This week launched our new hotline feature with a comment and question from you guys. Keep them coming! Before we got to the Q&A, Kevin and I discussed news from IFA, Europe’s largest appliance show. There are smart fridges, roaming fridges, washing machines and yes, speakers. We also discussed a Cat-M1 network in Africa, noting that it has an unusual property. Because it’s a day ending in Y we also had a security breach to discuss. We ended with a user experience adventure I had with my WeMo dimmer switch.
Want to build a connected product? Then listen to Landon Borders of Big A** Fans talk about his company’s experience building a high-end connected ceiling fan. It’s a look at the beginnings of the internet of things and also shows off lessons every product manager should heed when thinking about building a connected product portfolio. He offers thoughts about working with HomeKit, Alexa and Google as well as his thoughts on manufacturing and customer service. He also drops a few surprising stats. Enjoy!
Hosts: Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Tofel
Guest: Landon Borders, VP of connected products at Big A** Fans
Sponsors: ForgeRock and Xively
- Roaming fridges and what makes a smart speaker?
- Greg has a question about Homeseer
- Only half of Big A** Fans customers use the connected features
- Thoughts on Thread
- There are the platforms that matter in the smart home
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I am renting a router from my ISP in Europe, because we get fiber directly to apartment and they supply iptv boxes too (100mbit/s down and 50+ tv chanels for 24 euros).
Only tv boxes are connected to their router directly, and all other stuff is connected to my personal router.
I have been a listener for quite some time, very interesting show keep it up. One thing that I found interesting that prompted to write this comment is about the conversation around having common interface for digital assistants.
I think one day we’ll see digital assistant become like operating systems today where we could choose hardware and software from different providers and these assistance become like operating systems and skills become apps. Then developers could focus on actual capabilities / features, one day (not too far) users could go to respective app stores and download these capabilities.
Developers could then build cross platform apps or “skills”, I see bots would grow up to be these Apps and they start understanding voice commands like they understand text commands today.
I see this coming already where Alexa and Cortana become available on various hardware and mobile operating systems.