the Week for this week. If you have any feedback,
questions, comments, Picks of the Week, ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. We'd love
to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.
And we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports this show,
but especially those who are able to financially support this 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 a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a big shout out on the show that every pledge
gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can
gather every day and chat about why in the world Savant bought GE lighting like just all morning.
Absolutely. And if you're looking for other ways to support the show, uh, if you enjoy the podcast,
uh, get value or entertainment, or hopefully both out of it, uh, we'd appreciate if you took
a minute to leave us a review on iTunes or in your podcast app of choice, those positive reviews
definitely help more people, uh, discover the show. So we'd really appreciate it.
Can you give us a five-star review in air,
Jason? I think you should. That is a good question. If not, it sounds like a feature request.
Yes, you could put that in. I'm going to hold my five stars from you until I can give my five
stars to hometown. That's right. And I can go back now and bookmark all the times that I
mispronounce somebody's name and then try to get better.
That would be, uh, that would be an undertaking.
I know I'm not proud of that.
Oh, it's too good. Too good. Well, Jason, that wraps up the show this week. Uh, good talking
to you. I'm going to go stand on Comcast's head until they are able to get my internet, which should be 600 down. It's currently
100 down, which is half of the thing I had before. So something's wrong. I should have known when I
walked out of the house this morning and I walked down to the mailbox to get the mail, I looked over
and there was a Comcast truck with a guy on the, you know, extension ladder working on the pole up high that,
that,
that generally means something happened upstream.
So yeah,
that's usually not a good sign.
Nope.
Nope.
So,
all right,
Seth.
Well,
I hope you have a great weekend.
We'll talk to you next week.
All right.
Sounds good.
Have a good weekend.
All right.
Take care. you you Thank you. Thank you.