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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

smart home

CNET’s Ashlee Clark Thompson Talks Favorite Smart Kitchen Appliances

When we want candid reviews on smart home appliances — especially in the kitchen — we turn to Ashlee Clark Thompson (that is, when we’re not turning to ourselves). An associate editor at CNET, Thompson covers cooking gadgets and explores how tech will influence the kitchen. Oh, and she’s also a pretty hilarious Twitter poster.

For all these reasons (and more), we’re thrilled to have Ashlee Clark Thompson at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this October! To prime your palate, we asked her a few questions about her favorite smart kitchen products — and what she looks at when she’s writing a review.

Read the Q&A below:

What’s the number one thing you look out for when reviewing smart home products?
Since most of my work is focused in the kitchen, I look out for how easy it is to use a product with existing recipes. Lots of devices have companion apps that provide a huge catalog of recipes to try, but many home cooks have their go-to meals or recipe cards passed down from grandma. A device should be able to teach me a new recipe, but help me improve upon an old one, too.

Name one connected product you didn’t think you would like, but ended up falling for?
The Pantelligent. It was a $200 smart skillet that connected to your phone to guide you through recipes. I thought it was a kooky concept, but it did exactly what it promised. Plus, it helped me make some great grilled cheese sandwiches during testing. Unfortunately, I think it’s now gone the way of the Juicero.

Envision the smart kitchen of the future. What does it look like? What products does it have in it?
The smart kitchen of the future fits the needs of the person who uses it. Not everyone needs a tricked-out kitchen full of gadgets; folks need tools that will be reliable and meet their needs. For some, that might just mean a wireless digital thermometer and a smart speaker. For others, it might be an entire system that’s connected, from grocery apps to fridge cams to a smart oven.

What are some of your favorite connected products you use in your everyday life?
I use an Echo Dot in the kitchen daily. It’s helpful when my hands are covered in flour or meat, so I can ask Alexa to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit or play some NPR. My Honeywell Lyric thermostat has helped keep my electric bills in check. And my Philips Hue lights have been crucial for reading in bed.

Voice assistants in the kitchen: yay or nay?
See aforementioned flour/meat hands comment.

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Thanks, Ashlee! If you want to hear more about the tools she think will shape the future of the connected kitchen, snag your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th in Seattle. 

BSH Appliances Teams With Techstars To Create Connected Kitchen Accelerator

BSH Home Appliances (BSH Hausgeräte GmbH) announced this week it is teaming up with Techstars to create the “BSH Future Home Accelerator Powered by Techstars”, an accelerator targeted at “early stage companies with innovative digital business models that want to accelerate their ideas around the connected kitchen of the future home.”

The program, which will kick off in February 2019 with an initial cohort of 10 companies, will have a total of three cohort classes over the course of three years (2019-2021) and mentor a total of thirty startups.

While – as the name of the accelerator indicates – much of the focus will be on the kitchen, the company took pains to emphasize that the scope could be much broader than that.

“We didn’t want to be too closed on topic,” Tibor Kramer, the program’s manager, told me in a phone interview. He explained this was in part because they didn’t want to shut out interesting ideas that could help make a consumer’s life better.

But Kramer also made it clear that the main focus will be on the digital kitchen. The kitchen is the “heart of the home,” he said. “We at BSH, as a home appliance manufacturer, are quite focused on the kitchen and on kitchen appliances and cooking is the most creative process.”

The move by BSH into creating its own accelerator is part of a larger trend of established companies in the food, home and retail spaces trying to tap into new ideas and energy through the creation of an accelerator and incubator programs. BSH joins the likes of IKEA, Land O’Lakes and Chobani who have gone down this path, and will likely spur other appliance and houseware products to consider doing the same.

For BSH, the creation of their own accelerator could give them a leg up as appliance companies scramble to find new products and platforms to accelerate digital transformation. These companies are transitioning from a business largely centered around the one-time sale of non-connected, stand-alone products towards a future in which software-powered kitchens open up new opportunities for radically different business models.

“As a company focused on improving our customer’s quality of life, BSH is forging a path to be the leader in digital services for the connected kitchen,” said BSH Appliances CEO Karsten Ottenberg in the announcement.  “To be successful in this rapidly evolving space, it is important to continually expand our digital capabilities and align ourselves with the most innovative startups and technology – which we will achieve together with Techstars through this accelerator program.”

According to Kramer, while Techstars will mentor the cohort companies on how to build and scale a young company, the role of BSH – which owns a number of appliances brands such as Bosch, Siemens, Thermador, Gaggenau – will be as experts in the home appliance business.

“We will handpick our mentors from the Digital Business Unit (the new business unit where the accelerator will reside), as well as executives from BSH corporation that we think will give added value to the startups,” said Kramer. “We want to give them a good mentoring and connect them with the (BSH) network.”

The program will begin taking applications online on July 23rd and will notify those accepted in November.

BSH Appliances CEO Karsten Ottenberg will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit in October. If you’d like to hear him talk about transforming BSH towards the digital future, make sure to get early bird tickets today. 

COO of Lecker Labs, Makers of Yomee, Talks Crowdfunding Success

Since we announced the 8 finalists in our SKS Europe Startup Showcase last week, we’ve launched a series of Q&A’s to introduce this year’s talented crop of food innovators. Next up is Anindya Roy, COO of Lecker Labs, producer of Yomee.

Lecker Labs got their start at the food tech accelerator program FoodX and before launching a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for Yomee, a countertop appliance which combines milk (and milk alternatives) with branded probiotic pods to create chilled yogurt in 6 hours.

Head to the SKS Europe blog to read our Q&A with Roy and learn more about the inspiration behind Yomee, the startup’s biggest challenges, and the secret to their crowdfunding success.

If you want to meet Anindya and more of the Yomee team in person and see them demo their countertop yogurt maker, register for SKS Europe in Dublin on June 11-12th!

 

Facebook’s New Patent Will Enable It To See Into Your Fridge & Suggest a Recipe

Facebook was issued a new patent today outlining a system that would allow users to access and control networked devices in the home through their mobile app and enable the social network to serve up ads based on the contents of a person’s fridge or other data gathered from inside the home.

The patent, called “Controlling Devices Through Social Media” (US patent #9,967,259), explains a number of scenarios in which Facebook users may access and control networked devices in the home. They also outlined how the could provide recommendations for the user based on data gathered from in-home sensors and cameras, as well as information from the person’s Facebook profile.

One such example has Facebook accessing a camera within a refrigerator and providing a meal recommendation. From the patent:

As an example and not by way of limitation, a refrigerator may include cameras to take pictures of items placed in the refrigerator and upload the images to the cloud, where image recognition may be performed upon the images, and an identification of the items may be provided to the refrigerator. As another example, a refrigerator may retrieve recipes from the cloud based on the items in the refrigerator and user-preference information from the user’s social network.

Facebook’s patent also outlines how it could notify the user when their milk is about to expire or they’re out of eggs. If that isn’t weird or creepy enough, they also outline scenarios where they would send targeted advertising to people within the person’s social graph.

From the patent:

“…as an example and not by way of limitation, a user may purchase a particular brand of hot sauce, and a target group of users may receive a notification based on their affinity for that brand of hot sauce or for hot sauce in general.”

Now, it may seem a bit strange for Facebook to be pushing even further into our lives at a time when many of us (including the government) have a heightened concern about how much information we provide to the social network. But in its defense, the patent was filed back in a simpler time – July 2014 – when many of today’s privacy concerns weren’t as front and center.

It also should be noted that at the time Facebook filed its patent, it had grand designs on making Facebook an IoT platform. However, in 2016 the company decided to shelve Parse, the IoT platform it had spent a few years developing.

All that said, it’s worth keeping an eye on this patent in case Facebook decides to revive its push to connect itself to our physical world.

Video: CNET’s Ashlee Clark Thompson on Her Best Cooking Gadgets

We at The Spoon have long been fans of Ashlee Clark Thompson, Associate Editor at CNet and hilarious twitter poster. (You may have seen her on stage at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit talking about the future of food.)

Like us, Thompson is fascinated by the smart kitchen market. “The kitchen has become the center of the home,” she said. “We’re seeing all these screens pop up everywhere. For me, as a person that loves to cook, that’s exciting. But it’s also a little scary, because I want products that will last.”

Chris Albrecht caught up with Thompson at this year’s Housewares Show Smart Home Pavillion to debrief about said products. Check out the video to see Albrecht and Clark Thompson discuss the best cooking gadgets to invest in, their hesitations about connected products, and how tech can make us better cooks.

CNET at the IHA Smart Talks Theater

Interested in hearing more about the Smart Kitchen Summit? Our first European event is coming up June 11-12th in Dublin, and we’ll be returning to Seattle for our fourth year in October.  

Multitasking Smart Side Table Sobro Halfway to Funding Goal

Remember when your nightstand used to just hold a book, a glass of water, and an alarm clock? Wait, it still does? (Mine, too).

The Sobro side table/nightstand would scoff at such simplicity. The latest furniture item from Storebound, the folks that brought you the ultimate mancave coffee table, just reached the halfway mark on its $500,000 funding goal on IndieGoGo.

The sleek side table looks like a slightly chunkier version of what you’d find in IKEA. And it’s seriously pimped out: connected Bluetooth speakers, wireless charging for two phones, a storage drawer that locks, app-enabled mood lighting, and all the power outlets your 21st-century heart could desire. Which all sounds pretty useful to me, except for the app-enabled colorful mood lighting, which seems like a last-second add-on to make the Sobro table seem more “hip.”

Though it markets itself as an end table slash nightstand, its special features definitely skew towards the latter. For one thing, the table has a motion-sensor-activated LED light (separate from the mood light) on its front that’s meant to function as a nightlight, guiding your path as you stumble to the bathroom.

The product’s connected app also has an “intelligent sleep mode” that can help you create good sleep habits. If it’s anything like other sleep apps, presumably you enter your bedtime and approximately when you need to get up, and the LED light bar simulates a sunrise to wake you at an ideal time in your REM cycle. The app also offers a variety of white noise sounds to lull you to sleep, controls the brightness of the nightlight, and can manage the mood lighting feature of the table.

I know, I know—we’re a smart-kitchen site, what are we doing covering a side table/nightstand?

Well, there’s a hint of kitchen built into the Sobro table in the form of its built-in cooler drawer. Really, though, the table is just an interesting addition to the smart home sphere; one that aims to fit a bunch of tech perks into one piece of furniture. And measuring 24-inches wide and 19 inches tall (with adjustable height if you want to make it taller), it does it in a pretty sleek size, too.

The Sobro side table has reached $250,000 of its $500,000 funding goal on IndieGoGo, with about a month left to go. Purchasers should expect to receive their nightstands sometime around October 2018. There are still a few of the Super Early Bird editions available for $299. Once those go, the price will jump to $349. According to the IndieGoGo site, the nightstand will eventually retail for $899.

I’ll probably stick with my no-frill nightstand setup, though it would be nice to be awakened by gentle LED lights and never have to hunt for a charger again. If they add an ice cream freezer drawer, though, the Sobro table may be too tough for me to pass up.

If you want to hear more about Storebound, the company which also brought you the PancakeBot, check out our podcast with their creator Evan Dash.

Ten Trends That Will Shape The Future of Cooking In 2018

With 2017 in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look forward and make some predictions about the next year in food and cooking. While I often wait until after CES to look into the crystal ball since there are always lots of announcements at the annual consumer tech mega-show, I think it’s safe to point to a few big trends we can expect over the next 12 months.

With that in mind, here are ten trends I think you’ll see the shape the future of the kitchen over the next twelve months (Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date on our coverage of all of these trends over the next year):

Digital Recipe At The Center Of Action

With apologies to Tyler Florence, the recipe is not dead. In fact, if anything the recipe is becoming increasingly important in the digital kitchen. It’s becoming our automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preferences and the context of our current day, meal plan, and food inventory.

I expect all of this to continue in 2018 and even accelerate as recipes become shoppable, connected to cooking guidance systems and fuse with new interfaces such as voice assistants and chatbots to help with the cooking process.

New Cooking Boxes

While “cooking box” isn’t exactly a standard industry term, it’s an apt way to describe the wide variety of exciting products coming to market that allow consumers new ways to prepare food.

Last year we started to see new takes on steam ovens like the Tovala, the first consumer market RF cooking appliance announced in Miele’s Dialog, and even combo devices that combine fast-cooking with flash-freezing like the Frigondas. In 2018, I expect to see lots more innovation with built-in and counter top products as old-school appliance manufacturers and housewares brands realize there’s opportunity in deviating from the same-old cooking appliances and offering consumers new options when it comes to preparing food.

Smart Grow Systems Move Towards Mass Market

While home grow systems have been around for years, adoption has remained fairly narrow. That will start to change in 2018 as the idea of using technology to grow and create our food at home enters the mainstream consciousness. Driving this trend will be the ever-increasing consumer desire to source food more locally. After all, what’s more local than our own homes?

The great thing about this space is there’s already a wide gamut of interesting options available for consumers today. Whether it’s low-cost offerings like seed quilts, to the growing number of soil-less home grow systems like those from Aerogarden or Ava, to crazy backyard farm robots like those from Farmbot, I think we’ll see more innovative products – and greater consumer adoption – in 2018.

Home Fermentation

There’s no doubt one of the most interesting trends we’ve seen in consumer food over the past couple years is the embrace of interesting fermented products like kombucha, and I think this interest will start to generate more interest in consumers fermenting their food at home.

We’ve already seen companies like Panasonic show off fermented food cookers, and beer appliance startup PicoBrew is starting to offer Kombucha as an offering. With interest in fermented products likely to increase, I expect more innovators will look to make creating these products at home easier.

Desserts Meet Tech

Like most, I love myself a good dessert, and I expect we will see an increasing number of interesting ways to fuse technology with sweets in the coming year. Some of these innovations will focus on convenience (like the CHiP cookie maker), but some will enable consumers to create hard-to-make sweets like chocolate, ice cream and other types of desserts that are normally time and knowledge intensive.  Expect to see some interesting announcements in this space in the next 12 months.

Sensing Kitchen

When the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman got on stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit with startups creators of digital food sensing tech and demoed live in front of a huge audience, you could hear the audience murmur as Wilson and crew smelled cheese with a digital nose or tried out the Scio infrared spectrometer. This technology that has long been gestating for commercial and supply chain applications is finally making its way into the home, and I expect that to continue in 2018, particularly as some find new ways to apply AI to better prediction and understanding around flavors and food characteristics.

Meal Services And Connected Hardware

One of the trends we’ve been watching for a while is the pairing of meal kits with connected hardware.  That trend accelerated in 2017 as Tovala shipped product, Nomiku created their sous vide ready meals and Innit hinted at new products powered by Chef’d as we ended the year.

It makes sense. Recurring revenue has long been the mantra of venture capitalists (just ask Tovala, which just got a $9.2 million series A), and in the connected cooking space, the way to get recurring revenue is offer food.  I also expect meal kit companies to also increasingly look for ways to partner with kitchen tech innovators (much like Chef’d has with Innit) as they look for ways to raise adoption and retention for consumers.

Speaking of food delivery…

Automated, Smart Grocery Delivery

With the acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon stopped dabbling around the edges with lab experiments like Amazon Go, Amazon Dash and Amazon Fresh made its intentions clear: it wants to take a big bite out of the $700 billion grocery business in the US.  And while the company has had mixed success with efforts like its Fresh delivery business, these long-gestating experiments have given them a potentially huge advantage as they start to set up central hubs and physical points of presence for the grocery business post-Whole Foods.

And now, Amazon and others see the opportunity to fuse home delivery with smart home access control and automatically deliver groceries all the way to the fridge. Combine that with the ability of fridges to actually tell us when food needs a refresh, and you can unlock some interesting scenarios.

New Interfaces

While this past year saw the continued march forward towards of popular voice interfaces like Alexa, I think we’re only at the beginning of a large-scale change in the control layer for how we buy, prepare and cook our food.  Sure, we’ll see more and more Alexa skills for cooking gadgets in 2018, but also expect more manufacturers embrace chatbots and projection interfaces as ways to interact with our cooking equipment this year.

Cooking Robots

We cover cooking robots here at The Spoon a bunch, and while many are fun and likely never to see wide adoption over the next decade, there are a variety of interesting cooking bots we’ve seen that might have real applications for specific use cases.  Some are simple food automation devices. Others are more social robots. And, in some cases, companies are working on human-like robots that could be intriguing additions to the kitchen of the future.

Needless to say with CES less than a week away, we’ll likely see many of these trends reinforced with news.  I’ll be at CES catching up on many of these announcements myself, so if you hear of any or want me to know about your product, DM me on Twitter.

Walmart & Amazon Want To Send People Inside Our Homes. Will We Let Them?

A couple weeks ago, Walmart announced an agreement with August Home and Deliv to create a direct-to-fridge delivery service. The idea is to use August’s smart access technology to grant temporary access to a delivery person to place the groceries inside a customer’s fridge.

And last week, word leaked that Amazon was also working on its own direct-to-fridge delivery effort by developing a smart doorbell (one would assume the doorbell would also connect an electronic access control product like a smart lock). Both efforts are intended to add extra convenience for consumers and address the problems of unattended delivery.

This got me to thinking: as the epic battle for the future of grocery delivery extends from our doorstep and into our icebox, how many of us will let total strangers into our homes for a little extra convenience?

According to a survey conducted by NextMarket Insights on behalf of Comcast/August Home in early 2016, about 30% of online consumers said they would give temporary access to a service professional such as a house cleaner or delivery person. While that’s well below a majority, it’s probably enough to encourage Amazon and Walmart that there’s a market for this.

And there should be. The problems of “unattended delivery” are real; food left on your porch can get stolen or spoil, particularly if you spend long stretches of time at work or outside the home.  There are many consumers who would gladly adopt technology such as a smart doorbell/smart lock if it meant their groceries were safe and cold when they got home.

Still, I’m not completely sure if we’ll ever see a majority of Americans trusting enough to let complete strangers into our homes.  My wife and I have had home cleaners come twice a month for about a decade, but I didn’t feel comfortable with them being alone in our homes until after a year or so had passed and I got to to know them personally. How many of us ever get to know our grocery delivery guy?

Historically as consumers, our comfort levels rise as we get more accustomed to new situations enabled by technology. Take Uber or Airbnb. Ten years ago most of us would have scoffed at the idea at getting into a strangers car or sleeping in a person’s home. Now it’s considered perfectly normal.

But will we ever have that same level of comfort with unattended access? It’s our home, after all, not someone else’s.  My guess is that slightly more consumers will get comfortable with the idea of letting strangers into their homes, but not a whole lot more.

And that’s probably fine with Walmart and Amazon, both of which are working on other alternatives such as grocery pickup, drones and locker access. And who knows, maybe Amazon is working on refrigerated version of a storage locker us less trusting types could install our our doorstep.

Walmart Partners With August Home To Enable Direct-To-Fridge Delivery

Earlier this week, August announced a new line of locks and a doorbell.

Normally I’d say a product lineup refresh would have been the biggest announcement of the week for a Silicon Valley hardware startup, but that might not be the case here. That’s because this week the company also announced they had started a trial with Walmart and crowdsource-delivery startup Deliv to deliver direct-to-fridge groceries.

Now, why do I think this is potentially even bigger news than new locks? While I’m as interested as the next guy in new locks and doorbells, these products are just generational upgrades. That they came the same week that Nest also announced its doorbell tells you just how competitive and saturated the smart security and access market is becoming.

What the Walmart news is a potential new business model for Walmart, Deliv, and August, one which enables new same-day, value-added delivery service not only to the consumer’s home but directly into the home. In an industry that is desperate for differentiation in an Amazon world, this is a big deal for all three companies.

So how will it work? Here’s how they explain it on the Walmart blog:

Here’s how the test will work: I place an order on Walmart.com for several items, even groceries. When my order is ready, a Deliv driver will retrieve my items and bring them to my home. If no one answers the doorbell, he or she will have a one-time passcode that I’ve pre-authorized which will open my home’s smart lock. As the homeowner, I’m in control of the experience the entire time – the moment the Deliv driver rings my doorbell, I receive a smartphone notification that the delivery is occurring and, if I choose, I can watch the delivery take place in real-time. The Deliv associate will drop off my packages in my foyer and then carry my groceries to the kitchen, unload them in my fridge and leave. I’m watching the entire process from start to finish from my home security cameras through the August app. As I watch the Deliv associate exit my front door, I even receive confirmation that my door has automatically been locked.

You can see a video explaining the concept here:

Why the Future Could Mean Delivery Straight Into Your Fridge

On the August side, this trial is utilizing the August Access platform, which integrates their access products like smart locks directly with service providers to enable the service provider to provide home delivery and concierge services (like house cleaning or dog walking) when the consumer is not home.

When I wrote about August Access in 2015 for Forbes, I said, “So what does this mean and why would I want to let people I don’t know into my house using a smart lock? While not everyone would want to or even need to allow a service provider access to their home, if you’re like me, now and then you need someone to take the dog out or clean the house. Because of this, the ability to give temporary access to an approved service provider makes lots of sense.”

For Walmart, this provides a final last-100-feet solution that could be valuable for consumers. The challenge will be taking this offering and scaling it to a wider audience. In Silicon Valley (where the trial is taking place), smart locks are probably pretty common. In Arkansas, probably not as much. One eventual solution could involve Walmart subsidizing the cost of a smart lock when delivery customers sign up for a year of home delivery.

Lastly, there is the question of whether consumers want delivery people to come into their home. Further complicating the concept is Deliv utilizes a crowdsourcing model, meaning it’s essentially an Uber for home delivery, which means you might get part-time students or retirees looking to supplement their fixed income as a home delivery driver entering your home when you’re not there.

The trial is currently taking place with existing August customers in northern California, a crowd that might be more comfortable with both technology and strangers walking into their home. I’ll be interested to see how it performs once they expand beyond early adopters in other geographies.

And who knows: Maybe the next idea is the ability to keep an eye on visitors to the home with a smart home camera or fridge cam.

Could it be those are in August’s next product introduction?

Carley Knobloch Wants Tech In The Kitchen To Be More Accessible

With the emerging popularity of smart home devices across every room of the home and the popularity of voice control devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home leading adoption, the media has become saturated with experts looking to educate consumers on how to use tech in their own homes. Of all the smart home gurus, Carley Knobloch might be one of the most well-known because of her practical, education-oriented approach and tone. Carley’s mission is to help people improve their relationship with technology and sift through the buzzwords to form their own opinions on connected living – one tap or swipe at a time.

Carley’s media legacy began with her blog, a carefully curated resource filled with product reviews, news and guides. The site’s aesthetic mirrors Carley’s approach to talking tech – simple, sleek and modern. The technology is not at the forefront but rather, a tool to help tell a greater story on how connected living can look. It’s not wires and bulky black boxes, but instead functional, stylish smart home living products and accessories that make life just a little bit easier.

In addition to her blog and social media pages, Carley is a regular contributor to the Today Show and CNN, and is the Technology consultant and host for HGTV’s annual smart home. Carley sees her role as specifically to educate those new to smart tech. “I’m helping the later-adopters and the smart-curious folks out there unpack what’s going on in this exciting space, and how it can improve their lives now, and in the future,” she says. For Carley, speaking to this audience is a unique position to

“I’m helping the later-adopters and the smart-curious folks out there unpack what’s going on in this exciting space, and how it can improve their lives now, and in the future,” she says. For Carley, speaking to an audience of mostly homeowners (with a heavily female audience) every day that is excited about the smart home and what it can do means helping them get started with products that make sense and are priced right. They want to buy products that are addressing their needs and solving real problems.

“When I started my blog and media career, there weren’t a lot of women— who run a home, a family and a business—  talking about technology. Most tech experts were speaking to the early-adopters and enthusiasts,” says Carley. “I set out to create an approachable conversation about tech in the home and the kitchen that everyday people could relate to: What’s going on? How does it affect me? Is it time to adopt? Will I be able to use it?”

Creating this open dialogue with her followers has helped Carley steer the industry conversation and better understand the issues that are directly impacting the adoption rate of smart home technology – in or outside of the kitchen. Many companies and manufacturers are taking a “rapid fire” approach to developing technology, without focusing on the end-user experience or adaptation.

“I think that ultimately, consumers are looking for the right price, and the right application: a layer of technology that will make their lives easier, not harder,” says Carley. “They are eager to figure out what technology is right for them in the kitchen and beyond— many are wary because the industry to date has been like the wild west with everyone firing products into the market that may not be ready or require a big learning curve.”

So where does Carley see the smart home conversation heading for product developers and manufacturers? “Manufacturers should be holding themselves to high standards, as early ambassadors for this product vertical,” she explains. “They have to get more right than they do wrong, or it will be hard to change consumer’s minds later.”

Now in her second year at Smart Kitchen Summit, Carley wants to help tackle conversations on how the IoT is affecting big brands across the appliance industry and will lead a fireside chat with Kenmore/Sears and GE leadership charged with this very task.

Don’t miss Carley at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit. Check out the full list of speakers and register for the Summit, using code HGTV to get 25% off ticket prices.

The Smart Kitchen Summit is the first event to tackle the future of food, cooking and the kitchen with leaders across food, tech, commerce, design, delivery and appliances. This series will highlight panelists and partners for the 2017 event, being held on October 10-11 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

Neato Robotics Machines Are Coming To Clean Up After Dinner

Giacomo Marini isn’t afraid of the robot future – in fact, the company he leads is betting on it. Neato Robotics was founded by Standford alums Joe Augenbraun, Linda Pouliot and JB Gomez through the Stanford Entrepreneur Challenge and officially launched in 2010. The idea behind the company – that robots are just as capable of performing chores as humans – Neato has been working to develop advanced robotic technology for for vaccums in order to alleviate the stress and drain of modern life.

Neato has enjoyed success as a startup against rivals like Roomba and they have a heavy focus on intelligence and proprietary technology to create a self-cleaning vacuum with the smarts of a self-driving car. In fact, the company is the first and only group making robot vacuums with laser SLAM technology, best known for its use in the Google self-driving car, to map and navigate. Marini claims this technology is uniquely suited for indoor navigation and allows the robots to operate with precision in the dark.

Robotics and machine learning are two hot areas in Silicon Valley at the moment – and Marini is no stranger to success in the tech mecca. A co-founder of Logitech, Marini was part of the team that moved the Swiss-based company to Palo Alto in the early 1980s and credits much of the computer accessory company’s growth to that move. Marini went on to stay in Silicon Valley and run a venture capital firm and eventually join Neato as CEO in 2013.

Neato sees their vacuums playing an important role in making the clean up after meal prep and dinner much simpler. “Gone are the days when spilling flower on the floor while you cook would mean hauling out the heavy upright vacuum,” adds Marini. “Now you can simply use your voice to tell your Google Home or Amazon Alexa to start your Neato for you.” Neato recently added chatbot functionality for Facebook, jumping on another trend of using chatbots to control our homes – meaning you could shoot your vacuum a note to clean up the kitchen after dinner’s over from the backyard. 

Marini believes that the continued focus on user experience has been an essential component in the increase in connected device adoption. And – he points out – as the complexity of what our devices can do increases – that experience must remain the same. “As the capabilities of this technology become more complex, it’s imperative that the devices remain simple to interact with, so that our relationship with them feels natural and compelling.”

Ultimately, Neato Robotics wants to make products to give people more time. If we have tech to help us shop more efficiently and cook good food at home more simply, we should also be able to use tech to clean up, right? Marini agrees, saying “We’re at a pivotal point when the speed of emerging technologies make the human potential seem limitless. Our mission is to allow people to spend more their spare time on things that really matter – their passions, work, loved ones – and not on housework.”

Don’t miss Giacomo Marini, CEO of Neato Robotics at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit. Check out the full list of speakers and to register for the Summit, use code NEATO to get 25% off ticket prices.

The Smart Kitchen Summit is the first event to tackle the future of food, cooking and the kitchen with leaders across food, tech, commerce, design, delivery and appliances. This series will highlight panelists and partners for the 2017 event, being held on October 10-11 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

Curious About The Echo Show? Here’s My ‘One Day’ Review

The Echo Show arrived this week. Like many, I was excited to put the latest addition to the Echo lineup through its paces.

Welcome to my one day review.

Why write a review after using a product one day? Doesn’t one need to spend weeks – maybe even months – with a product like the Echo Show to really understand the possibilities of this complicated and interesting new product?

Yes, but here’s the thing: For most products, you also are able to notice things right away. Not unlike a first date when you show up at the restaurant and notice your date for the night has three eyebrows or is a loud talker, there are things you notice right away when you’re around someone or something.

So here goes:

Out of Box Experience

The install experience was painless, quick and well optimized. Once I pulled the Show out of the box and plugged it in, it walked (and talked) me through the installation.

The device found my Wi-Fi network, had me enter my password, and within a minute it had checked in with the cloud and knew this was Michael Wolf’s new Echo Show. The Show started to download a software update, which took about five minutes. Overall, the product was installed and running in 10 minutes.

The Sound

For about five minutes, I thought this device sounded horrible. Then I saw the layer of protective plastic over the speaker.

This is why I don’t write five minute reviews.

Plastic removed, the Echo Show sounds good. Not quite as good as my Sonos Play 3, but it could give my Play 1 a run for its money.  Turned up, the Echo Show is fairly loud.

Volume is controllable via Alexa, but it also has volume up and down buttons on top of the device, which I like. Sometimes you just like old fashioned physical buttons.

The Echo Show Shape and Look

Like many this week, I was surprised at the beefiness of the Show when it arrived at my house. This is mostly due to Amazon’s early press images and videos which showed the the latest Echo mainly from the front of the device. When you actually see the Show in all its glory, it’s a lot deeper than you expect.

So Amazon intended for you to mainly see the Show from one side: its front. This is clear not only because of how deep and heavy the back side of the Show is, but also because the sides of the device are angled inward. It reminded me of those early big screen TVs before everything became ultra-thin.

Because of these angled sides, you can walk from side to side and still have the illusion that this is a thin device. See video below:

Given the shape of the device, it works best against a wall. While I’m sure that with so many of today’s modern kitchens having islands, I’m sure many Echo Shows will end up stranded one one (sorry), but I’d suggest putting it up against a backsplash as it just looks better.

The device’s front screen leans ever-so-slightly backward. When I pushed the device with my hand and tried to tip it over from the front, it stuck stubbornly in place. It’s clear that Amazon gave some thought to how this device would sit on a surface like a kitchen counter as people and things moved around it and possibly bump into it.

Visual Information + Voice = Game Changer

Here’s something I realized right away: By finally giving Alexa a screen, Amazon has opened up immense new possibilities for potential applications and content opportunities.

This may sound like an overstatement, but it isn’t.

The main reason for this is the powerful combination of synchronized voice control/visual information. While the Amazon visual skill cupboard is slightly bare at this point, you can see from what few samples there are that by adding visual information, Amazon’s created a new and exciting direction for the Echo.

I spent the most time with new Allrecipes visual skill. While the skill feels very much like a 1.0 effort (I’ll have a review of the Allrecipes skill soon), but I can nonetheless see the potential. I was able to bring up recipes, pick one I like, browse the ingredients and cooking instructions.

But the coolest feature of the Allrecipes app was the ability to play and pause videos.  This is really important because if you’re like me, you like to watch and rewatch videos as you move through the cook process.

At the risk of being repetitive, let me say it again: it’s this combination of voice search and command with visually rich information in a shared-screen computing device is by far the most exciting thing about the Echo Show.

There are other aspects about having an always on screen that are important. The “sleep screen” info on the Echo Show is unobtrusive, natural and well placed. Maybe because Amazon has had so much practice creating sleep screen content  with the Kindle, but it’s clear Amazon thought about placing interesting and relevant info on a device. With the Echo Show, the device not only shows basic temperature and time info, but it scrolls through headlines, suggestions for using, etc.

The Camera

Of course, the camera’s most obvious benefit is the ability to communicate with others via voice chat. While I haven’t done a drop-in with my own Show yet, I did try it out in store at Amazon Books and the video quality seems really good.

Less obvious is the camera is being used as a sensor. When I turn out the lights the screen soon goes into soft-light mode, which I thought was a nice feature. And while it is early days for the Show, I expect at some point Amazon will unlock other computer vision capabilities that could really unlock contextually relevant information.

“I Would Use That”

When it comes to Alexa and our first two Echo devices, let’s just say my wife Tiffany has been indifferent to annoyed. Sure, she’ll ask Alexa to play music, but for the most part doesn’t see the value.

But after a few minutes playing with Echo Show, she was sold.

She tried out the Allrecipes app. She searched for a recipe and tried the video feature and liked it. She started, paused, played a video of making a strawberry smoothie, something my daughter wanted to make.

After a few minutes, my wife said, “this is something I would use.”

And of course, she then suggested I get rid of another one of my kitchen gadgets taking up counter space in order to put this one in the kitchen.

But hey, progress, right?