HomeTech.fm - Episode 319 - CEDIA 2020 Live Special

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

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, September 18th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from lovely Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, how's it going up there? Not bad. Coming to you not from the CDS show floor. So this will be an interesting week for us as Seth bites into his first hot dog. We are live with a small audience here of loyal members of the home tech community for our first ever virtual Cedia happy hour. You know, we couldn't let COVID ruin all of the fun this year. And so we wanted to do something to continue the tradition we've had.

Seth, we've had great home tech happy hours the last couple of years. And I'm glad we're at least doing something to try to keep that tradition alive. Yeah, no doubt. I'm super bummed we didn't get to go out to see each... Well, you're in Denver already. As I said, super bummed we didn't get to go to Denver, but you're already there. And we didn't get a chance to meet up and see what was going on at a show, at a live show in person where you can all gather in one place and, I don't know, get coughed on and look at nice technology. That's all I think of now. Yeah. Yeah. So real quick, and we've got,

like I said, a bunch of people with us here this evening while we record, and we appreciate you guys hanging out. We're going to bring people up to join us and share their experiences. I think before we jump into that, Seth, I'd love to hear your perspectives on Cedia this year in terms of just it being a virtual event for the first time and how much, if at all, have you engaged with the event and what are sort of your, let's start out with your high level observations about this format? Well, so high level uh it is rough i guess is is probably the first thing that comes to mind when i see it uh what what they've been able to scrounge together i don't know it it really seems like this was a last minute effort to get things up and going where where they could have postponed like other if you go back and look at like what was going on at the time like other

shows like maybe isc west or something they were they were postponing or saying they were going to do something else um cd was kind of like pushing forward and emerald was saying oh yeah we're still going to have the cd show so i'm not sure i'm sure in the back office area they were going what do we what can we do to uh to make an event still if this doesn't happen um of course they're doing that uh but i i really do think that this format i think it's just it's it's rough i think because i think because the vendors if you go to the booths and the vendors if you the booths i'm boothing i was boothing all day today um it really seems like some of them were able to take advantage of the tools that were put in front of them like uh

like sony's booth comes to mind samsung's, like the big guys, like the ones that had time and effort, time and people to throw at it, like labor to throw at it. They really seem like they were ready. But it seems like even some of the smaller, I say smaller, anything smaller than Sony and Samsung really looks like just kind of like threw something in there to see what would happen. You go to the chat rooms, they're dead. Nothing's happening. I don't know. It just seems like from a high level, this was kind of a miss and I don't think it's any, I mean, anybody at CDS fault for this at all. Like this is, they're doing,

they're making best the best of what they have to work with. Right. So I don't know. I, I'm, I, I, I, I'm not enjoying it. I'm, but I'm, I'm just, I'm not a fan of this particular type of like, here's a show, a virtual show, and we're going to give you a webpage to go look at for the next three days. And we're going to base everything around that. I think broader speaking, like this could be done in multiple events

throughout the year. It could be spread out to where it's not just like one keynote thing. And I realized that CD and Emerald have to like keep everybody kind of thinking September timeframe, but I think long-term, this is going to show a lot of vendors that they don't have to do this kind of thing and spend all that money moving forward. I'm already hearing, I mean, if you look at the Snap AV booth, Control 4 is virtually not there. And I'm already hearing rumors that they're going to have like a Snap AV event, like branded event later in the year, like October time. So I don't know. What about you? What do you think of this thing? Yeah, I think generally I agree, at least insofar as it just—and we knew coming into this, and we've talked about this on the show.

Where I think I'm struggling is I'm still comparing this to the in-person event. And that's almost unavoidable to do that. But I really, like last night, I sat down after the kids went to bed and I was intent on spending a couple of hours, like, really poking around and trying to make the most of it. And I just, the whole time, I just kept, like, comparing it, right? And I think it was hard to get into the show floor aspect of it. It was at night, so I wasn't engaging with chat or expecting anyone to be, air quote, manning the booth. It was after hours. But I think probably two big observations for me. Number one, we talked about this a little bit in the hub this afternoon. Greg and I, I don't think Greg's with us here for this one, but we were just chatting,

and I think he succinctly framed it, something I was struggling a little bit to put my finger on, which is when you walk around the show floor at Cedia or any trade show, you're constantly just scanning the environment and the things that sort of catch your eye. You go and then you can very quickly like engage with a person and get right to what it is that you care about. Right. And this is you just that catch your eye factor is just not there with this. This is like a big website where you're just browsing and clicking through tiles. And so that's number one, again, the catch your eye factor. And then the other thing that I thought was kind of interesting was in a sense coming into this event, I actually

thought that the virtual format might in a sense be an equalizer, meaning you don't, like with the in-person event, you've got SnapAV and Crestron and the big companies like that can buy these massive booths and everyone else is smaller and it tiers down from there. And in the virtual event, everyone gets sort of the same real estate, so to speak. There are, of course, differences in how people get placed on pages based on sponsorship level and stuff. So that's still a factor. But what I thought was interesting, and you pointed this out, was even when you go in to one of those virtual booths, there's more of a difference than I thought there would be. Right. Right. Like you can clearly tell that some companies had more resources and people with the time

to really sit down and make the most out of their virtual booth and other companies, it felt more like it just was slapped together a little bit and underutilized. So not shocking in hindsight that that would happen. It makes sense. But it just, I thought was interesting because again, coming into the event, I thought, well, maybe this, this is going to be kind of an equalizer for the, for the smaller companies. But, um, I, I didn't really get that impression going through several of the booths. It was kind of a different experience from,

from vendor to vendor in terms of how much thought and effort had been put into those. You could tell. Yeah. You, I mean, you look at somebody like, uh, what's the company, uh, that makes, uh, I'm trying to remember the name of it. Oh, Oh, Libra. They make the, uh, the, um, uh, bond bridge that communicates with the fans and that kind of thing. Um, those guys, I thought they did. I, that was one of the first booths I went to check out booths and, uh, like they seem like they did a pretty good job at like, and then I went over to Samsung and, and, and, and, and they've done, they, they have like a, uh, a Samsung house essentially set up that they have gone in and done custom recordings, you know, highly produced recordings of somebody, you know,

going over the entire Samsung line top to bottom and like, okay, wow, there, there's what a budget can do. There's what a marketing budget can do. And I don't know, both, both are really well done and both are extremely helpful in understanding the product. But the, the, I think the attempt to draw that parallel, like, or draw that parallel like or draw that like this is like what you were doing where you're comparing there you're saying it's the same like i think that's what's going to hold this type of show back it needs to be its own thing it needs to be its own type of show it doesn't need to um somehow try and represent the physical analog, if you will. It needs to, this type of event, I think, can work very, very well,

especially for the amount of money companies can put into it, clearly, like Samsung and Sony. But it doesn't, what I was hoping, and I think you brought this up too. Uh, I was hoping that it would be an equalizer and I would be able to find those cool products, you know, like I do when I'm walking the show floor. Uh, and I, I wasn't able to do that. It's hard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And actually I'd love to, um, if we can experiment here with bringing Josh Christian on with us. I don't know, Seth, if you have to do that from your side, but while you're looking into that, that has been a general observation that I've had as well, like finding the cool things that stand

out has been difficult. And Josh, are you with us? I am. Cool. How are you doing, by the way? Thanks for joining us and for being here. I wanted to have you come join us for just a second. First of all, why don't you give just a quick hello to the audience and just introduce yourself really quickly. Hey, everyone out there. I'm Josh Christian. I'm the CEO of the Home Technology Association. Awesome. Thank you for that. Go ahead. Fan of hometech.fm. Well, we do appreciate that. Yeah, you've been a longtime supporter of the show, and so thank you for that.

Yeah. about this earlier, just kind of how you really have to be super intent on seeking things out, it feels like in this virtual medium versus maybe a more passive approach at an in-person event. Yeah. Listening to your comments, I echo a lot of what you are experiencing too. I think it's just, unfortunately, the nature of the beast, right? If I'm thinking of when I'm at a CDN normally, I'm focused on that. I, you know, my phone's in my pocket, there's text coming in, a couple of things, but I am there to run around the show floor, meet some people. I have definite appointments set so I could focus on those things. And like you mentioned too, you and I were texting or emailing about this earlier is you'll walk by to go see somebody at a booth down an aisle and then something catches your eye and you either stop there and look at it

or you make a note to come back. So that's missing. So that part is a little bit of a bummer. So what I did do though, I did poke around some of the booths and went in and out of them. And to echo what you guys saw, yeah, the experience changes. There's quite a bit of variance in there. And after a while, it just is almost like eye fatigue, in a sense. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe I'm just sick of looking at computers all day because of our Zoom world. But it was a little harder to focus on like, what's new? What's the neat thing here? And I thought something that could have been done to really, and maybe this was there. I just, I missed it, but I don't think I did.

When I went to the homepage of the expo, I didn't see any little tab to click on that said like hot new products or, you know, big unveiling or something like what's the new thing? And I, nothing really caught, I mean, I guess if I'm a, you know, if I'm a, in my position here at the Home Technology Association, I'm not selling a product, but maybe if I was, it'd be a little different experience with me. Let's say I was selling Crestron or Savant or Lutron or any of these big brands my rep would have probably told me some new stuff that's going to be you know shown or revealed at the Cedia Expo and I would have gone there but just as a casual you know me in my position here I don't have to know so much technical stuff anymore but I definitely keep my finger on the pulse of what's going on i didn't find a like an easy repository place to go to really grab that to see like the

hot new product right but what i did do i guess my way of around that is i went to some of the tech bites and listened to those things and wanted to hear industry peers and some manufacturers and some interior designers and such were on just to see what they were saying. But that's my experience. I wouldn't fault Cedia too bad for this. It's just the unfortunate world we're in now that we have to do it this way. And I think they really came together well to try their hardest to do it. Of course, I'm sure they're going to learn some things.

Maybe they're going to listen to the show here and hear some of the things that we all say and maybe iterate and tweak a few things. But I was reasonably impressed with how they set up these virtual, you know, booths. We at HTA were, I was fairly gung-ho to even do it ourselves. Ultimately, I withheld because I didn't want to be put in the other category. There was no associations category. I thought, hey, no one's going to go to work for other, right? Yeah, I saw that. If they put associations on there, because there were associations on there actually, right? NKBA and some others were on there there i would have probably done it um but anyways that's my

observations awesome thanks for asking yeah well uh thanks for coming on sharing them seth go ahead yeah i think you were gonna i i i was gonna say i do believe in this format i think this is a great um i think it's a great way to get information out to people. And I think, you know, not everything has to be a giant trade show wrapped around like, you know, spending 20 to 30 to 50 to $100,000 on a booth, you know, like every people can get their message out, uh, this way and at a much lower cost, at least marketing wise. Um, and, and, but I, I think that the tools that we have, like, you know, I was trying to do something a little special for our happy hour here at the beginning. Um, didn't quite work out. Like the tools are all just kind of rough and hard to use and kind of have to like put them all together and that kind of thing. So I, uh, I do believe in this. I don't want to like down it too much, but I think it was just a little, uh, like a little rough around the edges, uh, this year. And hopefully we don't have

to do it next year, but if we do, maybe there'll be some, some learning experiences that come out of this one that they can apply. Like you said. For sure. Thanks, Josh. We appreciate you, uh, sharing your perspectives. Sure. Thanks for having me guys. Uh,. Thanks, Josh. We appreciate you sharing your perspectives. Sure. Thanks for having me, guys. We'll echo, Seth, what you said and what Josh said as well. I think that it would be easy to, I think relatively easy for us to come on this show and nitpick and, well, not nitpick, but even just generally talk about all of the things that we didn't like about it. And I think that that wouldn't be fair. I think that Cedia did a good job generally of pulling this together. I felt like the site was pretty rich.

I unfortunately have not, to Josh's point, like when Cedia is an in-person event, we all block our calendars and some of us travel from long distances, and it's easier to immerse yourself. And this year, at least for me, and I know for many others, like my calendar is as full this week with normal day-to-day stuff as it, as it is any other week. And so, um, so I wasn't able to, to carve out any, or I shouldn't say I wasn't able, I didn't make it a priority to carve out the time. Uh, and as a result, I, I haven't had a chance to spend a lot of time in some of these things, like the networking lounges, the live chat rooms, the meeting lounges. I know they had the ability

to book meetings with vendors and things like that. So there was a lot of functionality there that I think has potential. And I think, like you said, hopefully we can get back to in-person events, but assuming that we need to stay with virtual for longer, or perhaps virtual just becomes compelling enough to exist in its own right alongside in-person events in the future, I think there is potential there that I think Cedia can tap into. Yeah, absolutely. I think there is potential there that I think Cedia can tap into. Yeah, absolutely. And others.

Speaking of training there, I would love to actually bring Eddie on. We've got Eddie Shapiro here. And if you could do that while you're doing that, I know Eddie is an integrator. I'll let him introduce himself in a little bit more detail. There he is. Hey, Eddie, how you doing? Good, good. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Thanks for joining us. Why don't you give a quick personal introduction here before we jump in? Sure, sure. Eddie with SmartTouch USA in the Washington DC market, a big Cedia volunteer and all about all things Cedia. So, uh, probably have a little bit to say.

Yeah. Well, that's, that's great. And we appreciate you being, um, being here and coming on. So I wanted to touch specifically on training with you because I know that you've done a bunch of the classes, but before we get into that specifically, would love to hear your general observations as somebody who's invested a lot of your time and energy in Cedia as an organization. Well, first, I want to say that I'm glad that Seth got his air conditioner in the garage and that you've got your hard drive going, I hope. I do. I do. We're live. So big picture is I agree with all you guys, including Josh. And I think that Cedia is doing the best they can.

The most interesting thing about this week is just the collision of so many things at once. You had the Apple event yesterday. Crestron is doing their own event alongside whatever's happening at Cedia. And then you have Cedia virtual and, and, you know, Cedia on the floor, you know, virtually as well. So in terms of education, I think Crestron just hit it out of the park. It was pretty impressive using a different platform, of course. And then I think Cedia has done a good job leveraging Zoom and just getting these classes going. The schedules seem to be pretty well organized.

So if you did pay for education and you jumped into some of those, it most of the time worked really well. There's also a lot of on-demand content that I don't know if it's behind the educational, you have to pay for it or not, barrier, but a lot of on-demand stuff, which I think is really good. And there were also a lot of events that were open to everybody. So, and I think that tomorrow there still is a lot of events that you can you can go to in terms of different uh panel discussions etc got it and and where have you spent uh kind of the most of of your time and what have been maybe one or two of your biggest um specific takeaways from the event this year so spent a lot of time so far listening to a panel discussion with Walt Zerbe and Joe

and another gentleman about 5G, been listening to how people are pivoting with COVID, you know, classes on 4K, 8K, video distribution, you know, it's the things you get every year, and I'm very education-focused, so I tend to gravitate towards that. So anything to do with audio, video, I mean, I think Anthony Grimani did a class on audio and basically the acoustics of the room, which I thought was really important.

Leslie Schreiner did a number of classes on basic business practices. Ray Holland did a great class on moving from technician to manager and just how to manage people, which I thought was great. And do you, do you find that those, those classes, the virtual classes, whether they do them in Zoom or whatever, are you finding those are just as productive or, or are they, I guess what I'm asking is, which do you prefer, being there in the room when somebody is doing the presentation, or do you mind, you know, sitting down watching maybe a prerecorded type thing or a, in some cases, kind of a lecture type thing kind of like what we're doing with this webinar here.

So I would flip back over to two things. First, I'm a shiny object in the CD of floor kind of guy, you know, I can't get from one end of the CD of floor to the other without stopping at 15 different booths because everything captures my eye especially if it's well done and well designed and and if it's got a mid-range or woofer attached to it I'm there or a tweeter so I think a hybrid like for example I think Crestron again flipping back to them because they had a really fresh approach to what their classes were, would be good. One of the benefits of the Cedia Pass for education is that if you signed up, you can watch all of your classes again, I think, through the end of the year. So that means that, you know, you can watch two next week and

watch two the week after and, you know, and fit that in between your CDA podcast on Friday and your Home Tech FM podcast on Friday and, you know, all the other podcasts, depending on how exciting you want to be, you know, grab a hot dog, grab a beer and you're good. So I much rather prefer to be in the room because I think when you take yourself out of the day-to-day and you fly to Denver, one of my favorite cities, you fly there and you're in the convention center, you are consumed with what the teacher is saying at the front of the room. And I think it's got a lot of value. What would be really cool is when we get that again, and I hope we do, that they would start recording them like they used to do years and years ago. And so that you could get that hybrid mix of going back for up to six months and listening to your class again, if you wanted,

or even longer. Right. Well, Eddie, we really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on and sharing your perspectives. My pleasure. Go Home Tech FM. Hey, thank you for that. We appreciate it. Yeah, I think just to come full circle and kind of close out on what Eddie was talking about, it does seem to me like the people who I've spoken with, at least who have gotten the most value out of Cedia this year are those who've really focused in on the training. And I think going back to that idea of like, how do you take virtual in its own right, in its own merits and make something valuable out of it? I think it makes a lot of sense putting aside the whole distractibility conversation and how do you

get people to clear their calendars for something that doesn't require that travel, which is a big question. But I think the idea of aggregating a lot of really good courses and concentrating those down into a format like this is compelling as I'm trying to think through things that, again, sort of stand on their own two legs in a virtual medium. But that's kind of what these tools are. I would say primarily the tools that we have are made for meetings, right? Like Zoom is made for a stand-up meeting every Monday morning or something like that. The secondary option is to use it like this for like a webinar or a lecture or something like that. There's plenty of webinars that have been out there. So those tools have existed for the past, I don't know, 20 years. This is kind of a new setup to do kind of like a conference slash education thing. And so of course the,

the things that the tools are designed around are probably going to be a little bit better. Um, I do kind of want to take a step back to Jason and talk about, I guess, um, Richard had a good question about like, well, what is it like, what is Cedia this year? Uh, what, what, what can you do there? How does it set up? How did they set it up? And you just kind of want to go over the experience. As you log on to this CDExpoVirtual.com web page, it's all it really is, is a web page. You're presented with kind of a standard layout menu. Everything is kind of the same. If you go to the About page, it's kind of a standard layout menu. Everything is kind of the same. Like if you go to the about page, it's kind of the same like layout and everything as everything else,

all the booths and everything. So everything is very similar from page to page. Um, there are, uh, there, there's an expo hall menu where you can go in and, and booth, which is what I did today. Uh, and, and go through there. There's an education tab where you can go take the educations. Uh, there's events tab where you can, you can go in and, um, you know, check out a couple of like the CE pro best awards, the tech bites, that kind of thing. It's a couple of lounges to do networking in and that, that kind of thing. Um, I think most of what I've done, like I said, was, was, was hang out in the expo hall, which if you click on it, it's just kind of like lists about 120 brands that have registered for a booth here. You kind of get like just a list of them with a little image next to them.

And you click on that, you go into their booth. And from there, the vendor has an option to add as little, as much information as they want. Some of them have very little information. Some of them, like with Sony, Sony, I thought, did the best job as far as layout goes. And I don't know if they paid for it, which they probably did. But they had a, their booth had like the, a virtual, what do they call it? A virtual, uh, like booth. And, and it wasn't like virtual as in like not real, but they had every two hours, they'd give

a tour, a quote unquote tour of their booth. I didn't get a chance to see it. Cause I went in, like, I think it was at three o'clock. I went in at four and I was looking around. I'm like, oh, I can't see this booth, but next to it, they had the chat, so you could see the stream of questions come in. And there was just a higher level of interactivity there in the Sony booth than I saw anywhere else. So I think that was done right. I think that's how this should look. I think you should have your video, your live video next to a chat window, and run with it that way. That's how you can get that real-time feedback.

You can answer questions as they come in. It's not just like a video that you go and hit play on and what you produced in a nice location months ago is what just plays back and people are asking questions and you type back on it. I think just having the person there in real time, being able to answer the questions, kind of like what we're doing tonight. Like we're bringing people in, taking people out. I think that is, is, is really

what would be powerful for a lot of people, including the education stuff. Like imagine if, uh, if we, we had Eddie on and we were, we networking class here and we were talking about IP networking and we brought Eddie in and he asked this question and we brought him back out and you and I sat here and answered the question. That would be great. So I really think that these tools, as they get figured out, people will see what works best and what doesn't work as bad doesn't work so well and they're going to gravitate to what does work best right yeah i i think that video is a key component that i felt like was would have made the experience the booth experience a lot better at a bunch of them because like josh alluded to it you just get a i felt like i was getting a little bit fatigued yeah of just poking through and trying to read and figure out what's new. Video is so much more engaging that I think if I'm a vendor and I'm thinking about virtual events as a whole, definitely my observation is video is key.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Eddie just in the chat said, uh, AR, uh, like experience. Um, that's interesting. I think even like VR, uh, where's the tie in between VR and, um, you know, putting on an Oculus rift and going to a virtual event versus what we have today, zooming out into the future as that technology becomes more and more ubiquitous how does that play into this that that's also interesting to think about and and i you you've brought this up a number of times uh and i was guilty of it as well like carving out that time to visit the show floor like like like it was said before if you're in c if you're in denver and you have all the appointments set up you're you're going to go to the show floor and you're going to put comfortable shoes.

You're getting on a plane and it forces the issue. Yeah, exactly. You can't wait till your kids go down to sleep at night, poke around a little bit, get distracted by something else on YouTube and head off that direction. So, yeah, it's a whole different beast when you're there and you're you're a captive audience, so to speak. Yeah. And but but I think I think we can get there. I do think we can get there if the content is I guess it tells you something about the content. Right. If the content is interesting enough, people will hang around for it. People. And that doesn't mean I don't I think that setting it up as a three day event type thing is probably not the best.

But if the content is there, people will come. People will definitely come for that. Well, speaking of kind of the overall experience, I'd love to bring Justin on. I had the opportunity to send a couple of emails back and forth with Justin, and it sounded like he had dug in quite a bit to the event this year, and so we'll get his experiences here as he comes on. Justin, you with us? Hey guys. All right. There you are. How are you doing, Justin? Good to see you. Thank you very much. Yeah. It's great to see you too. Yeah. Thanks for, uh, thanks for joining

us and for coming on here to share your perspective. So before we get into anything too particular, talk about sort of your overall experience of Cedia as a virtual event. Wow. I think this is my 20th Cedia and the other 19 in person. And this being the flip is a big change. You know, a lot's the same. I'm exhausted. And when I've been before, I'm kind of hung over my feet and my back are tired and I'm jet lag. And this time it's mental. I've been on Zoom and working in a virtual office for six months and now I'm just concentrated into nine hours a day of Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, website, website. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And by the way, I apologize. Let me back up a quick step and give a quick introduction. Tell the audience who you are real quick. Sure. Thanks. My name is Justin Roundspell. I'm a co-founder and principal of Stratus Group,

and we're a design firm. I've been in the integration industry for 20 years. And for the last five, we've had a design company with my business partner, Travis Beery, focusing just on working with architects. And we design the projects and then transition them over to an integrator to do the work. Got it. And I think if memory serves, you guys are here in Colorado. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. We work all over the world, but Colorado's our headquarters. Based here in Colorado. Cool. Talk about some of your specific experiences. I know when you and I were discussing before this, you mentioned specifically the Crestron offsite virtual event. Talk to us a little bit-minute segment and then have live Q&A interaction with an audience. And I did one about a week ago with Planar that was pretty similar.

It was really well presented and polished. It was designed to be a time-boxed two-day event that you could interact with them and get some great content. And where you guys said maybe the Cedia format's a future, I think that's a potential future as well. Seth mentioned Control 4 is heading that way. And when I was exploring the show floor, I noticed that Lutron's looking at the same thing coming up in a couple of weeks. Yeah. Yeah. I think I didn't have the opportunity to see it in person, but from what I've heard, it sounds like it was a great event. And I think the polish is a word that I really keyed in on there, and the idea of companies needs to really embrace virtual and try to do things that take advantage

of the medium instead of just saying, hey, we're going to basically take what we did in person and sort of port it over to virtual, right? I will also defend smaller manufacturers who may not have marketing budgets as Crestron, Lutron, Sony, that kind of thing. It's really hard to do right now. Like I was saying at the beginning, the tools just aren't there. The knowledge that it takes to edit videos, set up lighting correctly, rig lighting, put up a professional video camera in front of somebody and hit record that, that doesn't exist in, in your average manufacturing, you know, location that, that, and, and much less their marketing department. So, um, that, that still has a long way to go that, and that's, that's what I'm qualifying, you know, under tools as well. So,

um, yeah, yeah, I, I, I, I really am bummed out. I I've heard, I think Greg was in our, in our, in our home tech hub chat was the first one talking about, uh, the, the, uh, the Crestron thing. Now I'm really bummed that I missed out on that because I was hearing all about it before while it was going on. But, um, I, I, again, distracted, I didn't set aside time to go do anything. That's right. Justin, before we let you go, I did want to ask, I got the impression from our exchanges that you did spend some time doing the virtual show floor, boothing, as Seth and I have been calling it. Talk to us about your general experiences there.

Yeah, I did quite a bit of show flooring and I did a pretty intensive, I tried to get my value out of a training pass in the training site as well. And on the show floor, I agree with everything that Josh and you guys and Eddie have said. It's a different experience. The premier people that are on the sponsor list certainly get a highlight. And if you go to, I think there's a button to show all vendors and you dig through there, you can find some of those hidden gems, innovation alley kind of companies. Like I found one called Datum. That's a design company. It's actually a gentleman I'm familiar with, and it was exciting to see him listed in the CDA show floor and a company called Design Flow. So they're little companies you would never have thought of next to Samsung, but they've made their way in there. And if you do a little work, you can find those gems. Yeah, that was actually an observation I made was that I, Seth, you and I have always loved going to Innovation Alley.

That's such a fun part of the floor to go just see what's there and talk to some of those early stage companies. But unless I missed it, this Cedia virtual event didn't have anything like that where those companies were sort of cordoned off other than you just had to scroll to the very bottom because they were often the lowest sponsor levels. So it was very sponsor driven, which of course is similar to the in-person where the big companies always have the best booth locations. But I did miss that. I kind of missed having those sorts of innovative companies grouped together in a place that you could go look at. So maybe there's room more for Cedia and other virtual event companies to almost editorialize a little bit, like do curated

collections is what I mean. Right now, this year, it felt like everything was very driven by just your high-level buckets of product categories and then, of course, sponsor levels. But maybe that would be something that in a virtual event would work well. You have curated collections of booths that different people in the industry, thought leaders leaders in the industry could put together and say, Hey, here's what you should, here's what you should be looking at. It's a great idea. It's a great idea. And Justin, your feet hurt less this year, right? Definitely. My feet hurt less, just, just exhausted the Sony hours because it's an international event. You could take classes at five in the morning till 10 PM. So awesome. Uh, actually one more question before we let you go,

you mentioned the value of the training pass. Give us your perceptions on that. Wow. I think it was kind of a spectacular deal this year. And when it's a live event, I don't remember. I feel like the early registrations like 300 roughly for a training pass. And this year, the early price was 150. So you get all the classes that you can get in person, which are, that's the best case because you get live interaction. You can ask questions and get live answers, but it lasts until December 31st. You can go back and watch any of the recorded live courses. You can watch all of their on-demand courses with the training pass, which I actually confirmed in a chat with the operations people. So to have access to all of that's amazing.

And if you need CEUs to keep a certification, you can get all the hours you want between now and the end of the year. It's a huge deal and good content. Right. All right. Well, Justin, we appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. uh, Justin, we appreciate it. Thanks for, uh, thanks for joining us. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Justin. You got it. Take care. Good to hear, uh, perspectives again. It's as I was, was reaching out to various people to see

if they wanted to come on and join us. Justin definitely struck me as somebody who had done a little bit of everything, right? I talked to some people who had just done training, others who had a little bit of, uh, boothing, and whatnot. And I felt like Justin had a, it's kind of a rounded perspective of the event this year. Yep. Yep. Well, I was going to ask in your boothing, did you happen to come across anything? Like I just went to the design flow. I passed over design flow and, and datum just cause I kind of recognized what they were. But then now I've gone to the design flow booth and I, I'm looking at his articles and what he, what he hands out. And there's, there's a couple of videos that are interesting enough.

Like it's peaking my design interest, like, and what, what this could be. So I'm going to have to visit this booth. I mean, this is going to be a boothing booth that I do after the show. I'm going to have to check this out. Yeah, and Robert in the chat, no booth babes this year. Hey, I'm here. That is very true.

Got my hot dog. The swag was fake. He mentioned that. I actually, I'll come back to your booth question in a second, Seth, but I thought that was kind of an interesting thing that I saw just on the topic of the overall experience was they had virtual swag and you could, so they had certain manufacturers, like you could, you know, fill out this contact form, give us your information in the first 50 people, we'll send you a t-shirt and stuff like that.

So those I thought were some interesting ideas. I also noticed that they were, when I watched the day two video that came out on the email this morning, they talked about how if you filled out these different forms at every booth, like every form, you'd get a point. And then the highest point person would get a trip to New York or something like that. So you can see I'm just trying to do things to drive engagement. And I'm not sure a lot of things that I made notes about, right? Like it just was, I got quickly fatigued and distracted and kept finding myself like looking at other things. And I think going back to that theme of, of distraction, like it just takes a lot of intent and digging to find a lot of gems. One that I did find that I thought was kind of interesting was the Ring X line. And just seeing Ring really continue to push, they've been one of those companies that, of course, came at the market from the straight-to-consumer angle and have continued to push more and more into the professional space. And so I thought it was interesting to see that line and see them continue to really double down on how can we do things to improve our offerings for professionals. They're integrating

with Holovision now as one example. There was a Ring Holovision integration. So just some interesting things there. But generally, I was more paying attention to the overall experience and how the different booths kind of compared to each other. And I didn't find a lot of noteworthy products, but I think you uncovered a few gems in your digging. Yeah, well, even speaking of Ring, the Savant integration with Ring was kind of shown off. And there's a nice little video that they put together on that. So if you haven't seen exactly how that works, go check it out. They have, you know, of course they have taken the time

and integrated the video in with the control system. So that's working well. There's, you can initiate, you know, you can basically use the Savant app as your Ring app. You can even toggle on and off the lights if you wanted to on some of the, you know, you can even toggle on and off the lights if you wanted to on some of the, you know, the lighting devices, um, like the spotlight devices. So, um, not, not a bad integration. Uh, it's, it's one of the better ones. I say that knowing that for the past

four years, I've had essentially the same, you know, essentially the same integration. I've just been unable to put video into anything because, uh, you nothing, nothing, I don't write the home automation software. I write the driver and the driver, it can do, you know, what the home automation systems can do. So as soon as we have the ability to put video into something like control four, we will. But right now we're waiting on control four to update a few things. So I was, I'm glad to see what I'm glad to see about that is that it proves the point that we've been arguing with ring for four years. Like if you build integration, they will come. Right. And, uh, that's definitely something that people are talking about. If you go to their booth, they're asking, you know, when are you going to have integration with this, with other, other systems? It's like, yeah, uh, that's what people want. They want integration. So get it in there. They're going to, you know, that's, that's everything for, for, for an integrator. It's literally in the job title. So if it doesn't integrate, we don't want it. And, um, right. Speaking of speaking of non-integration. So this is my call to action. This is my call to action tomorrow morning when you all wake up and you, and you go, uh, to the, to the CDA,

to the CDA virtual expo, the lift master booth, go, go to the lift master booth, crawl into that. Uh, don't tell him I sent you, but crawl into the, their chat and ask them when are they going to open up for integration for my queue systems? Because they keep shutting everybody down that tries to, to hack their system. And there's no integration, like the lift master, the, the, the, the way they've done the Maya Q things. You remember in the back in the good old days where you could like do a contact closure on a garage door and it would open and shut kind of like the one. Oh yeah. That's what I have at my house because it's like 30 years old, but with the new ones, they've taken that away and they just power up the keypads by

the garage door. Um, and doing that, they can do all sorts of fun little things. They can put a little computer chip in there that has a temperature sensor and they can put the temperature of the garage on the wall. Wow. Um, but they can, what they, what they, what they, what that means is that that is an RF transmitter now it's not a contact closure button and you can't cross the wires anymore. So, uh, go to their booth and ask them where their integrations are. They've been talking about these integrations for so long. Every client out there wants integration

with their garage door. Um, ask them about it. I can tell you that, that, that vendors, I have talked to no less than three vendors this year that when they went to Cedia last year, uh, they did, they walked in the door without a Control 4 driver or any integrations with anybody. All three of them have come back to us and said, yeah, we need those drivers. We need them now. On the show floor, they were coming and finding us and saying, yeah, we need to get set up. So there is a huge, if you're missing integration and this

is a way to talk to them and demand that integration, go, go to the booth. That's my, that's my go. Sick the, uh, sick the home tech community. Home tech nation, go in there and do, do this tomorrow. That's right. Well, this is just too good of a segue. So there, there's a few more things that you found Seth that, that I want to cover before we wrap up. But Robert just chimed in and I wanted to bring Robert on and get some of his perspectives on the show. So let's pull Robert on. He's saying he's got a solution here for your garage dilemma, which we can touch on first. Then you're muted there, Seth, I think.

I didn't get that. Yeah, I was. Hey, Robert, how's it going? I was saying I know the solutions around soldering wires onto a keypad and that kind of thing. And that's generally what you're told to do. But MyQ is sitting there with the ability to integrate with them over IP, just like everything else in the world. And they are flat out refusing to do it. They have sent cease and desist letters to people who have hacked their system and trying to sell drivers on top of it. They're shutting down integrations left and right. They don't want to be integrated with.

They want to have their own little kingdom. Go tell them that's wrong. Go do that. But the garage is just so lucrative. Yeah, that's what they're trying to do. And if you look at like the brands they are, that's literally every garage door opener sold in America. There's only a couple that aren't a lift master type garage door opener. So go yell at them. That's the goal. Well, Robert, welcome. Why don't you give a quick introduction?

Thank you. I'm Robert Spivak with Do It For Me Solutions. We're a systems integrator in the San Francisco Bay Area, focused on the South Bay, Monterey, Carmel, Gilroy area, geographically. Well, thanks for being here. And let's start where we've started with pretty much everyone else. Give me the 30,000- foot view. What's your perspective on the virtual format this year? Absolutely. My expectations were 100% met. That's because I had very low expectations. I think there's a couple of things here.

I can't comment on education. I didn't do any of that this year, but I think the majority of the boot thing is just a curated handholding of website content. So that's certainly very minimal. And I was hoping or thinking there might be more. But the key here is interactivity is missing. I think the reason you go to a scheduled event or make an office stay and stay home instead

of calling on clients is the ability to have interactive content. And the websites, the virtual websites, all the little posts that link you back to their existing trainings or product announcements, very disappointing. I did one of the little chats with a vendor. It was nothing more than an old text chat, which is okay. Someone came on quickly. They started talking to me and then they disappeared and never finished answering my question. But I would have liked if there was a button that said go live or go Zoom or even go audio to have escalated that into a one-on-one real-time conversation right at that moment. And I think the technology is there. I can speak a little bit to this.

The technology is there. And let me just say the package pricing is there as well. So it's an extra fee to do that. I'm pretty sure. Because a lot of, if you look at a couple of the other booths, they'll have the one-on-one, schedule a one-on-one. You can do that there. But not schedule.

I mean to transition live. I'm there text chatting and just hit a button and pop up on the screen. I think in general, this is extremely embarrassing that an AV visual audio industry has not used any AV tech at all. We're using in this virtual experience. As you said, tech that's been around for 20 years. This type of virtual trade show has been done before COVID. It was done three years ago, five years ago, six months ago. There was nothing here that really tried. We could have, I don't mind bugs. I would have been happy if they have tried some new things,

even if it didn't work perfectly. But there was no effort to try anything innovative and show off our skills. Yeah. I will, I'll agree with you there. And I will say that, well, I will say that I did notice Crestron and another company called maybe Liberty or something like that, starting to push out what I've been preaching here on the Home Tech Podcast for a while. They're talking about their, like, they call them? The work from home type thing, the integrations with the little small products that they have for integrators to put premium cameras, premium sound, premium lighting into people's homes, set up studios in their home

office. I think that is something that is a huge opportunity moving forward for integrators. And we should be talking about that a lot more. Yeah. I think, Robert, you're 100% right. And Justin in the chat room chimed in as well. That interactivity, I think, is so key. We talked about video a few minutes ago as a specific thing that I think folks should be thinking about, but just interactivity in general from the more platform perspective or the event planning perspective. Eddie makes a good point in the chat room that I do think is worth pointing out. Emerald owns the event, and so as far as the infrastructure of the event and some of those main decisions about how to design the event, what technology to use, easy to sort of conflate those two.

But this was driven by Emerald, I would assume, primarily. So the connection between this being an AV industry, while 100% true, I think a lot of these decisions are probably getting made irrespective of that context, if that makes sense. Well, I think what we saw and what we're experiencing could have been done by Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. There was no tech there. I mean, there is a group that has figured out tech and they don't need fancy cameras. They don't need thousand dollar lights. They're called teenagers and they go on Twitch and they go on live on Facebook. They go live on YouTube. They just take their cell phone and click and they're live. They're interactive.

There's these little videos called TikToks that are like millions and millions of people are using them to communicate. And that's not high production value, but we could be starting there and then bring in the professionals to increase the quality, increase the bandwidth. But we seem to be at zero right now. Right. It's also interesting to think about. Nowhere to go but up, I guess. Go ahead, Seth.

Nowhere to go but up. That's all I was saying. It can only get better from here. But I think as an industry, we also need to, you know, if we're expecting the quality of our trade shows to be just as good as like a Zoom call, I think we're missing out a little bit there. Like we as an industry need to learn the tools and the technology behind it. And we're still, you know, struggling to get structure wiring put into homes these days. Well, I do want to give a shout out to Bond. The Libre, I think, is the company that you mentioned earlier. They came from really a gadget, Amazon, GAFA-style approach.

They came to the show a year ago. They talked to integrators. And now, less than a year later, they've added PoE hardwired Ethernet and a dealer program and open public API. They integrate with Sanfi and savant. I think they have an official driver with savant they've really embraced taking this newer technology that's affordable and packaged while bringing it into everything from consumer

to high-end control systems yep right it's a cool company we met them at our our happy hour last year they came by and chatted us the guys there came by and chatted with us a little bit um yeah the bond pro bridge was on one of my pics that i ran through while I was, while I was booting and a POE plus five-year warranty, 3,500 square foot range up to 50 devices. So yeah, they, they, it sounds like you said like they came in, they listened, they, and they made something new. That's really cool. Yeah. Now, absolutely. Robert, thanks for coming on. We appreciate it. Thank you.

I think to respond to one thing that, that Robert said that I thought was interesting was, or that the conversation highlighted, I should say, is that the, Seth, you were saying the technology to sort of escalate up into a more interactive model was there, was tied to package pricing. And I don't know the details of any of that. And clearly, I understand why they would structure it that way. But I'm wondering if that's something that also like Emerald and CDI could go back and relook at.

Because ultimately, think about, and I say this at risk of comparing the two, right? I've been talking a lot about don't compare the in-person to the virtual, look at virtual on its own merits. But I think it's appropriate in this case. It's not as if when you go to an in-person event, you can only speak to a human being at a booth that paid X amount of dollars, right? Like that interactive element is assumed. It's table stakes. It's part of the deal. And so I think at a virtual event, if you're trying to drive engagement, then I think being thoughtful about how much of that you want to tie to your pricing structure would be important. Because if you're saying that, hey, we're going to give more interactive tools to people who pay more, then what you might be doing is actually shooting yourself in the foot, so to speak. Because if you're driving the engagement of the event as a whole

down below a certain threshold, people aren't going to be compelled and it's going to be a smaller pie, right? So a smaller piece of a bigger pie versus the opposite, I think, is worth thinking about. Yep, yep. I agree. I think all the tools should be available for everyone. Go ahead and do the promotion aspect of it. If you walk into a regular trade show, the banners are up on the top that say SnapAV

every time you go in. But go ahead and keep the tools the same so that it's a level playing field if If somebody does click and walk into a booth, there's, there's nothing that says a 10 by 10 booth can't be just as extravagant as a 100 by 100 booth. Um, but, but, um, online, there seems to be that, that, that segregation between people who may have paid more to get more features plugged in like that. So anyone I was talking about i don't really know but like i didn't see very many other booths have a live video stream right next to a chat window like the chat was always somewhere else but if i go into someone else's chat there were maybe two people in there uh if i went to sony's there were 50 so it goes to show

you they can look you can look at you can see works. You can see what people want to do. I think everybody should be able to do that if they wanted to. Right. I think Robert also made a really good point about video. And while I can totally see what you're saying with the high production quality and let's step up and do it right, I think you you have to segment it a little bit and say like, okay, for the, for certain parts of video, like if you're doing your product showcase video that you want to highlight what's new, like, yeah, that's probably not great to do like a TikTok selfie necessarily. But, but like, can you imagine the Sony booth, the guys walking around with the selfie stick going, and this is our new.

Right. But I think that the guy with the selfie stick walking around the booth is better than nothing. It's better than just text on a page. So I think don't let perfect be the enemy of good. in these virtual events to tap into more of that low production quality, yes, but still video, still interactive, still not text on a page. That's an interesting thing to think about as well, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anything else that you, well, I guess I'm doing it. traversing the website. So, um, I, I was getting distracted by Netflix. I'm not going to lie. Oh, I've got, I've got some good, good picks to give you. Oh man, there was a whole Apple event that we didn't even really even talk about that happened yesterday. Yeah. We should touch on that

before we, before we wrap up, but I'd love, uh, I'd love to know what else you saw in your, in your booth adventures. And then, uh, yeah, let's talk about Apple for a minute before we wrap up, but I'd love, uh, I'd love to know what else you saw in your, in your booth adventures. And then, uh, yeah, let's talk about Apple for a minute before we wrap up. Let's see. I've got yell at lift master on here. I've got control four was absent, but we think there's going to be a snappy event later. Uh, two, I, I, I did notice there were two lighting brands that had kind of shown up. Maybe there's more, but I noticed two, uh, like lighting brands isn't like lighting fixture brands. Um, we, we've seen these in the past, but they weren't like as big as these two, uh, vendors are, uh,

WAC and American lighting are both kind of pushing themselves into the, uh, integration market. Um, mostly I think because, uh, when you get into DMX control and low voltage control of lighting, like electricians probably get to that and they're like, no, thank you. I don't want to get involved with DMX controls. And the integrator is like, yes, bring that on. I'll take that. So I think you're seeing that type of lighting come in. WAC, I guess it's WAC. I'm not sure. I'm not sure how they pronounce that company. Given some pop songs, I wonder what that stands for these days. Whoa. So American Lighting, they were at Cedia last year. Blackwire distributed some of their products as

well as some of their low voltage LED strips. Both of these brands have the standard RGBW, RGBWW, which is the two white thing. And then they have the tunable white solutions as well, the standard, and you have the standard LEDs as well. So, um, something to keep an eye on. I think, uh, we've, we've been seeing rumbles around that type of product for, for years. And I think the lighting vendors are realizing that, uh, integrators are kind of an untapped economy for them or an untapped marketplace for them. Um, so it may be something to start reading up on learning a little bit more about on. And of course, you know, if you go to Blackwire, you know, we sell them over there. We can walk you through the process. Talk to Cody.

He's in the chat, right? He may have dropped out, but talk to Cody. He knows all about it. That's who I go to. Give him some work to do. Yeah. The secret's out. Good stuff. What about this? Yeah. You might be going there. Yeah, I think I am. Go ahead. I saw you made a note about a Samsung Terrace TV. Yes. The Samsung Terrace TV, at least what they have in their marketing venues, looks hot. I'm like, that's just a Samsung TV hung out there. We've done all these, these, uh, TVs for years outside on the nice, but, uh, you know, they've, they've got the big knits 2000 nits or something like

that. 2200 got to have the knits. Yep. It's a bright TV can compete with the sunlight. And you're, you, you, you see these, like if you go to McDonald's and order a hamburger or whatever, you see these on their menu screens now. Uh, and, and in broad daylight, you can read the menu clear. Sometimes I'm, I'm driving up to McDonald's. I'm like, is this a menu or is this like a, like a printed sheet? They look so good now. Um, and, and then of course it changes like where your, where your order comes up and I'm like, Oh yeah, that's very nice. Um, so those, the technology is, is moving away out of commercial and into the home. I think they had another pro line thing they were showing off. Of course, the wall thing they show that every year is kind of like their Halo product.

That's what brings everybody to their booth to check out the wall. And then you realize that, no, your client probably can't afford it and you probably don't want to put this in. So get just a nice Samsung OLED or QLED and put that on the wall. So the wall is huge and it costs a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's an understatement. Uh, cool. Well, good stuff. I'm glad you were able to pick up my slack this year on the booting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I,

I, I did try a little go. Yeah. Yeah. There was, there was, it was, I think it was harder this year.

It was very hard. In the past. You could, you could walk to certain areas where you like innovation alley. That's where I love to hang out. That's where, um, you,

you, you, you, you, you meet, you meet guys like, uh, Nate with connected,

which you interviewed last week. That's where you meet guys over at Kavo, Paulus with the home assistant. That's where the cool stuff is, and we don't have that this year. I'm really kind of bummed out they didn't have an innovation alley category. They should have had something like that on there.

I feel like they needed to have something across virtual booths that would be like, and maybe some of them had it and others didn't, and I just didn't get to the ones who did a good job of this. But when you walk up to an in-person booth, it's very obvious what that, typically it's very obvious what that company is trying to highlight. They'll put the things at the front of the booth. There's lights pointing at it. It's bright colors. Like you get all of these visual cues about what you should be paying attention to. And I felt like that was missing where I would click in a booth and I wanted something to grab my eye. I wanted something to pop and say, here's what I should know about this company and what they're doing this year.

And I felt like that was missing. And so I just, I was like clicking through booth after booth and like just almost going through the motions, um, versus being compelled to dig in. Yeah. If you go to the all brands page, you're presented with a list. And if you're a vendor, you have a little thing that says, upload your icon here. Well, it looks like most everybody

has uploaded their icon. They follow the instructions. But that should have been like a place to put some advertisement because that's the most prominent thing. Like as I'm scrolling down this long, boring list, nothing's really catching my eye. Cause Oh, there goes Google's logo. There goes HTMI's logo. There goes Hisense logo. You know, who cares? Who cares what your logo is? Tell me, drag me into your booth somehow. And, uh, and I, I think it's, you know,

formatting and everything. Uh, but there's definitely some hacks that could have been done here a little bit better. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Well, I think at risk of being repetitive, I think we've covered some good ground with Cedia this year. And I think overall, again, to close out, my impression was a bit of a mixed bag. I think I, like Robert, I didn't have terribly high expectations this year in terms of the booth specifically. I was generally impressed for the first time around in terms of the overall level of... I know Robert said that he was kind of disappointed and it didn't feel like they really pushed the envelope, but I don't know. I felt like a lot of work went into it and I could tell that, that it was an event

that had I blocked off my calendar and had I really done the thing to require to, to really focus and pay attention, like I could have gotten more out of it this year. So I think generally my hat's off to CDF for pulling something together. I can't imagine that this was an easy thing for them to do. And to Robert, Robert missed the One Vision, not stickers, Robert.

They were urinal cakes. Urinal cakes. One Vision urinal cakes. One of the most genius marketing, guerrilla marketing ideas that has come out of it out of the show and guess what we we had that last year i was i was hoping that one vision would up up up one up itself this year and uh nothing we can't we can't do anything now i don't know how we were gonna how we were gonna one up that one so we got another year to figure that

out that was pretty fun. Got some more time to think about it. Yeah. Cool. Well, Seth, what do you say we spend a few minutes on the Apple event before we wrap up? Yeah, yeah. There was an Apple event suddenly announced, I think, in between, it was about a week's worth of notice.

It wasn't very long. I think a lot of people went to watch that thinking, I know Greg did, because he was very perturbed in our chat, thinking that he was going to be able to order a new iPhone. They did not announce anything to do with iPhones. It was an iPad and Apple Watch event. And if you're interested in those two products, and 50-50 chance you are,

who knows? Um, they, I think, I think they had a pretty good showing. They, they, they introduced some new Apple watches. Um, and then they also introduced, uh, what is it called? A new iPad air, I guess. They spec bump on everything, but the iPad airs really look a lot better. They look like mini iPad pros. So Jason, since you've been putting off that new iPad purchase, I think it's time. I think we finally got you get the SSD. Easy now. I just got my hard drive installed. Give me some time to catch my breath. Well, I do want to, I do want to follow up on that because we should have talked about that last week, but I was out. You were out? How is the, how is the hard drive? Oh my God. Life-changing. Yeah. I never doubted that it would be right. I do have to say that the, um, the installation was, was actually

really simple. I, uh, what was the company Seth other world computing? I think. Yeah. Next sales at OWC. Yeah. OWC max sales Mac sales. I want to give them a shout out because they made the process really easy. The first one that I, the first hard drive that I bought was a, was a different kind that was much, much more difficult to install. And as soon as I realized that I got gun shy, but they had a different version, like a PCI version that they had a video and everything. And, um, super easy. The physical installation, I think only took me about 20 minutes and they have a nice kit that you can buy comes with all the little tools that you need, you know, little plastic pry bars

and special screwdrivers and all that stuff. So super simple. Um, honestly, the, the probably most difficult part of the process, which wasn't all that difficult necessarily, but it was just, I didn't anticipate quite how long it would take for the, excuse me, the clone, the hard drive clone. Uh, I have almost, uh, I have like 890 gigs on my, on my hard drive. I got a bunch of videos and stuff. So cloning, uh, took a long time, but it went off without a hitch uh yeah it's like i got a brand new computer here got a brand new computer plus you have the old hard drive in there you know if you wanted to store stuff to it you could keep those

videos on there and keep the fast ssd kind of clean and clear for whatever else you wanted to gunk up that's the next thing i want to do is go in and optimize that so give me about six months. Two years. I should be able to get that done. I wanted to comment on the Apple event. I think to me, the most interesting thing, the interesting things that came out of that event were actually not the hardware, just because I'm not personally an Apple watch guy and yeah, iPads. I'm intrigued by them, but I'm not like, it's just not really a area of interest for me right now in particular. I thought the fitness plus workout service thing was cool. Uh, I think

specifically it's something I want to at least take a look at and get a sense for what they're going to do there because I'm still personally not comfortable going to the gym. So I'm still doing all of my exercising and trying to stay in shape at home. And I have definitely found that my workout, uh, repertoire is getting very stale. And, and so like, I'm sure there's a million different places I could go to get like workout, uh, curated workouts and things like that. So I don't know necessarily that I'll go with Apple's offering, but I only wanted to comment that I think it's smart. So many people are working out at home, and I'm sure that I would imagine that even if Apple had this in the plans before COVID, that COVID has kind of accelerated that because of

the number of people that are working out at home at this point. Yeah. I mean, those, those types of, uh, those types of systems like, uh, the, what is that bike, the Peloton bike that, that those things are super popular right now. Like every, everybody seems that workout from home is, is a very, it's a very real thing. Uh, and of course there's a million videos out there of different, you know, personal trainer type people doing, you know, saying, oh, this is so easy. And they bounce up and down for 35 minutes and like, you know, coughing up a lung by the time I get to five minutes. Yeah, that that that that was a genius play. I'm very curious to see how well they do it, how long they want to keep this up. I know Apple is moving into that kind of like their services company.

They're saying, you know, the hardware is kind of topping out. I think the iPhone market is kind of saturated. They're not going to get anybody buying a new Mac, you know, anytime soon. Like they have got their customers, their customers are all buying iPhones. So now they've got to overlay services on top of it. And they've said this, this is what their corporate filings are saying. So they're adding these types of like Apple TV, they're adding, um, Apple news, plus all that, all that stuff onto, uh, you know, their subscription models where they can make that RMR that everybody

seems to want. And they did announce, um, I don't know if you saw this, it was kind of towards the end. They announced the Apple One Plus. Yeah, the service bundle. Bundles, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was the other one I thought was interesting. Yeah, because it can actually save you money. I started adding up some of the things that I pay for. And by the time I pay for everything, I could pay $10 more and get everything

and then have, like, the exercising app and maybe in music or something like that at the same time. So, you know, that's, they want to make a, they want to make a subscription, they want to make a bundle that's appealing to everyone. And I got to say, it's not a, I mean, it's higher price than I want to pay, but it's not bad, right? Like it's one of those like, oh, that's not a bad price for everything that you get out of it. Right. There's a really interesting article. If you Google four myths of bundling, this is Coda.io, the CEO of Coda.io wrote this very extensive analysis. And I heard him interviewed on a podcast where he went into this whole idea of bundling. It was a really, really interesting conversation.

And I think we're going to see one of his big thesis. His big thesis is that bundling gets a bad rap and that we tend to think of bundles as a bad idea. The classic example being people who talk about cable and they say, well, I have to pay for this stupid bundle and all I want is these individual channels. And I won't try to rehash his argument about that, but I think that what comes to mind to me for these Apple bundles is a model, mental model that he uses called casual fan and super fan. And the idea is that, you know, with bundles, what you're really trying to do is draw in a drive value to casual fans. So for, in this example, Apple would look at it and say, Hey, we've got super fans. And those are people who will, they have the activation energy required

to go out and buy Apple music on its own, and they have the activation energy required to go get iCloud storage on its own. And then we have superfans who will go get TV Plus on their own. But if we bundle these all together and get the pricing right, then what we can do is dramatically grow the number of people who use all of these services because we're attracting those more casual fans in who might only be a super fan of Apple Music, but if we offer this bundle, then they'll do TV Plus and Arcade and Storage and everything else, and we can drive more users overall into the system. So nothing shocking about that theory, but I think an interesting lens to look at bundling through, and I think seeing more and more of these sorts of bundles is a trend that it's subtle, but it's happening more and more.

And after hearing that interview and reading his blog post, I'm paying more attention to that. And I think it's a really interesting trend to observe as companies try to figure out ways to drive services. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the super fan thing kind of like I am, have become a super fan of the Apple TV plus this since they gave it to me for free. And I think, I think it's going to be like a, a $5 a month type thing. Like it's, I want to say it's five or $10 a month, uh, whenever the subscription, the free thing runs out. So like I was going to renew that anyway. And as I start adding up the things that I already pay for, plus the things that I'm not paying for that will be added in. Yeah. The bundle makes a lot more sense to do.

Right. And I won't be using, I won't be using this silly arcade, Apple arcade thing. Cause I'm just, I'm not a gamer. Like those games, they actually stress me out i'm not i'm not good at that i i get so worked up when i'm playing video games and uh i i just can't handle them i'd rather not good for your blood pressure they are well they're just they like they affect me and uh they will keep me up at night you know like the mind just goes or whatever and i just i just can't do it can't do it what i what i do get enjoy enjoyment out of is my wife loves to play video games and i just watch her play um she she there you go she goes and and i don't have to have the stress of missing the jump six times uh leave that up to her that's right um all right there's one more thing uh one more thing i thought that was interesting

um they announced a new family thing for kids. Apple's trying to sell more products here, but they announced a little family thing for like basically kids to have watches. Right. So if you, if you get your kid an Apple watch, they can, you, you as a parent can kind of monitor that and like set it up as like a sub account and they can run off and, you know, call you from their watch and all that good stuff. I think it requires the cellular one. Um, but it's kind of almost like a standalone unit, uh, even though it's like part of the family account, it's like a standalone thing. So, um, we, my wife and I were talking about that and it was like, well, you know, maybe in a, you maybe like you know a number of years uh instead of getting like a burner phone or something to stick in her backpack

or whatever you know right maybe we'll just get her a watch and that way we can call her you know see where she is yeah no that makes sense seems smart cool well we've we've covered a lot of ground here seth between cdia and the Apple event. This was fun. Yeah, yeah. I got to say, I'm very curious as to where all this goes. I do want to get back to the out of this abnormal normalness that we're in and get back to boothing in person and meeting and seeing everybody in person. It was a bummer to have to cook my own hot dog today. And I'm sorry, Jason, I know you didn't have time to cook your hot dog, but I made two. I didn't.

But I ended up eating two. Yeah, well, better late than never. I'm going to go up and cook a hot dog now. I had my heart set on a hot dog, and I got stuck in meetings late and had to rush right into this. But this was fun, and I want to extend a big thank you to everybody who attended and hung out with us and came up and shared some of their perspectives. That was really fun to hear from others and gain, again, those other perspectives on the event this year. Yep. Well, Jason, that wraps up this week.

What do you say? We, we call it a week. We, we go back and cook hot dogs and enjoy the weekend. Let's do it. Seth, have a great weekend. Have a good weekend. And, uh, yeah, we'll talk to you next week, man. Take care.