Happy Sunday Morning, here from this part of the world! Kids are all back in school and college, and having a little more time to grow the smart home training side of the business. And planning to start teaching the next cohort of Certified Next-Generation Smart Home Installer (NGSHI) Professional Program Training Program graduates towards the end of the month, no dates fully agreed yet, but keep an eye on emails, etc…Anyway back to all the cool smart home developments that occurred this week:
New Nest Stuff 🪹
Can’t remember if I told of all of you about Nest’s new stuff but I came across a review and wanted to highlight it. Before I reveal some more on this, let me take a quick fleeting visit through the Nest memory lane. Nest really revolutionized the smart home space with their iconic smart thermostat, and Tony Fadell shot to stardom as an awesome product designer. Google picked up on this trend and bought the place lock, stock, and barrel for 3.2 billion. Armed with tons of cash, Nest continued to refine their smart home portfolio and expanded into security through the acquisition of Dropcam for their cameras. Once comfortable in the camera space, Google marched into alarms, doorbells, and smoke detectors. So, nowadays, Google does have a well-rounded portfolio of smart home products, and any refinements of this in terms of new iterations catch my eye. Hence, I read with interest a new review from Gizmodo on the companies latest Doorbell. The key messages are this new Nest doorbell is bigger, wireless, and cheaper!
Rocky Smart Locks 🔑
On the smart lock front, I came across a kinda interesting story about Level Bolt and Rocky Mountain Hardware hooking up. Never came across the Rocky Mountain crew (I’m sure they’re giants in the door security business), but Level Bolt is really trying to ‘nestify’ their solutions. In other words, try and mainstream smart locks. In this announced partnership, Level is embedding its HomeKit technology into a variety of Rocky Mountain Hardware collections. Seems like a good move by both companies and can only help to grow the smart lock space. Here are some relevant highlights of the partnership announcement.
This Weeks Blog Post
It’s dark, you’re hungry, and you finally grab the right key, but now you can’t locate the keyhole. A bit frustrating…! Enter the smart lock and up-and-coming category of smart home devices that instantly recognize homeowners as they approach, turning on the entry light above the front door, opening the door with a reassuring snap of smooth mechanical motion.
>> Read the complete article on the blog
HomeDepot Smart Home App 🏬
This is one that came from left field; US-based Home Depot released a smart home app. Aptly named Hub pace, the system is marketed as a new smart home platform that makes smart home products easy to set up and control with new smart devices. Once products have been set up in the Hubspace app, they can easily integrate with the Google Home or Alexa apps and enable voice controls for hands-free product control. It does show some commitment to the smart home and wishes them well, but the smart home graveyard is full of mainstream retailers such as best buy and Lowes who attempted and failed to really succeed in this space. Wish them the best and will keep an eye out as things evolve at Home Depot. All the details about Hubspace can be found here.
Philips and Hue 💡
Ah, this is cool! Big fan of Hue bulbs in the O’Driscoll household for years and like this latest announcement. Drum roll… it’s got to do with Spotify partnering with Signify (maker of Philip’s Hue smart lighting products)! As a result, your smart bulbs will automatically sync up with whatever music you have played, changing color and flashing along to the beat. To get this working in your house you do need a hue bridge, which we have, and might set it up for the kids over the coming weeks. Click here to learn a little more.
Speak up Alexa 🗣️
Ever feel yourself roaring ‘LOUDER’ to your Alexa speaker? Well, I do! Amazon knows about the problem and is introducing a new feature called adaptive volume, as the name suggests, it will detect a noisy environment and respond accordingly. The word on the street is that the feature is only in the US region at the moment and you will hear more about this feature in due course. Excuse the pun 😊 You can check out this online article for a few more snippets.
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command! 🎤
Hey Siri, Turn on the fan in my home office
This is it for today, See you next Sunday 😉. If you have colleagues, friends, or neighbors that would benefit from knowing about smart home devices, please consider sharing them.