HomeTech.fm - Episode 321 - The Speaker Looks Like a ____

Episode Date: October 2, 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, October 2nd. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. October. Crazy. September is done. October is here. We've got some good weather down here in this morning. It was, get this, Jason, it was like 72 or something when I woke up. 72. Nice. Yeah, and dry. We don't get that very often, so you kind of have to appreciate it when we do it.

Get out and get some fresh air after that uh invigorating presidential debate i presume yeah yeah i i have a quick question anybody um know where i can get a good mute switch for a microphone yeah i hear they make them yeah i i i we're actually experts in fact yes yes there you go i've got one right here it's a button yeah yeah that's the rules uh they make a button one which sits on your desk which is really nice and they have one that's like a foot pedal too um which i i like using both of them yeah i i don't care what side of the aisle you sit on that was a train wreck yes it was i uh i i think uh maybe just like uh having a you know, two separate, like, you know, those game shows where they put the like headphones on and put them in their own isolation booth.

Yeah. And then totally. And just put both of them in an isolation booth with a microphone and a headset on so they can just hear each other in the moderator. And that's it. And I guess. Hard cutoffs at your two minutes, your cutoff. Yeah. You've got a clock just counting down. Yeah.

We, we, there are like, there are solutions. I know. I feel like, I feel, I, I feel like we, we figured this out in, in the world of, um, TV game shows, uh, you know, fast forward, I don't know, a hundred years. And we'll probably be doing like survivor president, you know, presidential run 20 or 3048, you know, that'll be it. So yeah. Well, it was, uh, it was entertaining if nothing else in a very informative way. Yes. I genuinely would like, uh, some, some like some good old-fashioned debates to come back, other than the like, going for the old, you know, sound bites and what looks good and that kind of thing doesn't really work for me.

Yeah. I want to see some substance. Yeah, it was tough. It was tough to watch. Speaking of uninformative, why don't we try to turn that around, Seth, and let's put out a nice informative episode of the Home Tech Podcast this week. Just you and me. Busy week. Amazon and Google both had events. We've got a couple of other headlines as well. So what do you say we jump into those?

Let's do it. No mute switches needed. Yeah. Well, don't speak too soon. So yeah, we're going to move right into the Amazon event. We want to start there. There was a whole bunch of news that came out of this. We're going to go through these from top to bottom here. Saving the best for last, Seth. Drones. Yeah, we got to get to that.

Anyways, we'll get there. Yeah. Bonkers. But starting out, spherical echoes. So they totally redesigned the look of these echoes. I don't know if I like it. I mean, it's definitely different. Kind of feels like they're trying to make it more of a conversation piece,

certainly than before. The design looks a lot more, I guess, eye-catching is a good word for it relative to what they have today, which I would describe as more utilitarian. But I think the biggest thing, sort of putting the aesthetics of this device aside, the thing that I found interesting was the emphasis on smart home functionality. They've got Zigbee support as well as Amazon's Sidewalk Bridge, which I think we talked about Sidewalk in passing a while back. wireless communication standard that that as i understand it is a fairly non-technical person here is a wireless standard that amazon devices use to communicate with one another and this can act as a as a sidewalk bridge has some sound enhancements as well but yeah i i think the the zigbee and the the smart home additions there were probably to me the most interesting right component well the

sidewalk is i think it's like a low frequency type thing where the use case they initially had come up with was like you'd put a tag on your dog or something and all of the devices like the echoes would have this sidewalk technology built into them and if the dog is outside of somebody's home a few blocks away it would it would register with their amazon and and you'd be able to find you know oh the dog is two blocks away i need to run over there and get him so right um yeah i'm not i'm not a big fan of the sphere thing the the lady in a soccer ball i guess we're gonna have to have to call her. This is really strange looking. It'll grow on you, Seth. They should have renamed it Marvin. You remember the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with the depressed robot?

Yeah. It looks like it reminds me of his head in the movie there. That's good. That's good. They got a new Echo Show as well. This one, I kind of think this is a neat feature. I still haven't pulled the trigger on one of these smart displays. And I actually like they've got a feature built into this one where it has a motorized

base and it'll follow you around the room. So if you're watching, I guess, videos on it or whatever the case may be, I could see that being kind of useful because it is a pretty small screen. So if you get off access of that screen, it could be hard to see what you're looking at. So to have this device kind of tracking with you around the room, I think is pretty interesting. Not a bad idea. It reminds me of the feature that the Facebook portal has, where it has a higher definition camera that can kind of like track you around the room, wherever you are, and you're talking, you know, rather than doing this mechanical thing they built into the camera but uh that

brings that brings up another thing by the way i've been searching for someone who has a facebook portal just i'm still putting it out there because it's been it's been years that i've been asking this question if anybody has seen a facebook portal in the wild please let me know please let me know pictures or it didn't happen i i just i'm going on like rumor now i i just i i have not found i these things have to exist they have to exist out there i just have never i have never personally yeah i've never seen one either in the wild and i don't know anybody else that has either so i just i would really like to know where these things are going oh just best buy and that's it do they just go unicorns i don't know yeah

this is a good idea though i like the uh the rotating screen uh if it does a good job of following you around it just doesn't randomly start pivoting around the room uh you know you sit there and watching something on the screen and it just starts rotating in a different direction than you aren't i could just see it it being, you know, it's Amazon. They do fun stuff like that. Yeah. Here's another one, Seth. Interesting move. Not a surprising move, but interesting to see Amazon getting into cloud gaming.

Luna. Yes. So they've got Luna cloud gaming with a controller that you can buy with it. We don't talk a lot about gaming here on the show. It is an area that I've been reading up a little bit about recently and just getting up to speed with cloud gaming in particular as a business in the state of the technology there. And I think cloud gaming in general has quite a ways to go. There are some limitations there, as I understand it, from more of like a hardcore gamer perspective, you know, when you start getting

into the more intense first-person shooters and multiplayer, things like that. But I think, you know, it's an interesting category. And the fact that with cloud gaming, you can play games on these tiny little devices that are very, very inexpensive and have almost no onboard processing power relative to something like a playstation 5 is it's interesting it's definitely a category to keep an eye on yeah and and on the integration side like how does that integrate into a house when somebody wants to you know typically this has been my my experience is like uh when we we did a house that had kids that were you know old enough age to like

have a gaming setup in their room or whatever it's like you kind of just like dropped off the tv in that room and then like slowly backed away like here's your here's your hdmi let's plug in the xbox and then you just like back away and the kids take it take it away from there i've never really had to in it like be really involved in integrating a game system into a house or anything larger. I don't know about you, but usually it was just like hook it up and they take it over from there. Yeah. No, I never have. I can't say that I have.

I just shared an article into the chat room and we'll put it in the show notes as well. If anyone's curious, uh, Matthew ball.vc is a site that I discovered recently and really long form, deep dive analysis on, on cloud gaming. If it's a, it's a category that you've never read about, this is a great primer. Um, really encourage people to go read about this. It's pretty, pretty fascinating stuff actually. Yeah. I imagine this has to have a pretty good internet connection too, because it's streaming the video from some bigger computer somewhere. It's almost like a remote desktop thing, which is wild to think about that you can play a game and there's very low-ish latency on it.

A very cool technology that has been building in the gaming world. Yeah, absolutely. A new Fire TV stick and UI. Thank goodness the UI before was not so great. I used one of these, my in-laws, that's where I used one, and wasn't a big fan of the UI. So it looks like they've done some improvements there. They've got this device, got Atmos, voice remote, 40 bucks. They've also got, looks like a more lightweight version for $30. Killer price. Always has been a killer price for the Amazon Firesticks.

They just, like you said, the performance on them hasn't been all that great. But I imagine this one has got to be turning the corner on that with having like the HD streaming and Dolby Atmos built into it, you think it has a decent processor in there for it, but I don't know, who knows? This may just be one of those like devices that's good for hotels, you know, overnight stays at hotels or whatever, you can go plug it in. Right. Throw it in the bag. Exactly. Uh, Eero for those who don't remember, acquired by Amazon. New Wi-Fi routers, they get Eero 6 and Eero Pro 6. Again, Seth here, the interesting thing to me, Zigbee, emphasis on Zigbee.

Got a Zigbee smart home hub built into these, work with Alexa, of course. The main difference I found between the Pro and the non-Pro or the standard was that the pro is a tri-band and the other one was a dual band i didn't find a lot of other differences at first blush so i'm not going to dig into that a little bit more um but i've got ero here at my house it's been good to me i think it's a solid product and i guess good to see them iterating on it yep always always a good uh good decent wi-fi system uh to to use i i recommend that quite often based based on your experiences but yeah it's it's been a it's been a pretty good line i think even the like the pro the there's like a pro the pro line is available to through distribution and that kind of thing for dealers to use here's one for you you, Seth. Your Alexa can bark at potential intruders. Is this the guard plus thing that they have introduced? It is. It is indeed.

$4.99 a month. Your Echo devices can listen for sounds, mimic your smart home usage, call an emergency line on your behalf, and evidently make sounds to ward off intruders such as the sound of a barking dog. Yeah, interesting. The guard stuff had come in a long time ago and I guess this is just like an additional subscription based thing on there to add onto it. $4.99, it's pretty low.

I think, what is Ring Charge these days? Kind of in the same ballpark. I'm kind of surprised that they're not integrating that in with Ring somehow, considering that's the security brand. Yeah. Well, I'm looking at the story right now. It says, Amazon says a number of security providers will be bundling Guard Plus with their subscription plans, including A3 Smart Home, Abode, Resideo, Ring, Scout Alarm, and Wyze. Ring Protect Plus customers will get the service for free. Everyone else gets a one-month trial. Makes sense. So I think I'm Ring Protect Plus.

I know I'm Ring Protect. I'm going to dig into that. Matthew makes a good point in the chat room. Isn't that like the 90s that had boxes on the back of doors? You could knock and it barked. I remember that. What's old is new again. I wonder if you get to select the type of dog that barks,

like if it's one of those little yip-yip dogs or something that sounds. There it is. Rex. Rex plus. There's our show art. Indeed. So I think, Jason, we need to take the Rex Plus and put it on the next product we're going to talk about. Because Ring has officially moved into the throw shit against the wall and see what sticks category of products.

Spaghetti strategy. Yes. Yes. see what sticks category of products spaghetti strategy yes yes ring has announced a security drone that lives in your house uh they released a video on this thing and you you can see that it's kind of like the use case for it where you guys break it into the house it sets off the ring alarm which in turn turns on this drone and you can, well, I guess you can only launch the drone. It's kind of important to say for privacy purposes, you can break your phone out and press go drone and your, your drone will launch out of the base and navigate through your house to

where the alarm is taking place and see the bad guy. And, uh, you know, if he's not thwarted by the sound of like bumblebees coming down the hallway, uh, he will be thwarted by realizing, realizing that it's a drone with a security camera on it that you're able to look at and record him breaking into the house. I don't know. I don't know what to think about this. I think I'm going to have to buy one for the museum because this is probably the one, the strangest, one of the strangest products I've ever seen. It is, it is wild. I got to give it to them. Uh, I like the ambition. I, I don't have a use case for it. I mean, I, when we travel, I've mentioned this on the show, I've got little wise cameras that I

bought enough of them that I can cover all the areas I need. We have a fairly small house, but I mean, I get it. I think it's a neat idea for particularly if you're going to be gone for a while and you don't have, if you have a bigger home and you don't have enough cameras inside and you do want to be able to keep an eye on things all around the house while you're gone. It's cool. I mean, it's a cool gadget. I don't know how useful it is for most people, but I like that they're pushing it. I like the ambition and I just think it's neat. I think it's neat that they were able to engineer this. I wonder how well it actually works. Does it ever have trouble getting back to the base?

I think that's pretty standard kind of functionality for drones at this point. They're pretty good at getting around. So I would imagine that works pretty well. But one thing I saw that I was surprised by was that it said the camera is blocked when it's in the charging base. So it doesn't function as a camera when it's sitting on the charger. Right. And I thought that was surprising.

I mean, I'm not sure if that was a design thing that they had to sort of sacrifice on or if that was deliberate. But while this thing's sitting on the charger, it's effectively worthless. Yeah, it's just a charging, like, it's almost like one of those charging vacuum cleaner things. Right. Yeah. But you know, what's funny, the most of the pushback I've seen from that is on, on, on the, on the internet is, you know, no way am I putting a ring camera inside my house. But, you know, ring already has made cameras for years that could go inside the house and this is the least of a truth like if if you were worried about having a ring camera

viewing in your house and like you had this versus the uh you know the the camera that you know the solid the single camera the i forget what they're called ring camera that you can just put into your house stick up cam or something you would know when this one worked because it's going to sound like a swarm of angry bumblebees is cranking up in the living room and following you around. It's a fair point. Yeah.

If you're walking around, you know, in your birthday suit and you hear the bumblebees coming, it's like, oh no, Amazon spying on me. But, you know, if you're doing that and you have the stick-up cam, you'll never know. You'll never know if they're spying on you. Yeah. you're doing that and you have the stick-up cam, you'll never know. You'll never know if they're spying on you.

Yeah. That's interesting. Are people particularly sensitive to Ring? Ah, yeah. Is it? I think it's there. I mean, it's better they've had some privacy concerns with the, well, there was the whole kerfuffle

over the AI learning thing where they had subbed out pictures of people's or videos of people's doorbells and like they had had a group i think in like ukraine or something like that categorizing cars and that kind of thing for the air engine it's like literally everybody else is doing that but ring you know caught the brunt of it for some reason and um i don't know they've had some issues with basically turning over data to law enforcement a little bit easier than some people would like. So I don't know. I think for the most part, they're an okay, like they've done an okay job of either

responding to those privacy issues or, you know, having a good reason, especially in the, in the case of the AI stuff, it's like, that is industry's practice. It may just not have been well known for people outside of people, you know, expecting the doorbell just to be existing for them and, and, and not really reading the fine print that they're, you know, when they, when they're saying, I'll, you know, I agree to whatever the, the end user license agreement when they sign up for the app. Eddie in the chat room says, want to put one of these in our warehouse. Great point. I think small business owners, this is a nice potential thing. You throw it in the office and when you're not there at night, it's kind of keeping an eye on the place. So I don't know. It's really interesting technology. it's one of

those things it's like the first version of something that probably isn't gonna be a long life on this thing relative to the the span of the smart home but i i think we'll see more of this and i i applaud it i i love the ambition i I thought this was really, I definitely did a double take when I saw it. I'm going to save a place on the museum for it. I mean, it's- You're going to reserve a spot for it? It's definitely going there. I mean, there's no chance

that this lasts more than two revs. Yeah. Matthew says they just need one that takes the garbage out. That would be successful. I mean, so I hate to stay on this very much longer but it's 249 uh shipping next year sometime yep but from all of the pictures and even the video i don't know if you can tell how big this thing is um and i haven't seen any specs on it

either but it seems like it's larger larger than a tissue box it seems like it's larger than a tissue box. It seems like it's a good 12 inches by 12 inches by maybe 9 or something. It seems like a rather large device. It's a good question. Yeah, I actually hadn't really paid much attention. I'm looking at these pictures just assuming it's kind of a small little device. To me, I think it's larger. It looks like, especially in the video where it's flying around a small little device, but to me, I think it's larger. I think it looks like,

especially in the video where it's like flying around the house or whatever. Um, like it looks like it's huge to me and I can't really tell, um, yeah, that's a good question. How big it is from all the perspectives that they've, they've given, but it looks like it's a larger, larger device than they're letting on. So I don't know. Right. No, that's a good question. Uh, speaking of ring, they're also moving into the car security market, interestingly enough. So ring has announced its first foray into products meant for use outside of the home, the security camera is designed for cars. They've got a car camera. It's got two cameras. So one that, that aims out and one that aims back in

towards the driver. They've got a car alarm, which just plugs into the OBD diagnostic port and it'll listen for, you know, sound of broken glass. I think it can sense if the car has been jolted or anything like that. And of course, send you an alarm to your phone. And then interestingly, they've also got a car connect system, which will integrate the Ring app into like existing cameras within, let's see. Like a backup camera. Yeah, that was my... Some of the cars, fancier cars,

have like the 360 view camera. Yeah, and it says it'll also integrate the same Ring app that supports the company's home security alarm, video doorbells, security cameras, et cetera. These are all slated for availability starting next year. And it says it's working with automotive makers, but they said the first partnership was with Tesla, which I thought was interesting

because Tesla is kind of a, it's more of a computer than a car company type thing. So it looks like it'll work with the Model 3 X, S, Y that have the Sentry mode enabled and it'll be able to install the device in the cars and allows them to connect to the car's existing cameras. um i think that's kind of a cool little add-on for for your car i hope to see that come to more uh automotive automobiles in the future right it says this uses sidewalk the sidewalk thing we talked about earlier um uses that technology you can find the dogs anywhere so

there you go exactly interesting i i think it's a logical move for ring i suspect they'll see success with this um a lot of people want security in their cars and may not want to go through all the trouble of of getting a fully installed car alarm. You can just pop this thing into your diagnostic port and there you go. Yeah. And most, most cars already have like a basic security system. And when you, when you were in high school, like the thing was like, you got, you got one of those car alarms with like the 30,000 features on it. And now I don't even hear those anymore. It's just kind of like a horn will beep a few times and right. Uh, that's it. But like this, this seems like it's kind of like the next step that, you know, the, the dash cams, those are kind of

popular too. So to, to see that, like become, this is kind of like a little more mainstream version of that. At least the camera is, um, just kind of more, more mainstream with a, with a bigger brand behind it to, to have one of those like dash cameras installed. Those are, those are very popular right now. I see you can go on YouTube and watch countless hours of dash cam video for some reason. Yes, you can. It's quite entertaining. Yeah. So those were the big announcements from Amazon's event. A big one there. Lots of stuff going on, as you would expect from Amazon and the infamous spaghetti strategy that we like to talk so much about here on Home

Tech. What do you say, Seth? Shift to Google here? Yeah. Let's, let's talk about Google. Um, had a, uh, their pixel five event, which is their phone, their phone event where they show off their new phone that they had already oddly enough trashed a few months ago. Like it's already like Google is not like Apple. Like it seems like everything about Google, there's, there's no secrets kept and all of a sudden, uh, we get the phone and it's like, yeah, we've known about these features for months. Uh, thanks. Um, but we did get a new, a couple of new products, uh, this, this, this time around, uh, within the home, uh, people would use for home. We got a new Chromecast, which, uh, does not, I think this is a huge step

forward with the, with it. Uh. It does not require a phone. So departure from the previous Chromecast where you kind of like would use your phone as the interface and cast or mirror the video over to the Chromecast itself. So all the heavy lifting was on the phone. This time they've built it into the Chromecast. They've given you a dedicated remote, which is kind of nice, and for a $50 price point. Yeah.

Looking at a picture here, pretty nice looking design, I guess. Hard buttons on the remote. Big, big. Like that. Yeah. This is a big plus here. You got YouTube and Netflix quick launch hard buttons. And yeah, like you said, I think a big step forward, their first device was really

just a mechanism for you to cast your phone up onto the screen. And this one has all of the smarts built right in. $50, a compelling price point. Obviously a very option-rich environment now when you're looking for for streaming devices but this looks like one that um you should consider if you're in the market i gotta say this one looks very compelling um i mean just having the youtube and netflix built in plus all the other stuff you can do with it um i mean fifty dollars is a great 4k 4k hdr um all the apps that go along with Chromecast, it's making the Apple pricing of like $200 look absolutely insane these days.

Tough, yeah. They're really going to have to do something with that. Agreed. We mentioned cloud gaming earlier, Seth. Interestingly, the new Chromecast does not yet support Stadia, Google's cloud gaming offering. Says you'd think they would have given Stadia some stage time at this event, but cloud gaming isn't officially supported at launch.

Says it will come at some point. So be on the lookout for that in the future. Speaking of TVs and Google, they have announced some changes to their app structure. So along with the launch of the new Chromecast, Google is changing the name of Google Play Movies and TV to just Google TV. So I guess just a rename, simplifying quite a bit. Renaming is happening on Android phones to start that you can expect it to change on other platforms as well. So a bit of a rebranding there.

Makes sense. Kind of falls in line with everyone else, you know, Prime TV, Apple TV, you know, just kind of makes sense. Yeah. They're getting rid of the Play branding. Looks like the big thing that's changing here. So you've got Google TV, the app, Chromecast with Google TV, Android TV, YouTube TV, Google Fiber TV. And yeah, there you go. All Google TV now. Can you keep track of it? That's becoming the question. Yeah, yeah.

Well, one more product that came from Google this week, or actually today, a $99 Nest audio speaker. New Nest audio. This sounds actually pretty interesting. I wonder how well this works compared to Sonos. Oh, that's right. They're suing them over. This is what they're suing them over. Indeed.

Yeah, we're going to get there in a second. Not a lot of love lost between those two companies right now. But yeah, it looks like this is, I mean, the biggest thing that I saw as far as an upgrade from the previous generation, 75% louder is what they're claiming, is what I saw, and 50% more bass. So it looks like some significant improvements in the audio quality on this device. And yeah, this is another one, like you said, Seth, it's been leaking around. We we've known this is, is coming. So I think Dave's ads was over this a couple of weeks back, but what's interesting is these colors that they have introduced here.

I don't know if you, you, you seen the gray green pink blue like these are like the same colors as the new ipads are like those new ipads from last these almost exact same colors i would i would be shocked if they're any different but um you could you could get a new ipad to match your nest audio uh smart speaker which is kind of wild yeah interesting very uh very pastel yeah and they're they're shaped oddly i guess i don't really like what do we come what do we come to expect out of a smart speaker these days um i'm not sure like the amazon one is an orb, like an orb with a glowing thing on the bottom. And this one is hard to describe. It's like an eraser head.

I don't know. Very strange looking. Yeah, Matthew's saying possible Sonos killer. I'd agree. Interesting, killer. I'd agree. Interesting, man. I'd agree. Like this could be a Sonos killer, especially at a $99 price point. Having a company like Google behind it, you can pair multiple units into stereo.

You can do the rooms on and off. Built in with Google's audio services like YouTube. Could be for the right person. Rashid. We're a family show rashid he's speaking about the shape it's a very very large okay whatever floats your boat rashid we're gonna leave it to listeners to go look at the picture and try to surmise what rashid said i'll tell you you what, send me an email. And if you guess it right, we'll, we'll come up with some sort of prize for you. We've got stickers. I have, I've had stickers forever. I've never, never offered them up. There you go. We've got some home tech stickers. So if you're listening to this show and you want to go look at the new Google speaker and guess what Rashid said, it like. Email us feedback

at hometech.fm and we've got a sticker for you. Eddie, don't encourage this. And we'll add on to this contest. Give us a good name for what this is. That's not what Rashid said that we can actually say on air. And I'll send you a sticker as well oh that's funny oh wait sorry not the speaker now i'm just confused i'm confused yeah i think the speaker looks like well anyways we'll go with it all right watch the edit today speaking of uh no love lost here between sonos and google uh shifting gears a little bit sonos filed another patent lawsuit against google alleging that the search giant is infringing on five wireless audio patents across the entire line of nest and chromecast

products sonos filed its first patent lawsuit against google in january in california the federal case has been put on hold. This new one, Seth, apparently filed in the Western District of Texas, which evidently is an emerging patent lawsuit hotspot. Good old Texas, yeah. So there you go. The feud continues. Man, I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen here. This is one of those... It doesn't tell me that Sonos is doing any good by fouling it in Texas. Especially the eastern or western district of Texas. It's notorious for these patent troll type lawsuits that the courts are all kind of like stacked up to bring in money into

the local economy and that kind of thing. So it's kind of discouraging. But it will be interesting to see what happens over time if these guys probably end up settling with some kind of money changing hands. It's kind of sad. It's sad to see Sonos doing this

kind of thing. Yep. Google, of course course says it will fight back so hopefully the companies can so far this has not impacted consumers in the sense that the services on sonos haven't been interrupted but uh we'll see time will tell and uh next our next big virtual event on our calendar we've got google and amazon out of the way i think the next big one is going to be snap avs which they're calling snap pro live got a little bit of uh information on when this was going to happen it looks like it's going to start 2 p.m eastern the one true time zone, on Tuesday, October 13th with a keynote presentation.

You had to get that in there. Of course I did. With a keynote presentation from John Heyman and other members of the company's executive team. So looks like they're going to be doing some of their big announcements there, SnapAV, Control 4, pre-absent-ish on their updates at the Cedia Virtual Expo thing. So I'm guessing they just kept their powder dry for an extra couple weeks here. Indeed. And they're going to give us something fun to play with here in October. Yeah, they're promising a new smart home product, whatever that means, according to strategy.com here. So keeping us in suspense, I'll be interested to see what they do with this event in kind of an emerging trend, certainly, that we've seen this year is these big, big virtual events.

And SnapAV is, is the biggest company in the industry. I think at this point, I don't know that anyone is, is, is bigger. So it'll be, it'll be interesting to see,

to see what they can do. Be, be, I'll be excited to see what, what, what they can bring in. I mean, between,

between, I mean, there's gotta be enough announcements already between SnapEV and Control4 that they'll be able to have a pretty good event out of this, so. Yeah. Should be nice to watch. Indeed.

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And don't forget you can join us in the chat room live each Wednesday starting 7 to 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more at hometech.fm slash live. Well, Seth, I got a pick of the week for you this week. You do, you do. All right. So this is a common problem now in the, in the day and age of COVID we are all, I mean, for me, this is nothing new. Let's be honest. I've been working from home full-time for like three and a half years, but I've certainly become more cognizant of the challenge now that I'm on video conferences all day long with a lot of people who haven't been on video conferences for three and a half years. And lighting. Lighting is a big thing.

And if you're on a lot of these calls, particularly important ones where you're dealing with clients and you want to put your best foot forward and not look like, I don't know, maybe you just rolled out of bed because maybe you just did. I don't know. Maybe you just, just rolled out of bed. Cause maybe you just did. I don't know. In any event, Loom Cube. So I was looking for just like an easy lighting solution. I didn't want to spend a whole bunch of money. And this was, I think 50, maybe $60. And it's a little device about the size of like a deck of cards roughly. And it comes with a really strong, like suction cup. So you can stick it to the back of i've got it stuck to the back of my monitor here and and then this one's nice because it's got uh adjustable brightness as well as adjustable uh color temperature so you can change the uh the

temperature of the color to get either that warm or the cooler color, depending on your preference there. So really inexpensive investment. Charges, as you would expect, just with a USB cable. And it holds the charge for quite a while. I mean, I've had days where I'm on calls pretty much the whole day, six, seven hours, and it'll last on a charge pretty easily through that. So you don't have to have it plugged in all the time. I just charge it every day or two. It's been a good investment. Nice, nice. These aren't these, well, Lume Cube,

I'm familiar with them for the actual cubes that they sell, which are their little, I was not aware that they were doing these little panels like this. So that's really cool. And the panels are a lot less expensive than their LED lights. Like I'm familiar with the, they're about GoPro size cubes that have these super bright ish led lights on them that you can use for pretty much the same thing.

But they were used in like photography and video for, to like do some pretty cool lighting effects, you know, they can highlight a specific thing or put some light on something that you want. And it's very, since it's so small, the size of a GoPro, it's very portable and you can like move it around. So this is really cool. $59. They start at $59 for the panel mini and it looks like it goes up to $99 for the panel go. Yeah, there's a couple of different models and this is, yeah, Lume Cube is the company, as you alluded to. They got a bunch of different products.

This is the video conferencing lighting solution. So I know for a lot of us, you've got light maybe above you or behind you, but you don't always have light kind of facing at you when you're on your calls. And again, it definitely helps on those more important calls when i'm with my co-workers it's like you know turn off the lights and yeah yeah you don't want to see me uh yeah there's a bunch of um there's a bunch of video tricks that you can do for uh for video conferencing maybe we should put that as like one of our to do talking things because lighting's not lighting's not the only thing um and i i suspect like as we move into the this this era of like people wanting to go to the office less because

they've discovered they can and still get their work done and in fact more efficiently sometimes um like this may be a thing i i really suspect this is a thing that integrators are going to get into uh and i want to do plus i you know, just generally getting some good information about, you know, how to look good on a video conference call, how to sound great on a video. Like this is stuff that we've been doing. We don't say we look good, but like this is stuff that we've been doing. I wouldn't go that far. Yeah. For a very long time, like five years, we've figured out how to make sure that we can talk to each other and, uh, each week and

record decent audio and have decent microphones and that kind of thing. So it makes a huge difference when you're, when you're talking to somebody, if they can understand you or not. And, uh, yeah, definitely. I think that's some, something we'll put on our to-do list of things to chat about one of these days. Yeah. I will say the last thing on this topic is some of the reviews that I read, uh, the only negative ones I saw said that they were having issues with the suction cup not sticking. And I haven't had any of those problems so far, knock on wood. So just something to be cognizant of. I'm wondering if maybe those people had more curved surfaces on the back of their monitor or something to that effect.

I'm not 100% sure, but I've their monitor or something to that effect. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I've had zero issues with that so far. Yeah. I mean, just use some super glue next. If it falls, it keeps falling. Duck tape.

Duck tape. Yeah. Or gaffer's tape. You gotta use gaffer's tape. That's right. Yeah. Good correction. Yeah.

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We would really appreciate it. Jason, that wraps up another fun week of dual event home technology news, which, you know, thank God, because like it was really slow over the summer between coronavirus shutting everything down, shutting down the product pipeline for, for most everybody. Yeah. Uh, you know, it feels like we're finally getting back into the swing of things. This summer was probably the slowest summer I've, I've seen in a long time. Yeah, it, it definitely, uh, everyone kind of was, was, uh, was reeling a little bit from COVID and it does feel like things have, uh, things have picked up, picked up momentum again. So we're into, we're into event season and everyone's for better or worse adjusted to this new normal and looking forward to, uh, to the months ahead

where we're coming down the homestretch of 2020. Hard to believe. Oh, thank God. I mean, really just in this year, put it out of its misery you know it's just no kidding it's one of those years let's just this was supposed to be the year i keep saying this we were supposed to have flying cars and like jet packs and like you know whenever i thought of 2020 when i was a kid i'm like that's so far away we're gonna we're gonna be flying to mars by then and uh here here we are none of that we do have rockets that can land themselves though that's kind of cool something to be happy about yeah there's that have you seen the shirt with a 2020 and it's got the one out of five stars it says 2020 and then it's got one out of five stars

and at the bottom it says very bad would not recommend there you go well let's let's hope we can move to 2020 and as fast as possible or 2021 yeah yeah let's let's just uh let's just get across the finish line here in in uh in 2020 that's that's all we're hoping for all right well guys thanks for uh joining us there in the uh in the Home Tech Live channel on our Slack chat. We appreciate you popping in and giving us something interesting to think about when we look at Google products. Rashid? Absolutely. Great stuff.

Seth, have a good weekend. We'll talk to you next week. You too, Jason. Take care. All right. Take care.