Episode 78: There are no dead dogs on the internet of things

There’s a new Wink hub heading to Walmart, Home Depot and Amazon, so Kevin Tofel and I unpacked the new features on the second generation of the smart home hub in this week’s episode. We also discussed Amazon’s delivery plans that could take advantage of your connected door locks and garage doors, and then hit Kevin up for his opinion on the Apple Watch 2. SAP’s $2 billion investment in IoT, an IoT botnet, The Wirecutter’s favorite connected camera and Snap’s (formerly Snapchat) new glasses round out the show.

The Wink Hub 2 will sell for $99.
The Wink Hub 2 will sell for $99.

Afterward Carlos Herrera, the CEO of PetNet talks about what happened when his company’s pet feeder stopped sending users updates in late July. He offers a valuable lesson on building connected devices and sets the story straight about what really happened during a 12 hour server failure. All pets were fed during the lack of internet access, which means for now, the internet of things didn’t kill anyone’s dog.

Hosts: Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Tofel
Guest: Carlos Herrera, CEO of PetNet
Sponsors: HPE and ARM

  • What’s new with the Wink 2?
  • Amazon and August teaming up?
  • The Apple Watch 2 is a good fitness tracker
  • No dogs were kills during the loss of these servers
  • What a bunch of aerospace engineers learned when building a connected device

Published by

Stacey Higginbotham

I am a journalist who has covered technology for over a decade at publications such as Fortune, PCMag, Gigaom, The Deal and BusinessWeek.

3 thoughts on “Episode 78: There are no dead dogs on the internet of things”

  1. There is at least one way to have some insight into whether your surveillance cameras have been compromised. Presuming that you use a local NVR, keep close watch on your router’s outbound traffic. If the video is being recorded locally then the continuous data rate outbound should be within some known parameters. If the router indicates the outbound traffic is spiked in a continuous manner, then you know that you need to investigate.

    I do believe that local NVR is vastly preferable to someone’s cloud service. Although, presuming that you don’t continuously record to the cloud, you could invoke some traffic pattern analysis to be alerted when outbound traffic to simple too high for too long.

  2. It’s unlikely that pets will simply die because of the server failures. No matter what, a dog owner is caring and attentive towards his pet, there is no chance of the dog missing a meal. There is always a human connection that cannot be satisfied with the use of internet. So, yes, every pet was fed and none of them died.

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