HomeTech.fm - Episode 362 - X Marks the Spot

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

This week on HomeTech: More vendors exiting from the CEDIA Expo, Sonos kind of wins over Google, and cool new products from SmartThings and Josh.ai. All of this and a fun pick of the week on this week's podcast.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 20th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home audio video. This week, it's going to be about Cedia and the show that is happening, but not happening. I'm not sure. I don't know. we had a really fun home uh home tech talk yesterday uh that we talked a lot about uh a lot about the show kind of things that were going on um what what you know everybody's thoughts were on the matter and we actually talked about a little bit more like moving um greg brought up pretty good conversation to the table about moving out of a house that has a bunch of smart home product in it and what to do. Kind of like an ask the experts on that. And yeah, kind of curious to

see what he ends up doing because he has a lot of Wi-Fi dimmers in his house. And when you take away the brains of all that, the Wi-Fi dimmers stop working, right? So you don't want to leave your house in a non-working manner. So curious to see how Greg continues to navigate that. And we also talked about some of the Samsung stuff, which we'll get into, but it was a good conversation. It's actually one of the ones I probably don't have to edit too much, and I'll probably be able to get up fairly quickly to the patron feed. If you don't know about that, head on over to hometech.fm support, and you can get access to joining us live in And those, uh, you also get an invite to the hub, uh, to check out those home tech talks. So, uh, last week, I think we talked about death of custom AV, which was just kind of a fun little topic. We talked about many more things, but

this week, good conversation and was happy to have everybody on there that could, that could join in. If you're interested again, a link for all that information is over at home tech.fm slash support. And, uh, there's like an invite link inside the Patreon for our patrons about how you can join in on those conversations each week. With that said, what do you say we jump into some Home Tech headlines here? What a week. Last week we talked about SnapEV or SnapOne, I guess now, and Savant pulling out of Expo. And that was just the tip of the iceberg, right? Starting on Friday and continuing out over the weekend, more companies, all starting with S, oddly enough. So, Sound United, Sonos, Samsung,

and Sony all announced they would not be attending. I do not know why S companies were the first to pull out, but there you go. There you have it. No idea. Must be a weird coincidence, I guess. On Monday, we were just waiting for the next shoe to drop, and RTI kicked off the fun, followed by Fortress Seating, Legrand, which is a pretty massive booth there, AudioQuest, GoldenEar, Wisdom Audio, and through the rest of the week, a number of other companies, including Ring, Brilliant,

and big show anchors like Crestron and Lutron pulled out. I know of a few more. I don't know if they've announced yet. I've heard through the grapevine that ADI and Netgear will be pulling out as well. And I think a few more pulled out last night. I didn't write them down in the show notes here, but the show, there's a nice article over at Strategy

that I'll link in the show notes that has kind of like a running tally of all the companies that have either pulled out of Expo and said they weren't going, and they have a map there that indicates kind of the empty floor space that's going to be there, that's going to be vacated by all of these. I think just kind of looking at this floor plan, I think they'd be able to fit most of the show

kind of in the back hall there now. It's full of small booths that don't take up too much space. And it's just going to be a smaller show. It kind of is what it is. It's been a bad week all in all for CD Expo. And I was on the Resi Week podcast earlier in the week, a smaller show. It kind of is what it is. It's been a bad week all in all for CD Expo. And I was on the Resi Week podcast earlier in the week, kind of on Monday, kind of getting some raw feelings out from over the weekend with everybody there. And I think it was a pretty good show. Check that out. I'll link it in the show notes as well.

But I think what I walked away from that feeling was, you know, and it's kind of the feeling I have now is just disappointment, just disappointed that we can't have nice things. Right. So I don't know where this really hurts is the small vendors that have to pay dearly for these booths there. And like a 10 foot, like 10 by 10 foot piece on the floor costs you thirty thousand dollars at these shows. So if you need electricity, you need Internet, you need to have a booth set up because you can't do that yourself. You know, it's kind of like they have to drag that. Well, you do set it up yourself, but sometimes you don't. All that costs more money. And that doesn't include the costs associated with getting like your sales staff and engineering staff all into

town and fed in a hotel. It's a big marketing expense for some of these smaller companies, and especially in the relation to their size, where the big guys can kind of pull out and write off, you know, maybe $100,000. These little guys are going to have to, you know, look at tens of thousands of dollars that are either they're going to have to commit to now and bring into Indianapolis, or they're just going to have to eat. And how does that affect their, they're going to have to deal with that. How does that affect their bottom line moving forward? Already in a constrained market in the pandemic here.

So yeah, not a good situation. Not a good situation to be in. I think next year you're going to see a big push from vendors to have these local targeted events. Bob Madonna spoke to that last week. We've been seeing many more have that same conversation this week and saying that they were going to bring in more local events and smaller events where people don't have to travel too much and they can meet in smaller groups. And the best thing that they can do for this is you don't have to worry about your competition being two booths over and stealing the sunshine from your – you can control the narrative. You control what is being said.

You can show exactly what you want to show without having to worry about all the stuff that you have to worry about at a big show. And I really think you're probably going to see that be the main thing that comes out of this, is that these smaller events are going to happen. And then maybe the presence will still be there at the Expo next year, but it'll be smaller because everybody will have seen what's going on at these small events that come into maybe larger areas like Florida, Texas, Arizona, California, New York. Those are big areas that would have, you know, it's smart for a lot of these companies who are, you know, hanging off the construction industry to meet in. But then you've got to get everybody else in, you know, and you've got to get the marketing out to everybody else.

We talked about this on ResiWeek, stream that stuff, man, get it out, have the live components, um, be, have a live component to your workshop or have a live component, uh, to your event. So, uh, so that you can, um, reach people who may not be able to like reach people overseas or in Canada or Mexico or whatever that may not be able to travel to the United States so easily in the first place, much less now, it would be nice to see an effort being made by what's supposed to be a technology industry and a technology association from Cedia.

It would be nice to see us step up and show the world how we can do live streaming and how well we can do it. Because we're the technology gurus, right? We're supposed to know this stuff. So I've also been seeing how this affects dealers. I hadn't even really thought about this, who paid for on-site training, which is now non-refundable. I think it was non-refundable when you bought it, but you can't get your money backfundable. I think it was non-refundable when you bought it, but you can't get your money back now for, I think most of it was like $450 per person that was going into training.

So that money is gone. I'm hearing big grumbles about that around the industry. And again, I can't believe it's 2021 and Cedia, a technology trade association, is still insisting in having in-person training events with no option to have some kind of like stream out to more people who would love to enjoy the content. But man, I just don't understand what, I don't understand, whoever's in that organization and has the harebrained idea that people only come to Cedia

because the training is in-person. It's not only wrong, they're hurting the future of Cedia. They're hurting the viability of this organization. It's 2021. We all know this is just utter BS. Now, everyone worked from home and the world simply did not stop. In fact, it got bigger. You can hire talent from anywhere in the world now. You have meeting tools at your disposal that are getting more and more refined. It's time to step out of this 1970s mindset that everybody has to be sitting in the same room to do a job or learn something. It's absolutely bonkers. The world knows that it's BS now, and it's time for a progressive organization like Cedia. We're leading the

charge on new technologies in the home. Well, why not have, why not lead the industry on new trainings? There's a little bit of trainings going on, but there's still in-person trainings only. And it doesn't make any sense why both aren't available. I can tell you, if you want to add value to something, you make it available, but there's no value in a training that I can't take because I'm not there. Anyway, moving on. For its part, Emerald is saying the show is 100% going on, which I have a funny little graphic here that has Indigo Montoya. 100%. I don't think that means what you think it means. This isn't ideal. I think Emerald's messing this one up a little bit. It's kind of striking to me that there was no plan B,

especially after the home show that they put on recently that kind of like fizzled out to, I think KBiz or whatever it was. That was kind of like, there wasn't much of a show there. And I think the vendors, what someone was saying on the ResiWeek podcast, Katie was saying on the ResiWeek podcast this week, is that vendors who attended that realized that there may not be a Cedia this year. We maybe have a Plan B. And I can't believe that Emerald, as big as they are, hasn't struck up some way to do some type of virtual event as well, tagged along. Like, why isn't the keynote being streamed out? It's a little late for all that right now. Like, this is absolutely last-minute conversation and that kind of thing,

especially for a large organization like Emerald. I just don't get it. They could have ticketed out, like, a production of virtual booth walkthroughs and that kind of thing. But like I said, it's a big company. I know those are kind of like big ships, right? You can't turn them on a dime. But I think they've had more than enough time to realize that the era of these big shows is over. And if they're not realizing that, it's really going to hurt them in the

future. Uh, we'll, we'll all get, we'll need from these little small snapshows or savant trainings or whatever we want to call them. Uh, and with featured, they'll bring in feature products and from, from their partners and we'll call it a day. We don't have to go to Cedia and show up to this trade show in September anymore. It, it, it's 20, again, 2021, the world has figured out that not everything has to be in person. You know, that said, I do realize that, you know, seeing a cool TV, which by the way, probably comes out, you know, sometime at the beginning of the year, not the end of the year, you know, a nice cool 8K or 10K HDR TV, you can't do that over, you know, a presentation or a webinar.

So you do have to see those in person. But again, do I need to travel in September to a show every year? I don't know. I'm not too sure. Moving on, moving on. Some more sad news this week. A longtime distributor, Capital Sales,

has abruptly shut its door. Their website, The Distributor, posted, we have enjoyed doing business with you. Please be advised that Capital Sales has abruptly shut its door. Their website, The Distributor, posted, We have enjoyed doing business with you. Please be advised that Capital Sales Company is no longer in business. Effective August 12th. We have enjoyed doing business with you over the several years and regret having to close our doors. These guys were actually a big part of me learning kind of the ins and outs of the industry. I remember going to some of their trainings, like especially on Panasonic phones.

They were pretty big on that. Chatting with a number of their tech support agents. And I think I went through a number of their trainings and talked to some of their staff were pretty involved in some of the integration forums that were out there. Good guys all around. And very helpful in the industry in general.

And I'm really sad to see them, you know, have to shut down. I'm not really sure what happened, but, you know, I suspect it's probably related to the pandemic that's been going on. They look like, if I look at their line card that they had, they look like they were pretty, like, commercial heavy. And some of those projects may have fallen through or a lot of the products you couldn't get anymore. Like, they're so constrained right now. You know, if you can't, if you're a business and you have to sell product and you can't get that product to sell, that's a problem. That's really a big problem. So I'm sure there's other external factors like, you know, SnapAV rolling up every distributor in the world and kind of moving things

their way as well. But I don't know. I don't know what happened up there in Minneapolis, but I really will miss them. They were a really cool company. And one of the first distributors that was doing like a drop ship type thing, they were one of the first that invested in an online store and proved that model could work like what we do over at Blackwire. So it's definitely sad to see them go. And again, a good group of guys. I hope they find gainful employment in the future. So moving on, if it matters, matter. The upcoming smart home standard that will magically solve every issue we've ever had with every smart home product and bring Unity to Google, Apple, and Amazon is now delayed.

I'm being silly, of course, but the Connectivity Standards Alliance announced in a blog post that we won't see Matter until sometime in 2022. We'll probably see Matter products continue to roll out, but because the spec is mostly feature complete, the group is yet to develop and finish off an SDK and certification programs for companies like developers and companies to make products and have them, you know, Matters certified where they can put the little logo on there. So it's a big effort. It's not just from Google, Apple and Amazon, but there's other like 200 other companies that are involved. So I'm sure getting everyone on the same page is probably pretty tricky, especially right now with, you know, pandemic stuff still are involved. So I'm sure getting everyone on the same page is probably pretty tricky, especially right now with pandemic stuff still going on. So I can totally understand why you would delay.

And quite frankly, really don't mind. It's take your time. Get it right and don't release something buggy where people get frustrated and walk away. There's been a lot of hype around this. And if it doesn't live up to the expectation on day one, I don't know. People are already frustrated with the smart home products out there. Like you don't want to mess. You don't want to have like a fresh start, like an opportunity to do a fresh start this big.

And have people come in and say, this doesn't work as well, and I'm just so frustrated with this smart home. This was supposed to solve all my issues and bring peace to the world, and it hasn't done that. And they'll just get frustrated and walk away. So I'm not interested in that. I really do want success out of this program

and this platform. So wishing them luck, wishing them luck. Finish it off, do it right, and hopefully we'll start seeing some matter stuff roll out next week or next year. Speaking of Google, on Friday last week, a federal judge in the USITC, or International Trade Commission, made a preliminary decision related to a complaint

that Sonos had filed against Google back in early 2020. They alleged that the search giant had infringed on five of its patents. And validating all five claims, the judge said that Google should not be allowed to import devices that violate the intellectual property of Sonos. Hmm, interesting. The decision isn't final, so to speak. You'll see Google shipping its products at least through the end of the year. The ITC is going to meet on December 13th and probably weigh in on the matter a couple months later. I don't know. It takes time for all this stuff to go

through, but I think this is a pretty big step for Sonos. Though, if they win the case and this case completely out in December, I can imagine there will probably see some settlements or licensing agreements or, you know, there's two other actual lawsuits filed between Google and Sonos. Like Google has countersued Sonos and Sonos sued Google again. Like it's it's all a bunch of lawyers that are going to get paid a lot of money. And I think what you'll see out of this is, you know, some kind of settlement somewhere where somebody agrees that they can have this technology. Like maybe you'll see Sonos have access to some kind of Google technology and Google have access to Sonos technology. I don't know. There's ways things get worked out outside the courts, especially if, you know, things look one way or the other. That's what the lawyers are for. So I personally, I don't think

anything is going to come from this. It seems like Google and Sonos are pretty at each other right now. But it's at the same time, it's all lawyers and they do. Lawyers are going to lawyer, right? They're going to do their thing. Some big news. I'm not sure if I skipped a slide. I'm just going to skip over my notes here. Vital Management, an industry consulting and coaching company founded by industry icons Paul Starkey and Steve Frist. Frist? I don't know. I know him as Coach Steve, right? Has been sold to a group of industry colleagues led by Matt Bernrath and Jeremy Burkhart. The consultant company has rebranded simply as Vital. And Bernath will lead the charge,

and Burkhart's role still isn't really in development. Bernath, I think they said, was a dealer in the past and been part of Vital for a while now. And Burkhart, I mean, everybody knows Jeremy Burkhart in this industry. He kind of has his finger on the pulse of the industry and has direct contact with a lot of dealers. So probably more, you know, doing Jeremy Burkhart things and bringing in people into this vital, you know, consulting company. They support custom installation businesses and enable them to, quote, profit, grow, and prosper. That's their tagline. With standards, metrics, coaching, collaboration, performance, and value creation, Starkey and

First were instrumental to help guide a group of integrators to become Braavos, which is now the number seven integrator in the CE Pro 100, with more than $65 million in revenues last year. They will remain engaged with Vital for the next 6 to 12 months. So interesting developments there. Good luck to that team. And yeah, we'll hopefully see more come out of that. It's pretty cool to see. Steve's been around for a long time. It's one of those reading his, on forums and that kind of thing, uh, kind of helped me understand things like profit margin, that kind of thing. And I know, I know many, many, many people in the industry have taken these QuickBooks courses.

And, uh, I think they, they, they founded them vital management, um, you know, a couple of years back, I remember when that happened and, uh, yeah, yeah, it's yeah, yeah, it's been a pretty big success. I mean, having Braavos kind of underneath their belt is a pretty, they're no longer associated with Braavos, but like having that whole thing being built up and kind of thought out of this company is actually, I think, pretty big. So it's kind of interesting to see. Ah, there we go. There's the story I was looking for. Big news from SmartThings this week. Samsung SmartThings announced a new platform that would allow more devices and automations to run locally on SmartThings hubs, and they're calling it SmartThings Edge. I think it's kind of funny because I have a control for edge system here.

Crestron's been doing edge systems for decades, evidently. This is kind of like new branding on old stuff. And I have here on the show, the artwork here is, what's old is new again? Because it's always been edge computing for anyone involved in the smart home for the past 30 years. These new companies are the ones that brought everything out to the cloud and introduced issues with latency

and downtime and that kind of thing. So I don't know. Anyway, this is a good thing, a really good thing for smart things. Local automation, processing, device control allows for faster and more reliable service, especially if the internet's out. You're able to do things on your system and the automation routines are still able to work and continue to work even if the internet's down and there's not

a server out there to process those. So DMZs and a friend of the shows, Jimmy Hawkins, points out that the idea of running automations locally on SmartThings isn't new. In fact, it was one of the selling points of SmartThings version 2 hub when it came out in 2015. So they've been thinking about this for a while. Those expectations fell flat when the hub could only run certain automations like smart apps and devices locally. So this kind of broadens that out and makes it available for more developers to integrate products and run them locally on SmartThings devices. What's wild to me is that these issues with SmartThings have like literally spawned other companies and products like Hubitat. I'm thinking Hubitat and like people have even bounced to like other platforms like Home Assistant.

That's like completely taken off. So it's wild to me how popular this system actually became and how demanding some of it, I'm quoting demanding, some of these users were to the point where they just like broke off and started their own companies entirely. So like Hubitat, I'm thinking Hubitat there. Like it's just wild to me to see all that's come out of something like SmartThings. So cool story here. It looks like they've got good tools in place for developers to make and distribute their own code. So that's really good and always a good thing. SmartThings lives on.

So good for them. And it sounds like they're going to have some really neat integrations being developed, especially if it's, you know, open and easy to use and that kind of thing here in the future. Has anybody checked on Wink lately? Are they still alive? I haven't really, they were down in January for like a week, or January, February, beginning of the year, for like a week, and nobody like really noticed or said anything, you know, they were, they were just down and everybody thought they were out of business. And they came back and they've been rolling since then. I haven't heard anything about that company since then though. It's kind of, kind of crazy. All right. A really cool product

was released. Finally, Lutron Electronics in collaboration with Josh AI announced a new offering that combines the power of a Lutron keypad and a little Josh AI Nano voice control device. The Josh AI Ready Wall Plate combines the nice look and feel of Lutron keypads next, and it basically has a little Josh Nano sitting right next to it inside the keypad. So if you can't see the picture here, because you're listening to a podcast, it's kind of your standard Lutron, like Palladium, C-Touch, like a standard decor style keypad. And it's got the Josh Nano kind of built into it. There's little mounting brackets and that's basically a piece of aluminum that Lutron has milled to build in the Nano right into the wall.

I think this is a nice looking product. Both of these these uh companies are stretching their luxury wings to bring something like this in and but i i'm glad to see this kind of collaboration between between two brands in general um because you know this is not like a high effort thing like this is not a high effort collaboration but it's cool to see both lutron and josh ai getting together and making it happen. Um, I, I it's, these, these are two very luxury focused brands. And, um, you know, at least on the high end of things, especially where you would see some of these, uh, like, uh, palladium and key pads, uh, it's, it's, um, it's,

it's nice to see them getting together and, and. This new wall plate solution will be available to order and ship from Lutron sometime in the fall 2021, with both Josh Nano and the Lutron keypads being sold separately. So again, it's just a plate that goes on the wall. Not too crazy, but it's, again, nice um, work going on between two companies, like making it happen. It's custom, it's custom AV after all, right? That's what we're supposed to do. All the links and topics discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 362. And that link is hometech.fm slash 362. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live starting sometime, usually on Wednesdays.

It's been on Thursdays. I'm kind of liking the Thursday option. I'm doing it Friday morning now, though, because my night last night kind of ran long with some other stuff that came up. But, yeah, usually Wednesdays starting 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more about that at hometech.fm slash live. Easiest thing to do is either be in our hub and get the notifications there or follow us on Twitter. And usually I will tweet out when we're going live on Wednesdays, Thursdays, or even Fridays sometimes. All right. Pick of the week, pick of the week. I've got a really good one this week. I've been, I was really happy to find,

to find this one. I, I, I, uh, ran across this, uh, over the last week and I just had a great laugh at it. Um, if you ever, ever watched, been watching like a TV or movie and they reference another movie, like with, like it's a fake movie, but they reference it inside the movie, like, um, angels, uh, with filthy souls, which is the one, the movie in home alone, like everybody knows, right. Uh, keep the change, a filthy animal, uh, or, or like McBain starring Rainer Wolf castle on the Simpsons or like the heart wrenching story of simple Jack and tropic thunder, like all those fake films and TV shows and everything. So someone has taken and combined them all. It's

like a parody site. It's called net nest flicks dot fun. And oh my gosh, it's so great. They've got cover art, like plot synopsis, you know, the cast and director of that kind of thing was provided in the movie. So they've got screenshots of the movies. It's absolutely amazing. So go check that out. The website address is nestflix.fun. I hope they keep it up and keep adding things to it. It looks like they have actually, since I looked at this the other day, they have added a couple more movies in, but it's really fun to look at that kind of thing and get a good laugh these days. So if you have an idea, feedback, questions, comments, picks of the weeks, or a great idea for the show, give me a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit

hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And I want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, and especially those who are able to financially support the show through their Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support HomeTech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where everybody gets in there and talks every day about all sorts of stuff. You know, recently we've been tracking Cedia show floor news, but you know, there's all sorts of things that come up, uh, over, over the week.

And, and we, we discuss them in there. Uh, it also gets you into our discussions over at home, the, over at the home tech talks, and, uh, you'll get an invite to there. And if you're in the hub, you'll see a link to that. Usually I post it in there as we're having those conversations. So, uh, to learn more about all that home tech.fm slash support. Um, if you want to help out and can't support financially, just appreciate a five-star review or positive reading in the podcast app of your choice. And that wraps up the show this week. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in.

Thanks, a couple of people who dropped in at this weird hour that I decided to record. It's been a crazy week. It's been a long week. I'm glad it's over. Everybody, I hope everybody is doing well and and staying out of the hospital, staying well and staying away from this mess that's out there. Hopefully we can have nice things next year and have a nice show to go to, or, you know, we'll have something else.

I've got something cooking and I'll probably announce this later for kind of maybe an alternative for everyone who can attend the show this year. But I've got to cook up that idea a little bit more. So hopefully I'll have a little bit more to announce on that. This is what we call a teaser, right? Hopefully I'll have a little bit more put together next week. So we don't miss out on so many announcements or we don't, we're able to, we're maybe we're able to check out some new product that, that vendors are not able to bring to the show now because they're not going to be attending. So I'm going to be working with a couple of manufacturers to see if I can pull something

like that off, but also I'm thinking we're going to do some fun watch parties or something like that. So again, not all completely thought out. I've got a bunch of ideas floating around. I'm thinking we're going to do some fun watch parties or something like that. So again, not all completely thought out. I've got a bunch of ideas floating around. I'm going to have some conversations over the weekend and in the beginning of next week and see where things go and hopefully have something announced next week. With that, have a great weekend, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week.