Well, we all survived another Black Friday. Smart Home Products factored heavily into the retail promotions of Amazon, Best Buy and others. One CyberMonday surprise was the announcement that Lowe’s has finally decided to stop being a service provider and is actively looking for a buyer for their Iris ecosystem. Lowe’s attempts to build their […]
As the sun sets, I ask Alexa to turn on the deck lights so my wife and I can enjoy some time together after we tuck our children in. When I do that, the whole sequence looks like the following: Alexa takes my voice and digitizes it The digitized command is sent to the Amazon […]
I was reviewing the NPS scores for the big three Smart Home Providers, ADT, Vivint and Xfinity for Q1 2018. You might recall that ADT had some issues with a system upgrade in June of 2017 that caused a flood of frustrated users taking to the airwaves, dropping ADT’s already low NPS into the bowels […]
Just a few days ago, I receive notice from Instagram that they were accelerating the shutdown of the bulk of their API features, including posting on user’s behalf, searching for results and subscribing to updates from particular users. Ostensibly this is to cut down on using these tools for nefarious reasons as Instagram’s parent company, […]
Ahead of the news from Facebook on Cambridge Analytica abusing the data of American citizens, Twitter started suspending accounts for a practice called Tweetdecking, where accounts would solicit and at times pay for accounts to artificially boost their classic influence metrics of reach and followers. Over the weekend of 18 March, some of the Internet […]
CES 2018 is a wrap. Right now everyone is returning to their normal days, nursing whatever bug they picked up from a week of frantic hand shaking across the petri dish of CES. Not only was I able to walk the show floor but we also collected every tweet and instagram post on the show. […]
While most of us are winding down 2017, getting our last holiday purchases done and looking forward to a few days of family and fun, there is a group of folks that will not get a real break from work until January 14th, when the Consumer Electronics Show finishes and these stalwart people can finally […]
We survived Friday the 13th last week but the terrifying news of the failure of WPA2 to protect our home and business Wi-Fi networks from being compromised still lingers. In an effort to find a silver lining to the fact that someone driving by (while they are looking for Amazon packages to pilfer or new […]
In the alphabet soup of wireless protocols in the Smart Home, several stand out. Everyone knows Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Bluetooth has fragmented into Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) ,Bluetooth Mesh and plain old Bluetooth. Consumers tend to buy what they know, which historically has given a boost to WiFi and Bluetooth over Zigbee and Z-Wave. Given […]
Discussions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are everywhere, ironically enough, some of it written and published by bots… Elon Musk continues to gain headlines for his crusade against the development of AI, citing concerns that if we pick the wrong utility function, humans could be optimized out of existence. (from his talk with Walter Issacson, if […]
Some of you may be old enough to remember the series, the Six Million Dollar Man. In addition to having his own ambient soundtrack when he ran, Steve Austin also had a Bionic Eye that would do wondrous things in his fight against the bad guys. Since the 1970’s, research has continued on how to […]
Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) have been part of the science fiction stable for years, but research has brought us closer to that reality every day. We are closer to enabling the control of devices without lifting a finger, a boon for those with injuries or disabilities that prevent them from controlling most devices. This could […]
