This week’s show kicks off with news from Lennar about its new smart home offering with Ring, and a discussion on what it means that Ring now has more than 2,000 police and fire departments as partners. After that, we discuss what we learned from the Tesla recall about the business of connected products, and what options y’all have if you want to ditch your Wink hub. Then we talk about a Kickstarter for some smart infrastructure products, an update coming to Google Home, and wellness data coming to Google displays. In smaller news, we touch on Abode’s HomeKit widgets, Canonical’s Ubuntu Core 2.0 for IoT, and Kevin going all-in on HomeKit. We end by answering a listener question about the best HomeKit hub to use.
Our guest this week is Eric Feder, who is with LenX, the venture group for homebuilder Lennar. He’s on the show to talk about Lennar’s new partnership with Ring, Flo by Moen, Resideo, Level Lock, and more. We also discuss how Lennar’s views of the smart home have changed since it first started trying to integrate connected devices into its houses. He then talks about what features might be missing and investments the company has in new building techniques, gray water reclamation, and more. It’s a sneak peek into the future.
Love your show. Just wanted to present an alternative view on one of your pet peeves – for Amazon or Ring or any other company that is trying to expand their business footprint, rather than complain about their business models I think it might help if you explain to your audience why their business model is bad for end users with concrete examples and make a strong recommendation to stay away from offending products.
I think businesses will continue to do everything possible to increase shareholder value and it will be up to independent influencers like you to explain in layman’s terms the downsides (hopefully without being too hypothetical). You can also point to other very viable alternatives that work without the Cloud and can meet the needs.
Thanks for the great weekly updates!