This week Kevin and I discuss the news from Google’s smart home event, and what it means for the big players in the game, standards efforts, your television, and whether Amazon can compete without a smartphone when it comes to the smart home. From there we talk about Arm’s decision to spin out its IoT services businesses and Synaptics buying Broadcom’s wireless IoT business. An update for Alexa, insecure smart cameras, and a skinny new codec round out the news segment this week. For the IoT Podcast Hotline, we answer a listener question about creating routines based on sunrise and sunset.
My guest this week takes us to the manufacturing floor where his company is enabling insurance providers to better assess risk and price policies accordingly. Saar Yoskovitz, co-founder and CEO at Augury, joins me to talk about the company’s new guarantee that is backed by Hartford Steam Boiler, a division of Munich Re, that pays customers IF Augury fails to anticipate a machine breakdown. We also discuss the role the pandemic has played for Augury’s business and how the company ended up launching a new product for its customers to help them keep production employees working remotely. Instead of just helping manufacturers keep an eye on the health of their machines, Augury has a web-based communication tool that lets production managers keep an eye on their plant and schedule workers. It’s a cool story.
Disclaimer: I’m from Crownstone, a manufacturer of switches/dimmers which embeds positioning indoors into smart homes.
Very good podcast, congrats! My take-away(s).
1. There are very good scenarios in which you don’t want to use voice. E.g. turning off a light when you’re in bed and your partner is already asleep.
2. Google Local Home SDK implementation is not touted by companies as reducing latency or keeping your data local.
3. Adults like warm lights, kids like cool lights according to Ikea (Tradfri).
If I may, what’s your opinion on the usefulness of indoor positioning? It allows “handsfree” operation (in thee sense that the presence of your mobile phone is sufficient, rather than opening an app). It used to be present in the Zuli plugs.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/indoor-positioning/77898
https://www.internalpositioning.com/
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/99n06w/individuals_in_room_tracking/
https://github.com/mKeRix/room-assistant
From the perspective of a smart house, it’s quite convincing that without knowledge on where people are, it’s smartness will be severely limited. You guys have probably quite a broad perspective on this. Curious!