Hello everyone. Thanks for tuning in again. We're going to go through another
episode of new smart home products and new home automation features here for
you right after this. The first thing I'm going to talk to you about this week is
called Amazon Key. Now that's a service that was produced by Amazon
last year, and when they announced that service, it was intended as an
opportunity for you, as someone ordering off of Amazon, to open up your home when
you know there's an Amazon parcel arriving. That allows the Amazon
delivery person to drop that parcel inside your home. Now what amazon has
done recently, is they've actually opened this up to being able to deliver to your
vehicle. This is only possible if you have a certain model of vehicle. We're
talking 2015 and greater GM's with an OnStar service or a Volvo, again
2015 or greater, and the Volvo on-call service there. You have to be signed up
for one of those two things and have that vehicle be newer than the 2015
model...or the 2015 model or newer. If you're like me, you've been using the
Google Play Music service for a long time.
The reason I started using Google Play Music was actually the capability of
uploading my entire library of music and then having it be cloud-based. So this
gave me the opportunity to put all my music somewhere and not have to pay for
that. Now of course I went ahead I started paying for the service because I
wanted access to their entire library of music, however its sounding like YouTube
Remix is a new service. It's a new service that will be coming out here
right away from Google, and it will be replacing Google Play Music. I think
we've seen the writing on the wall a little bit for the entire Google Play
ecosystem or set of applications here. It just seems like
those are not being carried through, and a service like YouTube Remix sounds like
the next evolution. I want to tell you about a new product. Tthis is something
that again you can go and find on Kickstarter, so we're seeing some of
these technology type of inventions, or products, coming out on Kickstarter and
they're fairly serious products. So what I want to talk to you about
today is called SpeakEasy by Coma Audio, and this speaker has the Google
Assistant on board. What's more, is it can actually be a portable speaker, and can
be used for multi-room audio. This is along with your Google assistant. Now what
Como Audio has actually come out and said what you'll need to do is go buy a
Google Chromecast Audio in order to create that multi-room audio. They've just ensured
that the right port is there for you to use with their speaker. This next story
is a little relatable for me as someone who's a Computer Engineer, and who
completed a number of these product development type projects
throughout school, and in order to get my engineering degree. Now what's come
out from a university, and also from Disney Research, is actually a wall. And
they're calling it Wall++. Now Wall++, they're saying it costs
about $20 per meter in terms of materials, and then the wall is actually physically
connected to a control board. So Wall++ is essentially capable of
reading movement, sensing electromagnetic fields, or electronics in a room. Just based on
fields, magnetic fields, electromagnetic fields, coming off the wall. It's even
able to sense you as a person. It would be able to do even better if you are a
person wearing sensors. This is still in a research stage, but I think
it's pretty easy to see just from the demo, and I'll leave a
link down below for you to go watch this video. You can see from their demo that
it's going to be capable of doing a lot of the sensing that we've talked about
in the past, actually with Roomba saying "hey, we can travel around
your home, map what you're doing, map what type of devices you have around your
home." This Wall++ is capable of doing that with objects, with people, with
objects, being turned on like lights. And so it's applications appear to be
endless to me. So this is a great video for you to go watch here at the end of
our video. One of the things that I've been watching a lot is the IFTTT
platform. Now they've had a number of opportunities to go out and get
funding from different sources, but they have yet to really produce a full,
complete business model, that allows them to go and make money in order to
keep the platform alive. I think this is a big risk to us, as you know smart
home people, home automation people, because this platform ultimately allows
you to connect almost everything. Recently If This Then That has actually
come out and they're now talking about helping what they're calling legacy
companies, or companies that just don't have a smart home product, or don't
really have a automation type of focus. They want to help those companies
connect to this smart world or the Internet of Things, and so that would
allow them to pull money out of those companies in order to connect them and
partner with them. And so this is a model that they can go ahead and
use for going forward to produce revenue, and therefore to keep the service free
for the users like you and I. I don't talk a lot about Chinese
manufacturers of smart home equipment. There's just not a lot out there that I
think has the functionality that you and I are looking for.
They really just don't have that deep automation functionality yet.
However, the tides are starting to change, or turn, and I want to tell you about
Xiaomi and their Aqara series of products. This is a series of products
that they've recently announced. Now the Aqara series has a light bulb, a
cube controller, a smart door lock, and that door lock actually has a
fingerprint sensor. Now what they've come out and announced is that they're going
to have Apple HomeKit capability in the very near future. On top of that they're
talking, by the end of 2018, to actually have the capability of connecting with
both the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa or Echo device. The last thing I want
to talk about this week is in relation to Sonos. Now I could talk to you a
little bit about Sonos offering updates and letting you go to Airplay2 - and you
know that's that's good stuff, don't get me wrong, but what I want to talk about
this week is actually the fact that Sonos has filed for a smart home theater
speaker. It would have onboard an HDMI port, so this much we know. what we
also think from the filing, or what it seems to be from the filing, is a smart
home speaker, with an on board voice assistant. So I imagine this is going to
look a lot like a Sonos One. Hopefully in this case it has both of
the voice-enabled assistants on board like we've been coming to expect from
the Sonos One. So there you have it. That's our video for this week related
to smart home products, your home automation features, all those new things
that are out there this week. I hope this has helped you, and if it has of course
there's a subscribe button coming at the end of this video. So thanks for watching
everyone. We'll see you next time!