[SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome to Homestas in podcast, and I'm his Rohan and as usual I'm joined with my friend Phil, hey Phil, hey we're not hate a one good and today we have Jimmy on the show Jimmy how you doing man pretty good pretty good, thanks for having me
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[SPEAKER_02]: Alright, Jimmy, welcome to this show.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for joining us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thanks for having me.
[SPEAKER_02]: of course.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, a little bit of backstory for our listeners here.
[SPEAKER_02]: We randomly ran into you at CES.
[SPEAKER_02]: We were at another booth with, I think it was a black late booth.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mm.
[SPEAKER_02]: A little black.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think we both saw each other's badges.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're like, oh, you're from Toronto.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey, you do the homelessness bug.
[SPEAKER_02]: I say, you run an elephant and we're just chatting that way.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, uh, and you're here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, home assistant is cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I keep up with a lot of the developments from home assistant.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I ran into you guys, it was really cool because I didn't meet anyone from home assistant before just never cross past.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, it was good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, yeah, like, see, yes was eight months ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's been a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been a busy.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've been busy with your kid.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, it's been, it's, I've had a, well, not had a whole kit.
[SPEAKER_02]: I had a kit before that too, but, you know, he's grown and so on, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's been, it's been interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's, it's, you know, first year's tough, so.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, it is, it is, it is.
[SPEAKER_02]: Luckily, I'm just past that hump, but it's still, we're just, we're just easing off right now, right, it's, it's starting to get in that fun stage.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another 20 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you've got two of your own as well, and I know that's, I'm sure a handful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Definitely is, definitely is, but yeah, no, home assistant is great, though.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think through you guys, I connected with some of the folks from the Navocasa team, so it's good.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's good to be actually to understand a little bit more about how it works.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think from my perspective, and the people that use home assistant, I've always seen them as like,
[SPEAKER_00]: the super early adopters, like the developers that just want the most customized home, like the hackers, and it's not necessarily, like the focus of our target audience, like we make consumer products, it's for probably like the part of that adoption curve that's just after those guys.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it was really cool, like I think the first time I dabbled with homocystend,
[SPEAKER_00]: I logged in and I saw there was already an integration with our light panels.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, this is amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who didn't this?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, it's like, yeah, it's amazing that like people that are super passionate about this, they just spend their own free time to develop features that they want, which is incredible.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not necessarily easy to do that either.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, so I guess that's also a credit to Nanaleef as well, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because you've got an open enough system that someone was able to create their own integration into Homesteads without Nanaleef needing to be involved, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, here you are, Jimmy Chew, like, from Nanaleef, like the found, well, let's see over Nanaleef going, hey, I didn't know you had this integration with Homesteads, isn't?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like, that's cool, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So you didn't have to spend resources to integrate it, it was already there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's, I think, one of the beautiful things about open source.
[SPEAKER_00]: it's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: So very early on when we developed our first set of light panels, one of our big initiatives was the create an open API that goes with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, we actually created a developer website.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it's developers.nallief.me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And from there, anyone could create what are they want to just in, they get the security credentials, they get, like, basically, you know, how to actually access our APIs and a lot of different applications came from it, a lot of different integrations, integrations that we didn't need to be involved with, which was incredible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, one of the things that we did was we had an SDK as well where you could actually develop your own different lighting effects.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a little bit more complicated though.
[SPEAKER_00]: That required like knowledge of C and C++ and the ability to like.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, run code on our embedded software.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we only had a few submissions there, but the open API that allowed people to control our devices from the network, that was a, that was a big hit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I, I think that, like, you know, that was a, I would say a big part of our success, you know, the reason why people adopted it is, it's like, I think,
[SPEAKER_00]: There was like a lot of gamer companies, like Razer, Corsair, you know, they were able to do the integrations without our health, like a home assistant is obviously another example of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think over the years, you know, there's different layers of it, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, if you use the Nano Leaf app, you'll know that we have a discovered app where we have user-generated scenes.
[SPEAKER_00]: which again is also like really really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the only drawback of that is we need to better algorithm for the more like for the lesser popular ones to bubble up, but literally we have like tens of thousands of like scenes that have been created and shared by our users.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just need to like, you know, I think that's the power of the community, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, there's only so much that our dev team could do, but, you know, being tapping into Open APIs, Open SDKs, like, you know, discovery tab for user-generated content.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just, it creates more of a community feel to our products.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And also then the community is driving where some of those features come from, like, I'm guessing there are use cases for none of the left that have been and they're out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, they probably wouldn't even thought about, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, I want to mention context, you just mentioned gaming, definitely, you know, a whole myriad of integrations that work and empower none of the other things that wouldn't have been on your web app or on your radar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, and I think the emerging one is, of course, AI, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to say how AI is going to integrate with IOT, but kind of makes sense, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, you have this intelligence that's capable of doing all sorts of things, including the creation of code.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now you have, you know, like just in the last 10 years, IOT really took off.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have all these connected devices.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I don't think we're there yet in terms of the smart home with AI, with, you know, like the ecosystem's haven't really done anything interesting yet, but if I had to guess one of the first communities that will do something interesting is home assistant.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it's just what would be easy for the everyday consumer to set up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, play will tell.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, certainly like, we're recording just as 2025 to 8 landed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sure there'll be something new AI in 2025.9.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in 2025 to 8 of home assistant, they just did the considered very first previous of what AI is going to look like in home assistant.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a suggestions with AI for to label automations and tag things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can only imagine, you know, like 12 months time, we're going to have the ability to, like, for home isn't to use an open AI API and say, give me an automation that turns lights on, and often natural language, and it just does it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, but I think that it needs to go beyond just voice control, it needs to do, like, actually, you know, intelligent decision-making for your home, which, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: that's, you know, we'll see how that goes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think I talked about on the show before, but there's there's one youtuber that I that I watched tech enthusiast and he he let essentially, I don't know what system it was, chat GPT or Gemini or something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: He basically let it take over and and it's funny because he'd randomly see like, oh, this light randomly turned dot Okay, cool, maybe And and that kind of thing is like, oh, it's a cool thought dot experiment right to see kind of where it's going and and what you can do with it And and you know, I like seeing that kind of stuff because it's like it really like sparks a lot of ideas, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think when we were thinking about lights
[SPEAKER_00]: there's two cardinal sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is turning the lights on when you don't want them on and the other is turning the lights off when you don't want them off.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: That makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't know if you guys have experienced it with those motion sensors in bathrooms all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you have to be like, oh crap.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm in a public bathroom and they're the ones who are home.
[SPEAKER_02]: How long have I been in here yet?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_02]: Ah, T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A-T-L-A
[SPEAKER_00]: So I always thought that it makes sense to have cameras, to give AI context of what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be, but then people don't want cameras inside their house, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the drawback.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's the idea of maybe like infrared cameras, so that at least, you know, you're just seeing kind of body heat or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's a little bit of a tough,
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, problem to solve.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe it's, you know, how necessary is it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like so at the end of the day.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not, you don't require it to live.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we've lived thousands of years without that, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I get your point, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But I mean, we are kind of getting there with present sensors and all that stuff as those are becoming more ubiquitous.
[SPEAKER_02]: But
[SPEAKER_02]: I know what you mean, like it's a context, some of it is context, like am I picking something up for example, right, where as a presence sensor might thought might have might think that I've fallen over or something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, there's, there's, you know, a lot of that kind of.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure it'll get there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure it'll get there with present sensors, with cameras, with AI, like I'm pretty impressed with the latest developments of AI, like especially the one where you turn on your phone camera and it's able to see what's going on and actually like,
[SPEAKER_00]: have context of what's going on, that's crazy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that there's going to be a new development of hardware that's going to be coming out just to support these different types of use cases.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure you guys have probably seen the news that like, I think OpenAI had acquired the company that this is named from Apple, Johnny Ives, had created and they're basically
[SPEAKER_00]: for supporting AI, like I think some companies tried to do stuff like those the humane pin or whatever, maybe a little bit before their time, you know, wasn't ready yet, but it's a matter of time before we have new types of hardware to support all these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I think what you interesting though, it's really cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: Are you guys doing anything?
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you guys thought of or
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think as an IoT company and as a product company, I think a big part of it is being super close to the open standards as well as the open source community.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that like.
[SPEAKER_00]: The more closed off you are, well, the harder it is for AI to be able to like take control over your things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for us, like, we're doing lights, we're not doing anything like, we're not doing cameras, we're not like, doing security locks, like, there's, there's,
[SPEAKER_00]: When somebody comes to your house, you're not like, don't control my life, dude.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, no, you're like, don't you want with the lights?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, obviously you don't want your neighbors like turning your lights on and off, that's kind of annoying.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for the most part, like, you know, I think having that open access makes a lot of sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: You just want to make sure that the right decisions are being made.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, you know, like, as we dabble into other types of products outside of lighting, then, you know, we'll make sure that we make the right decisions there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think overall, like, being part, like, there's a big part of me that just wants to make it, so that people could overwrite our firmware with open source firmware.
[SPEAKER_00]: something that they could just like take over and just write their own code, it's not like we're not making money from the software, we're making money from selling the hardware.
[SPEAKER_00]: So take over, do what you want, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, the Open API is like one step towards that direction, same with an Open SDK, but like it should go, you want step further and just be like, hey, have at it, here's some hardware, do some cool stuff with it, and I think like,
[SPEAKER_00]: before the number of people that were capable of being software developers is very limited.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like you need to understand a whole other language.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nowadays with AI, almost anyone could be a software developer.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now all of a sudden you have this huge pool of people that are capable of creating code that runs on hardware.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let them do amazing things with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's kind of my thinking.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that we don't know what's going to come of it, but, you know, in the end, it'll be just, it'll be kind of cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that would be an interesting angle to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not there yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, internally within my team, like, I've been kind of like talking about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's, and it's challenging because we didn't necessarily plan all over our products to support that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually, like, you know, when we first started off,
[SPEAKER_00]: So Apple, we were one of the first companies that had home kit enabled products, and then it was only over the recent years that they kind of shifted over.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a being like, you know what, we're not going to manage our own kind of protocol anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to shift over to matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even matter, matter and home kit, both of them had pretty stringent security requirements and just they had ways in which they wanted the software to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: that might not always drive that well with kind of the open source community.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, and I think it's also even from a hardware manufacturer.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think Jimmy, you and I were talking about this when when I came down to your office, just all kinds of like incompatibilities and stuff like that, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like wireless drivers that, you know, you randomly run into issues with and stuff like that, because and then that's out of as a device manufacturer, you're not making wireless chipsets.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's you start to realize how many different layers there are into this one product right and you know It's like obviously you've got the lights behind you there, right and you can see them changing colors It's like okay, they're lights, but it's actually it's it's a lot of effort right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not it's not into integration is not easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So our our our light panels the lines product that you see beside behind me They run like a very simple like Linux server on there
[SPEAKER_00]: like even like can you power it up?
[SPEAKER_00]: It literally has to boot up.
[SPEAKER_00]: It loads up an operating system and then it loads up our code and then after 30 seconds or so that's when it actually starts playing the proper lighting effect.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was our original light panels and of course you know there's new forms of embedded systems that boot up much faster and we're moving towards that but yeah like you said there's a lot of layers to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's, and even like most connected products now, they still do commissioning through Bluetooth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's Bluetooth radios, and then on top, then after Bluetooth, there's Wi-Fi, and then sometimes it's sharing like different antennas, and it's just like, there's a lot of complexity to it that I think a lot of consumers don't understand, and also the industry, it took several years for the industry to really understand how to make this hardware in a way that's reliable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, like so I think like at the very beginning, when we first set started creating our light panels, we used like a like a Wi-Fi method of commissioning product like commissioning the product on the network, what it did was it first, you know, the device itself broadcasted a Wi-Fi signal.
[SPEAKER_00]: then your phone would connect to that Wi-Fi, pass it the network credentials, then it would disconnect from that Wi-Fi, hope that the device connected to the right Wi-Fi network and started broadcasting, like an IP address.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, hopefully when you go back to the Wi-Fi network, it finds each other, which is still the case of so many products today.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is hot.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is because it is a lot of work to create that both on the app side as well as on the hardware side.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it took us like, so it took us years to actually reverse that out and just do a simple Bluetooth commissioning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it was just like, so many routers just didn't handle that well.
[SPEAKER_00]: right so phones didn't handle that well and then Android made these different decisions around like well you we're not going to let you do that anymore you're going to have to manually switch Wi-Fi networks and then the the whole process of going from a mobile app then going to your Android settings page and selecting a different network
[SPEAKER_00]: then going back to the mobile app, it's just like, how do you expect to, there's too many steps, but it was like, it's not that we wanted these steps.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just, the, the, the, the Android, you know, device, like, what's called the OS, they changed the way that they worked and they forced this to go down this path because they weren't really thinking about IoT products and it's not to say it's their fault.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was probably for some type of security reason that they did that,
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the right way to work with, you know, connected devices?
[SPEAKER_00]: And even now, it's like, is the industry thread or is it Wi-Fi?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: They're basically competing standards for smart home, and we are straddling both, which is a whole story in itself.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's, you'll have the purists of every different camp, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey, everything should be Zigbee, everything should be Z-Wave, everything, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've even heard a few people being like, I love everyone, everything is Bluetooth.
[SPEAKER_02]: I strongly disagree with those people, but, but, again, you're loved after your
[SPEAKER_02]: That's exactly it though, Jimmy.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's your managing all these different stacks, you're doing all this stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the cool thing is, I think open sources, there's a couple of nice caveats, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's one, it's people can kind of do it to their hearts content, you throw in whatever you want to throw in in the hardware, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I think on the other side of it,
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, like I said, people can kind of make it whatever they want, but there's also a nice piece where, especially if it's a larger project that's that's that's compatible with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of auditing.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of, you know, like I inherently trust open source projects more than I do close source projects and it's completely invalid, right, because in my head, I'm like people are auditing that somebody's looking through the code.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have no idea what it means, but somebody's doing this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: But realistically, that's probably not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: People can just embed whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it depends on the code base, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have a huge community of people contributing to the code base, then you might be safe to assume that the bugs will get ironed out by the masses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you have like a small contribution kind of group, then you know, bugs kind of just stay there for a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like sometimes it goes on maintain.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then also sometimes like, you know, you have bad players in there doing bad things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's where it's kind of nice, like with the open home foundation, how they've got it structured.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's a lot of stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: I get even provisioning like Bluetooth provisioning.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have what's called BT home.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's called.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's definitely really good.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's just the challenges.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's still targeted towards a smaller demographic
[SPEAKER_00]: the developers still, you know, I think over time that will change to just basically the enthusiast and that's really what I think that's really the goal of it, but right now because it's so you know, so heavy on the development, basically it's developers and like, yeah, those types of people that are really the ones that would be keen on doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I think it's it's great, you know, like I, we're going to continue to do more things close to the open source community, and if I could open source are our products and just make it so that you could just put whatever code base on there, that would be like that's actually the direction that I want to head so that's something that I'm pretty committed to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Justin.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean, from changing gears a little bit, I want to know about, you know, nanolive, how you kind of got to, like, where did nanolive come from?
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, like, was the origin you thought of?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we're in this story.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, nanolive, there's three founders of nanolive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Me and two of my good friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: The three of us, we all went to the University of Toronto, and when we were students there, we were part of the solar car team.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a team of students that build a car fully powered by solar energy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And really it was just, you know, we were just joining a club to be like, okay, well, all the stuff that we're learning in school, how do we actually like do something practical with it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, one of my co-founders Tom, he was doing his PhD at the time and he was actually, he was he was he was he was doing a PhD in bio physics, but he was leading all of the electronics development on this solar power car.
[SPEAKER_00]: And me and Christian, my other business partner, we were just amazed, we were just like, who is this guy?
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not even doing an electrical engineering degree, and he knows and understands circuit design, and he's able to create like a super energy-efficient car that was fully powered by solar energy, and we were just like amazed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even to this day, like he's by far the best engineer that I've ever met.
[SPEAKER_00]: even though he doesn't have an engineering degree.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's just like, I think like the way he thinks about circuit design is actually like he thinks of it like a physicist does about electrons moving through different materials and through different pieces of hardware.
[SPEAKER_00]: So from there,
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, that was back in school.
[SPEAKER_00]: After we graduated, we kind of went separate ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: I went into like technology consulting, I worked for Accenture for about seven years.
[SPEAKER_00]: My business partner, my best friend at the time, Christian, he went into manufacturing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He worked for his family business and he was running a factory in China making bathtubs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so he isn't an electrical engineering degree, and he was making bathtubs in China for his family business.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would go visit him and he was just miserable.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was like, what am I doing in this small town living in a factory?
[SPEAKER_00]: I have this electrical engineering degree.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the hell is that for?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then Tom, he was actually working in a farm suitable company, like manufacturing proteins and doing some research of different ways in which to develop proteins.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we started to get together and be like, hey, like we built this cool solar car.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why don't we try and create a product that we can actually sell right and I remember talking to Tom about it and he's like, like, I can I can tinker and make these things when we're going to do just put it on eBay sell one or two pieces and then hand make these things like it doesn't make any sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: let's go visit Christian and at the time I was a consultant so I had all these like airline points and I was flying around all the time at hotel points I was like here use my points me and you let's go to China let's spend a week there and Christians going to show us around and he's going to introduce us to all these like different factories that we could actually work with
[SPEAKER_00]: So we went over there and we started understanding how supply chain really works, how our hardware products made.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a different side of like Asia that most people don't get to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's like how stuff's made.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's like different TV shows that show that it's kind of a variation of that But let's Hollywood and sometimes like you have high end factories that the like manufacturers like tronics that are all like fully automated And sometimes you see really ghetto ones where it's just like people hand sewing loves together, you know, like yeah But from there we started understanding okay, well if we design something now we know how to make it at scale
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we're like actually our first product that we tried to create was a solar product.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we originally called it the the nano grid.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is actually, it's actually goes back.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we, you know, there's the macro grid, there's the micro grid, which is maybe for like a small apartment or a community, whatever you can have a micro grid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we thought, a nanogrid, it's a portable solar device where you could actually, like, daisy chain multiple, multiple, these battery packs together and be able to form a nanogrid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we created it, it was really, really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the problem is, we're like, well, how do we ship lithium ion?
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't put it on a boat, we can't take it on a plane.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we were just kind of stuck.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were like, okay, we have this cool product.
[SPEAKER_00]: No way to transport it anywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's just keep building.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's make a light bulb to go with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we're like, well, if it has to work off a solar energy, it needs to be really, really energy efficient.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it still needs to be bright.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll sell it to Africa, places that are off grid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then so we went down this path of developing a super energy efficient light bulb.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what we ended up creating was actually the world's most energy-efficient light bulb.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was about 150 lumens per watt.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the time, I think most of the products on the market were only about 70 lumens per watt, so we almost doubled whatever it was on the market.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you if you search on Kickstarter for I think it's called Nano Light, you'll see our original Kickstarter video from like 2013.
[SPEAKER_00]: where it was the world's most energy-efficient light bulb, and we ended up like the three of us, we raised about $270,000 from Kickstarter, and that was the beginning of our company.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was the the the the the the the the origin story of of Manelese.
[SPEAKER_00]: We we
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we ran into a trademark issue with NANOLITE.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't really an issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a company that was called NANOLITE.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were like, you guys have a really cool product.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's pretty impressed with what you've done.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, we do have the trademark.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you guys are going to have to change your name.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're like, all right, I'll change my name.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, we never really envisioned ourselves being a light bulb company.
[SPEAKER_00]: We really wanted to like create
[SPEAKER_00]: like just really great technology for like products for the world and so we thought okay let's let's just call ourselves nanolief you know it's a nice made-up name and it kind of gives us the opportunity to kind of branch out to do different things
[SPEAKER_02]: And here we are 10 years later, that's awesome and and I'm sure like stuff like COVID and all that stuff helped too because there's a big boom of people again being like gamers especially right big boom of that kind of culture with lighting and all that stuff and then again even a lot of just DIYers people that are staying at home it's okay I want to cool home office.
[SPEAKER_00]: it's straight.
[SPEAKER_00]: So home decor really shot up during COVID.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think we were timing for business a lot of it has to do with timing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're in the right place right time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think if we were trying to start selling light panels today, it's just between inflation and the fact that everyone's like
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, returned to work, can't afford a home, let alone renovate, you know, like these are the challenges that the world's facing now, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a different market, but during COVID, you know, and the end of the years leading up to it, like people were getting better and better jobs employment was at an all-time high.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think overall like interest rates were really low.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, then COVID happened and the government was giving out tons of subsidies so that people had all this extra money in their pockets, and they were all at home, so they were like, okay, how do I soup up my place?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do I make my background nice?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because this is my future office, or, you know, my gamer pad, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah.
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[SPEAKER_02]: All right, so Jimmy, let's, speaking of, you know, smart houses, uh, I'd love to know what you're doing at home.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you do any home automation yourself?
[SPEAKER_02]: Dabble.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, uh, I do a lot of product testing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a lot of technology at home.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, you know, I think just like,
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I do have a, I remember early on when I became, like, when I became a founder and a CEO of a company, I watched a video of another CEO of a mainstream company.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a phone company.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to name names because, you know, that's kind of mean.
[SPEAKER_00]: But like, you know, the CEO, he was, I think trying to turn around the company, he picks up the phone and he's trying to demo it to someone in the press and he just had no idea how to use it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, how could you be the CEO of a company and not know how to use your own product, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But also, I do come from a software background, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think I believe heavily in product testing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so my house is like a major test bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually, I invite my developers to my house all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, hey, I'm running into this problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to troubleshoot it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need troubleshoot it here.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, in my house, I probably have, like, close to 10 border routers.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like, wow, it's crazy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I have, like, the Apple TV of Google Home.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have Alexa.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have the the Euro router.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have tons of Natalie products that are also border routers and all them, like, and I have multiples of all these, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's just, I have a very, very complex, like, smart home.
[SPEAKER_00]: But at the same time, things need to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's also other challenges with stuff like mesh routers and different types of mesh routers, some mesh routers don't support IPv6.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just like, these are some of the complexities that our customers face.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's just like, how do I recreate this within a home?
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the same time, test and understand all of our products at a very deep level.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, and also I'm pretty passionate about it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, I have tons of connected cameras.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have like, you know, the Sonos speakers, like I'm a big fan of Sonos.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was very sad about, you know, what, what they've been going through, the challenges that they've been going through.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, it doesn't change the fact that, you know, I think they're, they're,
[SPEAKER_00]: They're audio quality, quality is just great.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and once again, I'm not the integration that, uh, because I had an open standard, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like busy and home assistant from very early days.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've got you so no one's had nothing to do with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's probably just they have passionate customers that are just like, I love this product.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to make it work with my smart home.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so it's, uh, I haven't really gone into the fancy stuff like,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, control for and crust run.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was going to say, if you've got any like, if you've got a central brain, like obviously, is a central brain, you said it doubled in a bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have time to be assistant.
[SPEAKER_01]: Have you got an eye center?
[SPEAKER_00]: I use home assistant.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also use Google home and I also use Apple home.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't say I have a central brain, because, you know, primarily with nanolief, like we do a lot of apperal out, so I usually test with the nanolief products using the nanolief app, just to test out the features.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm currently using an iPhone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Usually I try and swap every couple of years between Android and iPhone.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also switch between, like right now I'm using a PC at the office I use a MacBook, sometimes I have a PC-based laptop as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a bit of a gamer, so it's like, you know, like, that was actually going to be my next question.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's fair.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if I should share share of the skeletons in my closet.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I do like my home setup is actually a PC mainly because I play.
[SPEAKER_00]: I play video games to kind of like, these dress.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would say, like, I kind of dabble in all sorts of different types of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do have several Raspberry Pi's at home.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them just to run an emulator of like old school video games.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, I have the home assistant green.
[SPEAKER_00]: I bought the voice assistant the demo version.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Preview edition.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, to be honest, I didn't figure out how to
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I struggled with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, you know, maybe it was like, you know, because it was a few months ago and maybe the code was just not ready yet.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I was kind of excited to see how, you know, the speech text and then the integration with different AI's, all that stuff works.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had, I need to spend some time and dabble with it again.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it has gotten quite a bit better.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you actually bought it when I was in your office because we were talking about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're like, I'm just gonna buy this now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, I bought it, you got it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I was able to configure it and once in a while it would work, but the only thing you could do was like, tell me a joke, and it was kind of always the same joke.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I got it stuck there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just like, how do I get it to like, do something intelligent?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I, you know, like I didn't spend enough time to like dive into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I imagine somebody's going to spend the time to do it, and then it'll probably be really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: But usually, you know, I suspect that Google Apple, they're all trying to figure out how to replace their current voice assistance with something a little bit more intelligent.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's probably trying to make it so that it's not unhinged.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yeah, I mean Apple is struggling like crazy It's almost like Siri got a little bit worse kind of in the last Like I enabled it Yeah, I I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to comment that you know, I'm sure they'll figure it out eventually
[SPEAKER_00]: with their trillions of dollars in the bank, they should be able to figure it out.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And apparently there is some stuff that leaked.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's some internal thing that I was just like, hey, AI is our focus.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, we have to get it right kind of thing, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: In which...
[SPEAKER_00]: I was really excited when they said that they announced their partnership with CHATGPT, I would have thought CHATGPT would just become the new Serian, it would actually tell you stuff that's intelligent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I cared probably a little bit less with the integrations with the OS.
[SPEAKER_00]: They probably should have just,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, listed out a bunch of things that were enabled on the US and everything else just just made it so that their voices system is smart, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like incredibly intelligent, like chatGPT is, that probably would have just been good enough because like a lot of the times, I just have a general question in life that I need answered.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, fair.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways, but that's, that's just me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have the Natalie campus and the Melanie elements behind me and when I look at the I remember opening the product packaging and you know the marketing, you know the last photos of it all set up.
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember there's like a picture of a house and it's just got a wall full of these canvas elements as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that your house, please?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, no, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually at our
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe it was like a couple hundred canvas panels.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had a massive, massive wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were too lazy to take it down.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just left it there for the 10, but it was really cool because the canvas and our shapes products, they're designed to support up to about like 500 panels.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really, the limit was really just the data bus, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: what you could do is you could just add additional power and we had like power distribution across all of our products to to basically throttle the amount of current that's going through.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was, it was really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the thing is like in the consumer market, like not a lot of people are going to be spending like thousands of dollars to like build that
[SPEAKER_00]: A commercial lighting company, it's a different business model.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like usually it's like you got these regional sales people and they want to take a cut.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then you got like the installers.
[SPEAKER_00]: They want to take a cut and really you end up with these products that are like $10,000 for an install.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were not.
[SPEAKER_00]: like we didn't want to be priced like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We wanted to really focus on the consumer market.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was just like we kind of realized a couple of years in like you can't be everything for everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: You either focus on the consumer market or you focus on the commercial market and we just you know I didn't necessarily want to spend my time building up a sales team.
[SPEAKER_00]: That wasn't my priority.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, like our sales team, there's like, in North America, there's like two people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, all right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, you don't have a commercial side at all, because you know, like business is always having to like fancy lights everywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, there's no like off, you know, random, departmenting, not a life that's doing like special commercial.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, that's sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there is an opportunity there, but the hardware would have to be different.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, a lot of our hardware is just put up with stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it a tape or like simple screws and like the whole selling point is that it's easy to install.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, commercial lighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're like, no, make it hard so that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We as an installer have a job, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when you think about commercial environments, a lot of the times, like they're networking requirements is complicated, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes they have like extra security, like you first go to a website, you log in and then you get like, you know, one day of access or something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: or it's just, you know, the security on some of these like commercial Wi-Fi networks, they don't support like broadcasting of MDNS and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it ends up really screwing up like the fundamental way in which a lot of our smart home products work.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's tricky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's tricky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of them probably want wired in too, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so my thigh and those kind of things also, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what the reliability of wired in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so then you start thinking about stuff like DMX, but then it's just like, I don't know if you got some playing with DMX before, but it's like it was created like 50 years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's just like, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm played with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know I know about it and I'm good not playing with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually really incredible though, like, um, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, I didn't realize, but a lot of these like concerts and stuff, you literally have like a light DJ that's like standing at like a like a huge crazy dashboard and they preprogram some lighting effects, but when the beat drops, they like push a button and then go pow right like it's really, really cool, but it's also super like it's it's actually very manual.
[SPEAKER_00]: to be surprised at how that manual it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, those are the guys in the middle of a concert.
[SPEAKER_02]: You got to sound a lighting guy's together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that was something that I've always been very interested in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, you know, if you get an opportunity, I would recommend download our desktop app.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a functionality in there called orchestrator.
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically it captures the audio that's playing off your computer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It does a lot of audio processing to understand things like
[SPEAKER_00]: what's the genre of music, what's the BPM, what's the mood, what's the the kind of like the chord that it's playing in, and it'll actually do different types of lighting effects to go with your music.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's we actually, I believe we just released an integration with another company
[SPEAKER_00]: And they basically, um, they do these like actually like personalized light shows.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these light DJs that work in concerts and nightclubs, they created a platform where they could create kind of their own lighting effects on top of songs.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if our desktop app detects that you're playing a song that has like a like a custom made light show and there's about a thousand of them that's that's been created so far.
[SPEAKER_00]: then it'll just create the, like, play this really cool light show for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's actually custom made.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's, it's really cool stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's, it's very manual.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like somebody literally went in and, and actually determined at every second what is going to, what is going to be the lighting effect.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it'll put, like, like, like, when I play it in my basement, it's, it's really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, that's pretty, it's pretty badass.
[SPEAKER_00]: that's awesome.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's cool because it's, again, it's kind of what I was saying earlier, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: People think it's like, okay, it's lights, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But it does so much, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It changes your whole atmosphere, changes whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: But on top of that, it's also just a really cool, just a cool, like, downtime thing, even, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, it's like, hey, I want a chill, let's turn lights down
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I was a kid.
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to use a win-app.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you guys remember when I really kick the lamb his ass, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So back then they had the visualizers in that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, visualizers were big, like big.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and as a kid, I would just sit there and I'd stare at my CRT monitor, whatever it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would be like, this is so cool when I just listen to music.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, like, to be, like, honestly, that was a lot of the inspiration behind, like, making our lights dance to music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, first we had the onboard microphone to make it super easy, but then it was, like,
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're having a party or something, you need to speak louder than the music in order for the other person to hear you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So usually the voices are actually louder than the music.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it screws up the light show.
[SPEAKER_00]: And also we had some things with a microphone that's on board.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to actually dynamically change the gain on the microphone.
[SPEAKER_00]: in order to capture the music at the right volume.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what we have is, if it's really quiet, it'll actually increase the gain, increase the gain, all the way up until all of a sudden, now you're just hearing white noise.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's just like, it was hard to get that balance correct in kind of an
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas when you do the desktop app integration, then all of a sudden it's like you're capturing the audio and it's clean and you could actually select the audio source and then we do some stuff around like detecting what song it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: We spent a lot of like passion in in developing that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was it was very like.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was very.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very cool, I'd recommend playing that microphone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, then you can get the source directly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that's been my struggle, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's always been like a gimmicky thing to me, because as soon as you plug music, think after you's your voice and then, yeah, to do a choir and just doesn't work, as you said.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, that's kind of the challenge.
[SPEAKER_02]: or if you start singing, then the lights just give up.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're like, no, I'm not.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not dealing with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is cool though.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, even with the microphone though, there was one of our light lighting effects.
[SPEAKER_00]: It actually changed the color based on the pitch.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like if you play like music by like a good vocalist and as they hit the higher notes, you can see the colors change and it's actually really
[SPEAKER_00]: It was really, really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we were trying to create scenes that would react differently to different types of music.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're playing like a piano song or something like that and you could actually see the notes as they go and they change and pitch.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then of course if you're playing like an EDM song you could have like different scenes that like really like bounce to the beat.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's, you know, I think that like there's something really, I don't know, I'm a big
[SPEAKER_00]: I love music, you know, I have a piano behind me and I don't know if you could see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but it's, you know, I'm not, I often call myself pianist or anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like, I like to appreciate music, but I think that there's definitely a beauty in it, and like being able to like kind of capture that in technology and in, like, in light, it's just, it turns the product less into a functional piece.
[SPEAKER_00]: but more into like a piece of art and design and it's something that like, you know, it's definitely one of my favorite features of our product, but it's, you know, the best experience right now is still through our orchestrator one app.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you know, an orchestrator, you know, like we spent a lot of development work on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do have a free tier, and we have a paid tier on it, and I think there's like been some backlash on that, but really the idea is we want to continue to invest in doing this, and the only way to do so is actually to have like some type of like, like, money to put towards the development effort of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but like the late link aspect is is really really cool too.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, you know, I wish I could share my screen and demo it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, any plans, like if you've got any future plans, like if you've got a a light in mind that you would love to see in the next, you know, five years like a car, you know, because I guess like you've got a whole department or your team there is like working on what's the next product going to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've thought about like where you with the eventual end goal is or what you're striving to head towards.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you know, I don't, I don't think that we're limited to lighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that like, you know, when we started this company like I shared with you guys earlier, like we started with solar products and it was really like the idea behind Natalie's is just creating like products that people will that they will kind of like bring joy to people's lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think one of the things like what are the reasons why I do what I do and why I love what I do is Just seeing that like initial smile on someone's face when they see a product that we've made You know like what somebody sees our light panels for something like oh this is kind of cool And it's like how do we create products that have that effect where it's just like oh yeah, you know what that that's clever that's smart That's really interesting like yeah like I like I like I want that
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, like, like, usually the products that I get really excited about are those types of products.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, like, we do have some products in the pipeline, where it's just like, you know, like, I'm personally like, yeah, I want that.
[SPEAKER_00]: that's cool and when it hits that mark it's just like okay this is going to be a good thing but then at the same time like you know being in smart lighting sometimes you just got to fill the assortment right like people are like oh do you have a light bulb oh we need some light strips or but like that's not something that I'm just like oh my god create a light yeah right but yeah people say no it's not I get it it's required but it's not exciting or sexy
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so like, you know, like, I'm not sure if you guys have seen our, like, this is our light switch.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's got a motion sensor built in, you know, it could turn it off, turn it on.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's controlling a whole bunch of the panels around my basement.
[SPEAKER_00]: You could, you could do scene controls, so it's just like, you could change it to white light.
[SPEAKER_00]: You could change it to different scenes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And these could all be programmed in the app.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's actually like controlling like six or seven of the lights in my basement.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have another one for my down lights.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a dim down my downlines.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ooh, nice.
[SPEAKER_00]: But like, usually I have them at the door because as soon as I walk in, it triggers the motion sensor.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just brought it to my desk to control the lighting for this podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: But like, this is all based off thread, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually using a thread radio.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's super energy efficient.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's it's it's operating off of a coin cell battery with a motion sensor inside and the whole idea of it is like people don't want to control their lights.
[SPEAKER_00]: They just want to walk in and have it turn on right and it's relatively cheap.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe it's like 30 bucks or something like that on our website and
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, you know, it also works with matter, it's a little finicky with matter, you know, it will requires a little bit of love.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're moving towards matter and thread 1.4 so that I think the whole industry is moving towards there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure you're, you know, this center is probably
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, better and dread 1.4 both of them much needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I think in the next two or three months we'll get there with a lot of our products and we'll probably see a pretty big performance boost from that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I think all of these products that we spent a lot of time doing development on are things that we feel very passionate about and things that we personally are think are really cool and we think we'll bring smiles to people's faces.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you can get from stay tuned.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, you space a like it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do have a question on those smart switches you just show you if I can a soldier or second.
[SPEAKER_01]: You said they matter over thread, I believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: It supports matter over thread, but the way it works with nanoliefs products.
[SPEAKER_00]: is actually proprietary.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, because I was thinking, oh, that would be a cool, if you could link just the buttons via a matter into home assistant, if you could, you could have, you could be basically in the next switch.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right now, we only support these two side buttons.
[SPEAKER_00]: being ported into matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you could have them be like a matter controller for one or two things.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a perfect world, we'd also support our motion sensor as well as our light sensor and expose all of the buttons to matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: But truth be told, matter over thread, it was not energy efficient enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was eating up way too much power and we were like, and also, most ecosystems didn't support it well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what you would have is like a popcorn effect with our products.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't think it supported like multi-cast at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure if it supports it now, but like this is, let me see, this is from my downloads.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, let me show.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to show you, so like right now, all of my downloads in this basement are controlled by by this switch and you'll see they they turn on and off at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's no popcorn effect and it's instantaneous.
[SPEAKER_00]: You didn't get that with matter over threat.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we tried to do it over matter over threat and we're like this is not a good enough experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we prioritize doing it in a way where it's just like, hey, now we have like a room full of lights that work really, really well and you could do these really cool scenes with it like all instantaneously with the buttons, sorry, I'll show you one more time now they're all like shining different colors and it's like it's really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all instantaneously and right now there's.
[SPEAKER_00]: 12 of them all being controlled by this one button instantaneously all in sync and Like pretty much never getting out of sync and I think that seemed really important to That was really yeah, like if with matters sometimes like I don't know the matter controller doesn't send a message out And I'm just like well, that wasn't me
[SPEAKER_00]: Or like, oh, you know what, your, your, your light switch isn't working.
[SPEAKER_00]: Go power cycle.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're apple TV.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like how does that make any sense?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that makes no sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, like what customer would know that and they would just be like return like yeah, you know one star and and that was kind of the the challenge that like a lot of times we'd face with stuff like matter and thread is just like how do we get it so that it's actually super reliable in a way where it's just you know like there was a period of time we're like
[SPEAKER_00]: every ecosystem was on a different build of like matter and a different build of thread and it was super unreliable and like we didn't do anything and a month or two later they fixed a bug and then our product worked again and then people would just be like, Natalie, if your products are crap like actually it was just you know like well which which smart home are you using what's let's dive into this and some of them some of them spent the time to do that some of them didn't
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think the whole move to matter 1.4, thread 1.4, hopefully that will at least have a certain level of a baseline for everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I'm pretty excited about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's interesting, one of the things when, I think it was pretty much given the first day that when Phil and I landed at CES, we, we were walking around and asking some folks and just like, hey, what do you think of, you know, like, what do you think of matter or thread?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, are you, are you planning on using this in your products?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think it was one person, I forget who it was, where there's some vendor and that was like,
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, it barely works, and but that that seems to be a theme across the board right there there is a few vendors that were all in on matter and all in on it and then it's three groups right what the groups that were genuinely all in on it then the groups that were kind of like it's here so that we can stick a label on our box and then there is the ones that were just like.
[SPEAKER_02]: Listen, the protocol's not here yet.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when it's here, we might consider it, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Which, which is fair, listen, I'm all for open and non-prepriety and all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is what I prefer primarily.
[SPEAKER_02]: However, to your point, Jimmy, I needed to work, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: If, again, if I have that like popcorn and like you called it, that's not gonna fly.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's I think it's getting there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's and the industry needs to move in that direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I am I'm blessed with a with a bad memory.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm able to kind of continue to look forward without.
[SPEAKER_00]: being traumatized by my past scars.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what you have to do, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's, I think that's how you got to live life, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, for any listeners out there, it's just especially as you get older, you know, you pick up more and more baggage and you don't want that baggage to affect the way that you think.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, as I think as an entrepreneur, you know, like you have to be optimistic and you have to be,
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, like even though matter at the beginning, it was rough around the edges, but it's here to stay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, like, you know, like give it another try.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like now, to be honest, like I have all of my downloads, like there's, I probably have like at least 30 thread devices in my house right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it works almost this pretty much flawlessly with Apple Home.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could probably just tell Siri to turn off my downloads and it'll just turn off.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and and I haven't had any problems now, do I dare power cycle my Apple TV?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, you know, I'm still a little scared to doing that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, you know, these are, this is just, it, but like one or two years ago, it was like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just like, it was a little scary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, and same thing with Google, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's, I think that like, you know, for those listeners that were like, oh, matter sucks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, given another try, everyone's been putting a lot of work into making it better, and it's gotten better.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it, is it the best design protocol or is one, could you some improvement?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe the open source community should kind of have at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it should be a matter of 2.0.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's maybe an open source stop having, you know, stop charging so many fees.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm just kidding.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope the CSA is listening.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perfect.
[SPEAKER_02]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, Jimmy, thank you so much for joining us on the show.
[SPEAKER_02]: This has been super insightful and just a fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh yeah, thanks for having me, it was a good time, we could do it again sometime.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was good, cheers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you guys guess?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want to share your home assistant journey or come on as a guest, reach out to us at feedback at haspodcast.io.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's H-A-S-Spodcast.io.
[SPEAKER_02]: The home assistant podcast is hosted by Phil Hawthorne and myself, Rohan Keremandi.
[SPEAKER_02]: For links to topics we discussed today, check out our show notes on haspodcast.io.