How to Create The Ultimate Smart Home

Tom White:
Welcome to the IoT Podcast. Graham, Kenny, pleasure to have you on.

Kenny Kim:
Thanks for having us.

Graham Hardy:
Yeah, Tom, good to be here.

Tom White:
Yeah, absolutely looking forward to this one. So Graham and Kenny, obviously from Snap One. For our viewers and listeners around the globe that don’t know who Snap One are, could you just kick off maybe with an introduction and Kenny, would it be okay if you could do that?

Kenny Kim:
Yeah, absolutely. So Snap1 is an international manufacturer distributor of smart living products and solutions. We cover different markets from residential, commercial, as well as security markets. Our products go into all those. And we distribute both our proprietary products. And we have about 25 different categories of proprietary products. But we also sell third party products. So. The products that we don’t manufacture or the products that we think are needed in serving a smart living experience in a system, smart home, smart business system, we want to provide a one stop shop for what we call integrators. These integrators are technology professionals that take all the components of these products and create a single solution for the end client. So that’s the market that we serve.

Tom White:
That’s fantastic. Thank you. And I think, you know, it’s a great, it’s a great introduction and something that’s quite topical for me at the moment, because I think we mentioned in our, in our discovery call, I was doing an AV install in our new office. And what kind of struck me actually was the kind of, maybe disparate nature actually of the various kind of providers and services out there. And when we were talking, I kind of realized what that actually makes a lot of sense with SnapOne, because you have a lot of brand names under your banner. a lot of different services that you can offer the end user. And I guess that’s one of the main kind of USPs of your business. Would you say Kenny, that you were able to do that and kind of bring it all under one roof for folks?

Kenny Kim:
Yeah, totally. And most of our brands are actually not consumer facing. We only exclusively sell to this integrator base who ultimately provides the end client with the best experience that they’re the solution that they’re looking for. And so, yeah, we have all these solutions. Our goal is try to bring all these things into a single solution, because at the end of the day, the customers don’t want point solutions. They want something that works cohesively together into delivering the experience of the… Did the desire.

Graham Hardy:
And oftentimes,

Tom White:
Yeah,

Graham Hardy:
Tom,

Tom White:
that’s it.

Graham Hardy:
when someone hires a professional integrator, it’s because of the experience they’re trying to drive, right? Maybe they’ve been at a party at their friend’s house and they’ve experienced their outdoor speaker system, or they’ve seen the whole thing and they hire someone to say, I want that experience. And so they may not know the brands of speakers that are in their ceilings or the kinds of surveillance cameras, but the professional installer is helping to tie that whole experience together for the whole…

Tom White:
Yeah, no, that’s absolutely excellent. And I think that brings me on quite nicely actually to the evolution of DIY and a new phrase that was new for me actually, but do it for me,

Kenny Kim:
Yeah

Tom White:
which is fascinating. For the folks at home, what does that mean? And maybe, Kenny, do you wanna take that one to start with? And then Graham, you can come in from an engineering perspective.

Kenny Kim:
Yeah, we’re very familiar with DIY, do it yourself type of technology. We like to say we play in the do it for me market. So the way we describe that is, you know, when an end client who’s looking to bring all these different solutions together, if you’re starting with point solution, DIY is great for that. Hey, I want to control my door lock or I want a doorbell. experience or one of these. All the point solutions, there’s a lot of kind of DIY stuff out there, ring, you know, those type of products, and it’s very popular. But when you start to bring these solutions together to create a single experience that controls all of it together, that’s when even the most avid and most tech savvy person, it could be extremely complicated and challenging. And so the do it for me market is one, we’re focused on kind of a higher end clientele. We’re willing to pay a professional to come in to not only recommend the right products, but design it, install it, configure it, provide all the personalization and programming around it, and provide ongoing support. So it’s really an end-to-end experience and support like professional experience, where you get the whole solution from this one professional who can kind of bring it all together for you. That is the market that we serve. That’s the do it for me market.

Tom White:
Yeah.

Graham Hardy:
From an engineering perspective, Do It For Me has an interesting aspect because we being the manufacturer can own from the sourcing of a product to the software that you interface with both how you interact and work with it as a homeowner, but also how the professional installer can support that, can remotely manage it, monitor it. We can provide an extended ability of service because we own that end-to-end lifecycle. It really gives us everything from whether or not… automation happens or doesn’t happen to can I reboot Apple TV because it froze up. All of those capabilities come because of owning that whole do it for me piece of the puzzle.

Tom White:
Yeah, and I guess, thank you so much for the overview there. It was new to me and I’m sure new to a lot of our viewers and listeners. But I would imagine then that this world of the professional integrator has really evolved quite a lot over time for Snap1 to be solely, you know, focusing their efforts towards that market, as opposed to the direct to consumer. How has that shifted then, say, you know, over the last 10 years or so?

Kenny Kim:
Yeah, there’s a lot of, you know, the space of IoT smart home technology in the home is really blown up in the last decade. So even prior to that, our market existed. But if you think about the type of products that went into the system in your home or in your business 15, 20 years back versus what goes in today, it is vastly different. So back then, it was a lot more analog products. It wasn’t really on the network. It was a lot of static type of devices where once you install it, you don’t really need to touch it anymore. Whereas today, pretty much every single product that goes in is IP enabled. And because

Tom White:
Mm.

Kenny Kim:
on the network, it lives in a dynamic environment. We talked about a smart home today, an average smart home, 20 to 30 kind of IP devices. In these Do It For Me market homes, we’re talking about… you know, almost 200 or more type of products in the home. And so the ability to manage all this, like it’s forcing our integrators to become almost networking experts because they have to support a robust network to support all these devices. The other big change is that when it was analog products, once an integrator installed the system, he doesn’t really need to service it anymore. He just need to go back if they want to upgrade a speakers or something like that. But now it requires constant maintenance, you need the software updates, security patches. You gotta make sure that as the network dynamics change, the system’s still robust and reliable. And so the challenge that this causes for our industry is that the business model is challenged. Where our integrators used to make money off of a single transaction to the customer, now they have to think about an entire service model that comes after the initial installation. And so… That is the biggest change that’s happening within our industry within the last decade.

Graham Hardy:
One, one thing to tell me the title of your podcast being IOT related, you know, IOT came about in the, you know, late 2010 piece and we’re going to talk about oversea here in a little bit, but we launched our first IOT product for support in 2014 and that really changed the game too, because all of a sudden that we could provide real-time communication to products in the home for support purposes that before, like Kenny mentioned, they would require you to roll a truck out to that house. Maybe you charged for it. Maybe you didn’t charge for it. professional installer, but now you could interact with devices more in real time, change the game completely with where we’re seeing today. So where you had self-contained systems that had very little impact, now you had all this new elements coming in that could impact how the home was delivered and also serviced.

Tom White:
Yeah, it’s fascinating really. And you know, you’re entirely right, Kenny, you know, you’ve mentioned about the all of the various IPs and Graham, absolutely, you know, it’s the evolution of IoT as a concept to enable more devices has also made it actually quite difficult for the average kind of Joe public to integrate this all together in their own homes, which completely makes sense. I was laughing with a friend of mine yesterday, we were on a call and we were talking about IoT being the modern day plumbers, right? So

Kenny Kim:
Thank

Tom White:
you’ll

Kenny Kim:
you.

Tom White:
have an IoT plumber that literally just comes around to your house and connects everything together and dynamic IP ranges, etc. because that’s really what it is. You’ve got all these kind of devices in the field and in the home and you need to get it to work together and you need to get it to talk together. And Graham, you’re 100% right. This is a perfect link to talk into. overseeing control for so could you take it away these are two prominent products that snap one offers and obviously in your position deeply involved in this could could you give us

Graham Hardy:
Yeah,

Tom White:
a an overview of them

Graham Hardy:
maybe I’ll let

Tom White:
please

Graham Hardy:
Kenny give a little intro to oversee and control for, and then I’ll be happy to

Tom White:
Yes.

Graham Hardy:
give a little demo of how we use these two different platforms.

Tom White:
Yeah, sure, please. Thanks.

Kenny Kim:
I’ll start with Oversea. So I mentioned this change from analog to IP. And we saw this early on as this is really challenging the almost operating expense portion of our innovators’ business. So we had to do something to help our innovators be profitable and be operationally efficient. And so we started Oversea years back. And our focus initially was how do we provide our integrators an ability to remotely support their customers, period. And back then, what that meant really was how do you allow integrators to reboot devices? Because oftentimes, rebooting

Tom White:
Yeah.

Kenny Kim:
devices take care of 80% of the problems out there with IP devices. And that’s where we started. And it was such a great success because whereas they would have taken an integrator. hours out of the day to go to a remote customer location to solve a problem at the site. Now, all they do is pick up the phone, open up an app and press the button and it reboots and resets the system. And so that’s where we started was just about rebooting. It has evolved since then. In the 10 plus years we’ve been in business now, it is now a platform that allows you to configure because we realized quickly that In order for you to manage an ongoing maintenance and support of a system, it’s directly related to how you configure the system. And so configuration is a big part of Overscreen Now. It’s about monitoring. When something happens, our integrators, our professionals who are supporting those clients need to be made aware of it so they can take action, sometimes even before the customer knows that there is a problem. And third is the troubleshooting capabilities. Once they recognize that there is a problem, They need an ability to diagnose the situation to be able to fix it all without having to leave the comfort of their office or anywhere where they are. All they need is just internet access. That is what Oversea Platform is today. And we’ve evolved from initially just supporting our own products. And I told you, we have 2,800 SKUs. A lot of them are IP enabled. And when they are, we’re making sure they’re enabled on Oversea to do all these things. But at some point in our journey, we’ve also decided, hey, this needs to be a tool not only for our own products, but it needs to be a solution for integrators at the industry level. And so we pivoted and say, let’s make this not just about our own products, but let’s support every single product out there. And so we’re using all types of protocols that are out there, you know, SNMP, OnVis, PJLink, all these types of protocols. that allow our integrators to support the customer fully, whether they’re using our products or a third party product, they can completely support the customer. So that’s how we’ve evolved from an overseas perspective. And that’s what that product is.

Graham Hardy:
You want me to do a quick

Tom White:
Yeah.

Graham Hardy:
demo first Kenny and then you talk about control floor?

Kenny Kim:
Yeah, sure.

Graham Hardy:
So let me, it’s always good, I’m assuming, for people to be able to see a product like Overseas. So I’ll share my screen here and we can give you a quick demo here.

Tom White:
Yeah, sure.

Graham Hardy:
So you guys can see that. So like as Kenny mentioned, if I’m a professional integrator today, I’m going to want to manage not only all my customers and devices, but I’m also going to want RMR, RM capabilities, ability to monitor and remotely manage it. So if you see over here, I have two customers. It’s my brother and I. But I’m going to give you a demo of how an integrator would use this. So first of all, if I would go set up a customer here, create a location, things that I’ve already done in this case. I’d put an address to them. I could even plot that. We even plot them on a map for integrators so that they can see a collective group of their customers. And when they dive into the customers, this is really where the power of Oversea comes to life. So I’m gonna go show you guys my house here. And we give the integrator a snapshot of the relevant information about the customer’s home. So in this case, location plotting on a map, date and time. We give them an average network health score. So for example, you know, how’s the latency doing on my IP network in the house? Because that’s the backbone of the smart home today is what the IP network is. And so we’ll graph what this shows here. This one’s a little slow to come up for some reason today. There you go. But you can kind of see that, hey, do I have high latency in the home? Is there something causing issues? I can run a speed test of sorts down here. And then the other piece of Oversea that provides a lot of value is. the ability to monitor to devices. So I have a total of 85 devices in my house, but there’s about 60 devices that I feel are critical to the operation of my smart homes. Obviously like iPhones and things like that. I don’t really care to monitor those, but you know, an amplifier, I care a lot about monitoring. And so that’s where

Tom White:
Hmm.

Graham Hardy:
you kind of get the delineation there. They can put things into different rooms. So if I want to see where are the devices, perhaps. One of their techs went and did this complex install, but somebody new is coming out to support it and doesn’t know what’s in the master bedroom versus the equipment room versus where. And then here’s where the real power of Oversea starts to shine is where you see all the device configuration pieces, as Kenny mentioned. So we, at the point of manufacturing for our products or products that we call a 1P device, we have an agent that allows the device to connect to Oversea and then we can communicate for configuration purposes. whether that’s a router here where I can go in and set IP configurations or I can reserve IPs. For some reason we’re a little slow today. I don’t know if that’s the browser, I’ll go back. Oh, there it’s coming, let me go back into it. a little bit of technical difficulty. We’re going to pick a couple of other devices. Whether that’s a router, we’ll use an IP surveillance camera that needs to be configured. So in this case, I’ve just set up a camera. I need to do its configuration. I need to set maybe intrusion zones, or I need to set activity zones. I need to go into the camera and configure the image settings. These are all things that the professional installer is going to do to get the smart home configured. One of the products Kenny mentioned was kind of the start of Oversea, was a power product we have called the WattBox. And one of the strongest use cases is the ability to plug something into a power outlet and to recycle that outlet if it freezes up, call it, say, an Apple TV. And I’ll show you that product here. The WattBox here is, here’s one that I have in my rack here at the house. And we actually allow you to either reset or turn on or turn off different outlets throughout the home. So if my… Moip device, or I’m sorry, my Apple TV device goes offline. I can simply just power cycle it right here. It’ll reset that outlet. And that would solve 90 to 95% of all support related cases is simply the power cycling of the device. And so through the years, we’ve built out this exhaustive tool for both configuration and remote monitoring for the products that we manufacture. If a device goes offline, you’ll see that I have some notifications over here that tells me as the professional installer that some devices went offline. I can, I can actually see more details of when it disconnected, that it reconnected and things like that. One last thing I’ll show you with Oversea is the ability to monitor and manage third party products. So many of the products that we surface in Oversea are our products. We, from manufacturing, build them to integrate directly with our platform. But in many cases, there’s much more products in the home that are IoT products that we don’t manufacture, things like Apple TVs. And so we developed a product called Oversea Pro, which is in many of our smart home products, and it’s also in a standalone product that will scan the network and pull back third-party information into Oversea ELSA. So here’s the Oversea Pro device. And what you’ll see here is things like a Samsung TV or… an Echo Dot or Apple TVs, all for the purpose of expanding our monitoring beyond just the products we make into the third party products. And you see right now actually it’s scanning my home and picking up anything else. We’ve done different integrations with either open source protocols like on VIF and SMTP, different protocols like that to surface more of third party information. And then in some cases, we’ve done direct integration like Samsung TVs are such a common or Sony TVs also are very commonly used in our industry. And so we’ve done more direct integration with those manufacturers to bring third-party products here. So all in the purpose of like Kenny mentioned in the RMM world to be able to remotely configure, monitor the devices that are in the complexity of the smart home. Anything I missed

Tom White:
Yeah,

Graham Hardy:
there, Kenny?

Tom White:
it’s

Kenny Kim:
Very good.

Tom White:
It’s actually fantastic. Thank you very much for showing and giving an overview of Oversea. I guess one question from a technical standpoint is you talked about power cycling there and you can solve most of the problems by effectively turning it on and off. How does it actually do that with a physical device? So I can understand you could kill the internet to the device, but to actually kill the power? How does Oversea actually do that on so many different devices with such ease, Graham?

Graham Hardy:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So it’s simpler than you think. If you plug a device into one of our outlets that is a controllable power outlet, by power cycling that device, you power the outlets. But we’ve launched a product called Oversea Connect, which allows the homeowner to do things and kind of call it a macro basis. So let’s assume that the complexity of a smart home and all the different power outlets and what’s plugged into it is way too complex for a homeowner to do. But the. the professional installer can go through and say, hey, let’s assume you want to reset the entire internet in your house because something went wrong, right? And that’s a series of outlets or a series of devices to power cycle. They can actually set that up and allow the homeowner to just simply click a button. And then the background, it’s running all that kind of complexity to reset the right and proper ones. So that might be. through oversea direct device reset, or it might be a Wattbox that actually power cycles an outlet that the Apple TV is physically plugged into. So it could be either one of those. And it gives kind of that holistic ability to solve problems, whether it’s in an individual setting or at a more macro piece of the puzzle.

Kenny Kim:
There’s a

Tom White:
Yeah.

Kenny Kim:
lot of other ways to also reset devices. So some of the products are actually powered through PoE ethernet ports. So

Tom White:
Yeah,

Kenny Kim:
like

Tom White:
okay.

Kenny Kim:
your surveillance cameras or your access points. So we also have the ability for you to actually reboot those specific outlets. So you can reboot those devices. We also have software reboot capability. So if the product has an ability to reset itself using software IP APIs we can call, we can do that as well. And then, so those are three ways we reboot devices, but I would have to say that when you’re troubleshooting and diagnosing today’s problems and challenges in a smart home or smart business, it’s a lot bigger than that. Like for example, like the way your wireless is set up, we, you know, you have to be able to troubleshoot are there conflicts on the channels? Are your power outputs too strong? So those are the things that we can also help diagnose. Networking challenges, as well as like configuration, even firmware patches. The software updates to devices is critical for you to maintain how your system operates.

Tom White:
Yeah, I mean, it’s fantastic really. And I think from just going back to what you said earlier from an integrator’s perspective, I would imagine this is critical for them providing support services ongoing, right? Because

Kenny Kim:
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Tom White:
without this, it’s gonna make their job a lot harder but even from a location standpoint, you kind of mentioned. Well, they’ve got to drive, you’ve got to actually physically drive there and do that. It takes time out of the day. But some of these devices are going to be really inaccessible, which is the kind of beauty of IoT in general. And it’ll be spoken about quite a lot. You know, once you kind of plugged it in and kind of installed it wherever that may be, you don’t really want to have to go back to it unless you need to go back to it.

Kenny Kim:
Yeah.

Tom White:
So I can see this being a tremendous benefit for a number of different people, actually.

Kenny Kim:
Yeah, I mean, the systems that are integrated and installed in homes, like sit in towers of racks that sit in an equipment room or basement somewhere. And that is extremely formidable if you’re not comfortable with technology for a homeowner or business or person to go back there to check, what do I unplug? So these type of capabilities are extremely helpful for troubleshooting and solving problems on customers’ behalf.

Tom White:
Yeah, I mean, as you said, if you know, if power cycling can save 90 to 95% of issues, right, which always amazes me, you know, the old phrase turn it off, turn it off and back on again, level one support, right. But that you could be in a world whereby you really never really actually need to go down there unless it was a hardware problem, i.e. caused by heat, fire, you know, some sort of water damage or something like that, because all of the capabilities, the monitoring, the latencies, the ping is all done provided it’s on Oversea. Right?

Kenny Kim:
That’s exactly

Tom White:
So,

Kenny Kim:
it.

Tom White:
yeah, it’s really fantastic. Thank you so much for giving an overview on that. Could we talk about Control 4 as well?

Kenny Kim:
Yeah, Control 4, so Oversea was the tool for our integrators. Control 4 is our product, is our smart automation platform that is targeted for both homes and businesses. And this is where the customers are actually interacting with the Control 4 experience, whether that’s through a remote, that’s through a touchscreen installed in their home, or their app, or their TV. All that experience is curated and managed smart brain called the Control4 system. And Control4 system has over 20,000 integrations and counting of all the different products that it can integrate with. And we have an open platform where anybody could create integrations into our Control4 platform, and that’s continuing to evolve. So we create experiences such as listening experience, a home theater video experience. lighting, climate control, intercom security, surveillance, all these different, what you would consider IOT or smart home type of experiences are curated and managed in a single interface for the customer. That’s what Control4System is.

Tom White:
Yeah, I mean, that’s, yeah, it’s great. I mean, you know, I’ve got to be honest, I’ve heard of control for, you know, over the years. And, you know, it’s been one of very few really good systems at linking everything together. And I think we have to look at this from a kind of consumer point of view, right? The consumer doesn’t want 15 remote controls for every single device.

Kenny Kim:
Yeah.

Tom White:
And not being able to find which one it is and how to how to use it, and then you’ve got a factory issue. It’s just ridiculous, right? Graham, you’ve got 85 devices connected to Oversight at the moment. And I would imagine you’ve probably got a couple more than the average home user, but even still, people are gonna have 20, 30, 40 devices in their home. That’s just what it is now. So I think Control4 is a fantastic product, but it’s really evolved as well. Kenny, you mentioned about the open integration. I guess that’s key, isn’t it? Like kind of like a marketplace, like the App Store kind of was to the growth of Apple, you know, control for open integration to allow what is maybe flavor of the month devices to be able to come onto the platform. Maybe that’s quite a big step in the evolution as well.

Kenny Kim:
That is totally, I mean, that is the crux of our industry really is that’s why our professionals are called integrators. They’re integrating all these things to work together. And so that is kind of the core element of what a smart home system is. So like you can have 10 different apps to control individual experiences, but the true magic of a home automation system comes together when you can now have a single button. that triggers a lot of these things together. Or using an event from a device to actually trigger other things in the home without you even being involved. That’s when the magic comes to life. And

Tom White:
Hmm.

Kenny Kim:
you can only do that when you have the connectivity to all these devices and you can talk to every one of them.

Tom White:
Yeah, yeah

Graham Hardy:
Yeah,

Tom White:
that is fantastic.

Graham Hardy:
there’s definitely some magic in it, Tom. I don’t know if the viewers will be able to see behind our light switches, but behind us, I have a music button there. And if I hit that music button, if music is playing in the room next to me, it’s smart enough to go, wait a second, you probably just wanna play that music in this room and join the two together. But if music isn’t playing, then it’ll preselect the preselect that I’ve determined, right? And you can tie that to your lighting system, you can tie it to shades and all those things. So like Kenny said, the magic of that really comes alive when you start taking what you might call a single discipline, like only lighting, and be able to tie it into all the other ones, comfort, security, audio, video, all those things. That’s where the real magic of something like Control4 becomes extremely valuable to homeowners and what they can do with a smart home.

Tom White:
Yeah, that’s incredible. So, so effectively saying you could walk in, PIR sensor on the light goes off, then that triggers an event to turn the music on because it goes, oh, hey, Graham’s home. I want to play some music. That triggers another event to turn the heating on perhaps, right? Yeah, yeah, that’s really special, isn’t it?

Graham Hardy:
Some of the best automations are some of your party scenes where you can turn on music and lighting for certain, or dinner party scene, or pausing a remote will turn lights on because maybe you want to get something out of the kitchen. Those kinds of automations are really exciting to see in the Control4 platform. Tom, I can do a quick demo for you guys if you’d like to see the Control4

Tom White:
Please,

Graham Hardy:
system.

Tom White:
yeah, yeah, absolutely, that would be fantastic.

Graham Hardy:
So let me show you. Control 4. Now, as Kenny mentioned, what you’re going to see here, I’m going to demonstrate on the mobile app. But this is the same interface, whether it was a touchscreen on my wall, my TV. When I turn it on, it’ll be the same experience. And so when I launch into the Control 4 system, and this, again, is something that the homeowner is going to interact with, first of all, you can see all the different rooms. And like you said, I have 85 devices in my smart home.

Tom White:
Thank

Graham Hardy:
So

Tom White:
you.

Graham Hardy:
if I go into something like the office here, I have speakers in my ceiling, so I can turn certain music on, whether that’s Pandora or Tidal or Apple Music. I can control the lights. Right now, let’s turn the fan on to do setting two. I can even view the surveillance cameras. I can see automation. If somebody drives in my driveway, it will actually trigger my surveillance camera to come on and show me that on a touch screen. I can change the thermostat controls, any one of those. And if I go into a room, let’s say like a living room that has a TV in there, you’ll see here that I have available things that I can watch on the TV, whether it’s Netflix or Disney Plus, something like that. Even locks and sensors are available. I can unlock or see if my front door is locked. So for the homeowner, this provides a tremendously valuable tool to be able to interact with their smart home in a way that not only brings value to them, but also interacts with their lifestyle. That same, those same things can be programmed whether it’s a button on a light switch or whether it’s a sensor that if I walk into the, say the bathroom at 1 a.m. the lights will just come on to a certain level versus if it’s the daytime maybe they come on to a different level. So all of that can be programmed within the Control4 system.

Tom White:
Yeah.

Kenny Kim:
Let me provide a case in point of what’s really popular these days in the smart home industry is around the lighting control. And so when we think about lighting control, it’s evolved way beyond just turning it on and off. It’s about how do you have the entire lights in your house follow the circadian rhythm so that when it’s in the midday, it should be bright because you need to be awake. When it comes to the evening, everything starts to dim down a little bit. And so the whole lighting is actually helpful to your health in living in the home. It makes you more energized. And so that’s a really popular trend that’s happening in our industry. But that’s only possible if you have the ability to control all those lights and do it from a single place where you can now manage the scenes and automations and all these triggers that come along with it.

Tom White:
Yeah, we had Hans Nicolong from Signify and he was talking about some of the lighting technology and advancements in lights. And you’re completely right. It’s setting advanced routines, isn’t it?

Kenny Kim:
That’s it. That’s right.

Tom White:
Tom wakes up, he wants to listen to BBC World News and he wants to make a coffee and that triggers. And it’s the convenience, isn’t it? It’s the convenience and enriching someone’s lives. to not be able to have to hit those buttons manually from an analog perspective because it can be automated It can be kind of daisy chained together to go in a flow I think it’s absolutely incredible and it brings me on really nicely guys to my next point about the future You know where this is all going It’s like it’s actually quite hard to predict because it feels quite advanced already You know, it feels it feels pretty kind of ubiquitous in a way, you know being able to link everything certainly the way that you talk about it today. But one of the big themes that we have here on the podcast and that we see in so many different aspects is the whole software defined movement.

Kenny Kim:
Hmm.

Tom White:
So we’ve had people talking about software defined cars and everything is becoming more software defined is programming concepts and principles become so advanced that the hardware really is actually kind of secondary to what you can do with the software. In your industry, how do you do that? How is that evolving and do you see that as the future?

Kenny Kim:
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. If you think about, if you talk to any person around, what do you think a smart system, either in a business and a home,

Tom White:
Oh

Kenny Kim:
should be doing? How does it provide you value? They’re not talking about the black boxes that go in the house. They’re talking about experiences it can do for them. And they’re thinking very futuristic scenarios like Jarvis from Iron Man. You want something to work on your behalf to constantly deliver value. I would say, you know, it’s a little bit a slight of a diss to my own industry, but our systems are really about controlling things today. Now, an integrator could truly create the scenes and all these type of things that are really seem smart, but it’s not truly dynamic. It’s not learning on its behalf. It’s all programmed to act in a certain way. Where we’re going to continue to see things is we’re going to invest, the entire industry is going to invest a lot more into software where we have to do better at learning patterns, doing things smarter on dynamically on behalf of the customers. Because a lot of times the customers don’t actually know what they want. If you ask them, hey, what do you want this button to do for you? Their imagination is very limited to what they know. I think we have to almost work on behalf of the customer to create those magical experiences even when it’s not predefined for them in the beginning. And that to me is a true smart home experience, true smart living experience that we all aspire to get there. And that’s why software is such a big component of that. Because at the underlying level, you need to, number one, have all that interoperability. You need to be able to have two-way communication to all these

Tom White:
you

Kenny Kim:
devices and sensors that can provide the foundation to do those things. And then on top of that, you need to have the smarts that can help you deliver those experiences in a very dynamic fashion.

Graham Hardy:
And Tom, that’s leading very much into what’s popular, what we’re investing in is things like AI, machine learning, and data science. Because if you look at whether it’s a surveillance experience that can detect people or cars or things like that and proactively notify you, those industries are really being changed rapidly from traditional monitoring solutions to now more proactive things in that way. Plus, as Kenny mentioned, the way it can learn things. You know what? in our current industry, just having your lights automatically come on at sunrise or sunset is becoming a commodity with lighting products, right? We’re getting to understand what Kenny was describing, circadian rhythms of lighting, all these kinds of things that AI can only enhance even greater as we go forward.

Tom White:
Yeah, I think it’s a coalition, isn’t it, right, of machine learning, tiny ML, machine learning at the edge, AI, data science, interpreting traits and habits of the consumer to be able to then predict what they really would actually want. And sometimes they might not necessarily even know that, right.

Kenny Kim:
Yes.

Tom White:
And they’ve taken it to the next stage. And it feels like an exciting time. And certainly on this podcast, we’ve had a lot of people talking around, you know, the future, what that is and the benefits of machine learning. And it really does touch in so many different aspects, but I can see how that can get to the next stage and why, you know, you guys are investing in that because it feels like natural progression actually, doesn’t it?

Kenny Kim:
Absolutely, yeah. And we’re in a really good space because, again, if you think about a traditional home, the number of IP or smart sensors that essentially feed into the system, you’re talking about 20, 30, 40 type of devices. We’re talking about hundreds in our industry, and therefore it provides a lot more data points and sensors that we can leverage to work on behalf of the customer. So it’s really exciting times. and especially ML and AI is becoming a lot more accessible. There’s so many things that we can do that we’re exploring.

Tom White:
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine the possibilities are absolutely huge and fantastic for that. One thing that springs to mind is obviously the security element of all of this and I know consumers and customers must be concerned about that. I would imagine this is just in parallel to the advancements you’re making. It’s that’s probably something that’s always at the forefront of your mind about how do we try and keep this secure and how do we keep this data relevant? to who needs to see it and what needs to see it as well. So I think that’s a big point, isn’t it?

Graham Hardy:
Yeah, you know, security by design is really our intent, especially because we are a manufacturer. So we can, from the manufacturing aspects all the way through the cloud piece of the app, secure products, and that’s a key element. Also, privacy is critical, especially if you think of our kind of unique relationship with a homeowner who hires a professional integrator to install something where they need an ability of… control to support the homeowner, but also not violate their privacy. And that’s a very interesting line we have to run with what do they have access to, what do they not have access to, how can they provide the best support without going further than what’s needed. And so all of those things are huge considerations for us as we develop and deliver our products.

Kenny Kim:
Yeah, I think security and privacy is utmost front and center of what we need to do. And we are doing. And I think that’s part of the reason why it’s slower as we think about R&D and rolling out some of these capabilities where we leverage data more. We’ve got to make sure we have the right infrastructure, policies, everything in place, technologies in place so that we can ensure that the data that’s being generated from the home, as we are all very sensitive to that. doesn’t get shared outside the world. It only, the data should be leveraged only to make the customer’s life better, and it shouldn’t be used in another way. And so to make sure that we have the right infrastructure for that, you got to make sure that you’re investing. And I think that’s slightly the benefit of, as what Graham was mentioning, is we are the manufacturer. So we have products that we develop all the way from the lowest stack, we even design our own boards, all the way to… the actually embedded software that runs on the device, the cloud infrastructure, as well as the application. We own the end-to-end, so we can ensure that there’s more privacy that’s built in and we’re not leveraging something that we don’t trust and we don’t have control over.

Tom White:
Yeah, it’s we talk about security a lot here and that’s really reassuring to hear as well for the users but also from a kind of technologist point of view for myself right because you know we talk about zero trust mentalities when we’re looking at devices and secure by design principles from from the board upwards as you say and I think considering you own all that end to end and it’s at the forefront of your mind about how do we bake this in. That’s really, really important. And it’s actually a worthwhile point to mention because a lot of people, when it comes to security, it’s a gold plating exercise and an afterthought, actually. And it’s usually quite weak, you know? I’ve heard stories of people mystery shopping customers and sort of talking about security. And it’s like, oh, the other guy does that or someone else does that, right? And no one actually really understands it. So the way that you’ve just described it, like both of you, is actually… really, really quite impressive compared to some other businesses out there. Um, and I think that that’s a really good point and a reassuring point. And I’m glad, I’m glad we spoke about it actually, because, um, I think more, more needs to be done from the ground upwards when it comes to security, especially when you’re in the home,

Kenny Kim:
Yes.

Tom White:
you know, you know, you’re in someone’s home. Um, so it can never, it can never be overstated how important that is. Um, so that’s, it’s really, really good guys. I’ve really enjoyed learning more about Snap1 today. I think it’s actually been fantastic. You’re both exponents of the business and really passionate, and I think that comes through in an absolute drove. So thank you so much for coming on to the show. As we near the wrap-up, we always do this section where we ask people what their predictions are for IoT in 2023. So I’d love to hear both of you individually, if I could. So maybe if I start with you, Kenny. One thing that you think is definitely going to happen or is most likely going to happen in IoT this year.

Kenny Kim:
Oh man.

Tom White:
Big question, I’ve got to ask it.

Kenny Kim:
Well, IoT moves at such a lightning pace that there’s going to be any number of things that I say is probably going to come true. But I think the safest probably bet is there’s going to be a lot more investment into AI and machine learning around smart home. That has to be because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to deliver on the experiences that customers demand. And you already see that everywhere, where there’s a ton of investments going into this. And so I think we’ll see a lot more benefit. The added bonus I will add is on Matter. And I’m sure you guys talked about it on this show. I think Matter’s making more traction. I think there’s been some speed bumps along the way, but

Tom White:
Hmm.

Kenny Kim:
I’m hopeful that Matter is gonna help propel our industry forward in terms of more interoperability, because that’s… Part of the problem of delivering a good experience for customers, the interoperability problem. And so a lack of standards is really challenging for us to deliver that experience. So I’m hopeful that matter is going to make some progress in this year.

Graham Hardy:
Yeah, I would echo Kenny. I think that AI is probably the thing you’ll see the most rapid expansion in the IOT space. I will say this too, from, from what things are available for someone trying to leverage IT, it’s so much broader today. For example, when we started Oversea in 2013, you know, none of Amazon’s IOT pieces existed, so we had to build every piece of the puzzle today, if you were taking advantage of those kinds of things that you want to leverage. the amount of things you can just take out of the box from what the larger cloud providers are doing in the IoT space is phenomenal. And you can do things much, much more rapid pace than ever before. So I think you’ll continue to see the expansion of that. And with that, it’s gonna have to come continue work

Tom White:
you

Graham Hardy:
with privacy and things like that since the expansion is so great. But yeah, to me, those things will just increase much, much quicker through the rest of this year and on to the next.

Tom White:
Thank you guys, I appreciate that and Kenny to your point matter matters right as

Kenny Kim:
I’m better

Tom White:
a catchphrase

Kenny Kim:
now.

Tom White:
that Which have been using quite a lot. It’s a bit cheesy, but I quite like it And finally to wrap up we’ve got a couple of quickfire questions And if I can start with you Graham, what’s your favorite? IOT use case something that you either use yourself or something that you think that’s really cool actually

Graham Hardy:
Um, I, I love playing with kind of the internet of things in the, in the maker space. So for a long time, we hosted the Charlotte IOT group and I loved working with, I’m not traditionally a maker in that sense, but the maker space is always very fascinating to me, especially when you start to see, uh, youth events and some of the things that they’re building. That’s a passion that I’ve always, uh, really enjoyed. to see a young group of kids be able to build robots and things like that. It’s just fascinating to see. And so, though we don’t get to play in that space as much, it’s one that I try to keep tabs on to some degree.

Tom White:
Yeah, okay, great. How about yourself, Kenny?

Kenny Kim:
I’ve always been really fascinated with, I came from the security industry, so I’m very fascinated with video analytics and video security. And how, if you look at a lot of the security frameworks today around protecting the home or the business, you only really know when someone actually breaks into your house or your business. I think… the things that we’re doing around analytics and all the capabilities that exist in the world today, we’re starting to push beyond just the perimeter but into the external perimeter of your home or your business where all the security frameworks change where you’re being a lot more proactive than reactive. And I am really excited about that. That just has been a passion of mine.

Tom White:
Yeah, yeah, I think we share a similar background with that. I did a lot of work in DRM and CAS and CAM and stuff like that. So I understand it quite well. And my last quick by question for you both, and going back to you Graham, but favorite tech entrepreneur of all time?

Graham Hardy:
Favorite tech entrepreneur of all time. Man, that’s a, you know, I’m going to have to say one you might not know. There’s a guy by the name of Scott Hanselman. Scott is at Microsoft, has been for years. I early on, I was a.NET developer in my early days in my career. And I always loved following both his blogs and his thing. And Scott’s always been a lover of IoT, has advanced what Microsoft was doing in their space. And so he’s probably one of the ones I still keep tabs on even to this day.

Tom White:
That’s great, that’s great. That’s actually quite unique as well. Thank you for that. Kenny, you’ve got you’ve got some act to follow now as well.

Graham Hardy:
Thank you. Bye.

Kenny Kim:
I’m going to be way too bland here. I’m sure you’ve heard this many times, but mine’s Elon Musk.

Tom White:
Okay.

Kenny Kim:
And for me, it’s Elon because he doesn’t worry too much about short-term consequences or results. He’s delivering things that truly focus on solving humanity’s problems. And I just love that bold kind of… entrepreneur aspect of it and that’s why what us entrepreneurs exist. We got to solve world’s problems.

Tom White:
I love that. What a way to end the podcast. Absolutely. And that’s what IOT can do, right? As a concept, as a movement, you know, enrich people’s lives, solve problems, you know, think about the IOT plumbers, you know, they’re coming.

Kenny Kim:
Thank you.

Tom White:
Graham, Kenny, thank you so much for coming on to the IOT podcast show today.

Graham Hardy:
Yeah, thank you Tom, it was a pleasure.