This week Kevin and start the show with an educated guess about what comes next for Apple after the iPhone and then discuss the leadership transition at IFTTT. In the wake of Google saying that it didn’t disclose the microphone inside the Nest Guard box, Kevin and I reiterate our take from last week, which is that cameras and microphones should always be disclosed in the specs. We also talk about Osram being for sale, smart circuit breakers, Libellium’s embrace of NB-IoT and what Google needs to do to catch up to Amazon in the digital assistant race. Finally, we answer a question from a listener about creating panic buttons for the home.
This week’s guest is Tyson Tuttle, the CEO of Silicon Labs (NASDAQ: SLAB), a semiconductor firm that is making a big bet on IoT. Tuttle talks about the role of various radios in the smart home and in industrial settings. He also explains why he’s not worried about the tech giants snapping up gadget-makers that are using his chips. We end with a discussion on how we need to rethink tech and innovation for the edge. It’s a good chat.
OMG! I hate to be “that guy” but you spent a good portion of the podcast talking about why Apple has what it takes to succeed in the Health tech market – especially having the patience to properly test and certify health devices and then ..
A call in question from someone needing a panic button solution for a possibly truly life-threatening emergency and you casually give them a DIY solution using unproven, untested, and uncertified products that are not marketed for emergency/health alert use.
At an absolute minimum, you need to explicitly offer an up-front disclaimer that any life-threatening situation should not be entirely dependent on DIY / consumer solutions that are not designed or certified for that specific use.
I hate being the “get off my lawn” type of person as I am very much pro technology (I earn my living every day helping regular people master the complexity of smart homes and home automation), but I worry that literally, lives may be at risk here.
Robert Spivack
http://www.DoItForMe.Solutions
You came so close to answering your own questions on the Leviton Circuit Breaker devices… Integration with other systems and products is easy if you use Z-Wave or Zigbee, because they have a defined application layer. If Leviton made those breakers with Z-Wave for example, then every Z-Wave controller/gateway out there could turn the breaker on/off and could receive the measured power usage using command classes that already exist. Leviton uses WiFi because they are uploading the data to the cloud – their cloud – to use somehow… perhaps to sell you power conditioning or lighting protection devices. By making it WiFi, which has no application layer (it only moves information from point A to point B), they could come up with their own protocol/language which prevents anybody else from having access to the data.
So without integration as you mentioned, the data being the only thing you get out of it, the only one benefitting is Leviton. By the way, I am pretty sure you can’t turn the breakers back on using the app, so using it to control high-power loads is also a partial solution.