HomeTech.fm - Episode 462 - The Building Blocks of Matter with Daniel Moneta

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

On this week's show we sit down with Daniel Moneta and talk all about Matter. Daniel works on Product and Marketing Strategy at Samsung Smart Things and is one of the leads responsible for marketing at the Matter Working Group.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, December 8th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Holston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, and pretty much Matter this week. Because we have an interview with someone who is very familiar with matter daniel moneda he's over at uh he's a project in marketing strategy at samsung smart things

but he's one of the leads on the matter working group so he knows he's got all of the inside detail he's been there for a while he's got all the knowledge about what matter is and i think this is probably the most comprehensive look into what matter is. Like the discussion we had between the three, four of us, this is probably one of the most comprehensive talks about matter, what it is, what it isn't, what it does, what its goals are that I have actually heard. And I actually like something clicked in my head. I'm like, I really like this now. I could see myself. I went on SparkFun and I was like, I'm going to buy a little Matter thing. And then I looked at it and I'm like, I don't have time to do this.

Not that motivational, I guess. It was a great interview, I have to admit. Okay. If you've listened to the show, at least for a while, since Matter was released, you know, we were haters. Oh, I wouldn't say that. We're just cautious. No, I was definitely a hater. I'll admit it.

Yeah, we were. And I even went and got some Matter devices and had trouble with them, and I'm still, you know, I was being a hater. I admit it. I was. But after this interview, he's converted me. I understand, you know, the challenges they're having and what they're working on. And I see a brighter future for what they're coming with, with matter.

And I understand. Yeah. They couldn't bring this all out on day one and it's going to take a little while. And we knew that too, but, um, I'm feeling so much better. It's a great interview. I think he cleared up a lot of stuff in this interview that people just didn't really understand. Yeah, I 100% agree.

I mean, I think I'm one of the bigger skeptics on the show about matter, just because at this point, I'm a jaded professional. We've been burned, TJ. We've been burned so badly. Like, it's not like, I think it comes from, that jaded reaction comes from a real place. Like, we've seen things come in, like, this is going to be the next thing that takes over.

We've invested a ton of money, either like of our business into it and time and training, and then like, it evaporates. And you're like, oh, not another one of these things. But I don't know, this seems like it's got some pretty good foundation, a pretty good foundation to it. So I'm optimistic. I would agree. And I think it's a great thing to have for the industry because, you know, all the pain points that we all know of, and it's only going to help further adoption. So I'm excited for Matter as well. So I think all three of us are converts after this interview. Yeah. I think one of the most key things I took out of this is everything everybody complains about, they already know about and they're working on fixing it.

Right? So we get a matter of thing, we complain about something, how it works or how it's set up or something. And it's like, he confirmed that, yes, we know about this, we're working on it, and we hope to fix it in the future. So, you know, I almost had nothing left to complain about after this. Yeah. And it's open source. You can head on over to GitHub to see what the status is on that and when it's going to be maybe done or, you know, hopefully it doesn't kick down the road too much. But it is nice that it's an open source project. And like you said, if you are interested and you want to contribute back into this, it's not, I mean, it's fairly simple to do at that point you can add add a

feature request in right on github right there or you can start developing on it and start committing things back he was talking about somebody um that made the what is it no js version of the matter client or something like that so matter js yeah matter js yep yep anyway um it's a good interview we'll let it uh speak for itself and and maybe convert you as a matter convert i guess we all are here so um but we we're gonna skip home tech headlines this week we're gonna go straight into our project updates this is usually at the end of the show uh i i don't have any projects i i was traveling this weekend and i i went to winter in canada is the best i can describe it because oh my gosh it was cold and and um I went to one of these things

where they do like the um the ice show things where they have like carved ice and they you walk around it and show it's all Charlie Brown stuff is there in Orlando have you guys seen those before that's just regular in Canada like it's nothing special you know like just walk out the door and see it yeah so that's what I realized as I was walking through this thing. And they said how cold it was. They said it's nine degrees, which I think, Gavin, it was like nine degrees last week when we were talking to you in Canada. And I'm thinking to myself, people live like this. It's two degrees up here right now.

But, you know, it's surprising because when we build our igloos, we use blocks of ice and it actually holds the warmth in. Right. And you'd be surprised how warm an igloo could get. It doesn't melt. It was not very warm in this igloo that they stuck us in. And I mean, it was a very impressive like artwork type thing. It was all like carved 3D Charlie Brown. Every scene from the Charlie Brown shows that you've ever imagined, they had carved out and put in there. And everything was made of ice.

It was really cool and very cold. And there was an ice slide halfway through. And my daughter, I think, went on it two or three times because she's six. And like, that was the best part. Like, she's freezing cold. She can't feel her fingers. She can't feel her toes. And she's like, I'm like, do you want to leave or do you want to go on the ice slide again?

Ice slide. Like, it was not even a question so yeah we went i went down the ice slide a couple times too it's fun well and to be fair to you seth i was also in orlando last week i know and i stepped outside my hotel on tuesday morning and i immediately walked back into the hotel because it was about 35 degrees and if you've ever been to florida it doesn't get that cold that often so it's quite the shock i was not able to wear flip-flops that day i had to wear my lined jeans i somehow brought lined jeans and a coat in florida yeah it's chilly it's it's not the cool it's the humidity right

because it actually makes it chilly because yeah well it's so humid it just that cold just sticks to you gets into your bones too quick i think it's not like the dry cold yeah anyway so i don't have any projects that i did because i was kind of out of town too kind of doing uh that all weekend and freezing myself i guess in in this freezer thing looking at ice and thinking this this is what gavin experiences like glad i don't have to do this my feet my feet are cold you know every season we go down, you know, on an ice slide. It's usually like the driveway, you know. It's usually not voluntary. He's just like, you know, I was taking the trash out and I went down the ice slide. It's a fun ride, you know, from the top of the driveway down to the bottom of the driveway, you know.

Like, it's a normal thing for us, you know. Like, how falling iguanas is normal for you. Right. You know. What happened this week up here, though, is there was a kangaroo on the loose. Oh. The city over. And that was big news.

And that's something I don't get to say often. You know, there was a kangaroo on the loose. It was on the loose for three days. They finally got it. Wow. Yeah. Normal day in Canada. Kangaroos are vicious.

So they will mess you up. Well, Gavin was chasing kangaroos. I was working on ice sculptures. TJ, what were you up to? Well, I, so obviously if you've listened to the show, you know, I bought a Govee space heater. And when I was looking at Govee's website, I was like, oh man, they make a bunch of random stuff. They make, you know, a smart ice maker and a fan and you know whatever else but they also make underglow lighting for your car and if you were ever a 16 year old boy in america i'm assuming

anywhere america i don't really know i mean i grew up in the country um so i wasn't like in a city or anything but everybody my age wanted underglow lighting for their car and this was just like 15 years ago if you if you watch the fast and the furious movie you wanted underglow lighting for their car and this was just like 15 years ago if you if you watch the fast and the furious movie you want it under yeah this is the high high of the fast and the furious like franchise because it's peaked way since then um but govi makes underglow lighting for your car and so i bought some it was like 35 and it's supposed to like i don't know it's got several led strips in there um and it looks like a pretty simple product like it's supposed to like i don't know it's got several led strips in there um and it looks like a pretty simple product like it's literally just led strips wired together with like a box

and then you connect it via 12 volt to your car um they didn't even give you like a cigarette like the 12 volt adapter or whatever it's supposed to be hardwired somewhere which i think is kind of cool because it's like yeah you know that's what the product is and so i i haven't got them installed yet maybe i'll maybe i'll send some uh pictures of my van uh next week with the underglow lighting if i get them installed so because that's that's where i'm putting it on i mean nice you're gonna have to lower it put some graphics ground effects on your van yeah yeah probably not lower it but yeah maybe some spinners or something yeah yeah i follow i follow a van group for my van i have a chevy express and there's like a a group out there um that you know repairs them and tells you how to fix them and buy parts from and stuff and there's a lot of people out there that have my my type of

van and they like they soup it up they put like bigger engines in it and exhaust and all this stuff and they like take it to the racetrack so i mean it's possible they pimp their vans i'm gonna tell you tj um if you did if if the uh third what do you say the 30 car strips are it's too much work to to do that they actually do make an in-car led strips that you can put under your dash and stuff we used to call these sleaze lights we i used to install these yes and in high school for for my friends uh we cars we would put sleaze lights in them and we wouldn't be able to do this it was just a single like 12 volt led we'd go buy an auto zone and then stick it up underneath the dash somewhere so you'd have like what we call sleaze lights and you'd be a sleazy person when you turned them on, I guess.

But these, you can change them to any color and they're segmented. So only $15.99, only $15.99. See, I know people who listen to this are gonna laugh, but for some reason- Oh, Richard's loving this. This does music sync. It does music sync.

It does. The underglow lighting for some reason to me isn't super trashy. Like I'm not gonna put it on my personal vehicle because I respect myself more than that. But I'll put it on my personal vehicle because I respect myself more than that. But I'll put it on my work vehicle and I'll only put it on the exterior. Just put it under the ladder rack or something. Yeah, right?

It's a creative place. It's the holiday season. Why not? And on next week's show, you'll be installing shag carpet in the back. Well, I already have carpet in the back. I don't think I need shag carpet, though. Oh, boy. All right. The next project is I need shag carpet though. Oh boy. All right.

Then the next project is I was all excited about our matter interview and I went ahead and bought my first truly matter device. I mean, I have the matter hub. I don't really count that as a matter device. Obviously, um, I've had some devices that can, uh, update to matter, but I haven't done that. Um, so I bought the, the, the nano leaf string holiday lights. They're like, I think they're $120 normal for about 60 feet. I got

them on sale for a hundred dollars. I specifically bought them because I wanted something with matter to try out. And I have to say, guys, it worked perfectly. I don't know if it was because we had the interview i'll never know that yeah but i mean i i pulled up home assistant i didn't even do anything with it i just plugged it in pulled up home assistant and added a matter device and i scanned the qr code and it just worked it just added i didn't have to do anything and i have to like i didn't have to download the app to do anything which is great. I downloaded the app just to see what the difference was. And Nanoleaf right now, at least, doesn't make you sign up for an account in order to

use this specific product. I don't know if it's all their products, but I was able to just control the device over Matter as well without making an account. And I was able to do everything that I've been able to do with Home Assistant. Plus, you know, all the scenes and the fancy stuff that those kind of companies add. Are they Wi-Fi or are they over thread? They're Wi-Fi. Okay, that's different.

Yeah, right. Yeah. So, I mean, that's the thing is things I want like a full matter and thread device, but I haven't got there yet. I found my experience with uh matter over wi-fi is much better um the the matter with thread devices like adding in everything it works great but i just see that they randomly just drop off yeah every now and then and that's what my one issue with that is but i i think that's more of a thread thing than it is a matter of thing. But I don't know how to troubleshoot it.

Well, don't goat mouth me. Goat mouth me because I just got them installed. Okay. I'm still looking at you, Govee, under car. You're caught up on those. I mean, honestly, they look pretty cool. You can change it from your phone and everything. So, you know, why not?

Yeah. I mean, they're not a bad price. Right? They're so cheap cheap because even if you got like the cheap ones like on the internet like 15 years ago like they were still like 100 to 200 dollars for like decent ones you could buy like the really cheap ones from like autozone or amazon or something like that but like obviously they just don't last these ones feel like they're good quality so are you still trying to justify your purchase of undercar lighting i'm not trying to

justify i'm just saying they're they feel pretty nice okay i'm buying them right now what are you still trying to justify your purchase of undercar lighting i'm not trying to justify i'm just saying they're they feel pretty nice okay i'm buying them right now what are you talking about yeah i'm fine all right all right and worst comes to worst you can repurpose them from like under cabinet lighting or something yeah yeah i mean i could put them under my chair and i mean it's 12 volts so yeah put it wherever you want exactly uh gavin i mean you weren't just chasing kangaroos what have you been up to you have uh it says here you're rethinking the disc array i guess yeah last last week i talked about i was gonna look at a disc array you know to um rack mount all my drives and there you said something no it's not that it was money because because i found some for a

relatively good price right but when you mentioned the fans i started looking at videos of disc arrays and yeah they're loud you know even if it's in my basement they would have you know i have no control over the fans they're just gonna echo through the house so i'm just like you know what i'm just gonna leave the disc in the the things i have now for now and if one dies I'll replace it with an SSD version that I just put right into the server. Yeah. Right. And, you know, hopefully SSD prices will drop in price. You know, I can get some four terabytes probably for a good price, you know, eventually. And I'll let that wither away. So, yeah. See, I do listen to you, Seth.

I just want to say that, you know, sometimes you say something that makes sense, and, you know, I pay attention. Oh, the 4 terabytes is not that bad now for the 2.5-inch drives. That's not – I mean, it's still way more expensive than a normal spinny disk would be at 4 terabytes, but still, that's not terrible. Yeah, I'll need probably like four of them or something like that. But I'll wait until, you know like black friday or but that's next year but um boxing day or something or the next you know amazon prime day you know i'm in no rush have you seen the um it's not the consumer grade but they have like server grade ssd thing they're like completely different package shapes there some of them are like super long

like 12 inches long but it just looks like a long ssd but it's just stretched out and some of them are like super long, like 12 inches long. It just looks like a long SSD, but it's just stretched out. And some of them are skinny. They're weird, weird shapes. I don't think it would work in any computer that you or I have. Yeah, probably. Specifically for these servers that need SSDs. Yeah, my server has eight ports for SSD, right?

So that's why I'm just like, like you know i'll just migrate over to it and then i don't have to worry about it at all yeah but it'll take time yep and with all the money i saved from not doing that i didn't get my server yeah see see i gave my server a nice 10 gigabit uh upgrade i bought a 10 gigabit nick um uh and then um the sfp to my unify switch um an rj45 and now my servers you know serving up content to 10 gigabit it's not that serving 10 gigabit to everything it's just that nothing's going to overload that pipe right right so it could be doing its backups and uh transferring its data and writing all the video footage and you can still stream fine and you're not going to use up the 10 gig um it's just the proper way of setting it up my unify is happy my server is

happy and you know i just like doing things properly right um yeah no it's it's one of those things like i have i mine came with a 10 gigabit nick in it i think or maybe i had one from the previous one i don't know i had one i put and i put it in and it worked in this one so it has two 10 gigabit to 10 gigabit the problem is i have two 10 gigabit outputs on it within my switches i had to go find like the right switches with 10 gigabit outputs and the ones i have they're ruckus and they have like licensing on the 10 gigabit ports but since i know people there, it's like, they just gave them to me.

So I was able to just, yeah, turn them on. But yeah, like there, it's not very hard to do, but the, the,

the, I haven't gotten, I've noticed that I have from my desk, from where I'm sitting now, from my desk computer over there to that box, it transfers really fast now. it's not it's not anything like i have a gigabit connection from here to over to the server but like you said it's the saturation of that line like it's not busy talking anything else and it's got 10 gigabits of bandwidth

it can just fully take in how however fast you can write down to the drive yeah and uh and and move stuff in that way so yeah it's it does it yeah, I've noticed it's beat up on local transfer stuff. It's not going to affect the internet because internet's not that fast. And surprisingly, it wasn't too expensive, I found, just buying the card and the SFP. It didn't cost me a lot. I can't remember the exact Canadian prices, but I already had the Switch with the 10 gigabit port.

I have the UniFi Dream Machine Pro IC. It only has one 10 gigabit port. I have the Unify Dream Machine Pro IC. It only has one 10 gigabit port for the LAN. The other 10 gigabit port is for the WAN, which I sent to my fiber. And it has like a 2.5 WAN, but everything else is gigabit in that. But as long as my server is using that one 10 gigabit, then everything else can, you know, max out the one gig and it'll be fine. So it feels that that was, you know, something I upgraded with the money I saved. Cool. And you know, and like everything this week has been around that server rack. So, you know, I I'm scheduling with the family a time when I could take it down. Cause I have to pull the whole thing apart and put it all back together. Main reason why i was moving it and one of the wheels kind of like bent or broke so i got now gotta take everything off of it and then fix that wheel now and then

put it all back together and in that time i'm cleaned it up so i actually you know this is my ocd part but i actually drew it out how i'm gonna lay everything back in it you know where the wires are gonna go and what's plugged into what ups etc etc so i have it in my mind how it's going to look it'll probably not look anything like that though when i'm done now it's it's a good idea to draw it out first i mean even if you did it just in an excel sheet like yes and just used uh um i i've done that before where to like okay one ru is one excel cell and i would write the product in there and then if it's two then i you know merge two cells together or whatever but yeah it's it's really sometimes you you think you have enough space and then if you're trying to do it on the fly

you're like oh no this isn't going to fit here exactly and then you have a problem but no and it makes way more sense to do it ahead of time and put it all together front and back. And at least the equipment will come out the way you want it to. It'll live in there. The wiring, maybe not so much. It seems like you were just putting it together yesterday. Yeah, I know, right? I know. I know.

And things change so much so often with me that it's like, oh, it got messy really quick. So now I'm moving all power. All my power PDUs are on the back of it. And then the switches and everything like that are going to be on the front of it. So it opens up a lot of space underneath it. Right. So I got, I get back a lot of use and then just planning. Cause I have two UPSs in there.

Right. And just planning it out. So I know that, um, if my backup server, you know, controls one of the UPSs and if that one shuts down that properly everything, it won't affect the main server. And then the main server can gracefully shut down if it needs. So it has, you know, so I have it planned out what plugs into where so that, you know, things will continue to work. Right.

So that I'm scheduling over the next few weeks because it's going to be like a, probably like a multi-hour job. And I got to, you know, let the family know. Nothing's going to be like a probably like a multi-hour job and i gotta you know let the family know um nothing's gonna work in this house yeah literally nothing's gonna work and i really i can only do this during the days too because at night when lights and stuff stop working you know they get very picky so you know uh that's gonna be a fun and then the last thing this week i found this very interesting. So I have two ISPs right now in my house, right?

Just because I have them both on a good deal. It's only temporary. But my main, so I have them set up as failover with Unify. And this is the first time I've ever seen this happen. But my main one went down and it auto failed over to my backup one. I was like, that's really cool. So my internet was only out in that little bit of time it took to auto fail over. And I like that feature.

I wish they would introduce the feature where it would auto fail over back. Oh, yeah. It's supposed to. But apparently, I found a lot of threads of people. People were complaining that, oh, it doesn't fail back. So I was running off my cable and I saw one thread where a guy, his backup was an LTE where you had to pay for data. But it was just in case of an emergency and it failed over and he didn't even realize. And he got a $600 bill by the time he realized because it didn't fail back when the ISP was back up.

That's horrible. It is pretty bad. The only way I could get it back on the mainp was back up that's horrible it is pretty bad the only way i could get it back on the main isp was to actually reboot the dream machine and then it came back up and it switched back to my fiber and i was like no they gotta fix this this has to be a bug that's wild yeah yeah so my my that my good thing my firewall actually has thatet actually has the failover feature when you put in dual WANs, but it also has an auto failback feature. So when the primary WAN comes back, it will turn that failover off and go back. And yeah, that's crazy, especially considering some of those are designed to go failover to cellular and you're using cellular data. It's supposed to fail back but people

keep reporting that it's not so i don't know if it's just saying you know your backup connection is fast enough you know we don't have to fail over or fail back you know i don't know what the you know what it is if it's an actual bug i saw they released i got an email that there was a new um firmware released and they did mention something about the failover. So I wonder if they actually addressed it like as of today, but I'll have to upgrade and test that and see what happens. But yeah, it was kind of annoying that I had to reboot it to get it back. Right. Cause then that took down everything during that reboot time. Well, I have a great solution, Gavin. You can go ahead and get the professional ubiquity support for about $30 a month, and

maybe they can resolve it. I thought it was $100 per site per month. I don't remember. It's something ridiculous. Yeah, it's something dumb. $30 a month still sounded like a lot to me. It was $100 per month per site. Oh my gosh.

But I mean, if I find the threads on their forums of people complaining about this, what's their support actually going to do for me? I'm going to pay $100 for them to fix this? Actually, I found this random guy on the internet that says he has the same problem. Do you want to look at it? Yeah. Yeah. Let me email it to you.

Thanks. Yeah. It's a support group for the failover failures. They're going to say, here's what our tech doc says. Reboot your controller. Problem solved. Have you power cycled this have a good day sir thanks for the hundred bucks are you that home automation guy can't you just set up a script to do it this is why i have a matter switch on my router you know when things go down i can just tell my home assistant to reboot it well speaking of matter uh we're gonna matter a little bit this week. And let's go ahead and queue up and jump into the interview here with Daniel Meneda.

Again, he's in product and marketing strategy at Samsung SmartThings. And he's also one of the leads at the Matter Working Group. He works on marketing with them there. So without further ado, we'll jump into the interview right now. Hi, Daniel. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. Yeah, excited to be on the show. Excellent. Well, I guess let's just jump in and let you introduce yourself. Describe how you got involved and started with the Smart Home and how you started to getting involved with the Matterworking group.

Sure. I've been in Smart Home probably my entire adult career and then some, so it's not necessarily a short story, but i'll try and summarize um uh i know you guys can't identify with this but i've always enjoyed like tinkering with my smart home and trying to get uh stuff talking to each other and so even before i really started professionally um you know i had the home where i like x10 stuff everywhere and was like trying to bridge the phases of the house you know know, and connected to HomeSeer on my PC through that RS-232 bridge and all of that. So really fell in love with, you know, the magic and opportunity of smart home

and connectivity there. Although obviously that was not ready for mass market at the time. Although some of that power line stuff worked pretty well, even back then. After I finished school, I went to school for business. I actually worked at one of the first startups doing wireless energy management for hotels. So that was sort of the beginning of before we called it IoT or smart energy or smart home or anything like that,

but learned a lot about wireless tech and shoehorning one system into another system and connecting them that way. I ended up starting my own company called MMB Networks with a couple of friends of mine I'd known since junior high and high school. And we helped we work with a lot of companies from, you know, innovative startups building connected devices, like major brands like GE and Procter & Gamble and smart metering brands to add connectivity. We even did an interesting product for Gatorade once, just like adding connectivity to products and learning a lot about the challenges and opportunities there. We got really involved in Zigbee at the time because that was one of the big open standards in the market. And that was helping everything be interoperable. And then during the pandemic, I left MMB, although they're definitely still around and in the space and went to Google for a couple years where I was a global marketing

manager for Google Home. Helped affect yet another badge change, you're welcome. And get that platform along with a great team ready for the Matter era. And then in January of this year, I moved on and actually went to go solve some similar challenges, but through a new lens at Samsung SmartThings. So I've always sort of been involved as a day job in smart home. And then kind of throughout that whole time, I've either been involved, like I said, in the Zigbee Alliance, which then became the Connectivity Standards Alliance, was there at the beginning of this Project Chip,

and have usually had a leadership role in that process. I was the marketing lead for the Zigbee Alliance. And then when we sort of re-orged around Project Chip and CSA, became the marketing chair for, well, Project Chip, which then became Matter. And I actually led the branding project on that. So that's a fun story too. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Okay. So glad you mentioned Project Chip because that, okay, I think that was what, 2019? Yeah. Press release. mention project chip because that okay i think that was what 2019 yeah uh a press release i think i heard about it because i'm kind of like listening and to more of the apple related podcasts if there if there are any learned that apple actually had a pr department yeah issued press releases yeah well if there are any amazon podcasts they they're probably more AWS generated than talking about their Alexa division or anything like that. And then maybe there is an Alexa podcast. I don't know. I've never listened to it. But Project Chip came out. They pushed this press release out. It kind of made like this huge wave in the Apple ecosystem. And it kind of, okay, so I go back and I read it now. And it makes sense. It says they're working on making a standard to help manufacturers deliver products and consumers basically get them up and going. And I think that was the stated goal, so to speak.

But the fact that it had, it was an Apple press release on an Apple website. And it says the first word. To be fair, everyone issued the same press release. But it was remarkable that one company, which often doesn't do that, let alone has other companies' names in theirs, would do that. Yeah. And they put Amazon first, right? Like, it's not even, it's Amazon. Alphabetical.

Yes. Alphabetical. Anyway, they made this press release. It started off as Project Chipped. And then, I mean, right at the end of the year, was it? I think, yeah, December, December 18th. The next year, we were straight into a pandemic, which definitely changed a lot of people's priorities and what they were doing. So I can understand, like how things could have gone a little bit dark there, but it took, it took a while before what we started hearing or what was rebranded, I guess, as Matter to join. And you mentioned that you were part of that rebrand effort. Yeah. I guess, tell us how, what is your working relationship with Matter? Like, what do you do day to day with that group? So I think, yeah, to a lot of people, these like industry standards bodies can be kind of a black box. But in fact, it's a very transparent box. So the way it works is the Connectivity Standards Alliance itself, it's a nonprofit global organization.

Any company can be a part of it. There's various membership tiers that you can join at. It depends on whether you just want to use the technology and run with it, or you actually want to help contribute to that technology or early access, or all the way up to you want to sit on the board of the organization and help direct its future and vision. So companies join, and then all of the humans in the room are there. I don't want to say, I hate to say on a voluntary basis, because we do get paid to be there by our companies. It sometimes feels like a volunteer job because we're sort of doing it in addition to many of our day jobs. But we are there to sort of represent our company's interests or sort of the greater good of the technology in the organization. And there are certain roles, leadership roles in the organization that we can run for and be elected for or be appointed to. And so without getting into a whole org chart,

within the Connectivity Standards Alliance, there's a bunch of technologies. You know, Zigbee is one of them that certainly you all are familiar with. Matter is another. And each of those is called a working group. And within that working group, you have like a steering committee, which is like a little leadership board for the technology. And then you have the subgroup. So there's the marketing and product group,

which sort of does open marketing and product roadmap development of the technical group, which actually sort of takes that and converts that into actual spec and product. And then you have the certification group, which thinks all about like testing and how to do quality testing and make sure people get through the process and inform the labs and all of that. And so with that sort of framework, I ran for and was elected to the position of chair of the marketing and product subgroup. And so I'm also on that steering committee. And I've sort of had that role since the beginning. It's sort of a two-year election cycle. We don't have to get into the nitty-gritty politics of that.

So it's a long-winded... I just figured this audience might be interested in like a little bit of the behind the scenes, but that's sort of how it works. Oh, yeah. You know, those are the roles we're in. So, you know, I'm often talking either with my matter hat on or as an individual company where, for instance, I represent smart things there. But largely, it's, you know, a lot of nerds in a room trying to bring their best ideas

and thoughts and complaints and to uh to the table um and make and make the standard and technology better um it's honestly the the best uh feature request experience uh i have i've ever had in my life uh you know one of the perks is having i literally have the product manager for every smart home product i own on slack so that is a a benefit to the uh to being part of the organization yeah i on slack so that is a a benefit to the uh to being part of the organization yeah i think i think that's a great overview because a lot of people are going to be using this technology or they've heard of it but they just they don't have any idea of what actually goes into making it um and figuring out you know who gets a say and how

they get a say um and i think it's important for people to know that because it's not just one person or one group that's doing everything it It's multiple people or multiple groups coming together to make it. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Like just because there's often focus on like the big name companies are in it. There's a lot of like, oh, it's just, you know, these four companies getting into a room. But like, the big companies only have won as many votes as the small companies, everybody has one vote on a lot of the, what we call like the ballot processes. So when we're like approving specs or we're approving new features or devices.

So, you know, really the most, the biggest determination of whether like the thing you care about is going to get over the line is how much energy and effort you're putting into it. And, you know, can you drive consensus? Matter is a very market-driven technology, right? It's not like an academic exercise where you get into a room and we come up with a really cool standard and they're like, okay, who wants to use it? Most of the features and device types, like you can only get approved at every milestone if there is a critical mass of companies willing to implement it and bring it to market. And so, you know, you have to do some consensus driving, you have to make sure there's actually market interest in that. And then you have to put the work in. So it really, and there's some really cool stuff that's been brought to the line by small companies, innovative companies, even ones you may never have heard of,

you know, not not saying that big companies don't bring a lot of resources to the table as well. But it really is a very open and democratic environment. And we even get kind of contributions from outside the work group to, to get hub as well. There's a lot of people that are even like, there's like the matter JS product project, which is like someone just did that on their own. Like that's not even something that we started up.

So it's a pretty open process. Better. We've talked about the matter. Well, better JS. We probably can get to the geeky stuff later but like um i think gavin brought that up on the show a while back and i remember we kind of we kind of talked about that and there's been like a couple of implementations of it to kind of like the matter js was kind of like a hard thing to use but people have iterated on that and made sub modules basically down the road like

where you can just implement it, the parts and pieces that you want. So, I mean, that's, that's awesome that it that's community driven as well. Yeah. I mean, the whole, the whole thesis of matter is like not trying to reinvent the world from scratch, but bringing the best practices and the best ideas to the table and, and building on there. And if, and if you really dig into the matter spec, you will see things that should be familiar from weave, from HomeKit, from Zigbee, from other projects, other ways that member companies who contributed sort of brought their best practices and even code to the table.

So there's a lot of questions that we have, but let's start with some of the basics here. Can you provide a brief overview of what Matter is and how it aims to standardize communication between smart home devices? I mean, right now we have Zigbee and Z- z wave and wi-fi and all these other standards what does matter doing exactly well because this isn't a this is a podcast so i can't bring up the xkcd uh comic but of course you know that's we all know it i know i can just reference it um so yeah let's start definitionally and then let's get into like the compare and contrast side of things. Because I think those are those are sort of two different conversations. And because matter also like absorb some of the best things about other technologies, too. So one of like one of my favorite series on the web, I think Wired did like a explain this concept to a five year old, a teenager, an adult and an expert and work your way up. And so maybe we can do a little bit of that here, although I suspect most of the audience leans towards the back half of those groups.

Yeah, I think the easiest analog is, it's a language that smart home devices can speak to each other. And the analogy I usually give is, we can all have the same walkie-talk on the same radio on the same channel. And that means we can connect to each other, which is great. But unless we're all speaking the same language, we can't actually do anything interesting together. And so you need that language to be able to speak. And that's what matter is. So that's sort of that, that five year old easy question. I think a lot of the kind of mentioning that press release back and listening to some of the horrible coverage that was done back in 2019, where this was going to be like the end all solution to all things home automation, like everything will be solved.

All the problems you've ever had in your entire life will be solved. But what matters is more like Wi-Fi, like the label Wi-Fi that you see everywhere. Yeah, I mean, I think you're speaking to like the typical technology hype curve, right? Like something gets announced and it's like, this will now solve for every problem in existence. And then like it comes out and it actually only solves for the problem they were trying to solve for.

And, you know, at an MVP level at the time and people get like really disillusioned and then, you know, things, things go up. And yeah, for those of you that are tech marketers you you've seen this before where like there's this you know huge crest of enthusiasm and that then plummets when things come out and it meets actual reality and then it starts to grow as people like make their implementations better and people understand what the technology is really for and and everything sort of goes through this this technology hype curve matter i think on a bit more of an accelerated path so yeah i mean matter was i mean it wasn't necessarily intended to wipe everything off the face of the planet. It was intended to be a solution for a set of problems, at least to start that was very critical to the growth and scale of, you know, the consumer residential DIY smart home market. And I think we'll talk maybe later about other areas of the market that it

applies to um and so yeah it was meant to be that common language for for the smart home you know one thing to understand maybe this is like more of the the teenager version of answer is so you have this common language I think where a lot of people get confused and and even you know set this speaks to like the Wi-Fi and thread and matter and sometimes the conflation of those things is the difference between a transport and an application layer. And there'll be a lot of networking nerds that say that this is not detailed enough, but we'll just put it into those two buckets to start with. So transport technology is something like Wi-Fi or thread or ethernet, right? Like it's how the bits move around. It's the, for lack of a better term, tubes that the bits are flowing around in, things

like 5G, etc. And then an application layer is like, what are the bits? Like, what is the protocol? What is the language you're speaking over that connection? And those two, you know, in a diagram level are different things, right? You have like a million different application layers running in your house all over a single transport protocol, like Wi-Fi or maybe two, like Ethernet. So Matter is just another one of those application layers. And so that's where I think people sometimes conflate like Matter with Thread,

where Thread is actually a transport layer that Matter happens to run over, as well as Wi-Fi, as well as Ethernet and any devices that are on the network that are any of those networks can speak Matter to each other over those technologies. And so that's another reason why you see like a lot of companies being able to update existing devices to support Matter because they already had those technologies baked into their devices. And so they can just add that application layer as an add-on. And I think not to do too much comparing contrast at the moment, but one of the challenges when comparing, let's say, matter to other technologies, like TJ, you were saying is, if you look at things like Zigbee and Z-Wave, they're what we often call full stack technologies. So they actually, they do have a

transport layer, and they do have an application layer, but they're bundled into one brand into one technology and sold as a complete package. So there is a, so Zigbee has both built in z-wave has both built in you don't really have a choice over different network transports because the whole value of that is like it's all the same and you don't you don't have to mix and match whereas with matter there's there's advantages as well in being able to do some mixing and matching okay i want to put a pin in thread so i think we're going to come back to it as we have we're going to move to the basic stuff here but i definitely want to put in pin and thread. So I think we're going to come back to it as we ever, we're going to move to the basic stuff here, but I definitely want to put a pin in thread and get back to a question on

that. And then the, the more academic answer to what is matter is like, it's not just a protocol. Like it's not just a spec there. It's not just an application layer. There is that there is a spec. There's also,

as you guys well know, an SDK. So instead of just like, here's a spec, go figure out how to implement it. There's actually a living, breathing implementation available that you can download and run. So everybody is starting from the same code base, which is great.

A lot of other technologies, you know, you had five different implementations of and they didn't quite match up, even though technically they conform to the spec. And that could be a problem for years. So and having an SDK really accelerates it. But it's also things like policies. How does how does the technology get developed how do things get across the line certification how are we testing it not both for compliance as well as for interoperability all of those pieces that are not just about creating a spec at an academic standpoint but creating like a technology that actually enables people to go to market and build

stuff with it in a way that they can ship and it will work and we can clusters later yeah that's that's that gets it a little bit dirty into the weeds there but um in terms of like you mentioned like matter helps standardize how devices talk to each other right yeah um what are other some of the other key challenges that matter may address in today's smart home so i think you know there's a set of user problems and there's a set of developer problems, but I think they're pretty related to each other. And I think you guys have a pretty good read on some of the challenges there. We know the smart home is growing,

especially over the pandemic. People are investing a lot more in their homes, a lot more devices per home, and they're adding that. But for users, particularly like the mass market of users who haven't really invested yet, we know there can be some big challenges. So like one of the big challenges is setup. Smart home devices can be difficult to set up.

We did a study where like the average smart home device requires 32 screens and over 10 minutes to set up, which is crazy, especially if you're talking about something like a light bulb. And every one of those things is a potential point of failure. It's also a significant percentage of the reasons that people report for returning devices, they just couldn't get the thing set up in the first place. And that's, that's unacceptable. And then, you know, the second problem is just figuring out what works with what does this light bulb work with this system, but not this system, or Hey, I got it set up with one platform platform but now i want to add this like cool remote control oh but it only works with this subset like users are having to do this like bend diagram of devices in their home and that's really difficult um and because of the lack of standardization you know another problem is you

have like very fragmented controls like okay great you can do x y and z in app a but you can only do x and y and app b and you can only do z by voice. And it's very hard to figure like, what is what? I don't really believe in the too many apps problem because I think apps are a great way for device companies to bring their differentiation to the market and like their cool added value features. But I shouldn't have to be digging around just to figure out like how to turn lights on and like do very basic stuff. And so a lot of that adds up to like a home that doesn't feel as smart as it should be.

Like, like it almost feels like historically, the value prop of the smart home is like, hey, now you can be the IT administrator of your house, which I suspect appeals to the four of us. But there's a large percentage of the market that no, they just want to turn their lights on in the morning. And so that's a big challenge that Matter helps to solve. But it also is trying to solve the meta problem, which is that devices are and trying to get them to work with each other through either official or unofficial means. And I mean, yeah, yeah, I'm probably underestimating. And that's the life of a smart home developer, right? Like you're trying to build a light bulb and you have to build that light bulb and it has to be compatible with like four different APIs, you know, one for each of the platforms you're trying to build against.

Some are local, some are in the the cloud some have different security requirements than others not necessarily better or worse but different those apis change somewhat frequently and like you're always keeping up with that let alone having to you know build app apps on devices to help get your device connected to the network and you don't even control that hardware directly so understandably device companies have spent a lot of their resources just on that baseline connectivity, just like literally trying to keep the lights on. And so if you're doing that, how much time are you really going to have to make all of those other things better and innovate and create like really cool experiences for users? So I think that's been the big challenge. So Matter primarily helps to solve that developer problem and in doing so helps to solve a lot of those user problems both indirectly in terms of freeing up resources but also directly in terms of like

solving for things like setup one of the things that we've kind of seen over the past couple years is the ability to buy matter or thread chips with different uh rfs on there as well so you can buy like a matter chip with bluetooth and wi-fi 6 and allfs on there as well so you can buy like a matter chip with bluetooth and wi-fi six and all this kind of fun stuff so you can make your own matter devices is that a possibility today like somebody could actually build something with matter or thread and then use it with any kind of hub is it is it that kind of standard or does that need to go through like some kind of certification process or something before I can use it? I mean, yes and yes. So you as a hobbyist absolutely can pick up a dev board, download the SDK.

Like you said, there's practically every IoT silicon provider has a chip that's compatible with Matter, whether you're doing it Wi-Fi or thread or held or even like, you know, combo tri-band chip. So it's really easy to build that stuff. Most ecosystems have a way for you to do that. Like I have some devices on some platforms where they're like, hey, this is not an official device. Are you sure you want to add this? And you can mash yes, which is good.

Some may be stricter about that. You know, please refer to the terms and conditions of your friendly neighborhood smart home platform. But if you want to like build a device and sell it on the market and put that matter badge on it, then yeah, you definitely have to make sure it's certified. And the Alliance has a process for certifying that device. There are a bunch of test labs that will certify those devices just like you know, test lab certified Wi Fi or red or other types of devices um and then that gives you the ability to brand and promote your product as a matter device and in fact there's there's actually a system called the dcl um which is like a blockchain based system where when you connect a device to a platform they can actually go and check and say like hey this device is a legitimate matter device it's giving you the right product and vendor code it's on a certified version of firmware or code. It's on a certified version of firmware

or even, hey, there might be a new version of firmware I need to pull. And so there is actually a validation process. And that typically happens, like that's invisible to the user when you're setting it up. And often like the platforms have sort of their own local copy of that.

But there's absolutely systems for making sure that like the devices on the market are legit. That's pretty cool. Because I know a lot of our listeners or a lot of people in like maybe home assistant communities and stuff like that like to build their own sensors. Yeah. And they're pretty much limited to like ESP home at this current time. Yeah. I mean, Matter is potentially a great, great option for doing that.

You know, again, check with your I mean, if you're on a home assistant, you're probably fine in terms of like using unofficial devices on a platform. I suspect they're probably the friendliest. But, you know, I have other even mainstream platforms that you think would be more draconian about that, that are, you know, are okay with a little bit of user consent, are okay with those devices. I think even HomeKit now throws up, it throws up a warning when you add a hub or something. But that's how you get HomeBridge devices brought in and kind of just says, hey hey you can't you should like are you sure yeah yeah it's like are you sure yes i'm sure put this in and then i get all these lights and everything that i have on a different system that's not homekit compatible in homekit which is great kind of kind of branching a little bit off of what we just talked about there um with TJ just asked, is there anything being done at Matter to educate consumers, like the people not listening to this

podcast, what the heck Matter is other than just like a sticker maybe that they see on the back of a device and maybe they know what that is, maybe they don't know what it is, maybe they think if they see this, you and I may have talked about this a little offline. Like just because a device has a sticker on it doesn't make it a great device. Like there's still going to be companies putting together stuff that doesn't work all that great, but they're going to have

they're going to be Matter certified, right? Like they the quality out of a factory is not what you guys are testing. You guys are testing the Matter spec on these products and that the conditions have been met to get onboarded and bring it into the system. If it lasts five weeks and dies every time or something, you guys aren't testing that. You're not, you're not looking into that. Yeah. Like it's not longevity testing. It's not like, Hey, you know, is the color blue that this light presents, like the color blue that you like the best um you know though

there is a lot of and and i don't mean that in a bad way but like that's the whole point like it's matter i think there's a lot of concerns that people have about like matter commoditizing things and you know that's pretty funny to me because you know we live in a world where i can buy a because of the ubiquity of bluetooth i can buy like a ten dollar pair of truly wireless you know bluetooth earbuds which is crazy to me now but like that has not limited the market for you know four to seven hundred pairs of bluetooth earbuds and headphones and and those companies compete on quality on sound on features you know does it have voice assistance of noise canceling like standards just increase the market opportunity um but they in and

in doing so they create lots of room for people to play at both ends of the scale the commodity accessory scale and the high quality or value- end of the scale. And that's great for consumers who are, you know, every consumer needs to jump in at a different point. So you're right, we don't test for that. I mean, it definitely has to work, it has to get set up, it has to connect, it has to, you know, have some level of reliability there. But beyond that, that's for manufacturers to decide what they want to offer and how they want to compete on that. So yeah, I mean, I guess like, yeah, I think there's going to be a diversity of devices out there.

On the education front, I think it's funny, like, and I say this is like the marketing lead for Matter. Like Matter is an interesting thing to market because I think there are consumers like us who have sort of been in the world as it has been and have dealt with some of the challenges they're in. But I think for a large majority of users and potential users, Matter makes the smart home work the way they assumed it was supposed to work in the first place, where things are just like, easy to set up, it's as easy as turning on a light switch, like my old light switch.

It's reliable. And so, you know, that can be a funny challenge to market um and saying hey this works the way you already thought it did um but i do think there's a lot of opportunity there i mean as the connectivity standards alliance we certainly try to do a lot of marketing in terms of explaining how matter works and and making sure that the right information is out there particularly so people with larger megaphones than we have the companies that are members themselves the media you know podcasts such as this one can can get out there, particularly so people with larger megaphones than we have, the companies that are members themselves, the media, podcasts such as this one can get out there and deliver the messaging. And I think in the next year, we'll be getting a little bit more active with some sources of truth and some marketing that's a little bit closer to consumer

to help. But largely, we're there to enable our members, which are device companies, platform companies, retailers, and everybody that's connected to them to tell that message. Is there any way you could share some practical examples of how Matter might simplify the user experience in the smart home, especially when you have like multiple brands involved? Sure. So I think, you know, setup's a really great place to talk about that. In fact, I'll talk about the day one problem and the day 1,000 problem. And I think you all have experienced both of those problems. The day one problem is usually setup. Can I get the thing connected to my network?

And so from a user perspective, you have all set up a Matter device, I assume. It's a lot different than um setting up a previous smart home device like often a lot of the existing setups were based on like cloud connectivity so you just sort of would have to set that device up in its native app register for some sort of account connect that account to another account um link them in the background etc you know that was a long process that you know can often involve forgotten passwords and things like that especially for a mass market that often doesn't necessarily remember what password they used two years ago for some system they set up. With Matter,

more often than not, you plug in that device, and you'll get a pop up on your phone that looks a lot like the pop up you get for when you plug in a new, you know, pair of Bluetooth headphones. And it has a picture of the product. And it's like, hey, I see this plug, do you want to set it up? And you hit yes. And it says, what app do you want to connect this to? And you pick your favorite app. And it transmits your Wi Fi credentials, it doesn't do any like, you know, temporary access point hopping back and forth or any of that. It connects it to the thread network, it, you know, passes the credentials to the smart home platform or native app that you want to connect it to, does all of that in a series of a couple of taps, and you're done. And so it's one process, it's a few taps, it's often under a minute, and you don't have to jump through any

hoops. And that's a big deal for user. It's also a big deal for developers, because they haven't had to figure out how to get you the user to get their device online, not knowing what phone you have, what Wi-Fi you have, what your password is, not having direct access to the chips in the mobile phone or the OS level. So that's a big change in, I think, how the user experience. Yeah, I can tell you from a developer standpoint, that has been like the onboarding process for each one of these manufacturers has been wildly different um some of them like philips hue for example you go in and press a button on the little bridge thing and it kind of pairs it together magically and they did a pretty good job with that some of them you have a um you know it says do we need to connect your wi-fi over to this other Wi-Fi thing

you've never seen before? But we're going to connect to that. And then you're going to set your Wi-Fi up, update firmware, it'll connect. And if it doesn't work, it'll make this sound. Right. It's just strange. And there was this era where like the phones had set up

where like if they connect to a Wi-Fi network that doesn't have internet, it flips back to the other one. And so you constantly bounce back until they realize that they broke everybody's smart home setup. so yeah this this kind of skips a lot of that i actually said you just said something that's that's really important which is like even if you can successfully get through some of those setups each one is different yeah and that's a huge problem especially for the mass market which is confidence like confidence that i i set this one up and so i

know i will be able to set up the next one and the next one and the next one. And I won't have to call my kid, my cousin, my tech friend, et cetera, to help me do it. And so once you've set up a Matter device, if you know the next one's going to be practically identical, then you're increasing confidence. So it's not just about simplicity. It's also about consistency of setup. And consistency is hard, too, because I even see that with Z-Wave devices. Some Z-Wave, you do three clicks. Some some you do four clicks some you do battery pulls right and i thought that was

standardized until i had to go repair 90 devices of my own right so i have to actually keep a document of how they work uh yes that is that that's a challenge as well so like and i think there's still areas that we can improve but but wherever possible, we've tried to make the specs so that each, although devices can be differentiated, the basic stuff like setup or pairing or connecting from one platform to another is somewhat repeatable. I should be able to tell you how to do it,

not knowing what you have or are using on your side. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's get a little geeky here and talk about some of the technologies that make that happen. Weren't already? Yeah, I know, right? No, no, we're not.

We got to start talking code. We're going to talk about Zigbee clusters, okay. Yeah, you mentioned clusters, so we're going there. Let's talk about some of the technologies that make up Matter. One is the standardized process of bringing devices on board, but what technologies under the hood are manufacturers in charge of

utilizing to, to make that work? Sure. So, I mean, there's a lot that has gone into matter. And like I mentioned, a lot of it was sort of best practices coming to the table.

you know, I think a lot of companies that maybe one of the reasons we uh slightly overestimated the time frame um we get that done in was uh not just because of the pandemic in fact i actually think that made things a little bit easier because everybody was meeting virtually and so it was with a more open and frequent process but you know everybody always thinks their technology is best and so oh we're just going to come and copy and paste our stuff into the spec and then we'll be done right right and um that did happen but more with more diversity than i think any one contributor expected and so i think if you look in the spec you'll you'll see flavors

of things from a lot of the best experiences around different platforms you know um as us samsung and smart things we contributed a lot of our expertise from being like one of the platforms that actually like had gone to mass market with open standards. We had like a bring any device you want that Zigbee or Z-Wave and how to actually create a developer ecosystem and a user ecosystem around that. So I think there's a lot of thinking there that went into it. There's aspects of HomeKit, there's aspects of We aspects of weave and thread which came out of the google world and then a lot of best practices from um from companies that make the devices ranging from like phillips to nanoleaf and other innovative companies so i think some of

one of the core pieces of matter is that it is a local technology right so it doesn't go through the cloud you're not connecting the device to its own cloud and then cloud over to the other cloud, etc. So your Matter devices are talking directly to some device in your home that is a we would call a Matter controller. It's a role that, you know, your smart think station or hub or TV or your Nest Hub or your Apple HomePod are playing. And so that makes things way more, it certainly makes it secure, it makes it reliable, it means you don't necessarily have to have all those accounts to set everything up to begin with and um the latency is a lot better because you're just going direct in the home um and for what it's worth that was actually set when we talked at cdia like that was one of the things that i think a lot of the installer market got

interested in which is they want to be able to bring all these like cool consumer devices into the home but they don't want to have to like mess with users, individual personal accounts and passwords. So having a technology like Matter that's just like directly connected to the big, big, big, big difference there. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So there's that. And that's why, you know, if you set up a Matter device, it unsurprisingly looks a little bit similar to like that HomeKit setup where, you know, you scan a QR code or you type in a code and it onboards the device. But a lot of the application layer, for instance, comes from the Zigbee world.

So we really adopted the Zigbee cluster library, which is a series of sort of building blocks and how you build the devices and made that work over IP, which Matter is based on. And so you do see a lot of similarity there. And that was great because it was one of the few open standards out there in the smart home that like actually worked and had real world application and had years of experience.

So the way that works is like you have these like Lego building blocks, like an on off cluster and a level cluster and a color cluster. And you say, OK, a light bulb is going to be a color changing light bulb takes the on off cluster and the level cluster and the color cluster and put some together and you can be a light bulb. And what's really great about that is it means you can rapidly create more device types. Because once you have a decent enough set of building blocks, like most devices are just some combination of those blocks with a little bit of context around it, right? What level means to a blind and what level means to a locker and oven are different, but you can use the same underlying code. And so it makes it really easy to sort of rapidly generate more support. And can you just like, while we're at it,

talk about the relationship with Thread because it's talked a lot about with Matter. I know it's a transport protocol, right? But like, how do you guys work together? How close are you like combined? I'd say very closely. So, and this dovetails off, Seth, your question as well. One of the core technologies in Matter, it's so much so that it was in that built into the project chip name, which was connected home over IP, is IP.

So everything that Matter runs on top of is based on IP protocol. That's why we have Wi-Fi. That's why we have Ethernet. That's why we have Thread. And the advantage of that is devices can all, you know, regardless of what network technology they're using, once they're on the network, they're all part of one big happy network. So my Thread devices can talk to my Wi-Fi devices, can talk to my Ethernet devices. And while it's not mandatory, if those devices have a cloud service, if there's like added value that that vendor has that they deliver that way, they can also talk out to the internet and talk to their cloud. So it's

really a best of all worlds situation that gives standardization and IP. Yeah, I think one of the bigger things that we see for some of the things that I've heard Gavin talk about and other people talk about and I think you mentioned it briefly earlier was if somebody has a value

add that you can access in the app. I'm looking at maybe Acquire or some company like that where you have like a ton of really cool features in their app but then when you move it back over towards the matter side or even the home kit integration side you get a very small subset so is that what we're looking at here when you're talking about those lego blocks like you right now matter only has those lego blocks that they can use and that's what they're utilizing. But when it comes to, I don't know, adding on some strange features that they've come up with, it's really cool. It works really cool in their app.

Like it doesn't work with Matter directly because it doesn't you get it because they don't have those Lego blocks built for it. Switchbot is an example of that where they have a yeah, they have like a silent mode to their drape curtain controller and that can't be exposed so yeah i'm actually just installing those this week um get a lot of smart home uh shopping for uh for black friday um the so the answer is sort of a little bit yes and no ultimately it's up to the device vendor like what do they want to deliver as a differentiated feature and and what do they want to deliver as a differentiated feature? And what do they want to deliver as the standard feature? So sometimes, yes, there is some differentiated feature they have that is simply not yet supported by Matter. And so the platforms haven't supported it. And so there's no way to sort of get that button to show up in a UX.

And so that they do through their own. Now, something that frequently happens in standardization and is already happening in matter is a company's out there saying hey this is a really cool feature and actually it's not good for us to just limit it to control through our app it's better if like this is controllable by another app or another platform or voice or things like that and so they'll take that and they'll bring it into the matter standard and they'll make it standardized so that those logo blocks are now available to anyone it's like right now we're working on,

you know, understandably in the first couple versions of Matter, we're really focusing on the core user experiences and the core journeys. And so we have a lot around lighting. Like right now there's an active team working on addressable

and dynamic lighting. So lighting where like, you know, every LED is controllable and, you know, think about like your Twinkly lights or your Nanoleaf devices or your Gobi devices. They can do music responsive in different modes.

And so now layering those features on top of or into the standard so that they can be adopted in the future. So, you know, we're still early on, but I think you'll continue to see those more advanced features being rolled into the standard as sort of optional things, blocks for people to use. Very cool. I don't think we answered Gavin's thread questions. Okay. Okay, yeah, I went off on a tangent about IP. So IP is really important. But you know, smart home devices are different species of device than I think a lot of products in our home that like Wi Fi was originally built for. And so there's a lot of use cases,

particularly around battery operated devices, where you know, you need something, something to last, you know, more than a few months. And in some cases, things like coin cell batteries, where you kind of want them to just you want to put a sensor somewhere, you just want to last like years without having to worry about going and cracking that thing open and putting a battery or it's mission critical devices that like really need good range. And you don't necessarily have control about where you put them. So think about like the lights that are far off in the backyard or that leak sensor that's you know behind the water center heater on your basement and you're not necessarily going to have great wi-fi signal there or you need that that longer range and so thread is this like great technology that has a lot of the benefits of technologies like zigbee and z-wave where you have this like low power mesh networking it's lower cost to build because because it's low power low bandwidth, but it has the advantages of IP so that it can become

part of that greater network and talk to other devices without like some, you know, proprietary bridge in between. And it can even potentially talk out to the internet if you need that. And so, you know, we've seen, there's sort of two camps of companies that really like this, like companies that come from like the ZigBee and Z-Wave world where they're like, oh, wow, I already have this kind of device. I already build these devices to be part of an ecosystem. If I add Thread to my portfolio, then sometimes it's literally the same chip that supports Z-Wave, supports Thread. Now I can address this whole new market that I wasn't able to address before. A lot of SmartThings users or Apple users or Google users that I just physically couldn't talk to earlier. So a lot of companies

are doing that just for the addressable market. And then if you came from the Wi-Fi world, where like you already kind of built a platform around the benefits of IP, oh, well, now I can have different types of devices. I can have more battery operated devices, I can have better performing devices, as Seth devices as mentioned right i can compete on battery life and performance and range and so we're really seeing that open up more of the smart home to more people personally i think one of the advantages is like uh well let me ask you this question if i came in and changed the wi-fi password on your router how long would it take your home to be you and i would have a problem sir you might not make it back out of the house there's a lot of devices they do not have a user interface built on like if i have there's you know

i have wi-fi bulbs like i got to turn them on about five times and reset them and then if i reset them by the way like some of the opera this the smartphone platforms i have they'll just disappear and so they'll be removed from any automations. And so if I reconnect them, I have to... If I change... I actually... I'm so mad at myself. I misspelled what I thought was super witty

guest network SSID, and I can never change it. I live with that shame every day because 100 light bulbs will have to be recommissioned and so i think that's a challenge and i know that there there's some work being done on like how to solve that scalably but one of the things i like about thread is that like if i ever change my wi-fi password all i have to do is reconnect the thread border router that's somewhere in my

house and all those things come back online so especially if your devices are like very mission critical or have use cases where the user might not be like super motivated or know how or remember how to reconnect them right like right on day one it's much more likely that you're gonna maintain that lifelong reliability um and connectivity over the life of the device so lots of great use cases for it and in regards to like border routers and control um um can you just give an explanation what's the differences between the two when it comes to the the whole matter ecosystem sure my my favorite topic because it's like i find and you you all know this like the more you try to

abstract complexity away from people the more complexity there is under the hood and then when you start peeking under that hood it gets gets like a jumble of wires real fast. So we actually, by the way, as the Connectivity Standards Alliance, we wrote a blog specific, literally, I think we called it peeking under the hood of matter. So that's a good reference if you're looking to like get into the nitty gritty of like the roles of devices that's available on the CSA IoT website. I think one of the challenges is similar to the smartphone world. We're packing more and more into devices, right? So your smart home hub is no longer this little white box in a corner that sort of goes ignored in a cupboard. It's a function of some other device like a TV or a smart display or a charging stand. And so you're packing these roles in. And so sometimes that can be a little bit more complicated to explain to users. But I'll talk about the two roles that you talked about. So one is a matter controller,

capital M, capital C. This is a defined role by the matter standard. And it is the thing in your home. Usually it's a resident always on thing. It doesn't have to be, but for the most part, it is essentially like the hub. It's's the brains of matter it controls the administrative rights it controls what devices are connected to it and it can you know it can affect the control on those devices um all the devices that when you let's say connect a light bulb to smart things using that what you're really connecting it to is this thing called a fabric within the home and a fabric is a almost like a virtual network within the home that's controlled by that smart things controller and any of the devices attached to it, like that smart things controller has the rights to talk to and the rights to control. And that way you can have various devices in your home that aren't necessarily all in the same fabric. And so the device that has that controller in it that has those admin rights, that's the MatterController. But again, it's typically not a standalone device. It's typically built into something else, and everybody just colloquially calls them hubs.

One thing that's important... Can there only be one of those per project? Or is there some kind of backup? Like, what if my hub dies? Let me answer that question two ways. So one is, a MatterController is specific to the platform you're using. So, you know, you have a SmartThings controller, you have an Apple controller, you have a Google controller, Home Assistant has a controller. So for each platform you have in your home, you probably have some device that's acting as a MatterController and it's running its own fabric.

And we can talk about this later. But like when we talk about multi-admin and sharing, what you're doing is you're like sharing a device from one fabric to another. Okay. Within an ecosystem, though, yeah, you can have a bunch of controllers and most smart home platforms that have done their job correctly it's like almost like transparent failover like if if one of them blinks out of existence or you unplug it the other matter controller that they have in your house like that'll just take over so to speak or they'll distribute it somewhat to like whichever the most powerful one is because maybe they're running some local automations

and things like that. So you can definitely have multiple of any of these things in your home. Yeah, I remember there was a story not too long ago about the like having multiple matter networks set up in the house because some admin keys weren't essentially shared between these two controllers.

Yeah. And I think there was some work being done to either correct that down the road or or maybe that it's being corrected i'm not sure but like that seemed like so that's that's more like uh i guess that's more speaking again on your second question about like thread border routers okay so having multiple matter i'll call them fabric so we try not to use that word with consumers mostly because again peeking under the hood is not generally necessary. You can, and in fact, in some cases, should have multiple ones in your home

because you've got an Apple one, a Google one, a Samsung one, whatever. Although most mass market users probably have one. Where we're seeing stuff about that was for thread. So thread, when you create a thread network, you typically have something like a border router. Thread border router is a, I don't want to call it a

bridge because that means something else, but it's essentially a pipe fitter between the thread network and I hate internet as a series of tubes, but you know, it's a pipe fitter between the two tubes, right? Between the thread network and the Wi-Fi network, information and communication flows seamlessly through that. It's not like a box that's doing like translation or has proprietary knowledge or can even read the messages in between and so if you've got thread devices and you want them to be on the on that local network somewhere in your home you need a thread border router it does not have to be from any particular manufacturer um so you know i have thread devices connected to a smart things station which has a friend border router in it but i still apple can still talk to it home kit can still uh home assistant can still talk to it etc so you just

you really need to have one of these or you could have multiple ones in your home and they can all serve redundantly as that role um and in an ideal world every time you add a thread device it joins that that thread mesh and it builds out that mesh and you get a sort of bigger and bigger one giant happy thread that what you were seeing was, especially in early implementations, is that the companies have sort of made the boxes with the border router, and then they would, by default, stand up their own thread network with its own credentials. It's almost like having your own Wi Fi network in the home. And any devices that were added through that app would connect to it, and then to the network. And so I guess the downside of that is you'd have multiple thread networks in your home

rather than one big one. And it would be better to have a big one theoretically, because you'd have sort of more redundancy and mesh networking. In reality, for most users, it doesn't matter because devices, once they're on the net, like it doesn't function as separate networks. Even if one thread device is on one and one thread device is on the other, because everything's part of one big network, they can still talk to each other. So most users aren't experiencing any sort of user pain from it.

It would just be nice, and especially those of us who are smart home and networking nerds and like everything to be neat and organized would really like it to be on one big network. And so all the pieces to make that work properly sort of exist. And there's work being done to make sure like we're all doing in a consistent way like we're all writing the credentials to the mobile os keychain or key store whatever and we're all pulling it properly when setting up the network um it's a little bit more complex if we're taking the ones we already have and merging them together but there's also there are processes to do that as well um but yeah that so that's all work that's ongoing and you'll you'll see more about that um but for now for most users it's it's a it's a reddit problem but it's not necessarily a real problem like uh so that's a perfect explanation yeah hey reddit problems can escalate quickly

and i get it i i think the biggest problem for the user is like, because, and Gavin, to your point, because these roles are getting put into all these other boxes, they don't necessarily know

that that box has some piece of critical infrastructure in their house. What you don't want is like, they unplug that Nest Hub or they move that smart thing station or they get a new TV

and it accidentally removes that piece of critical infrastructure. So we want less failure points. So definitely great goal to work towards having that more shared robust network but but it's not for the most part not really creating a real problem for people today right i mean in theory i could like you said remove something that was that had that and this is specifically for thread it's not for like if i had wi-fi devices this doesn't affect that at all those i mean unless you totally removed your matter whatever matter controller you had for your smart home platform like that's the only time when things break but

i mean like yeah like if you if you have a smart things system and you take every smart things hub and tv out of your house i hope it's understandable that that's not going to work well no i i guess i guess i mean the whole the whole point well one of the points i guess behind this was that it didn't matter didn't there we go i actually got you to say that earlier but it doesn't matter which uh which hub you used right it didn't matter which brand you went to you could go to apple you could amazon smart things doesn't matter we're gonna pick we pick best practices, and we're going to set up this whole network out of that. So in theory, somebody could say, well, I'm tired of using this Amazon thing. I'm going to go try out the Google thing and move their entire smart house over to that.

They could get themselves in a situation where they're having to reset up everything when they think they're looking at the package, and it says Matter. It's supposed to work cross-vend vendor and and they're not able to transfer things over i think so you found two good points there so one is um branding life advice you know always name your thing something that is amenable to dad jokes and puns we're here for that all day much mileage out of that um and two uh yeah you know one day we can talk about all the names that would have been um and two is i i think i i think there's a distinction between it doesn't matter what you have and you have a choice as to what you have uh okay yeah we're trying to drive that second one so it the point of matter was not to make everything the same. The point of matter was to take the things that are the same, like the underlying foundational they have in their home won't work with that new platform, or they don't have to worry when they go to the store and

they buy something what it'll work with or not. Right? There's a big difference between having having a smart device. I guess what we're avoiding here is is not so much the flexibility, but you're avoiding the lock in, like, right you're not locked in to only using Apple products or only using Amazon products. You can buy one of these things at the store and it's guaranteed to work. Yeah. Right. And we talked about this with the Cedia crowd too, because I mean, talk about a market that's like very walled garden-y, right?

You got to compete based on the lock-in, so to speak, is based on how much your user loves your experience, right? That's what keeps people in ecosystems if you're just competing because you're making it a pain in the butt for users to physically leave you're not going to win that in the long term like that's a very short-term strategy and so we know like that's what matter is is supposed to do i think the the analog that i like using is like and this works for a certain day i don't know what the demographic of your audience is but uh for those of us that used to get aol discs in the mail uh you know there was once a version of the internet where you know you picked your internet right

aol or compu serve or msn and everything was sort of prodigy yeah oh yeah i had that um and everything was dictated by by what that service had to offer and if your friends or whatever were on the other ones it was really kind of difficult for you yeah and eventually they all started to look kind of the same and and they were having trouble growing because of that limitation and then we went to open standards hdp and and ip and all these protocols that allowed the internet to become more open. And I mean, look what happened. Huge market opportunity. We all have it in our pocket. There's so much innovation. There's so much innovation for services. And you don't necessarily have to

pick one thing. My whole life is in Google. And I use all of that stuff for my day-to-day productivity and email and whatever. But there's lots of other services that I use that aren't offered by Google that are value-add. And I use a SmartThings platform at home. And so that openness, that choice is really what drives markets. And so that's what Matter is trying to do. It's not trying to say these things are all the same or flatten it or get rid of anything. It's trying to open that up. Makes a lot of sense in your example if you if you did switch platforms you know you you would have to

reconnect those devices that you already have to that new platform because like you kind of want there to be a consent mechanism to do that but um but they will work now in that new platform and there's more and more people are implementing u UXs that make it easier to like share devices from one to another. Gotcha. Okay. No, that makes a lot of sense. I think it's a big difference between, like I said, big difference being locked in to only using one platform and then having to go and take everything that you purchased and throw in the trash can, a bunch of e-waste there. Right.

And then start over again from zero, which, I mean, can happen in the pro world a lot. Exclude 300 devices from a hub and uh reattach them yeah yeah i know we've talked a lot about residential um are there any adoptions of matter that you're seeing kind of outside the house like are you seeing are there any commercial or industrial interests that are coming in and looking at matter it may not be at that stage right now but i'm just kind of curious if there's anything outside the house that that matter is able to help with no for sure so we actually have like a commercial uh we call it like a tiger team it's like a group within the work group looking specifically at commercial applications for matter

and so there's a lot of like the big names that you would expect to find in that group. And that ranges from like the CDA type installer applications to like the large building automation systems. And I think there's interest for a number of reasons. One, these companies tend to like IP because all their existing systems are all based on IP and a lot of former connectivity technologies weren't. And so it can be hard to mesh those together. And so the fact that Matter is based on it makes the idea of integrating easier. And I think particularly for the ones that are in the middle,

where it's residential but more pro-residential, there's a lot of cool devices that are already out and are coming out. And I know you guys in the professional installer sort of world had on, we heard this at CD a lot. There's a lot of times where consumers want that like cool thermostat or that cool lighting device or whatever that's like on the shelf at Best Buy. But there isn't an easy way to integrate that into like a pro install system. And pretty soon, like there's more cooler stuff outside your walled garden than there is inside the walled garden. And so there needs to be a good way to connect those devices that maybe have

been built for the DIY off the shelf consumer market into those more pro markets. And that, that requires effort of course, on the people who make those platforms to enable that connectivity and support matter. But there's also things like, like Seth,

you know, I've talked about like tools, right? That industry needs a lot of tools. And Matter in its early version was built more specifically for a user to go in, buy something, and connect it to their system. I think there's a lot of great opportunities, including business opportunities for people building tools that will help installers and professional commercial systems better integrate Matter devices. And there's also hooks and things we need to build into the standard to help that. But there's a lot

of interest and activity in that. And so anyone who's interested in that can join and contribute to that conversation. And I know we'll touch on tools in a bit, but in terms of Matter 1.2, it was released in October. Can you just go through, like, what does it bring to the standard? You know, how is the adoption bring? You know, are there any challenges you whenever you introduce a new version? Sure. So, you know, I think each each new versions usually will have so we've our goal is to do two new versions a year. So sort of a spring and a fall release, not exactly on the same day, but that's sort of what we aim for. And that sort of helps keep things rolling. And it's, it's, it helps motivate people like, hey, if there's a feature device type you want,

and you kind of have to get the work done in order to make sure it lands for this feature release. Otherwise, you got to wait for the next one. It also helps people to plan, right? If they they want to have a device and market of, you know, winter 2024, they better make sure it's in the spec for, you know, fall 2023, so fall 2023 so that other people can support it because it's all about interoperability. So it's a great process that way. Typically, you will probably see both core foundational feature updates that make everybody's lives better and then new support for specific device types or categories of devices. So 1.2 was a great example of that. We had support for some foundational appliances, like refrigerators, really any box that can cool

things. So we listed things like kimchi freezers and fridges and deep freezers and things like that, anything in that category. Room air conditioners, sort of standalone units dishwashers you know those kind of air quality devices robotic vacuums smoke and co alarms I mentioned sensors and purifiers and like a bunch of stuff around fans both standalone and like fans that are part of things which are a big user journey for people washing machines yes washing machines but not dryers I know believe me we spent a bunch of time going like how are you going to explain this to people um i'm happy to digress on that for a minute and it's oh we're curious as to how that happened i want to know a lot of a lot of clothes lines out there i guess uh well okay you joke but in

europe yeah so in europe yeah a lot of people have washers and not dryers. And by the way, a lot of appliance companies are European. So they help to bring that perspective into the standard. We are a global org after all. I think the way you have to think about it is like, think back to those Lego blocks, right? We're building a lot of foundational stuff right now. So this is the first release of appliance support. And everybody has only so many resources to dedicate to development. And so picking some device types that are really good representations of a lot of other appliances, and where like, if you build for washers, you're going to get a lot of building blocks out of it that are then good for the rest

of the appliances, makes a lot of sense. so things like notifications and cycle and modes and heat and you get a lot out of a laundry washer not just in terms of you can't actually go to market with just that alone but just like all that stuff can now be copy and pasted into dryers and and and other types of appliances so you really have to think about it that way. Like we're building the foundation for all of this stuff. And, you know, this just means that we officially stamp of approve like that piece of the spec. It doesn't mean that like we're not already like deep into work on the other appliances and the things that follow.

So all of that is continuing to be worked on. And once you see these foundational bits, you know, there'll be more sort of rapid releases of the things that come out. And do you see any challenges whenever you release a new version? I'm guessing like the various platforms have to update their code to support the new stuff, right? Are they quick to adopt it? Or does it take time to adopt it? You know, what are you seeing with that? I mean, I think maybe the unsatisfying answer is we'll see. I do think it is up to each of the platforms to decide when they're going to push adoption. I think there's a lot of pressure on them to do that. God knows,

Jen at The Verge is always on our butts on when we will support these things. And the device makers also have a lot of pressure on the platforms because, you know, they want to bring devices to market. There's no point in doing that if the platform don't support it. But having worked for at least

two major platforms now, I can also tell you internally, there's a lot of competitive pressure and just, you know, to deliver a good product to make sure we're supporting those products and those features that are going to be

critical to the device vendors and to our users. So I do think you'll see a relatively rapid cadence, particularly of like the core and features that are out there. Obviously, there's going to be a time span between like, hey, it's available in the spec. And hey, there's devices in the real world, because there's implementation, there's testing, there's scaled rollouts, there's all of that to make sure we do that well. But I think, especially as time goes on, you're going to see that get shorter and shorter. One of the nice things about the way Matter developed is like, we talked about this earlier, it's not an academic exercise, like even just to get a feature approved for development, you have to have, you know, you and enough of your friends interested in implementing it.

And to get it out the door at the end of the line, multiple companies have to have actually implemented and tested products against each other. So that definitely, you're starting off from a much more developed standpoint. But there are also real world things. Just because you made a product today doesn't mean it's on the shelf at Walmart tomorrow. You have to work with your distributors and when is it going to be released and what's the release window and have all the marketing behind it so all of the regular product cycles things still exist in this world even if like the spec is immediately available but i do think you'll see a shorter time from spec availability to when those devices are there over time yeah when one

thing is nice i mean you mentioned earlier that this is completely, like there's an open source implementation. You can kind of go in there and poke around and see things like, there are milestones that are on there and you can kind of poke your head into some of the issues that are open or the issues that are recently closed

and kind of see what the team, I guess their teams, plural, are all working on. All the pedantic arguments we're all having with each other over stuff there must be some interesting meetings yeah i'm it's interesting i'm seeing a lot of like darwin conversations come up for like maybe releases that are further out but that kind of implies to me that maybe mac os x will get some type of matter implementation in it in the future

which is kind of cool uh well i mean one of the things to keep in mind is like, especially for controllers, though, this is really esoteric, but like the way they're certified is you sort of certify a software component and then you can drop that component into a bunch of stuff. So you can drop it into a HomePod or a SmartThings station or a TV or a Nest Hub or things like that. And potentially Mac OS, right? Or your operating system.

And so I think technically, like, I don't want to speak on other companies' behalf, but there's a lot of interesting products that like technically are matter controllers that you would not think about that just because they have the, they share common software components.

Right. And, you know, there's thread in the new iPhone. You're seeing Android starting to implement functionality for that. So you can certainly see more of those smart home applications coming into devices other than just the news tops. Yeah,

no, I guess my point is here. It's like, it's just interesting to see all of this laid out for you kind of as a nice roadmap. There's things in here, like you said, you wouldn't even think would be in here.

They're in here and they're talking about them ahead of time. And I think that that's's really that's really cool like there's stuff on here for up to it looks like 1.4 1.5 is here but i don't think there's anything on it like there's no nothing kind of been tossed into that bucket yet but that's i mean that's on the right now waiting for it's okay yeah yeah yeah it's a plan yeah it's nice to see. The way things work is like, so let's say someone wants to have a new feature. So I don't know. Let's say there's some garage controller companies that might want to take it.

What an opportunity. I do know. Yeah, I do know that was a big conversation we had at Cedia. Yeah, and every episode since. And they want to, you know, maybe let's go build a standard because there's there's a gap in the market um to do that um i mean they show up at i mean my door and say hey

you know we think this is interesting they sort of present their case to the group if enough people are like yeah well we'd work on this we kick off a team they sort of develop what we call the either the marketing requirements document or new feature requests where they sort of detail all like the use cases that they're trying to enable. Everybody's like, yeah, this makes sense. It's within the scope. We think it's doable. There's an approval process for that. And then they move to, you know, my colleagues in the technical group and go and write that into the spec. So again, it's like really that market driven open approach. And so typically what you're seeing is, you know, there's people who are like, okay, we think we can get this done by 1.3 or 1.4 and then either stuff falls out of that and then rolls into 1.5

or people are just everybody's very ambitious about getting their thing in the next cycle so that's probably why you're seeing more focus on like the next two than the third one out than the one that's realistic yes i know exactly how that yes exactly yeah and also if you're if you're a member of the alliance like you you there's more of that repository that you have access to um so there's stuff that's not necessarily just available publicly interesting and okay i'm gonna jump into this tooling um there's a number of us i'm gonna call us they're like early adopter pains right we jumped in on the day

one it was released we got whatever we could we added it and we've had issues where you know devices do drop off whether it's thread device i think it's mainly thread devices i see it with right where they will drop off but are there going to be any tools are you guys thinking about this that will help us troubleshoot because right now when something drops off my only like the only thing i can think of is start rebooting stuff sure i don't know what to reboot i don't know you know where it is but that's all i can think of right so maybe you know are you guys thinking of something to help us troubleshoot these kind of things yeah so i think i think there's there's um like there's two species of challenges so one is like yeah mean, early us early adopters are professionally and perpetually

unsatisfied. So there's always going to be like, hey, I did the most advanced thing I could possibly do on day one, and it didn't quite work that smoothly. And now I'm going to go complain about it on the internet. So I think we did see a lot of that initially. And I mean, fine, if that's great, that keeps everybody honest, right? Like a really good example of it is, I think for most people set up was really great. That keeps everybody honest, right? Like a really good example of it is, I think for most people set up was really great. From day one, it was really easy to get those devices connected to

like the one smart home platform they had. There was a little bit more trouble people had like connecting it from platform A to platform B and doing what we call multi admin sharing. Some of that was technical, but some of it was just like every eco, the UX designer of each platform made different choices. And so it was really hard to say like every eco, the UX designer of each platform made different choices. And so it was really hard to say like, okay, go look for this button on the other platform, unless you knew specifically what app they were using and what they called it and etc. That experience, for instance, has gotten better. And we're even working internally on like a best practices manual that says like, hey, you know, let's all call things the same thing. Let's make it so that I, you know, if you're moving, if you're copying a device from,

you know, Samsung to Google, I can give you instructions without knowing specifically what you've got on the other side. So there's a lot of learning that's happening there to make lives easier. But you know, the number of mass market users who really are going to connect a device to five different ecosystems on day one is overrepresented in the early adopter group in the early days. So there's that stuff. Yeah. I think on the other side, honestly, I feel this too. I think too often when something goes wrong in your smart home, all you get is a voice system going, sorry, Dave, I can't do that. 15 things did not respond and not as much help in figuring out where

that was. Thankfully with Matter, we're reducing the number of places that there could be a problem. And those places are now more directly connected. So it should be easier to say, hey, this is where the problem is. This is what was disconnected. I think that more visibility and more tools is increasingly a focus and is coming. You can see some app vendors, you know, even Nanoleaf, you can give you a little bit more insight

into like your thread networks, for instance. But I mean, those aren't meant to be like diagnostic tools. So they're just what we have. There are apps like Discovery, which you can use on iOS and OS X and Hub.

But, you know, you have to really know what you're looking for for so i do think they're going to be more and more helpful tools both both standalone because you can do that and baked into some of the apps that we have to help us diagnose hopefully fewer and fewer problems along the way but it is a an area of a lot of energy you got to remember all the people involved in this are also smart home nerds. So like all of the user problems, like we also have them. I wasn't kidding about like, you know,

having all the product managers on Slack. It's, we all see those challenges and we all want to solve them. Yeah, it will be, it's still early days, I get it. We're talking 1.2, right? Yeah. So, you know

but definitely getting some type of uh some type of energy uh in in from from the people involved to build out these kind of like logging or tooling i don't even know what that would look like you know in inside of uh inside of the ecosystem and but there's a lot of things that just that just happen right like you don't know why they happen lot of things that just that just happen right like you don't know why they happen um you know they just they just happen like well that light turned on over there that one didn't i don't know why uh or why are those lights turning on like i don't know why i mean that's a really good example so like we talked about for instance in 1.2 um like the new device type support but there's also of course stuff that's trying to make it easier to um like build the architecture of your smart home platform so there's things like semantic tagging

so it's easier to understand like oh i have a button with four button i have a remote with four buttons well maybe this one's like lower left button and this one's a top button and things like just make it easier for the real world to map to okay yeah the experience that people are building but there's other things like um you like a feature that we are working on for upcoming releases like source attribution. So literally your point, a light just turned on. Why? Did a human turn it on?

Was it turned on in power? Was there a demand response request or something sent to it that turned it on? Did another ecosystem turn it on? And that way if you have multiple things in your home that might affect that device they can maybe act either report to you if you're interested but also act intelligently right right i might maybe i have an automation that you know turns my thermostat or my lights off at a certain time of day but like 10 seconds ago i just turned that

light on i probably don't want that automation to turn it off. And so that'll help things be more intelligent. So we're also continuing to build in those pieces that sort of make everybody's life better. Yeah. And kind of going back to what you said at the beginning, when we first started talking about how this is designed as a broad market product, and you know, most people won't run into those problems. But like, if you look at, you look at Gavin and myself, like Gavin is going to use Home Assistant and he's got everything in there. I'll listen to you set up with, you know, Chef's Kiss, Perfection, you know, naming and everything.

No, but he's got a lot of stuff going on over there and he can drill down and find out, you know, what's going on and why this message didn't get delivered over here inside of that. And I'm running HomeKit over here and I'm like, I swear I set that light to turn on at eight o'clock in the morning, just to make sure it was turning off or whatever. And it's not doing it. Like, did it do it or did I miss it or what?

And I have no idea what happened. So yeah, how do you bridge in between? Like, what is the interface of that? Like, what does it even look like? I have no idea. I'm not an expert in that at all. Like, is it just a giant log stream? Who knows?

Hey, that's where the market comes in, right? Like, our job is to build the hooks and the features in that enable those types of experiences. And then I think, you know, there's going to be a lot of great innovation out there from companies in terms of how to deliver that to users, right? The way Home Assistant might deliver that to you is probably something you would love and probably something a lot of people would hate and have no idea what to do with in mass market. It would be YAML. It would be a giant YAML file. The number of times solving things with, oh, technically it works as long as you know how to code in YAML. But I think part of the challenge and innovation, and I think there the experiences that pro users like and make them accessible to the everyday user in a way that doesn't feel daunting

and intimidating and helps them. And so, you know, there's a difference between, hey, we have this insight and we can use it for DIY tech support, or we have this insight and we can do this for assisted tech support. I think there's a lot of opportunities there. But like the foundational elements have to be there to enable it.

And I think previously they hadn't necessarily been there. If a message goes out into the cloud and never comes back, how do I know why? The tree falls in the forest problem. Exactly. Right. And so I think that's going to start getting, that level of transparency is going to start getting there. Looking ahead, what exciting developments or milestones can we anticipate in the near future for Matter? Is there any upcoming features or partnerships that you're particularly excited about?

I mean, I'm trying to think about what we've talked about publicly or not. You can just tell us all the juicy bits. It's just us listening. Don't worry. You can just tell us. Just let us know afterwards. We can edit it out. But the thing is, Seth, you mentioned there's so many times where we're hemming and hawing with reporters or whatever

and what's coming up. And it's like, just look in the GitHub. There's way more in there than people realize. I think we've talked about things like enabling access points, which I think could be really cool. So how do we build good smart home infrastructure into the devices that have historically been the infrastructure of the home, making sure there's more thread border routers and

Wi Fi routers and that those routers are capable of handling more smart home devices more intelligently can can do that, like credential sharing and make sure that devices can can operate across and maybe help solve some of that password problem with per device credentials. I think there's a lot of cool stuff. Again, that sounds very complex, but for most users, hopefully it's like go buy this Matter Access Point and you'll have the infrastructure you need for your smart home, I think is a great selling point for device makers and users. I think some of the work that's going on with regards to energy management and reporting. So we've talked about that. We're working on a bunch of features to bring that into the standard. I would love if every device I have

is capable of saying how much energy it's using. And I can manage and monitor that. I think there's a lot of great competition and opportunities in that space. And I mean, there's just a lot more interesting device types. And like we kind of talked about with things like addressable lighting, et cetera,

like the more advanced features of existing device types, I'm really excited about and having be able to do sort of those more bespoke, interesting, nuanced automations in the home. Excellent. Well, Daniel, I do want to thank you very much for spending a ton of time with us today, talking about all the Lego building blocks of and i guess i guess we probably can't can't say it that way but you know the little like understanding what matter is um and and what it's trying to accomplish what it's trying to do and kind of removing it away from like what the pundits thought it was going to do i think it's kind of a big big thing that we even myself i learned a lot while we were talking today i'm like oh i'm just thinking about it in a different way after talking to you.

Great. So I do want to thank you for taking your time to come on the show and explain it to us. Are we going to be able to have you back when 1.3 drops? Are we going to get you back on? Nowhere to find me. All right. If our, if our listeners who are, who want to keep up to date with Matter and dive a little bit deeper into what we just talked about today, can you share how they can follow your work or get in touch with you for any additional questions or updates?

Sure. standards alliance newsletter um and maybe the the thread groups uh if if you're into the networking side of things as well um follow those organizations on linkedin that's probably where they are most prolific in terms of like news and updates and places where you can listen um as far as myself um definitely you can follow me on linkedin that's probably where i post the most you know industry specific content um i do have a Twitter account under my name. I may post more in the future as we were talking about, or you can reach out to me. My sort of site consulting email is Daniel dot Mineta at wow. Signal corporation,

sorry, wow. Signal corp.com. Any, any of those you can get me. Awesome. Well, Daniel,

thank you again so much for joining us on the show and helping us understand matter a little bit better. Yeah, of course. Looking forward to the episode. Thanks, guys. We're going to move on here to our pick of the week. Let's see. I ran across this a couple of months back and it's been sitting in my like to do items to buy. And I kind of put it on our back burner here. And this I have a desk. My desk is not very big. It's like, um, it's a work bench that I bought from home Depot six or seven years ago when I figured I probably will be working in the garage

and let me get this work bit work because it work bench, because it looks like a standing desk, I guess, but it's a work bench and Husky makes it. So if you go into like a home Depot, any home Depot, they have these sitting in there. And I was like, I can crank this up and I can use it as a standing desk or I can lower it or whatever. Anyway, all that to say my desk is not very, it's long. It's like a seven foot desk, but it's very skinny, maybe two feet wide. And I don't have very much space, but I do have the need sometime for cords and whatnot. And there's always like cords dangling around and flops on my desk and everything. And I ran across this thing called a quick draw and it's by a

company called Elevation Lab. And it sits under the desk. It like attaches to the bottom of the desk. I've got, I have all sorts of stuff attached to the bottom of my desk, wiring management, cable things. I've got actually the, the microphone interface interface I have here is tucked away in velcro under the desk and it's it's not in a great spot because my daughter there's a blue light on it and a blue button that has a light my daughter turns that off all the time my mic doesn't work I'm like what the heck and I have to look under the desk and she's turned it off but this is perfect for me like I I need to stick cables under the desk and just like every now and then I need a charging

cable and I can just reach under there and grab this thing. It looks like a little blue quick release button. You can reach under it, grab the cable, plug it in. And then when you're done, stick it back under the desk and you don't see it anymore. And this looks great. I think, I think I'm going to, you can get them in a two, a single, a two pack and a four pack. They started what? $13, $20 for the two pack and $30 for the four-pack. You might as well just do the four-pack. I mean, that's the one that makes the most sense. That's eating into my Govee budget, though.

Yeah, that's what you need on a go-lodging. You're going to need one for USB-C, for Lightning, for USB, micro-USB. I wonder if I can stack them. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I'm just now looking at the website for the first time, and they got some pretty cool products. I'm going to have to go through there and see what i can add to my cart because right now i have that little organizer thing and then i have a headphone holder which the headphone

holders whatever i mean people make those oh they have a ton of stuff interesting yeah they don't they don't make just one thing huh and the funny part is as i look at these things i'm like i could 3d print that you know when you have a 3d printer you think of it different you know i'm opening up printables now and you can find headphone holders you know they got air tag holders and all kinds of stuff yeah i made a headphone holder before that screws onto my desk yeah for sure you could make all i think you could probably make most of these products but i where's the fun in them yeah for sure you could make all i think you could probably make most of these products but i for where's the fun in them yeah for twelve dollars i can uh i can just buy one so there you go yeah i don't know pick of the week there you go uh it seemed like a pretty good deal i think tj you were talking about um like a boardroom or something that could use something

like this yeah if you have like an ethernet cable underneath or something maybe it'll snap in there that's a good idea there's one picture with uh i guess it's the apple mouse they're charging it but the poor thing's like on its back you know oh yeah it's so sad the beached whale impaled turtle mouse that they designed that yeah it's horrible design i have one of those and i i i keep forgetting i have it but it's i slip it into like a travel bag just in case i need a mouse while i'm traveling i guess but it never comes out of there um i got it because you could use it with ipad a while back but i never i don't use that anymore i use the pencil there you go bet the apple mouse is not the pick

of the week the quick draw is is a good pick of the week. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, pick of the weeks or great ideas for show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And that's going to wrap it up this week. We do want to give a big thank you for everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our 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. Just one

dollar. Just one dollar. That's $12 a year. That's it. That's it, yeah. It's a bargain. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a shout out on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private Slash Chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and discuss all sorts of things in there recently um you get tj's light you can make fun of my

lights and richard looks quick on that one we're gonna get an advanced preview of tj's lights in there uh we there's been all sorts of like little things that have popped up like uh rebooting doorbells and all sorts of fun stuff in here you you actually i think i think you get to see jimmy's projects before he posts them on like tiktok or anything like that so yeah a little bit all right well if that's that's not a reason for the price admission i don't know what it is but anyway oh the oh the the the toilet paper holder with the light built in. Oh, that was great. That was awesome.

That could have been the pick of the week. I told Nicole I was going to get one. I was like, we have to get this. My next automation project. I ran across one of those in one of those $5 stores. It's not a dollar store because of inflation. Five and below. Five and below, yeah.

They have all sorts of weird little RGB things like that in there. And i ran across one of those in there like a rgb toilet paper holder yeah well i'm not i'm not gonna believe you because you didn't make us aware of it yeah jimmy jimmy made us aware of it so yeah and this one's as far as i'm concerned he basically invented them all right well there you go see that this is all the stuff you're missing these really cool inventions that were coming up with So, all right. If you want to help out, but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review or recommendation in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech. Everyone have a great weekend and we will talk to you next week. Till next time. Take care. slowing us down gavin's got to go you got a hot hot date tonight gavin yeah it's wing night wing night it's taco tuesday not wing wednesday it's wing night tonight