Episode 133: August’s new doorbell and Vitamix blends with Bluetooth

Both Dell and Salesforce made big announcements about their internet of things plans this week, so Kevin and I try to break that down for people. We then discussed Amazon trying to deliver things to the trunk of your car, Google Home going too far in recording conversations and updates to hardware for autonomous cars. We also review the latest August lock and doorbell hardware and answer a listener question from Sally about linking her Sonos with her August locks for some musical automation.

This Vitamix blender has Bluetooth and an app.

I was at the Smart Kitchen Summit this week, and ran into Tony Ciepiel, COO of Vitamix, which just launched a connected blender. I had a few moments to ask Ciepiel how Vitamix was thinking about bringing its blenders into the 21st century and why. He explained how to think about technology in a product designed to be an heirloom and what it means for the company’s operations to support a connected device. We also talk about sharing data across connected products and how technology changes blenders’ capabilities. Enjoy the show!

Hosts: Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Tofel
Guest: Tony Ciepiel, COO of Vitamix
Sponsors: Qualcomm and SAP

  • Dell and Salesforce are adapting to the IoT
  • Cheaper LIDAR and smarter cars are coming
  • August locks are good but the doorbell made me angry
  • Why use Bluetooth as opposed to Wi-Fi in a connected blender
  • Software can let you count calories even more granularly

Have a question? Leave a voicemail on the IoT Podcast hotline at 512.623.7424 and we might answer it on the show!

Episode 109: How to scale the industrial IoT

Google Home can recognize your voice, SmartThing’s Connect app on Samsung’s Galaxy 8 can act as a hubless hub for the home, and Spotify may be considering its own connected device. Kevin and I discuss these stories, plus Waymo’s autonomous car testing in Phoenix, and why iDevices was acquired. There’s also a quick discussion of Symantec’s latest security report and Microsoft’s new IoT suite.

iDevices, the maker of this connected dimmer, was acquired this week.

We did forget to discuss Juicero’s challenges, and the Amazon Look came out after our recording, which just means you’ll have more to look forward to next week. In the meantime, sate yourself with a deep dive into the launch of the EdgeX Foundry platform for the industrial internet of things. Dell’s Jason Shepherd describes the newly launched open source effort as a way to scale IoT like we once scaled the PC. Listen up.

Hosts: Stacey Higginbotham
Guest: Jason Shepherd, Director IoT Strategy and Partnerships at Dell
Sponsors: Samsung ARTIK and IFTTT

  • Kevin bought a Samsung Galaxy 8
  • Who the heck is Hubbell?
  • Microsoft’s IoT efforts are compelling
  • Dell’s push to make industrial IoT scale
  • Standards? We don’t need no stinkin’ standards!