HomeTech.fm - Episode 370 - 7th Annual Fireside Chat

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

On this episode of HomeTech: Join us for the 2021 edition of the Technology.fm Fireside chat! This year, we are joined again by two special guests, Richard Gunther from the Home: On podcast and the Smart Home Show, and Adam Justice, Founder and CEO at ConnectSense and Richard’s co-host on the Smart Home Show. We share our perspectives on the biggest connected home trends of 2021 and make some predictions about the year ahead. Don’t miss it!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, December 31st, the very end of 2021. Good riddance to another one of these really strange years. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week, I've got a special fireside chat with Richard Gunther and Adam Justice of the Smart Home Show. So glad to be able to sit down with them and chat earlier this week and kind of reminisce about things that happened during the year and give a few more predictions about what we thought may happen in

2022. I won't say too much more about it. You'll be listening to it soon enough. But I did want to take a little chance here at the top of the show to thank everyone who listens and supports the show and the efforts here at Home Tech. I really do appreciate it. I know that there are some who are able to financially support the show through Patreon. But in general, just like if you listen to the show, thank you.

It's been a real, real help kind of making it through this weird year. It's the hub's been as active as ever. Like if you're in the hub as a patron, there's like always a great conversation going on there. And I have been able to go into the hub and have one of those great conversations every single day because they're a mixture there's a great mixture between like professionals who you know do this as a living every day and like DIYers or you know just enthusiasts and if you have a what's great about it is if you have a question everyone in there knows something about like there's someone in there that knows something about what you're asking and it's just a great place and all around a great community so i just kind of wanted to thank everybody there for that is active and participates in the hub as well thank you so

much for making that community great there's there's some communities out there i'm not going to name names but reddit uh that are just like toxic environments. And like, it's so refreshing to kind of like go back and forth. You know, I kind of visit those other sites to kind of see what people are talking about in the news and kind of, you know, glean what I can out of the comments. But sometimes it's just so toxic there and it's just not a great place. The Hub and what everybody has worked there to make it with the community that's there, it's great conversations. Really, really good ideas that pop up from time to time. And there's news stories that people post in there.

We're able to react kind of live with each other and kind of feel out the news together. So it's just an all-around great place. I just also wanted to thank everybody who's in the hub there. The Home Tech Talks, we've been really active with those this year. We primarily have only been able to get those as live events. I wanted to make them available as pre-recorded events, but there are a couple of things that happened in there that probably wouldn't... We were having better conversations, I guess, if they were done in private.

And, you know, like maybe there was like some plans or something that we showed, you know, each other. And, you know, it's one thing to have that amongst a couple of people, but it's another thing to kind of like record that and post it online somewhere for, you know, anyone to kind of go back and look at at so after a while we we kind of pulled back from the idea or at least I kind of pulled back from the idea that I would publish that and in a more public format so anyway all this is a long way saying thank you so much to everyone who has supported the show through this year whether it's just been listening whether you're supporting directly on Patreon or or just sending some feedback through Twitter or the website.

Thank you all so much. It's been a rough 2021. About halfway through the year, I had a schedule change and it's been really hard for me to get back on the horse here towards the end of the year and get a consistent show put out every week the way I like to, you know, and I'm really hoping to hop back on that horse towards the beginning of the year here and, you know, maybe even bring in some help. I'm not too sure how to ask for that. I guess I have a show, a radio show, so I may as well ask on there. Like, if you are interested, you are very enthusiastic about the home automation world, and it is a commitment. I'll just say that. If you would like to join a passion project and help out on the show here, let me know.

Either feedback at hometech.fm or just email me directly, seth at hometech.fm. I'd be kind of curious to see if there's any interest in, in having someone else, uh, pop on the show and help out with that. Like I said, it is, it is a commitment. I had a great partner in crime here with Jason, uh, for what, five or six years. And man, we were both just, uh, just committed to getting a weekly show out. Uh, you know, so much so that we would, you know, sometimes record two shows in a week just to get one out the next week because one of us was traveling. So it was it was it was a great partnership to have. And, you know, I'm glad

he's been able to go on and move on to bigger and better things. I've been kind of following him in the space and the things that he's doing and writing. And it just looks like he's having a lot of fun over there. But, you know, I'm still playing here in the home automation world and the things that he's doing and writing. And it just looks like he's having a lot of fun over there. But, you know, I'm still playing here in the home automation world, in the home technology world, and I would like to continue those conversations here. So, you know, we'll see what happens. If anybody is interested in that, let me know. Seth at hometech.fm.

And I guess with that, let's go ahead and jump into this fireside chat here and round out 2021 with just a great conversation with two great friends, Richard Gunther and Adam Justice of the Home Tech Show. They have done a great job with that show. If you don't listen, if you listen to this show and and you don't have that one in your podcast feed, please go subscribe to it now. They do such a great job and it's great listening to them every week or bi-weekly or whenever they're

recording now. I know they're having troubles getting their schedule put together as well. But if you're not subscribed to that one, please go over there and do that. It is a great thing to listen to as well. So with that, let's get started with the seventh annual Technology.fm Fireside Chat. Hello and welcome to the seventh annual Technology.fm Fireside Chat. I am here once again with colleagues from Tech FM, including Adam Justice. Adam, hello. Hi there. And... I don't have a fire going.

Yeah, neither do I. It's not very safe in my office. Seth Johnson. Hello. How are you? I also do not have a fire going in my in my in my I don't have a basement. I have a garage, which is technically the same thing. It's like a Florida basement. All right. Well, earlier in your Slack thread, I think I used the fire emoji. So that's my fireside. I also don't have a fire going, but this is our virtual fireside chat. How about that? Well, we do this every year we get together and we talk about what happened in the smart home over the past year, give our predictions for next year, and we'll go ahead and get started. But first,

I want to make sure everybody gets to know who we all are. Adam, why don't you go first? Adam Justice, CEO of ConnectSense and co-host of The Smart Home Show, which Richard and I took over from Mike Wolf a couple years ago now. Yeah. Yeah. All right. And Seth? I'm Seth Johnson, host of the HomeTech.fm podcast, what is usually a weekly podcast,

although towards the end of this year has begun to be biweekly and maybe once a month. I don't know. I'm looking forward to getting back into the swing of things next year because I know that the CES in January is going to bring us so much news of new products to talk about. I'm so excited. Right. Don't be sad about your schedule. Richard and I record monthly-ish. Right, exactly. And I'm Richard Gunther with the Digital Media Zone. And I used to write a lot more over at the Digital Media Zone. And I used to podcast a lot more over at the Digital Media Zone. But I do podcast, as Adam mentioned, with him as the co-host of the Smart Home Show. And Home On is coming back. It is not gone. It's just been in a very long life hiatus. But with that behind us, let's jump into it. So we answer a couple questions each year. The first is, what is to you the biggest smart home story of the year?

And Adam, why don't we start this one with you? I feel like this is going to be a big topic of this show in general. But to me, working in this space, the big story here is just kind of a holding pattern around Matter. I feel like everybody, Matter moved forward this year, which is really good. You know, at one time, the timeline was they were going to have product shipping by the end of the year. And then a couple months back, they rolled that back and said, nah, maybe not. So I'm sure at some point, somebody had a, you know, a goal line of being able to show shipping products by CES. And that clearly wasn't happening. So I do feel like it's holding things up and the industry can't move forward until Matter is out. The good news here is that we got announcements from all the major players,

Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, all kind of pledging their allegiance to Matter, showing their support. So to me, that was the most important thing that happened in this space this year, because ultimately those key players all have to agree on a specification and ratify that spec for this to actually ship. So good progress. Go CSA. But still a little bit more to get it over the finish line. And we'll talk about that more later, I'm sure. Yeah. You know, it's shocking to me, just absolutely shocking that

a group that includes the thread group as one of its core participants has somehow managed to miscalculate how long it's going to take to ratify a standard. Yeah. I mean, Thread took years to, I mean, I feel like Thread took, I don't know, five, six, seven years to really come to fruition. So I hope that's not the case with Matter. I certainly hope that's not the case because by the time Thread actually came out, nobody cared anymore. Yeah. Well, they're going to care because it's a key part of Matter now. Which is the same thing as Thread, right, guys? No. No!

Let's not get into that on this. But with Seth being the next voice you heard, how about if you hit this one up next? I do think that Matter is going, it was a great conversation piece to have this year. And it felt like, to me, it felt like the industries and the people that were involved with it wanted to take their time. And I'm personally, I'm just glad that they're not trying to rush something out the door. It really, that that's, that's what we don't need. We don't need to have, Oh, one more standard. Oh, it doesn't do X, Y, and Z. Why didn't they think about that? How dumb. And then everybody, well, we'll just make a new standard and move on to the next one. If the, if they take their time and of course it was called

chip at the end of last year. Now it's called matter. Now they rebrand it one more time. Maybe they'll, they'll have it, but I couldn't agree more that you, it's so important to get it right. And stumbling out the gate would be the worst thing to happen. I know it's a totally unrelated example, but I'm also a gamer in my spare time.

And what was it in 2019 or whatever when they showed off halo at e3 like everybody freaked out it looked terrible and they decided to kick it out a year and what you know what ended up happening was they shipped a phenomenal game that's super well polished and it's just a good example of, you know, taking some extra time to get something right. You can get it so right. And this is definitely, I couldn't agree more that I'd much rather them take their time, get it right, get everybody on the same page, then rush something out and have somebody, if one of those major players pulled out, that would be really bad. So I'd

rather they take their time and do it right. Yeah. And I feel like as well, the ideas and messaging behind what this is going to be are finally getting down to the, I wouldn't say the public. I would say more of the smart home nerds. We've been hearing about this for a while and kind of as a nebulous idea or a working group or something that they were talking about doing, but having, you guys did a great show a few weeks, months, months back, I guess, time doesn't matter right now. That kind of went over all of the parts and pieces that could be in a Matter system. And coming from the pro side, I'm like, okay, it looks like a pro system now. We have a device that is hooked up to a high-speed internet connection that talks to low-latency devices that just need to send little information signals around.

We have video cameras that hook up over Wi-Fi and that kind of thing. And they are able to communicate out to the cloud and you have a unified setup process, no matter where you buy the product from. It just matters who you buy your hub from, who you want the central processing unit basically to be. And I think that's a great thing, especially for people who want to get involved with a smart home and may go down the road of setting up an Amazon products ecosystem and say, oh, well, maybe I want to go with Google. And it's harder now to switch over. It's not that terribly hard if you kind of like buy the right products, but it would be nice if all products that conform to that specification

would make it easy for people to move around. And I'm hoping that will help with the acceptance of this product because it's still not exactly what I think John Q Public is looking for. It's still a very tough road to get involved with the smart home these days, unfortunately. I guess that leads to a good question smart home these days, unfortunately.

I guess that leads to a good question I have for you, Seth. If Matter fulfilled all the promises that everybody thinks it could fulfill, and it is that good, does that worry you at all in the pro space that it chews into what pros would do, or it just gives another kind of thing for pros to hook on to? Not particularly to me for two reasons. One is like the raising all ships thing that Jason usually got that phrase a lot better than I did. But the second part is the pro side and the pro channel product really needs a swift kick in the rear to catch up with a lot of these products. We've seen stagnant product lines for a number of years now, even from the more progressive ones. So they have got to catch up and do what

they can. And it would be nice to see their product lines actually support something like Matter, where you could have, you know, integration with a Control 4 or Crestron Home or something like that, that brought those devices from Control 4 over into HomeKit. There's some workaround stuff like that, but it would be nice to be able to have that just kind of natively built into the main system. And there's really no reason that I can see from the Matter standpoint that they wouldn't be able to do that. It's just they have to want to do it first.

Yeah. I think you'll always have to what our friend Robert Spivak, sorry if I pronounced your name wrong, Robert, calls like the do it for me. So it's still going to be fairly complex. It's never going to be so simple that John Q homeowner is going to be able to just throw it all together. You're going to have to be somewhat technical to be able to do it. So there's going to be people who are, will be willing to throw money at it and just say, I want somebody to set this all up for me and set up the automation, set up the scenes and just make it work. Right. So even, even if it's very accessible to most people that know their way around technology,

that doesn't mean it's going to be accessible to everybody. So I think there's still a huge opportunity for those people that'll want somebody to step in and help them. Absolutely. And that takes care of the entry level and mid-range systems fairly quickly. When you get to the super high-end stuff, you know, fit and finish stuff, you're installing those systems and then the client looks around and says, well, why can't I do this? And that's a big, that's a big problem. I think for the luxury brands that are out there right now, I think they really have to step up their game and get involved with kind of integrating down market into these matter type systems where it just meet the clients halfway or meet somebody halfway being in this. I'm looking at one, I'm thinking about one particular manufacturer that just they like everything in a walled garden and siloed off from the rest of the world and integrating with them is near impossible. And that isn't going to

speak well for the future, especially if DIY product all kind of gets their act together and it's all universal. I buy it off the, and it works like it's supposed to i still think we're going to have issues with bad product right like there's somebody's going to make a bad product that has the matter stamp on it and people are going to get upset when something doesn't work yeah yeah that's sort of my concern too is that if you democratize everything then it just becomes a race to the bottom and if it's a race to the bottom, then you're going to have a bad product that's flaky and doesn't work well. And you have to find a way, too, for people to provide value, too. So I think it's really important for manufacturers to still find out what is our thing that we're going to do really well.

And some of those really basic things, yeah, those are going to become just commoditized. But for kind of your key products and experiences, do you do better, what do you do different, and what do you bring to the table that makes you the voice assistant I'm going to use? Yep. Right. I think we saw a little bit out of Google and Amazon this year on that. Not so much out of Apple. Yep. Siri's there. But Google and Amazon clearly have a vision of what their products can do or want to do in the future, at least as far as like true automation is concerned. Okay. Well, I'm doing a very bad job of keeping us on the rails. So how about if now, Seth,

you give your impression of the biggest smart home story of this past year. I think it's especially coming from the pro side, and I think it's definitely affected consumers. It's supply chain. Like that is the story that kind of started off slow because everybody had inventory. But towards the end of the year here, I've seen people who are trying to build homes that can't buy washers and dryers and can't buy. I went to Home Depot the other day to buy cut in boxes and I needed like two of these little orange Carlon cut in boxes. Can't get them. They just don't exist. The whole the shelf is empty. It's all gone. So, yeah, just weird stuff like that and construction supplies. And, and I, I know that there are a lot of like

audio amplifiers and AV equipment that are just, just extremely hard to come by right now. And from all that I'm reading and all they understand, like this looks like it's going to be continue to be a problem through maybe 2023 is the last number I heard. But man, I have to say that's been the biggest story for us this year. And I have to wonder next year as we move into an all new year with companies that don't have anything to sell, like how long are those companies going to be able to last? Like you have to sell product to make money. And if there's no product in stock, that's a big problem. Right. Well, right. And that's the thing that is kind of interesting to me is that the supply chain problem is kind of the trickle down from a confluence of events that have occurred. And now you've created this kind of negative feedback loop with the supply chain itself that things are getting worse now. They're not getting better. And even as they're trying to correct the problems getting stuff onto the shore, they're actually slowing down the process of getting stuff off of ships. And so it's just been a problem like nobody has really dealt with before.

What's the trickle down from that, right? You're talking about stores that aren't going to make money. You write software for people who install systems that they may not be able to acquire or they may not be able to complete so they can't install. Yep. That's been one of the drivers I released this year was for a commercial Yamaha mixer to be integrated with Control 4. And it was supposed to be kind of like a flagship driver for us. We did a lot of work on it and priced it accordingly. And I think we sold the last one off of our shelves sometime in the end of July. And Yamaha is saying that we're going to see them show back up in for sale in I think Q1 in January sometime, maybe.

But that's that's always it's always a maybe. And we spent all the time working on a driver. And then all of a sudden, well, there's no product to install the driver with. It's it's it's wild. I can speak on this a little bit because I live this every day. Yeah. I mean, everything I'm seeing, it indicates that this is going to be with us probably for most of 2022, maybe easing up in Q4 2022. It's such a complicated, I mean, you guys commented on some of the aspects of it. It's such a complicated problem and so many intricate parts to it. You mentioned like AV receivers. One of the things I heard, because we put in a home theater in my dad bought a lake house this year, there was a plant that built chips for AV receivers in Japan that burnt down, like burnt to the ground so on top of everything else you have going on you have a major supplier that you know out of bad luck or whatever the the plant burns down and then you're just adding more gas gas to the fire maybe that's a bad analogy in that case but it just you have all these other

forces at at bay so yeah it's a challenge and the the hard part is if it's not one thing, it's another. I heard about in automotive that at one point they solved the chip thing and then they were having a foam shortage so they couldn't make seats. So I mean, that's a lot of what we're seeing in electronics. It's like we may have all the parts except for one critical component. And when you go to a manufacturer, they won't even put you on the schedule until you have the entire kit of parts. You know, one little resistor or something can hold up an entire build. And somebody in this industry didn't like me comparing it to the toilet paper shortage, but it's kind of like the toilet paper shortage in that when people start freaking out that, hey, lead times are increasing, lead times are increasing, then people start buying

more and placing more orders, which caused lead times to increase and go out. So that's a lot of what we're dealing with. And it's just going to be part of reality for at least the first half of next year. Yeah. I think that foam shortage actually came because we're seeing the same thing with construction foam, like for foaming your house. I think that shortage came from the cold Texas winter that shut down a bunch of chemical plants. So it wasn't just like one,

it wasn't just like COVID and everything. It's this fire, it's natural disasters, it's water shortages in Taiwan. Like it's all sorts of stuff that is just kind of all hit at once in a perfect storm, so to speak, I guess, unfortunately. It hasn't been a fun year, I'm sure, for the manufacturers to put the products together. And definitely for installers who are trying to get the products into people's hands who have money to spend on them. It just hasn't been a fun year. I guess my message to listeners in general, and I think this is just

true in the world right now, just be patient with people, whether it's at a restaurant, whether it's at a store or suppliers or whatever, like people are doing their best and it's hard out there for everybody right now. And, you know, just give people a little grace and know that assume the best intent that they're trying to do it and kind of roll with it as best as you can. But I know it's not fun and we all would like our gadgets and gizmos and things like that. But it's the world we live in right now and everybody's just trying to do their best to adapt to it. Yeah. I'd like to take this time also to thank my podcast listeners who've been extremely patient with my release schedule this year. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Okay. So my answer to this one is think, a repeat of things that we've talked about in the past.

And that is that this year we saw even more consolidation and in some cases shutdown in the industry and not necessarily COVID related. These are this is just the the industryating, the industry growing up. Some of it is a little bit questionable. The biggest one that I can think of this year is Assa Abloy, the company from Europe that owns Yale Locks. And they at one point had acquired August as well. They now have acquired Kw Quickset and Baldwin. So with the exception of Schlage, they basically own all the locks,

which makes me wonder what has happened exactly to our SEC and FTC? Do they just not do anything anymore? Richard, would you say they have this market under lock and key oh that's so good and bad at the same time wow wow now if we could just get to one keyway i'll be really happy but that's never gonna happen even if they're all owned by the same company sadly enough yeah i would say you can be

confident that a legion who owns schlag is a pretty large company themselves so i don't see them gobbling them up as well so they'll be two two giants yeah yeah now one lock company that they didn't get is level level makes that lock that kind of goes in the inside of your existing hardware. They also have their own lock that does have hardware on the exterior of your home. And they've done something really interesting. They acquired a company that does smart apartment technology. And that seems like an ideal pair up for a company like Level. What has my eyebrow going up is that it's odd to me that that acquisition didn't happen the other way around. But nonetheless, this is a great market for them to get into i think and then probably the biggest

surprise for everybody from an acquisition perspective this year was ecobee getting purchased by generac the people that make generators and sell power packs for your garage i didn't see this coming at all. Yeah, I thought this was an interesting acquisition. I don't know, the smart thermostat space to me has been pretty boring, and we haven't seen any new innovation. I mean, maybe there isn't that much to do there, but I kind of want them and Nest to duke it out and come up with better products. I would gladly replace my old Ecobee 3 on the wall, but I don't really see any reason to. So hopefully maybe getting a new home at Generac, they'll start to think more broadly and come up with

some other solutions around Ecobee and how they can provide some innovation there. Yeah, one thing when you see a traditional market like this with everybody getting acquired, it's exciting, but it also speaks to the market is shrinking a bit and getting smaller. So I think we kind of have to keep, anytime you hear like these big companies acquiring each other, it really just, to me, it also, there's a red flag there that says something's off. There's not that much room for, like you said, innovation. Like, what's the difference between an Ecobee and a Nest thermostat? I don't really know these days. Maybe the look.

Like, Ecobee has been trying to do weird things. Like, they're the first ones to get Siri on device, I guess, kind of, I'm going to put on device in quotations because it really just means it streams over the audio to a HomePod to do the heavy lifting. Yeah. But that's okay. But they've been trying to do stuff with their product line to keep it fresh and keep it updated. And that's great.

But still, it just looks like after two to three years of all these major acquisitions and consolidations, it's like, we're just getting smaller. And especially in the pro world, we have one company that is just a massive distributor for everything. And they want to be kind of like, well, I guess you can go on the, on the other side of this, you have Amazon, like it's one company that's just, it's massive re fulfiller and retailer for, for so many things. So it's one company that's just this massive fulfiller and retailer for so many things. So it's interesting to see all this stuff happen, but I just kind of have to worry about the market getting smaller. Where's the buying power going to come from if there's only like two options in the future?

All right. Well, let's move on to our next question. And this one's kind of fun. I like this one. What is your one favorite product or service of the year? Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be something that came out this year, but this year it was your favorite product or service. I'll kick this one off. For me, my favorite thing is something that I didn't want to have to spend the money on to buy because I think it's overpriced. So I got it for Christmas last year, and that is the Hue Sync Box. This is the device that allows your television and the images on your television to drive what's happening with your color hue lights in and around your television. So in your family room or TV room or theater or just with light bars that you might have around or even behind your television. This does all the magic of making your room kind of mirror the feel of the scene that you're watching. And I love this thing.

I think it costs like $230 or something like that, which just struck me as ridiculous because it's basically an HDMI switch and then it does the same thing that you can buy or that you can get free software from Philips Hue on your desktop to do. So there's a processor in there, sure, but the technology behind it is not that new or even innovative because Philips has been doing this for literally decades. They had a television that had lights behind it that did this called the AmbiLight over 10 years ago, and it never really took off. Now, this is kind of seeing its day.

It's phenomenal. I love it. I wish it were easier to turn on and off. I wish I could just have it tied into like a scene in my, let's say my watch TV scene that I have through Siri. I'd love to be able to tie this into that and have it turn on and off appropriately can't do that yet but otherwise I think this is an amazing device and if you want to splurge on something

this is definitely splurge worthy it does look fun I will say it does look fun I don't know the price is just so up there we always say that Richard and I are expensive friends so sorry listeners we're expensive podcasts to listen to yes We always say that Richard and I are expensive friends. So sorry, listeners. We're expensive podcasts to listen to.

Yes. Yes. Just wait. It gets worse when we talk about mine. Okay. Well, let's go there then, Adam. So late entry, because I just got this in the last month, it was going to kind of be a Christmas present.

And then we were like, this is too many boxes. So let's just put it on early. So I had been eyeing this for a while and finally pulled the trigger on Black Friday on the Eight Sleep Pod Pro mattress cover. So Eight Sleep sells like a mattress, just like everybody else that has some sleep technology to it and I'll get into that in a minute but they also sell this version if you already have a mattress that you're fine with and we have a sleep number bed so I don't want to replace my mattress where you can add the technology onto your existing mattress what is eight sleep do so it has this sensor grid that goes on your bed with a bunch of kind of health sensors. So it's monitoring your heart rate, your breathing rate, a bunch of other things. And then the interesting thing it does is it has this little pod that sits next to your bed that has water in it.

And it's using water that runs through the the mattress pad thing to heat and cool your body to get ideal sleep sounds gimmicky sounds hokey this thing is legit i like i've been a sleep tracker for a long time i wear my apple watch to bed i'm getting better deep sleep than i have in a long time it it like cools your body at night to get you to sleep. And then it adjusts your temperature to keep you in like a deeper sleep. And then it'll actually warm up in the morning at your desired like time to the point where you're like, I need to get out of this bed. And so it just like gradually wakes you up and you're like, I mean, you can make it uncomfortable if you want to, but it at you're wide awake and time to get up.

So in our week and a half, two weeks of doing this, I'm super impressed. I know one of the guys that works there is an ex-August guy. Sleep is really important. And I think it's one of those health things that people are just starting to clue into. And it was something my wife and I wanted to do better with and be more consistent. And so far, I'm really impressed. So if you thought Richard's sink box was expensive, this is a whole nother level. But if sleep is important to you and something you want to focus on, you know. I like that it has dual sleep zones or dual zones like that.

That makes sense because there's no way that this would pass muster if I cranked it down to what, I don't know, like 40 degrees to go to sleep. I have no idea. I like to be cold. Yeah, this would not work in my household if it didn't have the dual zones. That's pretty cool. Yeah. It would be cool if you could have some mode, like find the ideal mode that humans love and dogs don't. And then I'd make sure that my side is always like that. Well, the key is you just don't ever let the dog sleep with you, Richard.

That's yeah. That just, I failed. I, I, I lost that fight. I lost that fight. I lost that fight on a previous dog. And then when we got a new dog,

I just drew the line in the sand and said, no, never, ever. And the dog sleeps with my son now, so. This is both a cover and a mattress. So you can go between, you can go to both. Right, so yeah, I just, yeah, I didn't get the mattress. I think it's one of those kind of foam mattresses like you can get from a bunch of different places.

The real kind of thing there is what comes in the cover. And so I just got the cover part and put that on my existing mattress. So you can go either way. I had heard some people, some of my Twitter friends that spoke really highly of it. And so I finally decided to pull the trigger. And so far, I'm pretty impressed.

So we'll see. It's the cost of a MacBook Pro-ish. Wow. Okay. Yes, that is. Does your MacBook Pro help you sleep better? It does not help me sleep at all. It does exactly the opposite.

The opposite, yeah. All right, Seth, what's on your list at the top of your favorite products? I had a tough time with this because I was trying to remember things that had come out this year. There really wasn't too much product that was released. But we ran across these guys at work and I kind of got one of their starter kits to put in my house. And I set it up and I've kind of enjoyed using it because it's one of the products I don't have to deal with. And I like products I don't have to mess with after they're set up. And it's called, let's see, the official name of this

company is just Flare Vent, I guess. So if you go to flare.co, they have these smart vents. And we've talked about these on our show a number of times, probably way back in the past. And these seems to be a newer iteration on it. The vents run between $89 and $109 each. So depending on the size of your house and how many vents you need, you can get expensive. I can get into a mattress range. But the good thing is you don't have to do like every vent. You can just start with one or two. And that's what I did. I have a mini split in the garage

So I started there and then I've got one room that I put a vent in and you have to get the little puck things I got right here. It's kind of cool. It's fun to use because it's got an Ink display on it. So doesn't use very much battery and kind of hangs off on the side and Once you get everything set up and you hit go, you just kind of tell your house what temperature you want to be at. And it just does all the math and balances all out. And you don't really have to mess with it anymore.

We had one room that gets a lot of cool. And so that's where I put the vent. And it'll shut down that room so the air gets pushed out to the rest of the house rather than just flooding that room with all the cold air that comes out of the AC. So for not so much money compared to like installing a giant zoned AC system, you can have a zoned AC system in your house. Does it coordinate at all with like a smart thermostat? Yeah. So I have Ecobee and I have the Ecobee thermostat as well, like the

wireless thermostat that comes with them. And both of those, like when you set up your room, you can put that Ecobee thermostat in the master bedroom, say, and that can be what senses the temperature for the flare vent. So there's kind of some deep integration with that. It's kind of nice. Meaning the Ecobee sensor. Yeah. The Ecobee sensor will be the thermostat, basically, for the flare vent in that room. You don't have to buy their puck thing. Although the puck is nice because it has the rotary dial that you can just walk up if it's too cold or hot in that room and turn it down. You don't have to.

But does it actually control the Ecobee as well? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Nice. That's cool. That's something I'd like to see more. I was talking to

lack of innovation. I'd like to see something more like that from like an Ecobee or a Nest. Like that seems like a simple thing they could easily do that would give you a better experience and nothing from them. Right. Yeah. It's a fun product. Like I said, after I set it up, I have just left it sitting here. The only times I've had problems with it was when we had people over and I'm like, it needs to be colder to ramp down the house to have a party or something. You have to ramp down the house to get it a little cooler. And I hour or two in there and there's five or six people hanging out and it starts to get warm. It's like, oh yeah, this thing's fighting me. So go back over and turn

the schedule back down. But that's really the only issue. It's just my settings. Very cool. Very cool. All right. Well, let's move on to our prediction segment. First, we're going to take a look at how we did with our predictions last year for 2021. And I mean, no big spoilers here, but I don't think any one of us was right on the mark necessarily. Let's start with you, Seth. You had predicted that this year there would be

an acceleration of the work from home trend and as a result, more products made for home offices. Well, I guess half of that might be right. I don't know. Like it seems like maybe not acceleration of the work from home trend, but like people just demanding not to go back to work. Continuation? Continuation, yeah. And I've seen a fair amount of people not want to go back into an office. Like there's been famously the Apple employees slash Tim Cook letters that have gone back in memos that have gone back and forth between workers that are, you're going to be back in, we're planning to return to work.

And then all of a sudden something else flares up. Oh, it's only three days. Oh, now we're going to send you furniture. You're going to, you get1,000 to buy a chair. So it seems to me that there's something there. I do like the work from home solution because you can hire out and at least the tools kind of exist still. I don't think they've improved any this year. I haven't noticed any improvement. So I guess like the acceleration didn't happen as much as I thought it was, but also we really haven't seen products being able to exist in this

market. Like if you needed a fancy audio system for your new work, like where are you going to get that? Because the receivers don't exist. So it's kind of like chicken and egg situation here. Which one do we get to come first? And do we have fancy new product that we can't build? Or are we going to go back to the office? I don't know. And I think maybe the problem with this prediction was just, if it's anything like physical product, like just the timing. So I think there, I've started to see some little gems or peaks of stuff like this, but with chip shortage and things like that, maybe next year is when we're really going to see this, but like it just takes a long time to build product and it's taking even longer because of the market forces we talked about earlier. So it's coming.

I think this was a good prediction. I've seen some interesting stuff in the camera space, which is kind of, that was sort of one of the first things that everybody was freaking out and trying to get webcams and so it makes sense that that's one of the first ones to kind of start to trickle out new stuff but I think it'll get there and I absolutely think working from home is going to continue to be a thing COVID aside because people have realized they can be as effective or more effective at home and, and just keep doing it. It's funny because I feel like there were improvements in technology to address this, but there are things like teams finally coming in of its own and becoming a really good solid product for remote collaboration. Finally,'t know if i don't know if i'd use

the word well much better than it was when it launched that's for sure it's gotten better yes i every time i'm on a team's meeting i have some sort of issue i mean maybe it's that i don't do it very often but like it's it's a nightmare for me but it's just me maybe it doesn't crash my computer anymore that's nice well that's a good start that's a good start me, but it's just me, maybe. It doesn't crash my computer anymore. That's nice. Well, that's a good start. That's a good start. Yeah, I mean, it has its problems for sure, but I think all the platforms do.

Zoom probably gets the mark for being the easiest to use, which, as many organizations learned the hard way, may be a little bit too easy to use. And so it took a while for people to come up on that. The cameras, that was a good thing that we got. We got some new cameras. I have a 4K camera on my computer now. I'm actually using Hue light bars and a shortcut through Apple to be able to trigger them on and off from my desktop, which is kind of nice. So I think you're seeing maybe

the adaptation of smart home technology in the office more now than you might have in the past. So, you know, if you interpret it that way, Seth, I'd call it a B. Solid B. We need to get, Richard, we need to get you an Elgato stream deck. This is the way to turn on lights and stuff yeah definitely oh he's got one oh he's got one why why don't you have a button for your hue lights on there yeah I frankly prefer to just use my mouse because that's where my hand is it's kind of like why don't you why do you want to use your desktop instead of an app? Because my hand's already on my mouse.

I'm working. So I'd rather just do it from my desktop. But yeah, no, it's good stuff. All right, well, I'll go second on this one. My prediction was that Wink would be out of business by the end of the year. Now, we do still have three days left, but I think perhaps they managed to survive in spite of themselves. At least as far as we know,

because nobody's really heard anything from them recently. Well, I thought you had this. I thought you had this in the bag because at the beginning of the year right they were they were completely offline for like three or four weeks like it was like is this even a thing anymore they didn't say anything and then they said oh we're sorry we finally got it back up and going we we we found the server and hit the reset button on it and everything came back up and going but yeah i thought you had this one in the server and hit the reset button on it, and everything came back up and going. But yeah, I thought you had this one in the bag, and then nope. They're here.

They're still around. The reports of their death are greatly exaggerated. Yeah, exactly. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. All right. So Adam, similarly? Yeah.

So I predicted the death of Wise, and they didn't't die but they just got weirder so this company is still amazing to me the good news is if you need an at-home covid test there you go to i to me the only thing that explains wise is like i think maybe one of these so there's there's these manufacturers in asia calledMs, which is like original design manufacturer. To me, WISE is just like one of these ODMs decided, let's build a brand and market it in the US. And because these ODMs will often build a myriad of different products and different kinds of things. And during the pandemic, they made masks or whatever. It's like, they just go wherever they can build things.

And to me, that's sort of what Wise is like. They're sort of in the smart home lane and then they build masks and COVID tests and other weird stuff. And I know there's some of our Twitter friends that love to dig in on this stuff and I just think it's so scammy to me. So yeah, I mean, talk about race to the bottom.

They're definitely a part of this, but it feels like they have to keep churning out more and more stuff to stay alive. They're just operating on super thin margins. And I don't know, it's really, really strange one to me. And they're starting to do things where they're changing their pricing model up a little bit more. They're looking towards services now where they can offer them. They are holding back features that you might consider just standard fare on certain products. And I think their new light strips are a good example of this. They have different tiers of the light strips that you can purchase. They're all cheaper than pretty much anybody else's product, but they're keeping back some things and making you pay a little bit of a premium on those. So it is such a strange model. I don't understand it. Didn't they come out with a backpack sometime

this past year or something? It's ridiculous. Probably. Why not? Why not? Yeah. They have socks. I see that they have socks. I might actually finally buy those wise socks and maybe a COVID mask test or whatever and see what we get here. Just crazy. Just buy all the random wise stuff. That'd be a great gift to send to Richard or Rye. You're getting a wise car. I don't even know what this is, but're getting a wise car. I don't even know what this is, but there's a wise car. I think last year we actually joked about that Jason and I were going to wait for this wise car to come out. And thinking that we'd have like a Tesla car.

No, this is like some little RC car that you can get. And then you put the wise camera on top and I guess it drives around. Oh, use your phone to drive it around. That's amazing. There you go. Not the car you were thinking. It's a little remote control job, but Hey,

add the cart. All right. Well, you won this round, Seth, you got closer than either Adam or I did. Tell him what he won. He won some wise socks,

socks. Yeah. Yeah. He won some wide socks. Socks, yeah. Yeah, he won the opportunity to go first in the next question, which is, what is your prediction for 2022? Well, since we have notes and I saw what you guys had put. I really don't have much here, but I guess I'm going to kind of stick with what we've been talking about with the supply chain issues continuing out. I really think that's going to be the big story, if not the biggest story next year. I really think we're going to see companies, I think we may see a couple of companies go under because they haven't sold anything or been able to sell anything for months now, months. So I'm, it's a dire prediction. I really don't want to see this.

I would love to see this resolved in some, any way possible, but man, it just real, it really feels like we're in the middle of this right now. And I don't see an end from where I sit as to like how we're going to get this stuff manufactured, brought over, when there's just so many small things along the way that prevent it from happening. Adam did a great job of outlining before. Yeah. I know the good companies that are on top of this are trying to stay well out ahead of it. Obviously, there's forces at play that nobody has control of. But I mean, some of our customers have put in orders, even into 2023. And so that's what but like you said, there are some people like retailers, installers,

things like that, that don't necessarily have a hand at that. And they're just kind of left to deal with the repercussions. So I feel bad for those who don't have control over it. But I guess know that the companies and manufacturers that can are doing something about it. And hopefully those ones will survive. I feel like the very, very small companies, like the ones with like 10 employees or fewer, are those that might suffer the most in this case. You need capital to be

able to get ahead of it. You need to be able to really put resources into this, either to maybe pivot or change how you're making money. And all of that takes money. And I just don't see that the smallest of the companies out there trying to make it in this space are going to be able to survive that. Yep. That's what I'm seeing too. All right. On that down note, Adam, why don't you turn things around and predict something happy? Yeah. So I think Richard, you and I both had kind of the same prediction here, but I think hopefully matter's going to finally come to fruition. I expect that we're going to hear a bunch about it at CES. I know the CSA is planning on doing kind of a rollout there if I guess CES is happening.

We definitely won't be there. But yeah, I think it seems far enough along that hopefully, knock on wood, we're going to see Matter product in 2022. I know for us, we were kind of been waiting on the sidelines. I've definitely been talking to a lot of people about it and folks in the industry. So we're going to be joining the CSA and probably the Threat Alliance and diving in and working on our products and things like that. We had enough fun being early movers on HomeKit and some other stuff. So we decided to wait back a little bit, but it seems like time is now, and this is definitely going to be part of our plans, at least for 2022. We know, we'll see, but I hope to see something by the end of next year.

And yeah, so I think that gets into a little bit of what you said here, Richard. So I'll let you go. Yeah, I'll cap that off with my prediction, which is that we will get Matter. We'll get the standard and probably some of the first products or updates to existing products to make the matter compatible. But it's going to be messy. I just don't see how we don't have some fallout from this, even if that is the confusion in the marketplace that comes from the different ways that companies can implement matter, which I think is going to be hard for a lot of normals to wrap their head around.

It's something that we've struggled with, even as we spoke with Jenny Tui, for example, a couple of weeks ago or months ago, it was months, geez. And I think when consumers hear that there's a new standard, they're going to expect that, oh, okay, plug and play, it'll all work together. And it's not going to be that simple. So I'm looking forward to it. I'm not doubting it. I think this is important. I think it's good. And I am eager to see companies succeed using this standard. But I think that first year is going to be a little bumpy. A good point to this. This was a conversation that came up on one of our internal slacks.

One of our engineers who just bought a home and was working on some smart home stuff was like, how am I going to know what's matter and what's not? And he's like, well, I assume it'll be on the box. And then we were talking about, well, but what about existing stuff? And so if there's existing stuff in the market and how are you going to know what existing stuff is upgradable? And like, I think that speaks to some of this mess is like, yeah, probably some of your existing stuff that's IP based is going to be able to upgrade to it. But how will you know? How do you get, how do you do that? What does that look like? I guess that's some of what we're going to be able to upgrade to it. But how will you know? How do you get, how do you do that?

What does that look like? I guess that's some of what we're going to figure out. But I see where that's going to be some of the mess involved in that. There probably will be product that will support it. But because of supply chain shortages, they're not going to be able to get out the new version that has the Fancy Matter logo and yada yada. So there's going to be a lot of stickers on boxes for a little while, I would think.

Right. I was just thinking that there are companies that are making works with Matter or whatever the phrase is going to be, stickers, so that they can apply them. I've got a great product idea. We're going to launch the best works with Matter stickers. And we're going to sell them to all the vendors

to put on their boxes. Why is this going to make them cheaper? You can just buy them on their website, right? Yeah. This is going to be a pivot from all those companies that had to make the keep six feet away stickers that went on floors. They're just going to pivot to making Matter stickers

this year. Yep, exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, I don't know. I think this was a lot of fun even if it did have some down notes i think we had a good year it was a different year than usual we're used to seeing a lot more product they're used to seeing a lot more movement i don't know that i would look at the slowdown that we saw necessarily as bad for the industry so much as, again, that confluence of events that has occurred that has just made

everything really more difficult. But I'm glad we got together. Thank you both. You want to take a moment, Seth, and promote something that you want to promote, either your business or your podcast or anything else you might be doing? Yeah, well, I'll just promote the podcast. HomeTech.fm is where you can find out more information on how to listen to the podcast. We're in all the major podcast directories that are out there that I can think of. If there's not one I'm not in, let me know. And I think it's at Home Tech Podcast on Twitter. Although I'm not very active there, I do go in and check it.

I am excited about, hopefully, it seems like there's just a lot of pent up energy, especially in the smart home space. So I'm hoping with Matter coming out and with all the other stuff that's just kind of been sitting on the sidelines, I'm hoping that we start to see more of that energy be able to be released through 2022.

So hopefully we'll have more to talk about as time goes on. There's always security. I'm just watching that the last password, master password may have been compromised float by on my screen here. So there's always security. We can fall back on security and streaming services, but I'm really hoping to get hands-on time

with some new hardware this year. Cool. All right, Adam. You can find me on Twitter at Adam Justice and everything my company's doing at connectsense.com. Or you can check out our show at the Smart Home Show, which is smarthome.fm, or wherever you find your podcasts. How about you, Richard? We have some good domains there between Home Tech FM and Smart Home FM. I like that. All right. Well, you can find some of my stuff out at the Digital Media

Zone. There will be more soon because I'm actually planning on covering a lot of what's going on at CES. Next week, I will be sequestering, or at least this is the plan, assuming that life doesn't throw us a twist. Josh and I will be getting together and sequestering together to work on CES coverage at the Digital Media Zone. So we're already lining up some meetings with vendors. CES is in the process, or I should say the CTA is in the process of rapidly trying to pivot to allow an additional virtual element of CES. So you can register virtually now. They're probably going to be using the same platform that they did last year, which was pretty terrible. So we'll see how that ends up going. But anyway, looking forward to any news that companies have.

And you can find all of that at the digital media zone dot com. And we thank all of you for joining us. We hope that you all have a wonderful, wonderful new year in 2022. Happy New Year. Happy New year. Happy new year.