Hiya, Gerard here!
How’s it going? Hope you’re Sunday is going well, a few quick notes about the goings-on in the smart home space last week.
Ring Recalls
Co-incidentally! I tuned into Jason Calacanis’s podcast on Sunday – this week in startups a fan for nearly a decade at this stage! And ended up listening to his recent conversation with Ring smart home founder, Jamie Siminoff.
Great discussion with both in a jovial mood, but fast forward a few weeks and Amazon/Ring smart home has announced that they are recalling 350,000 video doorbells. The reason being ….that a dangerous combination of particular screw type with an overheated battery in the doorbell poses a fire risk.
Good to see the company is acting on this and taking the neccessary steps required to rectify the problem. The problem has been narrowed down to second generation video doorbells and I’m sure you will be hearing from Ring smart home if you have installed a defective device. Get the whole read from Fox News here.
Nest and Hue end their relationship
The long standing connectivity relationship between Nest Cam, Nest Thermostat and Nest Protect and Hue smart bulbs will end this Tuesday 🙁 Google were the instigators of the breakup and forms part of Google’s wider strategy to finish the Works with Nest program and bundle the various features into the Google Home App. Awesome idea, but Google you need to speed this iniative up, its a bit mad still having to setup new Nest products in the original Nest app.
Check out the official announcement here.
Hiya Josh
So Josh is making some interesting progress in the smart home space. Add .ai to the term and we get an emerging player within the smart speaker marketplace – josh.ai. Over the years have heard the companies founder, Alex Capecelatro speak on various smart home podcasts about how the product was progressing. The company provides a voice controlled home automation system focused on artificial intelligence for high-end homes. Did note in recent weeks that Josh AI were getting us smart home nerds excited about an upcoming product announcment. On Tuesday, all was revealed! It’s a coin sized smart microphone that is coin sized and is embedded into a wall. Here a few features of note:
- Includes four microphones
- Generally supplied by professional installers
- Links back to a server called josh core
The company is taking pre-orders, and check out the whole read here over at Google Finance.
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command!
Set the temperature to x°
Thanks for reading! Until next week, Gerard