Forget about connecting your smart home, can you imagine the technical challenge of connecting a rhinoceros to the internet (http://fortune.com/2015/07/27/iot-rhinos/)? That's what a new anti-poaching organization called Protect has done with its effort to connect rhinos in South Africa to the internet as part of an anti-poaching effort (http://weareprotect.org/index.html). Kevin and I discuss the project on this week's show, as well as the challenges of living with new products that try to train algorithms to help make life easier. So far, their just make you have to interact more with mobile apps.
We also discuss Best Buy's plan to use the Geek Squad as a network of experts to help homeowners navigate the complexities of the internet of things. Neither Kevin nor I are sure this is the way to save Best Buy, but we're willing to see if the Geek Squad can become the Apple Genius Bar of the smart home. In other retail news, we snagged David Newman, the man in charge of pulling together Target's Open Home store concept that was launched earlier this month to discuss plans for the space and what he's learned so far (http://fortune.com/2015/07/09/target-open-house/). He also shares why the furniture inside the store is clear. Listen up, and before you go, please note that Kevin and I will be skipping our show next week because we're taking a quick week-long break in broadcasting. See you next on August 14.
Hacked cars, Quirky's cash crisis, connecting the Echo and Wink and why crowdfunding isn't working for hardware companies anymore.
This week we don't have a guest on the show, but we covered a lot of great stuff starting with the week's news about The thread Group releasing its code and Qualcomm joining the group touting the wireless protocol (http://for.tn/1RwffOm). We also spent a considerable amount of time covering Target's new retail concept for the internet of things (http://fortune.com/2015/07/09/target-open-house/). The retailer has opened up a store in San Francisco that stocks connected devices from 50 vendors and shows people how these products work in a simulated home and how they work together.
Listen up to hear how Target plans to use the store as a lab to learn about how to sell the internet of things. After that we talk about using connected devices in sports, specifically tennis (http://www.tiauknews.org/news/2014/12/11/babolat-set-to-grow-connected-tennis). Since Wimbledon just wrapped up we pulled data on connected tennis rackets on Babolat from IBM (http://ibmcai.com/2015/07/09/can-the-internet-of-things-make-tennis-smarter/) and discussed how better data might change the way the sport is played and how it may influence the rules of the game. Kevin also referenced a scary NASCAR crash that you can see here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84hz9w2GlV4).
Finally, our 5-minute review this week is on the Vivint doorbell camera.
If you love something you should set it free, but if you love a connected device you should spend gobs of money adding more gadgets until you have a platform. And this week I have done just that, spending $20 on six light bulbs that I can control with my Amazon Echo. I explain how I used GE's Link lights which work with the Philips Hue platform, which works with the Amazon Echo, to both lower my overall energy spend and add voice control to more of the lights in my home. It's awesome.
After this week's news and my lighting project I welcome Andrew Farah,CEO of Density to the show to discuss how we might count people in public places. Before y'all get too worked up, his sensors offer anonymity, and we discuss why merchants, offices, consumers and governments would be keen on getting a tally of people inside buildings. We also talk about alternatives that rely on facial recognition and how building a company that sells data is very different from building a company that sells products.
The president recently made a famous podcast appearance (http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_613_-_president_barack_obama) but he didn't talk about the internet of things.
Since he has yet to offer to visit the IoT Podcast, I spoke to Darren Sammuelsohn, a senior policy reporter at Politico who recently spent seven weeks trying to discover what Washington D.C. thinks about the Internet of things.
The resulting series of articles (http://www.politico.com/agenda/issue/internet-of-things-july-2015) is informative and little bit scary so I had Sammuelsohn come on the show to share the D.C. take on all things IoT.